Chapter_6_Acting_Shakespeare

Shakespeare redefined the art of acting. Most people, when they think of Shakespearean acting, think of something old-fashioned—actors adopting heroic postures and declaiming in fruity voices. It’s the sort of acting Shakespeare himself hated, mocked and roundly criticised, whether it’s actors ‘out-Heroding Herod’ and ‘sawing the air’ with their arms, or Bottom declaiming:

The raging rocks and shivering shocks

Shall break the locks of prison gates;

And Phoebus’ car shall shine from far

And make or mar the foolish Fates . . .

And then sighing contentedly:

This was lofty.

When Shakespeare was a boy, professional acting was still in its infancy. The Mystery Plays which he would have seen on the streets of Coventry were performed by amateurs—members of the various trade guilds who produced them. It’s here he would have seen some popular amateur ham actor tearing a passion to tatters in the role of King Herod—a role famous for its raging bombast. It was a role hugely popular with audiences (and ham actors, too, of course). When Hamlet warns the actors against out-Heroding Herod, it is no doubt such a performance that Shakespeare is recalling.

He also saw the guild actors (models for the loveable troupe of artisans in A Midsummer Night’s Dream) playing roles like the Vice, a companion of the Devil and another crowd pleaser. The Vice was the charismatic smiling villain who is very much at the core of Richard III—

Why, I can smile, and murder whiles I smile,

And cry ‘content’ to that which grieves my heart

And wet my cheeks with artificial tears . . .

—and in a more sophisticated, enigmatic way, Iago.

The character of the Vice obviously appealed to the boy Shakespeare and in Twelfth Night he gives us a thumbnail sketch of the Vice in performance:

. . . like to the old Vice . . .

Who, with dagger of lath [wood]

In his rage and his wrath,

Cries ‘Ah, ha!’ to the devil . . .

Monarchs maintained groups of musicians and sometimes Fools or Jesters. Henry VIII’s favourite fool was Will Somers, who served him for twenty years and (like Lear’s Fool) became his closest companion, the only man who could keep the King’s spirits up when he was ill.

Rag-tag groups of players trudged around the fairgrounds and performed in the various inn yards that were to become the model for England’s first professional theatres. But these players were much despised by the civil and church authorities, branded as rogues and vagabonds, frequently whipped out of town and—like murderers and suicides—denied burial in sanctified ground. Their only chance of survival was to attract the protection and patronage of the aristocracy, and gradually the great noblemen began to vie with each other as to who maintained the best troupe of players. Eventually Queen Elizabeth herself weighed in and supported a company known as the Queen’s Men. They were obliged to perform at court or some great house whenever required, but were otherwise free to perform in the city or tour the provinces with the Queen’s protection.

The actors in these troupes bore little resemblance to the movie and TV stars of today or the polished products of our drama schools, who are buffed and dentally perfect with nicely modulated vowels. Imagine instead a random selection of desperados from all parts of the kingdom, of all shapes and sizes, and all speaking different dialects—some cockney (like the Queen herself), others Northumbrian, Scots or Irish, some from Somerset, some from Wales. There would be no standard pronunciation, or spelling, until Dr Sam Johnson’s great dictionary in the eighteenth century. Until then you spoke and spelled according to your fancy and local custom. Even then, there was room for inventiveness. In one speech Shakespeare himself spells the word ‘sheriff’ eight different ways.

It’s no wonder Shakespeare was so fond of punning. Words had a very different meaning depending on who was speaking them and in which dialect. We lose those many shades of ambivalence when accent is standardised. Shakespeare spoke (and spelled) with a Warwickshire accent which it is not difficult for linguists to reconstruct. Consider Macbeth’s witches’ line: ‘Fair is foul and foul is fair.’ In 1606 it would have sounded more like ‘Fear is fool and fool is fear’. Characters in Shakespeare often misunderstand each other and send up each other’s regional accents. Listen to the Englishman Gower and the Welsh Fluellen in Henry V:

Fluellen: Ay, he was porn at Monmouth, Captain Gower. What call you the town’s name where Alexander the Pig was porn?

Gower: Alexander the Great.

Fluellen: Why, I pray you, is not ‘pig’ great? The pig, or the great, or the mighty, or the huge, or the magnanimous, are all one reckonings, save the phrase is a little variations.

Gower: I think Alexander the Great was born in Macedon; his father was called Philip of Macedon, as I take it.

Fluellen: I think it is in Macedon where Alexander is porn. I tell you, Captain, if you look in the maps of the world, I warrant you shall find, in the comparisons between Macedon and Monmouth, that the situations, look you, is both alike. There is a river in Macedon, and there is also moreover a river at Monmouth—it is called Wye at Monmouth, but it is out of my prains what is the name of the other river; but ’tis all one, ’tis alike as my fingers is to my fingers, and there is salmons in both.

With such a rich stew of regional accents and odd assortment of physical types on stage, the ensemble would appear bizarre to modern eyes and ears. With no universal healthcare, no dental care and pretty basic hygiene, it would not have looked much like your respectable classical theatre troupe today. But it was a very robust one and a young one. Life expectancy in London was thirty-five in the more affluent parishes, twenty-five in the poorer parishes where the actors lived. Shakespeare did pretty well to survive till fifty-two. Given all this youthful energy, the cut-throat competition, the excitement of working on all-new material and the heady success and popularity of the plays, we can never hope to recapture the visceral thrill of the Elizabethan theatre or the amazement of its audience hearing all these plays for the first time, marvelling at new-minted words and wondering how the story was going to end. The extraordinary thing is how today, under such very different conditions, the plays still manage to thrill, entertain, disturb and inspire us.

