CHAPTER 11

Session One

In this session: • Procedure • Selecting monologues and sonnets • The OED questions and answers • Subtext • Verse or realism • Shakespeare’s limited appeal • Rhythm of blank verse • First assignment

The Workshop: Ten actors,* all in their early to late twenties and all living in the Seattle area, are assembled in a workshop with the author as coach. We plan to work together for twenty sessions of two hours each over a ten-week period—a total of forty hours. Three of the actors have some background in acting Shakespeare, but the other seven have never tried it. To begin our work, we assemble around a table.

Coach: As usual, with Shakespeare, there’s too much material, but we’ll get through a lot of it. Part one of this book, Clues to Acting Shakespeare, is our guide. Each of the skills we want to work on is discussed here. We can try to stick to the order in which the skills are presented, but that’s not always possible.

For example, one of you may have a line in your monologue that can’t be resolved without jumping ahead to a new skill. So when that happens, we’ll jump ahead. But we’ll still revisit that skill when we arrive at that section of the book.

Learning to speak Shakespeare’s language is very much like baseball. It’s about fundamentals, and the more times you scoop up the grounder or swing the bat, the better you become. So you can’t visit any of these skills too often.

Alex: What if we don’t like baseball? (General laughter.) But I get your point.

Coach: And there’s a second point we can also tie to baseball. You don’t try to turn a double play until you can scoop up the grounder. So there is a kind of progression to learning these skills.

Alex: Do you need to follow it?

Coach: You could jump ahead to the last of the basic skills outlined in part one, which is imagery, but you’ll be a great deal better at imagery if you can first dig out the antithesis, and you’ll be better at finding antithesis if you can first phrase a line, and so on.

If you turn to page 12, you’ll find a list of the basic skills we’re going to work on. In our sessions together, we’ll work on each of the skills. Then you apply that skill to your monologue. Each of you needs a monologue—twelve to twenty lines—something you like. Planning ahead, select something you can use as an audition piece for the next few years. You’ll be spending many hours with this monologue, so you might as well get double mileage out of it.

Kristin: Can the women do men’s monologues?

Coach: Sure, but it may not serve you as well for the double use—now, and later as an audition piece. But you can surely select one.

So here’s the path. We learn the skills one by one, then each time you perform your monologue, you add a new skill. The other actors listen and everyone takes notes. We listen only for the skills we’ve learned to date. For example, after we’ve learned scansion and end-of-line support—the first two skills—you’ll read your monologue and we’ll listen for your use of those two skills. We’ll point out where you missed using them and trust that next time you do the monologue, those spots will be fixed.

Your first assignment is to select a monologue and a sonnet. You won’t perform the sonnet but you will perform the monologue, with all skills applied. After we’ve applied all of the skills to the monologue, I’ll invite some people in to hear your work.

With your sonnet, apply the skills as we go along and write out the analysis, then hand it in at the end of the workshop. This will allow me to review an example of your written analyses.

At our next session we’ll hear everyone’s choices and determine whether these are good monologues to work on. For example, if the monologue uses both verse and prose, you’re better off finding something else. All of the skills we’ll be learning apply to verse, but only some apply to prose. Also, be certain your monologue has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Later, if you use it for an audition piece, you’ll want that structure.

Once the monologue has been approved and we’ve completed any cuts or additions to the monologue, type it up—double- or triple-spaced—and bring a copy for each member of the workshop. The triple-spacing is to give you room to write down the analysis of each word, phrase, and line. You’ll need that space.

Bridgett: What if we find it online and it already has some space?

Coach: I still want you to type it up. And you must not ask anyone else to do it for you. You must do it yourself. Anyone know why?

Emily: You won’t miss anything?

Coach: Right. Every syllable, every comma, has to be accurate. You must identify them all. You can’t “skim” blank verse. If you leave out one syllable of a blank verse line, likely the line won’t scan correctly and you won’t be able to figure out how to read it. But don’t type until your monologue has been approved—which is the next session.

Bride: Are there ten skills?

Coach: About ten. That’s the number used in this book, which is designed for people just starting to act Shakespeare. There is more advanced study available to you. Those works are listed in the bibliography.

