The closest we can really get to Shakespeare, whom we really don't know much about, is by watching him be performed.
My name is Shehrazade Zafar-Arif. I'm from Pakistan and I'm studying Shakespeare Studies at King's College London.
When you watch Shakespeare performed, you just understand things about
the text that you wouldn't have registered if you were simply reading it:
the jokes, for instance, the word play, the inflections the actors might make to
show a transition from prose to verse. I chose to study Shakespeare here in the UK, because
I feel that you can't exactly study the literature, a certain culture, a nation
without being immersed in that culture and, more importantly, being aware of the
history of that culture and of that nation. And what we were told in our first class
at MA level was to put aside a lot of the assumptions we have about Shakespeare,
the sort of romanticised idea of Shakespeare, the author, inserting
some part of himself into his text, inserting some great universal truth; and we were quite
surprised to find that a lot of what we studied would involve a sort of nitty-gritty
detective work into the stages through which a play went before it went from
an author's mind to the stage to the printing house. As part of my course, my
classmates and I got to work on the Globe stage with Peter Hamilton Dyer,
who made us run through a series of exercises that actors undergo just before a
performance. We walked around getting a feel of the stage
and it just put into perspective how small the playhouse appears when you're on stage and
how you feel as though you can connect with each and every single member of the audience.