ABSTRACT
Modern actors seem to have a worry about doing Shakespeare, forgetting perhaps that the plays were written for uneducated actors, with very ordinary backgrounds. The actors in the days when Shakespeare was writing his plays performed a different play every day of the week, sometimes not repeating plays for up to a year, and they worked from cue scripts or sides. The actor working on a Shakespeare text, then, is like a musician working from a score the musician gets instructions from the notes, timings, and notations and the actor can get similar instructions from the use of prose or poetry. Experience has shown that the use of the First Folio receives an extraordinarily negative response from those who prefer that they are the supreme arbiters of what Shakespeare meant and how to play him. The original First Folio punctuation and line lengths are used, it have modernized the spelling and reluctantly taken away the capitalization of random words.
