For the past few years, as “prep” for their first Shakespeare seminar, I've set my undergraduates the opening two pages of a play I'm pretty certain they won't know, Henry VI Part I, reproduced from Hinman's facsimile of the First Folio. Their assignment: to answer what sounds like a simple enough question, “Where does a play begin?” Showing up for class a couple of days later, however, they know they've been stung. “Which play?” they now ask. “The play read? Or the play performed? And who are 'we' - early moderns or postmoderns?” There's a different beginning to a play, they observe, if “we” are picking up a book or taking a seat in the stalls - or, neo-Elizabethans, standing in the yard of the London Globe. One brave student offers Bedford's opening speech as the beginning - perhaps the standard place to start as a reader. But another student points out that Bedford has to get on stage before he starts talking. So the play has to begin with an entrance - like the stage direction says: “Enter the Funerall of King Henry the Fift.” But before that, someone else observes, “There's a music cue: 'Dead march.' The play begins with sound.” Then even that beginning recedes under pressure from another student's rhetorical musing, “Wouldn't you know what play you were going to? Wouldn't the play begin when you went to The Comedy of Errors, not King Lear?” (Or Henry VI not Henry V: what a world of narrative difference stands in that single digit.) Of course: spectators anticipate a different experience when they - notional Elizabethans - pay their penny for “The Tragedie of Othello the Moore of Venice” as against “The Famous History of the Life of Henry the Eight.” We do too, Shakespeare's latest spectators, for whom, besides, the play undoubtedly (also) begins with the great heap of what we already know (from school, adaptations and remakes, advertising, greeting cards, tabloid newspaper headlines, pop songs, the very air we breathe) about, say, a play called Romeo and Juliet before we see it, even for the first time. Can we offload our cultural baggage, think our way back to the Shakespeare play as premiere?