There were as yet no acting schools, no acting theories or philosophies. Expertise and technique were the fruits of experience. The more gifted, ambitious or charismatic actors led the troupe and passed on their skills to young apprentices. Companies became increasingly close-knit, identifiable and competitive, echoing the rivalries of their patrons. But the acting style, like the scripts they performed, was still rooted in the tradition of the old Mystery and Morality Plays with their stock one-dimensional characters, clichéd mannerisms and simplistic texts.

Once playhouses began to be built and theatre became more lucrative and widely popular, it began to attract the talent of the ‘University Wits’ and the standard of playwriting lifted significantly. Nashe, Greene, Peele and Marlowe penned lively and exciting poetry in dramas with a mighty sweep and broad appeal. But characterisation still remained conventional, archetypal, one-dimensional.

Shakespeare’s earliest plays share this universal defect. Characters in Henry VI parts 1 and 2 are largely interchangeable; there are few distinct voices. The rhetoric is powerful and emotional, but everyone tends to talk the same way—it’s hard to discern what we now call ‘personalities’. And then in Part 3 a distinct solo voice emerges—that of the murderous hunchback Richard, Duke of Gloucester. Shades of the old Vice are still discernible, to be sure, but overriding those is the sense of a fully fledged, living human being. This was one of the first parts written specifically for the twenty-year-old Richard Burbage and the first triumph in what was to become a great partnership. Between them, Shakespeare and Burbage revolutionised the nature of acting. This was in part due to Burbage’s natural facility for playing truthfully with a quickness and lightness that was a distinct contrast to Ned Alleyn’s booming declamation. Until now, Alleyn had been regarded as the tops. Ben Jonson said of him: ‘Others speak, but only thou dost act.’ Thomas Nashe said he was the best actor ‘since before Christ was born’. But he was limited by the roles he was given. His most famous role was Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, who has page after page of thundering rhetoric but no personality. None of Marlowe’s characters has any psychological development, any inner life, any spontaneity. And this is the great gap between Marlowe and Shakespeare.

Such was the success of Burbage’s Richard III that one of those links was forged between two artists that makes theatre history: think Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, Arthur Miller and Elia Kazan, Rogers and Hammerstein or Gilbert and Sullivan. Together, Shakespeare and Burbage set out to discredit and replace the old-style acting of Ned Alleyn. In what is an almost gratuitous digression, Hamlet gives the travelling players a lecture on acting. Plot-wise, this does not come at a fortuitous moment in the play. We are awaiting the arrival of the court to watch The Murder of Gonzago. Hamlet is all wound up because this is the litmus test of Claudius’s guilt, an event which will answer his doubts and decide his course of action. The last thing we need right now is a lesson on the art of acting. Sure, Hamlet wants his interpolated speech delivered to effect, but having taught the leading actor of the troupe how to speak it (a somewhat presumptuous act in itself), he then launches into a full-on critique of the craft of acting. Fortunately for us, it’s just about the best acting lesson we could ever hope to hear. By giving these lines to Burbage, both the author and the actor are nailing their colours to the mast and repudiating the sort of acting that was too often being acclaimed and accepted as legit:

Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue . . .

(Deliver the speech, please, as I taught you, lightly and easily.)

But if you mouth it, as many of your players do, I had as lief the town crier spoke my lines . . .

(But if you rant the way many actors do, my lines may as well be yelled out by the town crier.)

Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus, but use all gently . . .

(Don’t throw your arms around like this, but do everything with moderation.)

For in the very torrent, tempest, and, as I may say, whirlwind of your passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness . . .

(No matter how worked up you’re supposed to be, you have to develop both technique and artistic instinct to make your work comprehensible.)

O, it offends me to the soul to hear a robustious periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings, who for the most part are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb-shows and noise . . .

(It makes me sick to hear a bawling actor in makeup tearing a passionate speech to pieces, destroying it, just to impress the slobs in the audience who appreciate nothing but spectacle and noise.)

I would have such a fellow whipped for o’erdoing Termagant. It out-Herods Herod. Pray you avoid it.

(An actor should be whipped for overacting a part like Termagant—that violent character in the Mystery Plays. It’s even more over the top than ranting King Herod. Please don’t go there.)

Be not too tame neither, but let your own discretion be your tutor . . .

(You mustn’t err on the side of being under-powered; develop a sense of just how much energy is required.)

Suit the word to the action, the action to the word, with this special observance, that you o’erstep not the modesty of nature . . .

(Make sure your actions are appropriate to what you’re saying and be scrupulous about keeping it real.)

For anything so overdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is to hold as ’twere the mirror up to nature.

(Because if you overact you’re missing the whole point of acting, which always has been, and still is, to accurately reflect reality.)

To show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure . . .

(To give us convincing images of goodness, of those things we should despise, and of the times we live in as precisely as the image made by a seal pressed into wax.)

Now this overdone or come tardy off, though it makes the unskilful laugh, cannot but make the judicious grieve, the censure of which one must in your allowance o’erweigh a whole theatre of others.

(Now if you ham it up or are slovenly, you may get a laugh out of the slobs but you’re going to really turn off the intelligent theatregoer, and the opinion of one of them is worth a whole theatreful of the other sort.)

