I spent the week on poetic analysis of my speeches. Six brightly colored markers, a cup of tea, some pretty music in the background, and an hour is happily passed. 

SparkNotes is an amazingly useful (free!) online resource with "no fear" Shakespeare, online texts with modern day English translations alongside the original. It was interesting looking up words I wasn’t sure about, and realizing the meaning of entire sentences was different to what I first had assumed. 

Ariel has quite a few rhyming speeches/songs which will be fun to explore in rehearsal. I also loved discovering that a lot of Ariel’s speeches use aspirate, light, tip-of-the-tongue words. When she is spiriting, as the nymph/harpy etc, her sounds become more glottal. That ol’ Shakespeare was clever... DE-LICIOUS!