Read Romeo and Juliet by email.
Four weeks, and you will have read the whole play.
Two households, both alike in dignity — and one scene a morning. Shakespeare’s most famous play arrives the way it plays on stage: a scene at a time, speaker by speaker, from the street brawl to the tomb.
Four or five minutes a day, and every installment opens with a line reminding you where you left off.
Four weeks from now, you will have read Shakespeare.
27 installments, one an email
- First published
- 1597
- Installments
- 27
- Each installment
- 4–5 min
How long it takes
- Words
- 25,970
- Reading time
- 1 hour 48 minutes
- At 5 minutes a day
- 3 weeks
- At 10 minutes a day
- 11 days
- At 20 minutes a day
- 5 days
At 240 words a minute, the average for adult silent reading. Use your own speed
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Why read Romeo and Juliet?
A play is already a serial. Shakespeare built Romeo and Juliet out of scenes that run a few minutes each — a brawl, a feast, a balcony, a duel — and each one lands with an entrance or an exit that begs for tomorrow. Reading one scene a morning is closer to how an audience first met this play than any paperback is: the balcony scene arrives whole on day eight, and Mercutio gets a full morning to die.
The verse arrives as verse. Every speech keeps its speaker’s name in small capitals, stage directions stay in italics right where Shakespeare’s editors put them, and the lines break where the pentameter breaks — no reflowing poetry into paragraphs. Two long scenes are split at Shakespeare’s own stage beats rather than at a word count: the dawn parting in Act III ends with Juliet’s father at the door, and the tomb scene breaks at the cruelest possible line.
Installment 1 is the playbill: the persons of the play, then the Prologue — which is itself a sonnet, from the writer whose 154 sonnets were the first book this service ever sent. From there it is Verona straight through: 27 mornings, two hours’ traffic of the stage stretched into a month you will actually finish.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long does it take to read Romeo and Juliet?
About two and a half hours straight through (25,970 words). By email, it’s 27 daily installments of four to six minutes — a month of mornings, or faster at a premium pace of two or three scenes a day.
Is this the complete, unabridged text?
Yes — the full play in the carefully typeset Standard Ebooks edition: every scene, every stage direction, both Chorus sonnets, and the dramatis personae. Nothing is trimmed or modernized.
How does a play work as email?
One scene per email, in play formatting: speaker names in small capitals, stage directions in italics, verse lines kept as verse. A scene is a natural episode — most run 4–6 minutes — and each email is headed with its act, scene, and place. Only the two longest scenes arrive in two parts, split where the stage action turns.
Do the recaps spoil anything?
Shakespeare spoils his own play in the first fourteen lines — that’s what “star-cross’d lovers” means. The recaps are stricter than he is: each covers only the previous scene, so nothing arrives before the play delivers it.
How does it arrive?
One installment per email, one email a day, at the hour you pick, with a one-line recap of the previous scene at the top. Free. Unsubscribe or pause anytime.
Standard Ebooks edition, public domain. Texts from Standard Ebooks and Project Gutenberg editions. Not affiliated with either.