O, there be players that I have seen play—and heard others praise, and that highly—not to speak it profanely, that neither having the accent of Christians, nor the gait of Christian, Pagan, or man, have so strutted and bellowed that I have thought some of Nature’s journeymen had made men, and not made them well, they imitated humanity so abominably.

(There are certain actors I’ve seen and heard others raving about—and this may sound heretical—who were so appalling I could only imagine they were made by one of God’s apprentices rather than God himself.)

And let those that play your clowns speak no more than is set down for them—for there be of them that will themselves laugh, to set on some quantity of barren spectators to laugh too, though in the meantime some necessary question of the play be then to be considered. That’s villainous and shows a most pitiful ambition in the fool that uses it.

(Make your clowns stick to the script and not ad lib or muck about. Some of them pretend to ‘corpse’, or ‘go up’, and this always gets a response from the dim-witted in the audience. Meanwhile the play goes out the window. That really is scraping the bottom of the barrel.)

This last salvo seems somewhat irrelevant to the subject in hand and may be a crack at the company clown Will Kemp, just as some of the remarks about audiences must reflect more of Shakespeare’s frustration than Hamlet’s.

One of the obstacles blocking this new style of naturalistic, lifelike acting was the old style of writing as exemplified by Marlowe. He is justly renowned for his ‘mighty line’, that pounding iambic pentameter:

Is it not passing brave to be a King and ride in triumph through Persepolis?

Gorgeous stuff, but it can get mighty tedious as it rolls out page after page unrelieved by any variety. It’s almost impossible for the actor not to become declamatory. Yet Marlowe shows no interest in experimentation or developing new technique.

By contrast, Shakespeare never stopped experimenting, breaking up the iambic pentameter to make it more natural and psychologically truthful, switching back and forth between verse and prose, inventing an individual voice for each character. Just as he pokes fun at Ned Alleyn in the character of Bottom playing Pyramus, he satirises Marlowe in the role of Pistol (Henry IV: Part 2 and Henry V). Pistol is the swaggering soldier, the cowardly braggart much given to declaiming scraps of verse he has picked up at the theatre:

. . . Shall packhorses and hollow pampered jades of Asia,

Which cannot go but thirty mile a day,

Compare with Caesars and with Cannibals,

And Trojan Greeks? Nay, rather damn them with

King Cerebus, and let the welkin roar.

This is a wonderfully twisted rendition of one of Tamburlaine’s famous speeches:

Holla ye pampered jades of Asia!

What, can ye draw but twenty mile a day,

And have so proud a chariot at your heels.

And such a coachman as great Tamburlaine . . .

In Pistol, Shakespeare is ridiculing Marlowe, Alleyn and that whole tradition of bombastic strutting and fretting that he and Burbage were determined to eradicate.

The acting revolution was not, however, an overnight affair. There was still a generation of actors playing by the old entrenched conventions and many plays other than Shakespeare’s were still in the repertoire. For all his freshness, Shakespeare too still observed some of the formal gestures audiences had come to understand. There is much kissing of hands to demonstrate lovesickness (think of Malvolio); kneeling to show submission; lowering the head as a sign of modesty; folding of arms to suggest contemplation or grief. Macduff’s pulling his hat down over his brow is another accepted token of grief.

With Burbage, Shakespeare found it possible to explore the inner man as well as play the outward flourishes and conventional symbols of emotion. Richard III may have begun as a variation of the medieval Vice, but unlike that stock character, he is capable of change—of fear, guilt and remorse. This ‘internalising’ of character reaches its apogee in Hamlet, who reveals himself much more through his soliloquies, his inner self, than by his external actions.

It was written of Burbage:

Whatever is commendable in the grave orator is most exquisitely perfect in him; for by a full and significant action of body he charms our attention. Sit in a full theatre, and you think you will see so many lines drawn from the circumference of so many ears while the actor is centre . . . for what we see him personate we think truly done before us.

People often spoke of his naturalness, and the liveliness of his ‘personation’, capable of

so wholly transforming himself into his part, and putting off himself with his clothes, as never (not so much as in the Tiring-house) assum’d himself again until the play was done . . . never falling in his part when he had done speaking, but with his looks and gestures maintaining it still until the heighth.

He seems to have remained one of Shakespeare’s closest friends as well as a colleague. He named his children Juliet, William and Ann. He also seems to have had a robust personality and could be just as violent off stage as he was on.

The close alliance between Burbage, Shakespeare and the rest of the troupe was no doubt born out of Shakespeare’s having risen through the ranks, as it were, being an actor himself rather than one of the blow-in ‘University Wits’ determined to use the stage as a showcase for their erudition. An anonymous play entitled The Second Return to Parnassus has two characters named Richard Burbage and Will Kemp. They speak on behalf of all actors, decrying the ‘University Wits’ who write plays that ‘smell too much of that writer Ovid, and talk too much Proserpina and Jupiter’. They praise instead ‘our fellow Shakespeare . . . it’s a shrewd fellow indeed . . . puts them all down’.

Burbage paved the way for those great actors who reinvent Shakespeare for each new generation. It’s always the same pattern: at first they are rejected and criticised for breaking the classical mould, for being too ‘natural’ and ignoring the ‘poetry’, for being ‘too modern’. Then, little by little, they become the accepted norm, the icon of classical acting, the new breed. Unfortunately, in their later years, many of them are in turn rejected in favour of newcomers more in touch with, and more a true reflection of, the current audience.