Missing any of these sessions is a bad idea. If you must be absent, you should probably drop out now and take the workshop at another time. The reason is that we are constantly learning new skills, then applying them. If you miss a session, you miss a complete skill or two. It’s hard to catch up.

Once you can apply these skills to Shakespeare’s text, you will be able to speak it; people will not only listen, but they will also understand what you’re saying. If they don’t understand, you’re not using one or more of the skills. One of my favorite lines about Shakespeare comes from Peter Brook: “The trouble with Shakespeare is that it goes on without you.” What do you suppose that means?

Amber: People can’t understand you?

Coach: That’s one thing. Why can’t they understand you?

Bride: You don’t know what you’re saying?

Coach: That’s part of it.

Alex: Neither the audience nor you knows what you’re saying.

Coach: That’s pretty much it. Your mouth is working and words spew forth, but you don’t know what they mean, so the audience certainly doesn’t know, and Shakespeare keeps right on going—without you. We’ll probably hear some of that in here. (General laughter.) This “going on without you” is a common ailment for actors who want to act Shakespeare by “natural talent” rather than learning the skills. We’ve probably all seen a good deal of that.

Because it’s essential for you to know what every single word means—and not what you think it means, but what it probably meant to Shakespeare in 1600—you’ll need to visit the library. Can you find one? (A few chuckles.) Anyone know what you’re going to do there?

Kristin: Look up words.

Coach: Yes. Look up words. Look up every word in your monologue and sonnet except conjunctions and pronouns. But certainly all nouns, adjectives, and verbs. And there’s a special place to look. It’s called the Oxford English Dictionary—the OED. All twenty-six volumes. You’ll find them in the reference room. (General groans.) The OED is also online, for a fee. The reference room edition is free. Why the OED?

Emily: I know because I’ve used it before. It gives the historical origin of all words in English. So you can find when a word was first used, which sometimes was in a Shakespearean line, and what its original usage was—the meaning in the line. It goes way back before Chaucer, I think, so you can see what the word meant at that time.

Coach: Wonderful. With the OED you can figure out what your words meant to Shakespeare. For example, the Nurse’s line when she brings word of Romeo and tells Juliet, “You have made a simple choice.” Everyone probably thinks he knows what the word “simple” means, right? But guess what? To Shakespeare, it probably didn’t mean “easy.” It probably meant “ignorant” or even “stupid.” Notice how that different meaning could easily change the way the Nurse reads the line. Instead of giving Juliet information, she provokes her. Much better for both actors to work with. You certainly don’t have to read the line with the newly discovered meaning of “simple”—it’s your choice. But now you have a choice. Choices are good, aren’t they?

Jerrod: The more the better.

Coach: I think so. Wait until your monologue has been approved before visiting the OED. But if you’re eager, you could start working on your sonnet right away.

Together with the skills, we also have a series of exercises outlined in the book. You’ll find some in each chapter. The exercises help the actor to actually use the skills in various ways. We’ll have time to do some of them; others you can do on your own or in a small group. These exercises come from the Royal Shakespeare Company, Cicely Berry, Kristin Linklater, Patsy Rodenberg, and others, including me. Most of them are well proven, so be confident in using them. They will do what they’re intended to do.

For the next thirty minutes, we exchange knowledge about Shakespeare’s life and times, and I offer a short lecture about the plays, their plot origins, their publishing, their history, and claims to their authorship.

Alicia: To me, Shakespeare sounds so real. You don’t realize the actor is speaking in verse.

Coach: How do you suppose that happens, that we don’t realize the actor may be speaking verse?

Alicia: The actor knows how to speak the language.

Coach: Which is exactly what we’re going to do in here. And after we learn those skills, if the audience can’t understand your Shakespeare, it’s probably not the author’s fault. (General chuckles.)

Ryan: You have to know what you’re saying.

Coach: And if you don’t, how in the world will the listener know what you’re saying?

To know what you’re saying, and then knowing how to say it, require that you go through a series of steps. These are the skills that allow you to know what the language is doing and saying.

None of this has anything to do with character. Don’t think yet of character. Because an interesting thing happens when you apply the skills to the language. You come to discover your character. Your character is the person who needs to say what these words mean.

Ryan: What about the character’s subtext? In most plays you find out right away what the character wants and go from there.

