Understanding Shakespeare's Plays
Learn how to read, watch, and genuinely enjoy Shakespeare without getting lost in archaic speech. Discover how meter, rhetoric, and stagecraft bring the drama to life on the page and the stage.
Like Duolingo, but for Understanding Shakespeare's Plays. Tomo turns the whole topic into a game you play five minutes a day, until it actually sticks.
21 levels across 3 sections, about 42 minutes end to end, roughly 8 days at five minutes a day. It moves through Making Sense of the Language, Cracking the Dramatic Forms, and From the Elizabethan Stage to Modern Performance. It starts from scratch.
Free forever · No credit card · iPhone & Android
Key ideas in Understanding Shakespeare's Plays
- Shakespeare wrote in Early Modern English, where 'wherefore' meant 'why', not 'where'
- Juliet's dilemma is not Romeo's physical location, but why he has to carry the name of her family's bitter rival
- Assuming archaic words match modern lookalikes is the most common pitfall when reading Shakespeare
- Shakespeare regularly carries a single thought across multiple line breaks (enjambment)
- Pausing at the end of every line chops Shakespeare's sentences into unnatural fragments
- Following commas, periods, and semicolons keeps the character's core thought natural and clear
- Shakespeare often flips subject, verb, and object order to stress emotional keywords and preserve meter
- Inverting 'that wouldst thou holily' places 'holily' at the line's end to emphasize Macbeth's squeamishness
- Locating the basic subject and action resolves inverted lines into straightforward English
- In Shakespeare's plays, 'you' was the polite, formal pronoun used for social superiors and distant acquaintances
- Shakespeare used 'thee' and 'thou' to signal emotional closeness, speaking to family, or talking down to social inferiors
- Shifting from 'you' to 'thou' toward an equal or superior was often an intentional insult in Elizabethan speech
- Shakespeare coined or popularized hundreds of phrases still used in everyday modern conversation
- 'Break the ice' appears in The Taming of the Shrew, 'heart of gold' in Henry V, and 'in a pickle' in The Tempest
- Recognizing how many idioms come from Shakespeare shows his vocabulary is fundamentally woven into modern speech
- Shakespeare chose iambic pentameter because its alternating soft-strong beat echoes both conversational English and a beating heart
You've tried the other tabs
Thirty open tabs. Four facts you actually kept.
You watched. You nodded. By Sunday it was gone.
One answer, then back to scrolling.
Eight weeks. You meant to finish. You didn't.
Tomo gives Understanding Shakespeare's Plays the Duolingo treatment: levels, streaks, and quick quizzes that test what you just learned. That game loop is what the tabs above never had, so it's the one you actually finish.
Here's what playing it feels like
A real question from this course. Take your best guess.
Imagine Juliet on her balcony crying, 'Wherefore art thou Romeo?' What is her real dilemma?
Get it right to open this lesson and 20 more in the app.
Where Understanding Shakespeare's Plays takes you
- 1
Making Sense of the Language
- Reading the Words with Confidence
- Hearing the Rhythm and Verse
- 2
Cracking the Dramatic Forms
- The Mechanics of Shakespearean Tragedy
- The Engine of Shakespearean Comedy
- Soliloquy, Monologue, and Verbal Warfare
- 3
From the Elizabethan Stage to Modern Performance
- How the Original Playhouse Shaped the Plays
- Interpreting and Evaluating Modern Staging
3 sections · 7 units · 21 levels. Built to play, not to enroll.
Tomo is in ChatGPT
Tomo is also a ChatGPT plugin: the same playable courses, built and played inside your chat.
Add Tomo to ChatGPT- What to ask
- “Make me a Tomo course on black holes.” “Turn this chat into a Tomo course.”
- What you get
- Quick questions with instant feedback, hearts and stars, ready to play in about a minute.
- Where it goes
- No sign-up to start. Connect your Tomo account and your streak carries on in the app.
You pick the voice
Understanding Shakespeare's Plays is taught in the Storyteller style: every lesson is a story. Want a different feel? In the app you can spin up the same topic in any of Tomo's teaching styles. Same facts, totally different vibe.
More Arts on Tomo
Shakespeare in World Accents
Discover why Shakespeare was never meant to sound like the modern British royal family. Learn the earthy sound of Original Pronunciation, explore historic dialect survivors, and bring the verse to life in global accents.
Reading for Insight
Transform reading from a passive chore into an active conversation. Learn how to engage with any text to extract more meaning and remember what you find.
Toulouse-Lautrec's Montmartre
Step into the electric nightlife, bohemian cabarets, and hidden brothels of 1890s Paris. Learn to see the Belle Époque through Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec's razor-sharp eye, bold posters, and deeply empathetic portraits.
The Art of Modern Book Curation
Move beyond simple reading and learn to curate a literary identity. Master the techniques of high-impact reviewing and visual storytelling for the modern digital bibliophile.
The Sky as a Storybook
Discover how ancient civilizations used epic poetry and myth as a sophisticated mnemonic technology to map the stars and track time.
How to Watch Film Noir
Step into the rain-slicked, shadow-drenched world of film noir and learn to read cinema's most atmospheric genre like an insider. Discover how cinematographers used high-contrast lighting to signal moral decay, decode classic archetypes like the tarnished gumshoe and the femme fatale, and uncover the post-war anxieties that built these doomed stories.
Start Understanding Shakespeare's Plays today.
Download Tomo, search Understanding Shakespeare's Plays, and play your first lesson in under a minute.