In the eighteenth century it was David Garrick who rewrote the rules and had people’s hair standing on end with the realism of his acting, whether it was seeing Hamlet’s Ghost or recoiling from Macbeth’s air-drawn dagger.

In the nineteenth century Edmund Kean was the great revolutionary. Coleridge remarked that watching Kean act was like ‘reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning’. Sometimes Kean was criticised for effects that were regarded as too sensational, too showy for a refined theatre audience. But he certainly knocked the stuffiness out of classical acting and made Shakespeare astonishingly ‘modern’.

George Henry Lewes was present at his last performance as Othello in 1832, as he recounts in On Actors and the Art of Acting:

On that very evening, when gout had made it difficult for him to display his accustomed grace, when a drunken hoarseness had ruined the once matchless voice, such was the irresistible pathos—manly, not tearful—which vibrated in his tones and expressed itself in look and gestures, that old men leaned their heads upon their arms and fairly sobbed. It was, one must confess, a patchy performance considered as a whole; some parts were miserably tricky, others misconceived, others gabbled over in haste to reach the ‘points’; but it was irradiated by such flashes that I would again risk broken ribs for the chance of a good place in the pit to see anything like it.

The whole notion of Shakespearean acting being bombastic and ‘hammy’ is a hangover of the nineteenth century with its huge theatres like Drury Lane and the Lyceum. The theatres of the Restoration period and the eighteenth century were relatively small and intimate. The Elizabethan theatres, although they held up to three thousand people, were also intimate and wrap-around, with the actors in close proximity to the audience; at the Globe, no one was further than fifteen metres from the stage. But the Victorian theatres were vast, and most of the audience remote from the stage. Opera glasses were needed to study the actors’ expressions. There had been some degree of class distinction in the earlier theatres, but the nineteenth century saw audiences severely stratified, with the nobs in the stalls and dress circle, the lively riffraff consigned to ‘the gods’ way up the back.

Moreover, all intimacy was lost by the introduction of the proscenium arch, or picture frame, with its front curtain. The magical simplicity and economy of the Elizabethan stage was jettisoned in favour of massive sets and painted scenery, the more realistic the better (Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree even had live rabbits hopping around his Forest of Arden). The new gas lighting and, later, electricity meant one could achieve all sorts of marvellous effects.

All of this was, of course, greatly to the detriment of Shakespeare’s plays, which had to be severely cut to allow time for all the elaborate scene-changes behind the curtain. But with the revival of medievalism, so beloved of Sir Walter Scott and the Pre-Raphaelites, and the exciting new discoveries in archaeology (especially in Egypt), audiences revelled in the visual extravaganzas—Alexandria, the Capitol, the siege of Harfleur—all brought to life before your eyes, with scores of extras in ‘authentic’ period costumes, horses, hunting dogs and an orchestra sawing away in the pit.

Charles Kean’s production of Richard II had a weekly bill of seventy-six pounds, seven shillings for one hundred and thirty-nine extras, thirty-two ‘extra ballet’, thirteen ‘extra ballet girls’ and forty children, plus three men to ring church bells. All of the above were employed to stage a spectacular tableau of Bolingbroke’s entry into London, which is not in the script.

To compete with all of this the acting had to be pretty BIG, and thus was born a school of acting that gave us, at its best, Sir Donald Wolfit, and at its worst, several generations of ham actors bellowing melodramatically and tearing passions to tatters.

In the twentieth century in England it was undoubtedly Laurence Olivier who took on the mantle of Burbage, Garrick and Kean. Pictures of Kean’s Richard III bear an uncanny resemblance to Olivier’s personation and he seems deliberately to have set out to emulate Burbage and play all of his roles. He studied Burbage’s career closely, and when he was preparing to play Othello, remarked:

I think Shakespeare and Burbage got drunk together one night and Burbage said, ‘I can play anything you write, anything at all.’ And Shakespeare said, ‘Right, boy, I’ll get you.’ And then he wrote Othello.

This is a testament to the difficulty of playing what Olivier termed the ‘monstrous burden’ of Othello—a role that has no relief from its consuming rage and intensity. I’d be tempted to put Lear in the same category—and he has to be an octogenarian to boot!

Olivier was not, of course, the only great Shakespearean actor of the twentieth century. Before him others like Gielgud had seamlessly evolved as part of the great tradition and had beaten him to a knighthood—much to Olivier’s chagrin, it would seem. But in the tradition of Burbage, Garrick and Kean, Olivier broke the mould, seized the crown and brought Shakespeare back into the arena of popular mass entertainment through a peculiar modernity of approach. This was noted by Laurence Kitchin when he saw the young Olivier’s Henry V at the Old Vic in 1937:

There sat the king as the prelates got down to expounding his claim to the throne of France and there was I, ready to watch a matinee idol’s growing-pains. Having seen [Godfrey] Tearle [a leading Shakespearean actor in the 1930s] and [Ralph] Richardson, I expected to learn nothing new about the part. Sooner or later the legalistic drone would end and Henry would ask, in the stately manner of Tearle, or as near as a classical novice could get to it: ‘May I with right and conscience make this claim?’ It would, of course, be essential that the claim was just. Any doubt, and Henry would call off the war at once; if the play was not staunchly and reputably patriotic it was nothing. And then I noticed that the king was getting restive . . . Generations of persecuted schoolboys were being vindicated by a Henry who had no more time for that dreary speech than they. That was the revolution, consolidated when Olivier spoke the enquiry very clear and fast on a rising, hectoring inflection. It was plain that he was going to war anyway. Right and conscience were being given the value they had in 1937 when speeches relative to the international situation were made.