Coach: In Shakespeare, and in many classic plays, the characters simply say what they are doing, where they are, what they want. The actor does not need subtextual ideas to figure out these wants. We have no documentation to show that writers or actors in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries ever used terms like “subtext” or “motivation.” These are concepts from the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century.

Can you use subtext when acting Shakespeare? Well, sure. It’s hard to be an actor today and not think about subtext. But when you use it, remember that you’re inserting a modern idea into classical language. Does the language need it? If it helps, use it. But use it after you know what the language means.

At this point the actors want to know why Shakespeare is considered the best writer of the English language. Who decides what is best? In this discussion, we talk about art, cars, poetry, novels, music, architecture, food, etc. What makes A better than B better than C, etc.? A consensus is reached that a standard of excellence can be established for most things, including writing plays. It is that which others are measured against.

Coach: More questions? Let’s get all of our concerns on the table.

Bridgett: I’m not sure how Shakespeare can be the standard if it has no subtext.

Coach: You’re deeply involved with subtext because realism is so filled with it and you’re filled with realism. But realism, as we know it, is a twentieth-century development. You all know of Stanislavski’s work with subtextual acting, but he developed that because of what the playwrights were writing. These characters tended to disguise what they wanted to say or do, and their language became more realistic by comparison to its predecessor, so the actor finds the truth in the subtext rather than the text. But the contemporary theatre of Shakespeare’s time was language based—we refer to it as “heightened language”—and the characters said what they were doing and thinking. As an actor, you can use subtext when acting Shakespeare, but not to the degree that it interferes with the needs of heightened language.

Writing with subtext doesn’t guarantee that the writing is superior. It’s not a measure of quality. We would all agree with that, right? (The actors all do.) Nor does using heightened language ensure that the writing will be high quality. But the centuries have proved that Shakespeare’s heightened language is the best that can be found in English—and it was written without subtext as we know it today.

Ryan: What about plots?

Coach: If you consider the Shakespeare plays you already know, you can probably name three plots in each of them. Many modern plays, however, have only one plot. One plot written in realistic language is probably easier to act, direct, and produce than three plots in heightened text. That doesn’t mean modern writers don’t have a language style. Consider Mamet, who is contemporary today and 180 degrees from Shakespeare, and yet has a strong language style.

Amber: Why do so many people not like Shakespeare?

Coach: I think it’s because they can’t understand it. Consider us in this room—most of you are in the theatre business itself and are having your first real, in-depth study of Shakespeare. For most people, a couple of weeks of Romeo and Juliet or Macbeth in high school English are about all they ever get. English majors in college will surely be familiar with Shakespeare, but not even all of them will be required to do any comprehensive analysis. Few people actually study, and therefore understand, Shakespeare.

Then consider how many actors are really trained to speak this language—speak it so that an audience can understand it. When you start asking around at various theatres where you work, I don’t think you’ll find very many. Except for a few top MFA acting programs, which you can research, actor training today simply isn’t based on classical language.

So you will hear a lot of bad Shakespeare, and it will grind on you like chalk on the old chalkboard or somebody singing flat. It will drive you mad. And because so many of the skills required to hear or speak Shakespeare apply to realism, you will start to hear hundreds of poor line readings on television or film, on the radio, and in the theatre. You will start to hear emphasis on the wrong word, ends of lines falling off, pronouns stressed, questions marks used on lines that are already questions, antithesis missed, ignorance of imagery—oh, the poor authors.

Bride: Why don’t all actors learn this?

Coach: They should. But learning the skills we’ll be working on requires effort and discipline. Many actors prefer to rely on “natural talent”—sure death when doing Shakespeare. So ignorance of what you could learn is a major block, as is laziness. A bigger block, however, is probably the lack of opportunity to perform it. “If there are no jobs, why study it?” some say. I can answer that for them. You study it because it’s acting—and you apply whatever you learn here to any kind of material. It can only make you better.

But many actors don’t want to go to the OED and look up their words. They say, “Oh, I know what that means.” What a mistake. They have no idea what the word meant to Shakespeare, and when an actor discovers that meaning it almost invariably changes the line reading for the better. The actor’s job is to thoroughly understand the material—to know precisely everything he says and why. It’s dangerous to rely entirely on your director. He or she may not want to look up the words either.

