William’s Wherefore is, at its heart, a how-to book: it explains how to turn Shakespeare’s printed words into clear, understandable speech and lays out an easily accessible and practical approach to deciphering both Shakespeare’s Early Modern English and the arcane poetic structures that dominate his writing. The book shows the reader how to untangle Shakespeare’s complex rhetoric and grammar and it gives the reader a process for how to distinguish between the various verse-forms Shakespeare uses - both from each other and from the prose sections in the plays.Written in a style that the average American reader can understand and enjoy, William’s Wherefore requires no special skills or background from the reader - just a desire to learn more about Shakespeare’s work. It is aimed at bothaspiring professional “Shakespeareans” - both actors and academics - and general-interest readers.While reading silently - novels, newspapers, and magazines – is the cultural norm today, when Shakespeare created his plays the written word was read aloud by the literate elite to the illiterate masses who couldn’t read for themselves. A Shakespearean script is, essentially, a blue print for the sounds the printed words represent. In fact it seems that William Shakespeare merely saw the written scripts as tools for transmitting the “score” of a play to actors that would turn the “score” into speech. He did not expect his plays to be read by the general public: he never “officially” published his plays: two members of his theatre company published his collected plays years after his death.So just as the gorgeous sounds created in real time by musicians playing real instruments – not the musical notations on a page – are Mozart’s actual music, Shakespeare’s plays are the actual the sound of his written words when spoken aloud on a stage by actors. Sheet music merely signifies the sounds that must be created by musicians to create the music: written scripts signify the sounds to be created by actors.William’s Wherefore presents a comprehensive method for a modern reader to lift Shakespeare’s words off the page and turn them into beautiful, sensible speech.The main focus of William’s Wherefore is the arcane and often-misunderstood poetic bedrock of Shakespeare’s plays - Blank Verse (Iambic Pentameter). The shape and structure of Blank Verse provides a specific shape to the sound of Shakespeare’s words; a shape that Shakespeare created quite consciously. William’s Wherefore lays out the rules and standards of Blank Verse, along with practical information about how to put Blank Verse to work . Various other verse structures and the prose sections that inhabit Shakespeare’s plays are covered in the book as well.William’s Wherefore also provides a practical road map of an interpretive process that is necessary to develop characterizations and performances that will do justice to Shakespeare’s work. It shows a reader how to analyze what the characters say and how to translate those words into story. A reader will learn to take Shakespeare’s dramatic conversation and decipher what happens in the play, why it happens, and the “wherefore” - the purposes that drive a character’s actions. Theses techniques are helpful to actors and directors preparing to perform in Shakespeare’s plays, to audience members wanting to familiarize themselves with the workings of a play before attending a production, and to readers who want to enjoy and comprehend Shakespeare’s plays in the comfort of their own living room.In addition to the practical aspects of the book, William’s Wherefore is packed with interesting historical details and insight into Shakespeare’s plays and his theatre – information that is both engaging and attractive to committed Shakespearean actors and to general-interest readers alike. The committed Shakespearean will find a useful instruction manual; the general interest reader will gain a greater appreciation for Shakespeare’s great works.