It has been my great pleasure and privilege to see many wonderful performances in Shakespeare over the last few decades, including Olivier’s Othello (on stage, not the dreadful film recording); Judi Dench as Viola, Perdita and Lady Macbeth; Ramaz Chkhikvadze as Richard III; David Warner’s Henry VI; Peggy Ashcroft’s Queen Margaret; Henry Goodman’s Shylock; and Ian Holm’s Henry V—all original, idiosyncratic and, in their time, definitive.

But ‘in their time’ . . . that is part of the cruel nature of theatre, of acting. Great pieces of music, great paintings, great sculptures are somehow fixed in time. They may go in and out of fashion, fall into neglect and then get rediscovered, but acting is of the moment, and begins to date almost while you’re watching it. Most of Olivier’s screen performances now look quaint and mannered to the younger generation, as do most old movies. Only a handful of performances still hold up, and even then the viewer is conscious of making allowances for old conventions and aesthetics. It’s a continual puzzle to me that performances hailed for being so truthful, so realistic, ten years later look false and stilted. What has changed? Are people that different? Have our body language, our intonation patterns, our ways of reacting to fear, bliss or despair changed that radically in such a short time? I doubt it. But our ways of portraying them have. The sets of signals, the artifices, the conventions of acting are in a constant if subtle state of flux. Performers imitate life and then play it back to the viewer. The audience, if it likes what it sees, will either enthusiastically or unconsciously begin to take on the nuances of the performance: this is what it is like to be cool, to be tough, to be sexy, to look successful.

Art imitates life and then life imitates art. We’re all familiar with famous movie stars who have managed to capture the zeitgeist and become role models for a generation who ape not only their clothes and hairstyles but their mannerisms, catch-phrases, deportment and gestures.

When it comes to acting Shakespeare today, things are a lot less clear-cut than they were, say, fifty years ago when I first set foot on stage. Back then it was pretty widely accepted in England, Australia and America that there was a definable Shakespeare ‘style’ appropriate to the Tragedies and the Comedies—a manner of vocal delivery, accent, posture, an attitude to the material that marked it out as ‘Shakespeare’. This aesthetic edifice was already beginning to crumble, but there were enough actors, directors, critics and drama teachers of the old school still clinging to the wreckage.

It made acting Shakespeare in Australia quite a schizophrenic experience. Our role models were people like Ron Haddrick, who had recently returned to Australia after spending time with the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford (the predecessor to the Royal Shakespeare Company) where he had played major roles like Tybalt in Romeo and Juliet and Horatio to Michael Redgrave’s Hamlet. There was also a generation of wonderful radio actors (now almost as extinct as radio drama) like Richard Davies, Alastair Duncan, Nigel Lovell, Lyndall Barbour and Amber May Cecil with wonderfully cultivated and mellifluous voices, especially when they were reading poetry or classical drama. (Of course, it was important to drop those honeyed tones when you were off stage or outside the studio, otherwise people would say you were ‘up yourself’.)

So for a young actor coming into the business, it was very much a matter of ‘putting on’ a voice when you started to act and it’s a problem we in Australia still have. Critics and a fair proportion of audiences condemn actors for playing Shakespeare with Australian accents. Unless you sound like a BBC recording you’ve got it wrong. I admit there are some plays where an Australian accent can be inappropriate—for instance, if you’re playing Henry Higgins, an Australian accent would be very confusing, likewise a good deal of Oscar Wilde—but not Shakespeare.

(When we did Long Day’s Journey into Night (1999, a Bell Shakespeare/Queensland Theatre Company co-production), the two boys were encouraged to use quite broad Australian accents. There were gains and losses. On the one hand, it helped the characters seem more real and familiar. It relieved that tension where the audience is listening for inconsistencies. It freed up the actors to concentrate on the situation and emotional journey rather than listening to themselves. The losses were in the jarring inconsistencies when place names came up: the play is very site-specific. There are also phrases, instances of vocabulary, cadences and rhythms which are specific to their place and time. In a less domestic and naturalistic piece you might get away with it. But so much American and Irish drama is written almost in dialect. It would seem self-defeating to play David Mamet or Sean O’Casey with Australian voices. Very confusing.)

But Shakespeare does not belong in that realm of naturalism or domesticity except where a specific dialect is called for—like Fluellen or MacMorris in Henry V, Sir Hugh Evans and Dr Caius in Merry Wives of Windsor. In such cases you simply go for an authentic accent; there’s no point shying away from it. It’s worth noting that Australian actors can assume American accents with ease and most of our movie stars spend the bulk of their lives being American.

Shakespeare has a universality and timelessness that has seen him adapted into many different languages and cultures, and each has its own way of speaking and acting Shakespeare. Some of the most outstanding productions of Shakespeare in modern times have not been English ones. I’m thinking of the famous Zulu Macbeth, with its tom-toms and witch doctors, which came to London in the mid-1960s, the great Georgian Richard III with Ramaz Chkhikvadze, Declan Donnellan’s Twelfth Night with an all-Russian cast, and Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood, to name but a few. At the Shanghai Shakespeare Festival in 1994 there were eleven Shakespeare productions, each in a different Chinese dialect. The standout success was a Peking Opera version of Hamlet entirely sung, danced and choreographed with a blood-curdling Ghost singing in that unique and weird high-pitched voice of the Chinese theatre. The least successful production was a Henry IV which tried to reproduce an Anglo-Saxon aesthetic. They had medieval costumes, a Tudor pub, blond wigs and white makeup, along with lots of thigh slapping and tankard clinking. It was a painful lesson, demonstrating the advantages of tapping into your own cultural roots rather than aping someone else’s.

