Preface to the Third Edition

Ten years after the second edition was published, ideas to make the book more useful led to this third edition. The entire second edition was retained, except for corrections and revising. But I realized that techniques for training community theatre actors had been omitted from the second edition. This third edition corrects that omission.

The skills required to speak Shakespeare’s language don’t change, but the theatres and actors who need these skills are changing and the need for training is increasing. There are now 7,000+ community theatres in America. Trained actors and directors, including AEA professionals, are participating in these productions and in community college productions. Sometimes they want to do Shakespeare.

The actors’ union (Actors’ Equity Association or AEA) frowns on this involvement, but all actors, AEA or not, involved in the 1,700 “professional” theatres across America, with many more around the globe, realize that few theatres offer year-round employment and the chance to make a living at acting. Thousands of actors seek the very few available full-time jobs, and even the lucky ones usually settle for “jobbing in” for a show. At some point, trained actors and directors will take what they call a “real job” but will still wish to participate in their chosen profession.

My wife, Dude (an AEA member for forty years), and I both urge the actors’ union to create a special waiver for its members to participate as volunteers in community theatre productions, with no fee arrangements, particularly in areas that have no equity theatres nearby. Theatre artists need to participate in their craft. Nobody benefits from the current practice of forcing artists to work undercover.

Certain events allowed us to address the community theatre need and to produce this third edition. Prior to 2010 we had both retired, Dude from acting and teaching and I from directing and teaching. In 2014, we made the decision to spend our sunset years near our granddaughters, who live in Casper, Wyoming. We sold our home near Seattle and moved to Wyoming. Here, we found three community theatres, one of which was for children, another for a community college (Casper College), and the last for high school drama programs. The nearest professional theatre was a five-hour drive to Denver.

By attending the local theatre productions, I realized that few of these actors had actor training, and almost none had language training. I also realized that I had never, over the past thirty years, taught any community theatre actors (except high school drama teachers) the skills of reading Shakespeare’s language. I wondered how that experience would differ from teaching acting students or pros.

The idea came to me to assemble a group of community theatre actors (a typical cast of varying types), train them in some of the skills, and determine what changes, if any, would be needed in the training techniques to make this group of actors proficient in handling Shakespeare’s language. I would then use what I discovered to make some suggestions to community theatre directors regarding techniques for applying the skills to their casts. These results comprise the entirely new part three of this third edition.

By combining this new material with parts one and two, community theatre actors and directors will find most of the answers they need to prepare the language for rehearsal of a Shakespearean production. I obtained the new material by teaching and recording five consecutive weekly workshops to a community theatre cast of actors—called our “merry band”—and by evaluating how they worked and handled the material. Our reactions are included at the end of part three. A lot of people are involved in community theatres in America, but I doubt a more friendly or intelligent group exists than the “cast” we had for these workshops.