This is a link to my YouTube slideshow (nature pictures and family) with Shakespeare monologues and soliloquys. You don’t have to be a classic literature fan to enjoy these. I deliver lines in a way that is real and in-the-moment—only a bit more important seeming than a shopping list. I know that when I read It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury that I am at the highest end of literature, but here’s the thing: I don’t care—they are words, saying something to my friend, my neighbor, my cousin. That is what they are. They are metered phrases, and that meter forces inventive word choices and made-up forms: I like it, but I don’t care. When you tell me in a lyric a thing like I can’t make you love me or I work in a market as a checkout girl, or you tell me that the windshield wipers are slap’n time, you have moved the world forward with one marvelous idea—good enough: I am yours if you know how to do that.

I hope you can enjoy my readings in that spirit: The soul of humankind has never been revealed so well as in some of the words of Shakespeare. When he has a mother think about her absent child, looking at his clothes and thinking about how he filled them out, or how he walked around the house saying funny things, it is breathtakingly real. Shakespeare fills up the feelings that we all know—with, pure mastery. I will never get over that.

For my purposes, this site produced by MIT, works the best for looking up speeches.

Here are my recordings:

To be or not to be. Hamlet, 3.1

Let us sit upon the ground. Richard II, 3.2

I am not mad. King Lear 1.5

Grief fills the room. King John 3.4

Tomorrow and tomorrow. Macbeth 5.5

Cry of curs. Coriolanus 3.3

Our revels now are ended. The Tempest 4.1

The excellent foppery of the world. King Lear 1.2

The quality of mercy. The Merchant of Venice 4.1

If we shadows have offended. A Mdsummer Night’s Dream 5.1

For The Quality of Mercy, you may need to turn up the volume; it did not record just right for some reason.