But it’s harder for us in Australia because such a large part of our heritage is an English one. When the Germans, Russians or Japanese hear Shakespeare they hear it in an up-to-date translation, so there is no sense of the archaic. Part of the burden as well as the glory of Shakespeare for us Australians is that we have this still-living and vibrant four-hundred-year-old language which is largely comprehensible but is also riddled with obscure words, different grammar and unfamiliar syntax. Even in his own day Shakespeare’s use of language was more complex, more challenging than that of most of his contemporaries. So how do we handle that? Once you get the hang of it, get familiar with it, Shakespeare’s language is a source of endless delight, but for an audience coming to it unprepared, for schoolkids puzzling over textbooks, it can be a big hurdle . . . Do we translate it, do we cut out the hard bits?

I think theatre practice will see more and more minor surgery taking place—translating individual words or even whole phrases which have lost their currency. Some scholars are currently undertaking major translations of complex plays like Troilus and Cressida and have shown me their work. I would be very happy to stage such a version. It would not be a substitute but an alternative, one easier to comprehend in performance. My only stipulation would be that we keep as much of the original as possible and only translate those sections which are baffling on first hearing and which are essential to understand in the context of the whole play. Would you ever want to translate ‘To be or not to be . . .’ or ‘Once more unto the breach . . .’? I doubt it, but the day may come (language changing as rapidly as it is) when even the most commonplace words and phrases in Shakespeare will be obsolete.

For modern actors working in Australia (and the same thing applies in America, and to some extent even in Britain) archaic text is not the only problem. I come back to the question of voice, of accent: what is appropriate for Shakespeare? I include Britain in this query because there, too, a social revolution inside the theatre has thrown all the cards in the air. It began some time in the 1950s when a new generation of actors like Albert Finney, Peter O’Toole and Richard Harris brought regional accents and energy into London—a sound distinctly different to the cadences of Olivier, Gielgud and Redgrave. It wasn’t just the sound but a new class-consciousness and anti-establishment vigour reflected in the writing of people like John Osborne, Arnold Wesker and Harold Pinter—the kind of writing that led a despairing Noël Coward to decide that theatre was dead. Regional British accents are now widely accepted on the English stage whether you’re playing the classics or not. And black actors are regularly seen in roles such as Henry V and Hamlet. Thirty years ago that was unimaginable. If such a situation is acceptable in England, why do we find any resistance in Australia?

Let’s first dispose of this thing about the Australian accent: which Australian accent? There are dozens of them. You don’t have to be Henry Higgins to note the many varieties but I’m sure he could pick not only a Queenslander from a South Australian: he could tell you what school you went to and what street you were born in. He could tell if you’re a lawyer, a market gardener or a stockbroker, a bus driver, a schoolteacher or a politician (and probably your party and your electorate). Today these differences are rarely a hindrance to social or professional mobility in Australia, but for a country that loudly proclaims its egalitarianism, when the chips are down the old school tie and prestigious address still count for something. So we can still relate to the world of Shakespeare and its various power structures, and decide on the Australian accent of our choice when playing an emperor, a lad-about-town or a gravedigger. Our job is to make our audience feel they know these people.

The challenges facing the modern actor when speaking Shakespeare go way beyond accent. When people criticise an actor’s ‘accent’ they are generally meaning something else: a flatness of tone, a lazy diction, a thin sound that fails to express the richness of the language. And this is a charge that can be levelled at actors the world over who are struggling to reconcile the sort of acting generally accepted as appropriate for the movie or TV screen with the heightened language and rhetoric of the classics.

The language employed by writers of film and TV scripts tends to be monosyllabic, a precise reflection of everyday speech relying heavily on cliché and colloquialism. The language of Shakespeare is far more complex. It employs an unfamiliar syntax and a wide-ranging vocabulary that can be erudite, archaic and obscure. It needs a thorough understanding, great clarity of thought, and the vocal technique to sustain and communicate it. Because it is ‘unnatural’ to modern ears, the actor’s job is to make it both heartfelt and comprehensible.

In much modern drama, especially for the screen, silences and facial expressions can be more eloquent than words. A good actor in silent close-up can convey volumes. The subtext and the things left unsaid are often more significant than the dialogue. In Shakespeare there is virtually no subtext. Characters mean what they say and, if they’re faking it, they tell you so in an aside. Some actors and directors tie themselves up in knots to wrest perverse meanings from the text. Of course you have to dig beneath the surface of the text to decide why characters say the things they do, but you can be almost a hundred per cent sure they mean what they say. This is particularly so when they are speaking verse. The rhythm of iambic pentameter is the same as the human heartbeat, so when characters speak in blank verse they are speaking, literally, from the heart. You’ve got to pay more attention when they speak prose, because here the rhythms are broken up and you have more options in phrasing. When people speak prose they are often being tricky, deceitful and jokey. A notable example is the first meeting of Hamlet with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. The surface banter is undergraduate bawdy humour, but it is a smokescreen for duplicity which Hamlet senses and sets about deconstructing.

