In keeping with its motto of “Shakespeare for Everyone,” the Instant Shakespeare Company will be organizing readings throughout library branches this spring.

“My view is that Shakespeare has been taken over by academics,” said Paul Sugarman, founding artistic director of the Instant Shakespeare Company. Through staging unrehearsed, on-your-feet readings, Sugarman seeks to make Shakespeare simple and accessible.

Sugarman’s approach is in keeping with Renaissance oral tradition. “We have to understand that it was a much more oral society as opposed to our visual age," said Sugarman. "It’s more difficult to hear Shakespeare reading it to yourself than to hear it aloud. The language, particularly in the comedies, is so playful.”

Now in its 17^th season, the company initially found actor/readers through auditions but today spreads the word through its Facebook page. “We have a lot of actors with varying degrees of expertise, some are Actors’ Equity members and some are people who really like Shakespeare and just volunteer,” said Sugarman.

Instant Shakespeare uses original First Folio texts. A folio is a large book containing printed sheets that are folded in half only once, creating two double-sided leaves, or four pages. In 1623, just seven years after Shakespeare's death, John Heminge and Henry Condell, his friends and colleagues in the King's Men, the acting troupe to which Shakespeare belonged most of his career, collected almost all of his plays in a folio edition.

“The folios give clues about punctuation and capitalization and about which words to emphasize,” said Sugarman. “It also suggests more of the people’s kind of accent such as a Norse, English, Scottish accent as opposed to very proper English accents.”

Sugarman noted that although many people think of the language in Shakespeare’s plays as ‘old’ English, it is really the beginning of the modern language we know today. He added that many people who have felt intimidated by the language comment on how much fun it is after an Instant Shakespeare Company reading. “Kids are much more alert to the playfulness of the language and go with it because they are not familiar with the words but they figure it out from the context,” he said.