Shakespeare’s Advice to the Players

One of the problems of teaching actors verse is that the moment they have learned the rules, they can be confronted with a line where Shakespeare deliberately breaks them. One of the most famous lines in the English language is not a regular iambic pentameter:

To be or not to be that is the question

To BE or NOT to BE that IS the QUES-tion

The irregular extra syllable at the end of the line (known to grammarians, though it needn’t worry us, as a ‘feminine ending’) frees the verse colloquially and makes Hamlet’s question more urgent. It highlights the key word: ‘Question’; and helps express the self-doubt, the insecurity. The actor who has just learnt the nature of an iambic line will find to his amazement that the next four lines continue the pattern of irregularity in Hamlet’s speech. They all have a syllable too many.

To be or not to be that is the quest(ION)

Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suff(ER)

The slings and arrows of outrageous for(TUNE)

Or to take arms against a sea of troub(LES)

And by opposing end them. To die to sleep...

Only the last line is actually regular. All the rest have an additional syllable. As we shall see, the first task in approaching a speech is to make it scan, or find out why it doesn’t. If there are extra syllables or irregularities, the actor must use them to express emotional turbulence, because that is what Shakespeare heard.

All the time, by inversions or by deliberate mis-scansions or by adding extra syllables which can only be scanned by eliding them, Shakespeare is preserving the tension between the colloquial nature of his verse and the regularity of the iambic beat. Again, it is like great jazz playing. It must never slip totally out of the rhythm, but it must challenge it all the time. It is dangerous, expressive and thus unexpected. Regular rhythms in verse become predictable and can sap an audience’s attention. Shakespeare takes full account of this. There is an alertness in his use of irregularity. A film director tells his story and keeps our attention by changing shots, by cutting from one image to the next. Shakespeare uses irregularities in much the same way.

By his maturity, Shakespeare could risk a blank verse line which is a complete inversion of the normal rhythm, but which he knows will express the tragic agony of Lear. It is rhythmically the absolute opposite of what is expected:

NEVer. NEVer. NEVer. NEVer. NEVer.

NeVER. NeVER. NeVER. NeVER. NeVER.

Shakespeare’s irregularities only make emotional sense and can only affect an audience if the actor is riding on the underlying regularity beneath them. He must revel in the cross-rhythms, jump the irregularities and ride the bumps in scansion, in order to force the verse into shape. This tension to achieve regularity in the verse, in spite of all the irregularities, conveys the emotion, providing that the actor never gives up trying to make the line scan. He must always attempt to make the rough smooth. The nearer the verse gets to collapsing, the more tortured and emotional the expression. But it must never actually collapse; the excitement is that it often nearly does. The actor must risk rhythmical disintegration, yet never allow it to happen. What the audience receives is then dangerous and unpredictable.

To sum up: there are certainly an infinite number of ways of speaking a line of Shakespeare’s wrongly. Any interpretation which breaks the line, unnecessarily distorts the iambic rhythm, ignores the antithesis, neglects the assonance, evades the alliteration or nine times out of ten does not lean on the end of the line (because that is where the primary meaning is usually found) will ruin the communication with the audience and what the actor is supposed to tell them by speaking the text.

But there is conversely no one correct way of speaking the line. There are always infinite choices for the actor provided the form is maintained. He is not bound by some rigid system – say rather that he is freed by a form which gives him infinite emotional possibilities. By observing the form, the actor’s speech at its best sounds completely natural. The blank verse is made to sound like colloquial speech.