In a lot of contemporary writing emotions are disguised (as in life) with an assumed nonchalance, an attitude of ‘cool’. For reasons that vary according to circumstances, feelings are repressed, internalised and hidden. Rather than being declared, emotions are often wrung out of people and express themselves in short grabs. No one hides their feelings for long in Shakespeare; they’re pretty upfront, and if feelings are momentarily suppressed they burst forth in impassioned and sustained rhetoric. With most film and TV drama, we are watching through a window in the fourth wall. Characters are usually oblivious to our presence and go about their lives as if we (via the camera) are voyeurs. Performances of Shakespeare, on the other hand, benefit enormously by acknowledging and playing directly to the audience. There is no fourth wall. Shakespeare reminds us again and again that we are watching a play, that we are in a theatre and that all the world’s a stage. This creates an intimacy, a bonding with the audience, a unique relationship the camera can never achieve. When a live actor eyeballs you and asks you directly, ‘What’s to become of this?’, you get that visceral thrill you experienced when picked on in class. This struck me most forcibly on that occasion when I first stepped onto the stage of the new Globe in London. I was amazed to find how closely the audience is packed all around the stage, gazing up from the pit, staring down from the galleries. It would be pointless to pretend they weren’t there. The space demands that everything, as far as possible, is shared with them and all soliloquies are spoken directly to them so that they become, in a sense, colloquies. The play isn’t for the actors; it’s for the audience.

Because so much of contemporary TV and cinema aims to reproduce everyday life there is a lot of low energy and inconsequential material. Hopefully it has a dramatic pay-off and we can take delight in seeing the trivial, the petty, the domestic bits of life being well observed and truthfully rendered. But in Shakespeare the stakes are always high. Every scene is a little play in itself, with a conflict and a resolution. Every scene deals with a crisis of some magnitude. Energy is always at an optimum, even when you’re only standing and watching, because you are partaking in a crisis. You’re always poised like a greyhound in the slips, ready to spring into action. And when you do spring into action you need all your energy to sustain you through the demanding rhetoric and ring the changes. Your whole body must be fully engaged whether you’re speaking or not. You have to be an active listener. There is no slackness in Shakespeare. People should rarely sit down. Shakespeare works best when everyone’s on their feet.

There are no pauses in speaking Shakespeare; leave that to Chekhov and Pinter. Shakespeare dictates very clearly the tempo and dynamic of a scene. If he wants a silence he’ll indicate it. Otherwise you think of your reply while the other fellow’s speaking and you come in right on cue. Keep the ball in the air. Your need to speak must be paramount. If your need to speak isn’t strong enough, when you do speak you’ll sound phoney or under-powered. And the higher the stakes the more heightened the language and the feelings become. There are no inconsequential scenes in Shakespeare. It’s been said that theatre is life without the dull bits. That’s especially true of Shakespeare.

When it comes to the worst faults of actors playing Shakespeare, I’d say one of the most widespread is being incomprehensible. This is for a number of reasons but the basic one is laziness. It means the actor hasn’t done his homework and hasn’t figured out how to communicate meaning, thinking close enough is good enough . . . Even after fifty years of playing Shakespeare and being more familiar with it than many people, I always find it a shock when I go to the theatre; it takes five minutes or so to adjust my ear and brain—especially if it’s a play I’m not that well acquainted with. An audience needs time to take in the set, the costumes, figure out who’s who and follow the exposition in a language that is foreign to them.

So the actor needs to start by fully understanding and appreciating the text, and this entails a lot of dictionary work. You might have a rough idea what a word means, but look it up nonetheless—and not just in one dictionary but in a range of three or four good ones to compare their different definitions. You need to know not just what the word means now but what it meant four hundred years ago. Has its meaning changed? Where did Shakespeare get it from and what’s its origin? Does it have a Latin or Greek root? Did the Danes bring it over or the Normans? Does it derive from the medieval French or is it a good old down-to-earth Anglo-Saxon word? Does this matter? It can certainly be enlightening: consider Macbeth agonising over whether or not to kill King Duncan. His brain, his conscience, is telling him one thing while his gut is urging him the other way.

He begins with resolve, expressed in Anglo-Saxon monosyllabic hammer blows:

If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well

It were done quickly . . .

But then his intellect intervenes, and the words become Latinate, polysyllabic:

. . . If the assassination

Could trammel up the consequence, and catch

With his surcease success . . .

The gut takes over again, urging action, with more Anglo-Saxon hammer blows:

. . . That but this blow

Might be the be-all and the end-all here,

But here, upon this bank and shoal of time . . .

Note the sudden change of thought in the middle of the line: ‘that but this blow . . .’ There’s no pause there, no break—the change is instantaneous, which shows a mind in torment, torn this way and that. This is no contemplative piece; it hurtles along at breakneck speed. It’s the picture of a man racing against time and wrestling with the terror of damnation. You appreciate this more fully if you know where the language is coming from.

The value of dictionary work was brought home to me in a workshop I did with Lindy Davies. As part of an exercise I was handed a phrase from an old Anglo-Saxon poem—‘I am a salmon in a pool’—and instructed to look up the words in the dictionary. I thought this was pretty pointless as I already had a good idea of what a pool was and what a salmon looked like. The first dictionary definitions I came across weren’t much help but another was more expansive: it described how the salmon fights its way upstream until it can find a deep, still pool where it may spawn. Suddenly the phrase sprang to life and I had this image of a gloriously heroic fish flashing silver in the sunlight as it leaps and twists in the thundering snow-white rapids, battling its way against the current until it comes to rest in the calm, cool, green-black serenity of a deep forest pool.

