"It's hard to read the comedies. A lot of the humor is hidden in the way Shakespeare encoded his "stage directions" in the text." Agreed, I didn't express what

"It's hard to read the comedies. A lot of the humor is hidden in the way Shakespeare encoded his "stage directions" in the text." Agreed, I didn't express what I said well. The comedies make much more sense to me now but are easily lost on 12-year-olds unless carefully introduced and explained well. At my school it didn't help that anything likely to titillate the minds of 12-year-old boys was expurgated from the text (our school editions were first published in the 1940s/'50s or earlier and had been used by the school for decades so the editing had a sense of prudery about it). Of course that they were censored was never mentioned by the teachers but when I was about 15 I discovered the fact by accident after using one of my father's editions for homework. Not sure of the play now but it wasn't one of the comedies (I think it was Julius C.). This 'naughty' edition was a hit when I took it to school, the kids were rightly annoyed to see large chunks of text missing from their school editions. For example, any part with bastard in it was removed, and that was just for starters. Had the comedies not been hacked about I'm sure they would have made more sense. Fortunately I don't think that nonsense goes on any longer. "They're still better in performance, where the actors and director have done the "translation"." Very true, every once in a while we had a troupe called The Young Shakespeare Players come to the school and perform everything from Lear to Julius Caesar to The Scottish play to the comedies and they performed them in ways that would bring out the best for school kids. I suppose I'm sensitive to the way Shakespeare is introduced to schools because I'm a techie whose primary interests were technical and science subjects and I was only mediocre at English and languages school, so it would have been easy for me to end up among the group that found Shakespeare a drugery and that was so for some. Their attitude was the words didn't make sense so why bother studying it (the same went for poetry, I recall some kids just giving up on Eliott's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and The Waste Land). Fortunately, I caught the Shakespeare bug and I'm very glad I did. Incidentally, we had a little textbook just called English Essays, it contained works by Addison, Steele, Bacon, Hazlitt, Lamb and so on. I just fell in love with many of these essays such as Old China, A Dissertation Upon Roast Pig, On a Sundial, Sir Roger de Coverley and so on—I remember them as if it were yesterday. The language is so beautiful and eloquent yet they lose nothing for being very short. They were very formative, they brought great writing in small digestible amounts to kids like me who would normally prefer to be reading say Scientific American than novels like Thackeray's Vanity Fair, which I recall I struggled to get through. I cannot understand why these wonderful essays seem to have fallen out of favor with educators. — Edit: Re stage directions as we have them are almost never Shakespeare's own writing. I have a reprint collection of the earliest folio editions and they are a little too Spartan for me (they're harder to follow).