An interesting thing is that it’s easier to learn these skills than to use them as a character. You’ll have these skills in no time and can use them for the rest of your lives. But the hard part is speaking the language as the character, and not allowing the language to control or dominate you—which is what usually happens in bad Shakespeare. Once you have these skills, you know your character’s language. Now you have a chance to create a truthful character. Notice that I said “have a chance,” because it is not guaranteed that you can create a truthful character, even when you know the language. But at least you have a chance.

Consider the actor who tries to create a character and has no idea how to handle the language or what the language is doing. The character will stumble over the language or not clarify it for the listener. That’s why we learn how to handle the language first, then work on character. When working on your character and her relationships to other characters, as an actor you don’t want to be burdened by the language. That will really mess you up. You want the language to be natural. Sorry is the actor who “shoots from the hip” with Shakespeare’s language.

Bride: Where do we even start with this material?

Coach: If you were a musician with an instrument, how would you learn to play it? Probably by learning how to read music. The same with Shakespeare. We want to learn how to read blank verse. That’s where we’ll start.

Kristin: I’ve heard about iambic pentameter.

Coach: Everyone stand up and walk with me. (They do.) As you walk, say “heel-toe, heel-toe, heel-toe,” etc. Now change “heel-toe” to “dee-dum, dee-dum, dee-dum, dee-dum, dee-dum.” The “dee” is soft and the “dum” is stressed. As you can see, one foot is dee-dum, soft then stressed. This is called an “iamb,” from the Greek word, iambos, for foot. Put five of these together and you have five feet, five iambs. The word “pentameter” describes putting the five iambs together. “Penta” is a prefix that means “five,” as in pentagram. Iambic pentameter. That’s one blank verse line. Not so scary, huh?

Jerrod: Got it.

Coach: We’re ahead of ourselves a little, and will do more of that next time.

Alicia: Some people say Shakespeare has to be heard, you can’t just read it.

Coach: It was written to be heard, wasn’t it? Not just read. In Shakespeare’s time, the audience members would never be able to get a copy of the script to read the play. There were only a few copies made of each complete play. So not only is Shakespeare better when heard, it’s ten times better!

If you lie in bed with a huge book of Shakespeare’s plays on your chest and try to read one of them to yourself, you’ll be asleep by the end of the first scene. So right up front, remember this: When you work on your monologues, work on them out loud. Go out in a field or wherever you have to go and speak aloud and on your feet. You need to use your muscles and you need to hear the language. It doesn’t do much good to mumble it to yourself while you watch television. You have to be on your feet, doing it aloud.

Bridgett: It still scares me, trying to do this. I mean, he was a genius.

Coach: No doubt he was a genius, but he was also an actor, and he wrote for actors. The theatre was his profession, playwriting and acting his means of livelihood. I think you’ll lose your fear.

Kristin: And there’s the language—strange to us.

Coach: Sure. The closest we come to verse is maybe the study of a few poets in high school and college, like Emily Dickinson. Here’s an analogy to food. Suppose you’re having dinner at another home and the hostess places in front of you a very strange-looking meal with a name you can’t pronounce and a slightly funny smell. How many of you are eager to plunge in and try this dinner? (Laughs, and one hand, Amber’s, goes up.) You think, “I’m not sure this is for me.” Because it’s different we immediately think it might not be good.

Alicia: I did a Shakespearean scene at a community college once and found it very easy to memorize.

Coach: I believe most actors will agree with you. There’s a rhyme and a structure—like learning the lyrics to a song. You do that rather quickly, I’ll bet.

We’re running out of time. For next time, read the first two chapters, and find a monologue you might like to work on. We’ll read the monologues aloud and see if they’ll work for you. Then we’re going to work on blank verse—how to scan it and how to support it. And I’ll talk less and get you working more. Be sure to bring your Complete Works of Shakespeare as well as our acting text. Thanks for a great opening session, and see you next time.

*Actors are Kristin Calhoun, Bridgett Foley, Alex Garnett, Maggie Hillding, Ryan Holmberg, Alicia James, Jerrod Neal, Amber Peoples, Emily Rollie, and Bride Schroeder-LaPlatney. For their participation in the recording of this workshop, and for being good sports, my sincere thanks!