The image is not only an active as opposed to passive one (which makes it much easier to act), but it has a narrative and philosophical implication: I am someone who has battled against the odds and had a tough life, but now I have reached a haven of peace and reflection and I am preparing for the future.

So I think dictionary work and study of the language is invaluable, as is an awareness of its structure and subtleties of phrasing, pitch and cadence. I watch opera singers working on a score and note the precision they bring to bear. Actors could do with more of that, as long as we regard it as illumination and not a rigid formula which has to be lifelessly and technically regurgitated. Just like the opera singer we have to fill that form with spontaneous liveliness.

If you can visualise each image as fully as the salmon in the pool, a poetic speech becomes a necklace of images and you spring from one to the next. You can easily access and bring to life each image because it has been so fully explored and personalised. I am constantly disappointed with actors speaking Shakespeare who have forgotten or failed to notice what extraordinary language they are speaking—what original, bizarre and fantastic images and usages. They rattle it off as if it were commonplace instead of the most astonishing and original invention. And it’s not a matter of pressing the voice and the face into service to achieve expression—just the imagination; the rest will follow.

Just as the actor particularises each word in Shakespeare he must particularise each moment. We look at a slab of text on a page and call it ‘a speech’. It’s not. It’s a series of thoughts, impulses, ideas and actions. If you go for more than three or four lines without changing direction you’re missing something. And if someone remarks, ‘That was a long speech you had,’ it means all they noticed was how long you were going on, not what you were saying or doing. If a speech seems long it’s because you haven’t motivated it or noticed the shifts.

It’s not just those who are speaking who have to particularise and motivate each moment they’re on stage. If you’re on stage you have to ask why, just as you ask why you enter and why you exit—and where are you going? You have to justify every moment you’re on stage and make it live. I’ve been astonished, for instance, to see the trial scene in The Merchant of Venice played in such a way that when Shylock goes to cut out the heart of Antonio everyone stands around looking helpless! Would you? Wouldn’t you yell out, rush in and try to stop him? What stops you? You and the director have to think of something, otherwise the moment (which is the climax of the scene) is dead.

This kind of unthinking generalisation is a great enemy of acting Shakespeare. It’s like when everyone steps aside to give the leading actor centre stage. Why? It’s like acting a noble or a gentleman or a saint rather than a person. It’s like acting woe or grief rather than trying to cope.

What do people really do when they are grief-stricken, how do they really sound? They can do many different things, they can make many different sounds. You have to observe, to choose and particularise, not generalise. (An actor has to be a little callous and detached to note and replicate extreme human behaviour. I think it was Leonardo who remarked that when a man falls from a tower, most people rush to help. The artist is the one who sketches him on the way down.) If you particularise each word and image as well as each moment, you don’t have to worry about ‘acting’, about how you sound or look. The tempo, dynamic and pitch will change with each impulse and change of thought or intention.

Bad actors listen to the sound of their own voices; they sound pompous and affected. They are being grand rather than real.

Bad actors don’t think through what they are saying. They trot out remarkable images without discovering them and then inhabiting them.

Bad actors are not really in the moment. They know what’s coming next; they shouldn’t.

Bad actors play types (a fop, a rustic, an officer) rather than a particular fop, rustic or officer.

You can spot bad actors who are dead behind the eyes waiting for their cue. They only act when they are speaking.

Bad actors use stock gestures and postures rather than observing how people really deport themselves. They should spend more time analysing body language—it’s an inexhaustible mine of information, and frequently contradicts the words coming out of the mouth.

Bad actors signal to the audience (‘I don’t know what the fuck it means either’ or ‘That’s a lousy joke, isn’t it?’). That’s cowardly.

Bad actors let you know it’s a bawdy joke—there are two stock gestures for doing this. You’ve seen them many times.

Bad actors play a characteristic (‘I am evil’) rather than playing an action.

Bad actors bring their homework on stage and show the audience how hard it is. If you signal to the audience, ‘This is really difficult stuff,’ they’ll agree with you and switch off. Your job is to make it effortless and spontaneous. Leave your homework in the rehearsal room. As long as you know what you’re talking about, the audience will too. They mightn’t get every single word, but they’ll understand the intention.

Bad actors break up the verse and make it sound like prose in an attempt to make it more ‘real’. In fact it turns it into a jolting ride and makes it harder to follow, besides robbing it of its dynamic and emotive power. The verse structure is a gift, it’s a life raft, it will support you and take you on a wild ride.

Observe that the bulk of his work is written in iambic pentameter. Why? Because it’s an easy approximation of everyday speech. The iambic rhythm is the same as the human heartbeat and five stresses to a line is close enough to how we use everyday English: ‘I think I’ll go and make a cup of tea’ is perfect iambic pentameter.

Shakespeare didn’t invent iambic pentameter but, like the other playwrights of his day, he found it a fluid and flexible means of expression, one taken for granted by audiences. His earliest plays, like the Henry VI trilogy, use iambic pentameter in a quite conventional way and the stresses are unambiguous. When you get to a play like The Merchant of Venice, the verse form is the same but you can make multiple choices. You can choose which particular word to stress within the format, and interpretation starts to creep in. If you’re playing Antonio and you have the first line in the play, you may choose to play him with a vague melancholy and give all five beats an equal stress: