CHAPTER 31
Working with Amateur Actors and Session One
The setup: To offer Shakespeare workshops for community theatre actors in Casper, Wyoming, where we now live, I first must answer a question. (Later, the question answered itself, and not in the way I expected.) The question is: Do we train to the point of “getting it right,” or do we just train? My wife and workshop teaching partner, Dude, and I decide to postpone an answer until after we start the workshops. We need time to appraise how the amateur actors will respond to training in general, and how they will respond to the amount of work required to learn Shakespearean acting skills.
With Shakespeare, “getting it right” requires a huge time commitment. How much time will these community theatre actors willingly give to learning the skills? The skills to be taught are for mastering Shakespeare’s language before beginning rehearsal or making any character choices for a Shakespearean role. There are ten to twelve basic but essential skills that any actor needs before one can correctly speak this language, but learning the first four or five can make the language work. The next five to seven skills refine it. We hope to accomplish the first four or five in the fifteen hours these actors will spend with us. However, to “get it right,” they will need to spend another forty to fifty hours on their own, working on the skills and applying them to their selected material. Will they do that?
Our proposed five workshops have another objective, and this is tied to the new material needed for the third edition of Clues to Acting Shakespeare. We want to discover if training techniques to learn the Shakespearean language skills must be adjusted, or simplified, for the less-experienced trainees. Or should we employ the same approach we use when training professionals or student actors in training (future professionals)? If changes are made, what will they be and why are they necessary? We want these answers to pass on to community theatre directors who might be doing Shakespeare with a cast of amateur actors. We plunge in.
For a space, we select the Unitarian Universalist Community of Casper building’s main room and reserve it for five Saturday afternoons in October and November of 2017. The preceding July, working with the three community theatres and Casper College email lists, we sent out a “call for actors” to attend a meeting/demonstration about some “Acting Shakespeare Workshops” that will be offered in Casper in the fall. These workshops will be free to the actors selected, plus each actor will be paid $100 for their participation. The email went to about 300 people that had acted in a Casper community theatre production. Five showed up at the meeting.
We accepted four of this group, and they became our nucleus company. These actors then made calls to other actors, and we set up a second demonstration meeting. Ten new actors expressed interest, but only three showed up. We accepted all three, then one pulled out. At the same time, one of our nucleus group was cast in a college production and pulled out. We now had a total of five actors. I invited a retired drama teacher to join us, which he did for two and a half sessions, then pulled out for social and family obligations. We’re proceeding with six actors which then become five; they are an extremely personable and intelligent group. Five actors are enough.
We have learned that some actors in town expressed suspicion at the whole Shakespeare idea; others considered the workshops unnecessary; still others said it was all a waste of time. There are a few others who want to join our “merry band” (as I call the five) but have conflicts with job or family obligations. We have already discovered that, for these community theatre actors, family and job commitments have priority over everything—including free actor training. Learning how to handle Shakespeare’s language seems to carry an importance similar to visiting a fourth cousin that you’ve never met.
I visualized offering these workshops in a major city. If advertised as free Shakespeare training, and participants would be paid, one would need a stage manager just to handle the crowd!
In this session: What is blank verse? • Scansion of regular and irregular lines • Feminine endings • Walking the rhythm • Beating out the rhythm • Reading lines incorrectly • Caesura • End-of-line support: kicking the box • Scansion practice.
For the first session, we’ve all assembled in the large room of the UU building in Casper, Wyoming, where we all live. The group consists of six community theatre actors, plus Dude and me. The actors: Mike Bardgett is a former US Marine and college graduate in wildlife management who is just getting interested in acting and works with a melodrama group; Zach Becker is a college graduate and elementary school teacher who has community theatre and college theatre experience; Dawn Anderson-Coates began acting in high school, then community college, then was a theatre/dance major at the University of Wyoming, then settled in Casper and now performs at Casper College and the community theatres; Joan Davies has a college degree in music and a master’s in teaching, is a singer, and started acting about four years ago, performing in eight shows since then; Marilyn Mullen has a master’s degree in English and a certified trainer certificate from the Center for Nonviolent Communication, a field of mediation that she teaches at Casper College, but she has never tried acting; Michael Stedillie is a retired high school speech and drama teacher who will be forced to drop out because of family and social responsibilities. What an intelligent group of people we have to work with!
Coach: We’re starting out with me having to change one of my own policies, which is: no absences. But everyone seems to have some sort of conflict over the next five weeks. So, we’ll just have to deal with them as they come up. Everybody okay with that? (They are.) The problem is, from my perspective, that I can’t give accurate progress notes to help you with your material if I don’t hear the progress on a workshop-to-workshop basis. But, we’ll do what we can.
Dawn: Well, all of this is community theatre. You almost always have a group who have kids and jobs and all things in the middle.
Coach: I understand, so I’m not going to worry about it. We’ll accomplish what we can accomplish, and that will be it. Right? (They agree.) We’ll introduce ourselves and tell our backgrounds at the end of today’s workshop because, if we do it now, we could get long-winded and use up the entire workshop time in background stories. (They find this funny.)
We’re going to begin with blank verse—as you see on the white boards and as you have in the speeches I sent you. So, first thing, let’s distribute your speeches to each member of the group. Everyone should have a copy of each speech—including Dude, who is going to work on a speech along with you—which means you each have seven speeches, including your own. And don’t forget to give me a copy of each speech.
Everyone passes out their speeches. In pre-workshop communication, I had sent each actor a free copy of the second edition of Clues to Acting Shakespeare and a photocopy of a speech from one of Shakespeare’s plays, which I asked them to type up, double-spaced, and to print eight copies to bring to the first workshop. With email communication, they had each informed me that they preferred that I select material for them. Usually in these workshops the actors prefer to select their own material. Not this group of actors. I suspect they have a limited exposure to any of Shakespeare’s plays. They also probably don’t want to read numerous plays to find a speech they like, so they want me to do it for them! That’s okay. I already know that working with a community theatre group will be vastly different from working with professional actors. That difference is what we want to discover.
Marilyn: I forgot to put my name on mine. (She does this.)
Dawn: Okay I’ve got all of mine. (Everyone else agrees.)
Coach: We’ll identify and read through the speeches later. Notice that this nice room has two bathrooms—one here and one back there—and Dude brought some snacks that are on the table. (Oohs and awes.) Yes, we’re nice people, and these workshops are a comfortable and enjoyable experience. So, everybody relax. And please don’t worry about my hacking today. I picked up something at the Mayo Clinic ten days ago, and it’s hanging on. Dude said I would be hacking all day, but I think I can get through it.
Today we start with blank verse and the first skill, which is scansion. Some of you have already had a little bit of that. Other first skills include end-of-line support, which includes kick the box, caesura, elision, and feminine endings. Then phrasing and breathing, at which time your Shakespeare will sound wonderful!
Learning to read blank verse is where we’ll start. (I refer to the lines that are neatly written on two white boards we’ve set up.) Dude put this example of a regular blank verse line on the board: “In sooth I know not why I am so sad.” Here’s another: “The king doth keep his revels here tonight.” Both are regular lines. Blank verse. Is blank verse poetry?
Michael: No.
Coach: Right. It can contain poetry, but it doesn’t have to be poetry. It has its own structure. What is one distinctive thing about it?
Joan: Ten syllables.
Coach: Right. The first thing you do with a blank verse line is count the syllables. If you get nine, or eleven, you have what we call an irregular line. On the other board are examples of irregular lines. The first is an irregular line with a feminine ending, which I’ll explain soon: “To be, or not to be—that is the question.” Here is an irregular line because it requires elision: “Nor heaven nor earth have been at peace tonight.” And here is an irregular line that requires a trochee, or reversed stress: “From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,” which is a line Mike has in his speech.
In your speeches, you’ll probably have both regular and irregular lines. We’ll discover that when we do the scansion on each line. But first, let’s find the rhythm of blank verse. One foot in a blank verse line is two syllables—just like your real foot has two pressure points: heel-toe. So, if each foot has two syllables, how many feet in a line?
Joan: Five.
Coach: Right. And the rhythm is heel-toe, heel-toe, etc. Everybody walk around with me and we’ll beat out this rhythm. (We do, beating out heel-toe, heel-toe with our own feet. Each five feet makes one line.) Let’s change from heel-toe to dee dum, dee dum, dee dum, dee dum, dee dum. (We do, walking and talking the rhythm, a dee dum for each foot.) That’s the rhythm of blank verse.
Now we’ll mark the scansion. Look at the first line. For scansion, every foot, or two syllables, is divided by a diagonal line. Who wants to mark them? (Michael scans the first line.)
In sooth / I know / not why / I am / so sad.
Right. But there’s more to scansion. These authors are so brilliant at writing this language that they made the second syllable of each foot the stressed syllable. So go ahead and mark that. The unstressed syllable is marked (
), and the stressed is marked (
). He does the scansion. Now the line looks like this:
Dawn does the scansion of the second line: “The king does keep his revels here tonight.” She can’t make it work.
Coach: Sometimes it helps to work backwards. “Tonight” is obviously two syllables, so it’s the last foot. Agree?
Dawn: Yes—so “revels” has to be divided. (She does and marks the correct five feet.)
The king / doth keep / his rev / els here / tonight.
Coach: Everyone see that? (They do.) Now let’s mark the soft and stressed syllables. (She does.)
Coach: Now read it aloud and really stress the stressed syllables. (She does.) And there’s your rhythm. We’ll beat that into our bodies. You fell away with “night.”
Dawn: I heard it.
Coach: We’ll fix that. How will we fix that?
Dawn: See that box right there? We’ll be kicking that. (All laugh)
Coach: Okay, read the lines again, stressing the stressed syllables. (They do.) I should remind everyone right now that everything we do in here is rehearsal exercise. It has nothing to do with performance, it has everything to do with preparation for learning a play when you have this kind of language to master. You don’t perform a play overstressing lines the way we just read them. But you can do this in rehearsal. That gets your muscle memory into it. Let’s do some incorrectly. Mike, read your line incorrectly—stressing the normally unstressed words. (He does, we all laugh)
Dawn: Sounds like Shatner.
Coach: Your ear has to hear that what you are doing is wrong. You have to be able to hear that to direct Shakespeare.
Marilyn: There’s no rhythm to it.
Coach: Yes, and it doesn’t make any sense. But you have to hear it. You must be able to help your actors find the correct line reading. When you hear something read incorrectly, suggest to your actor that she work on that line some more, check to see if she’s really stressing the right words. (Dawn reads her line with the wrong stresses—we all laugh). Isn’t that great?
Dawn: I still think it sounds like Shatner.
We review the scansion on the second line, then we all beat out the rhythm with dee dum while we pound on our chair or leg. We hit something on the stressed syllable of each foot. The rhythm sinks into our bodies. We do the other line as well.
Coach: I won’t really give assignments to this group because you all have jobs and families and other obligations. But you still need to do the work required on your speech. For next time, everybody will put their first two lines on the board, with the scansion worked out. Okay? (All agree.) You’re only going to do eight or ten lines of your speech, as that’s enough for these workshops. But each of the skills we learn has to be incorporated into those eight lines. Everyone understand? (They do.) Let’s go on to the irregular lines, as you may have one of these even in your first two lines.
By the way, don’t start memorizing your lines. You may never get them memorized and can read them at our final meeting. We’ll talk more about that later.
Dude: Before we go on, can you talk a little more about poetry versus blank verse, the differences, etc. Does all poetry rhyme?
Coach: No. Lots of poetry doesn’t rhyme.
Dude: Then how does poetry differ from blank verse—what actually is it?
Coach: It’s a metaphoric idea expressed in a structured, maybe rhythmic, arrangement of words. One poet’s rhythm can be different from another’s rhythm and still be poetic. There are dozens of different structures in poems. Some use blank verse, some use eight-foot lines, some use rhyme, many don’t. Many songs become poetry or were first written as poems; they have the rhythm that converts easily to music.
Michael: The song of the heart.
Coach: Yeah. Marilyn?
Marilyn: Nothing, your explanation is fine.
Coach: The words are presented in a structured format. When you lose structure, you lose the beauty of the poetic.
Dude: I need more examples. What about blank verse?
Coach: Blank verse can be poetry, but its primary form is blank verse. Poetry is not its definition. Its basic definition is putting the English language into ten syllable lines. The blank verse line ends at the end of the ten syllables—that’s part of the structure—and that’s why, in your script, you find some lines ending without punctuation. And they keep on going to the next line. Did you discover that when you were typing your speeches? That’s why you have to type them yourselves, so you don’t miss those things. No punctuation at the end of a line is called an enjambed line. Suppose this line here—“In sooth I know not why I am so sad.”—kept going without the punctuation, with something like, “But I’m going to figure out what the problem is.” Well, the line on the paper still has to end here, after “sad”; it doesn’t have to have the period, but it has to end here on the paper because that’s ten syllables. Blank verse is a ten-syllable line. You continue with the next line, using a capital letter to start the line, and it, too, has to end after ten syllables even if the thought has not been completed. Shakespeare and his contemporaries perfected this form of writing the English language; it was actually created by a few poets before him—really developed by Christopher Marlowe, who wrote Doctor Faustus—and perfected by Shakespeare over the next twenty years, 1590 to about 1610.
Michael: So, the line ends but not necessarily the thought.
Coach: Right. And that’s why we work on end-of-line support, which is one of our skills. The thought does not end with the end of the line—it ends when it ends. It could take one line to express a thought, or it could take fifty lines.
Joan: Why did they develop this form?
Coach: They believed as poets—and most scholars since have agreed with them—that this form is the most perfect way to express the English language.
Marilyn: Please say that again.
Coach: This blank verse form is the most perfect way to express the English language.
Joan: Is it different in different languages?
Coach: Oh yes. In French, for example—like Molière’s plays—the basic verse is twelve syllables, called Alexandrine. You don’t translate English blank verse into French in ten-syllable lines; you translate into twelve-syllable lines. While we’re on this subject, the English blank verse foot is called iambic—five feet make it pentameter; you’re taking me into the academic now. What’s an iamb? (Nobody knows.) An iamb is the Greek word for foot. The foot has two beats: heel-toe. One complete foot has two syllables—two beats—a heel and a toe. (I demonstrate again.) If you take this blank verse line, it goes heel-toe, heel-toe, heel-toe, heel-toe, heel-toe. Five of those and you have five feet with ten syllables. So what’s it called?
Marilyn: Pentameter.
Coach: Iambic pentameter—an awful expression.
Dawn: I like it.
Michael: I was never certain what it meant.
Coach: Blank verse is the English language written in iambic pentameter. These lines that Dude wrote on the white boards are all iambic pentameter—but some are regular five feet, and some are irregular, more or less than five feet. Now, blank verse has its rhythm. Heel-toe, heel-toe can be expressed dee-dum, dee-dum—two syllables per foot. But these writers were of such genius that they could write their lines in five-foot meter, and each foot had two syllables—a soft stress and a hard stress—and the hard stress is in the second position, the dum. When you go dee-dum, the dee is soft and the dum is stressed. It’s easy to speak in blank verse, but try to do it with the stresses alternating, and you’ll see how much genius was involved here.
Zach: I never knew any of this.
Dawn: I thought I did, but I didn’t.
Coach: Letting your ear pick up the mistakes an actor is making becomes unavoidable after you learn this material. Dude and I watch TV or movies and groan whenever we hear a line read incorrectly—and that’s often. We’ll say, “Oh, oh, bad line reading.” (Laughs) One thing we really learned from all this blank verse study is that you never want to stress pronouns. Remember that. Never stress pronouns unless you intentionally chose to do so for a specific meaning. Otherwise, the pronoun is assumed, and the line reads better when you find the correct word to stress. It’s rarely the pronoun. You’ll discover that pronouns are stressed all the time by actors who don’t have any real actor training. For example, back to the opening line from The Merchant of Venice, you don’t need to stress the two Is: “In sooth I know not why I am so sad.” The Is are automatically assumed; “know not” is far more important than “I,” and “why” and “so sad” are what we need to hear, not the second “I.” The minute you stress the pronoun, you take away from something else in the line. Now, let’s see if we can support the end of the lines. Three pairs of actors, each pair grab a box and spread out in the room. (I have four boxes ready to go.)
Dawn: Who wants to kick a box with me? (All team up; Dude will coach with me.)
Coach: Now I’ll show you how to do it. (I demonstrate.) You’re going to kick the box on the last syllable of the line—not on the next to the last syllable, and not after the last syllable, but right on the last syllable. On the first line, we kick on the “s” of “sad.” You’ll find that this movement causes you to put your entire body into speaking the line. (Michael tries it, paired up with Mike) You kicked on “so.”
Michael: I did, didn’t I?
They kick the box back and forth and soon get it right. The other couples are also kicking boxes and getting it right. I listen in on various efforts, as does Dude, and we catch places where the kick is not properly placed. Soon all the actors are doing it correctly, and we add the second line: “The king does keep his revels here tonight.” This causes some problems because they need to kick on the “n” of “tonight,” not on the “t” at the beginning of the word. Dude helps various actors. They kick on “to” or after “night” or on “here”. Soon all have it. The room is incredibly noisy, and everyone has a good time. Boxes fly all over the place.
Joan: Is this all part of scansion, that you kick the box?
Coach: Yes, in the sense that actors forget that the last syllable is stressed, but that shows up clearly when you work out the scansion.
Marilyn: So how do you define scansion?
Coach: Scansion is just breaking the blank verse line into feet, and then marking the stresses. Actors are generally vocally lazy. Most people are vocally lazy. That’s why so often on film or TV and on stage you can’t understand what an actor says because this word (I point to “sad”) wasn’t played. For example, if I swallow this word “sad” (I read it that way)—what did I just say?
Dude: I don’t know. Something about you don’t know something.
Coach: And the audience is saying, “What did he say?” And by that time, the actor is speaking the second line; the audience missed the meaning of the first line and didn’t get the second line at all. Then the third line is coming. You’ve lost your audience in the first speech of the play. And that is exactly how most amateur Shakespeare happens. It’s really not the actor’s fault, it’s more the director’s, but even more, it’s a fault of time. I’m generalizing, but the arts have insufficient appreciation in schools for teachers to work with students over enough time that they can both figure out what needs to be done for a play to work and have the time to practice it.
Dude: It also happens in realistic acting.
Coach: Right, the last word of a sentence is lost. It becomes like a song that doesn’t know how to end. And that’s what you’re going to hear in most Shakespeare performances and also in ordinary language on the street. Just go stand in a store for a while and listen to people jabber, dropping the last words or phrases of their lines. So, the kick box exercise, when you’re acting or directing Shakespeare, can get everyone into concentrating on this technique of supporting the thought all the way through the line. But what else do you discover with this exercise?
Mike: Timing.
Coach: Yes.
Dawn: It’s very helpful to have a rhythm.
Coach: Yes, you get a rhythm out of this. What else? Think back. When you prepare your body to kick, what is happening?
Marilyn: You’re looking to the end of the phrase.
Coach: Absolutely right. You’re looking at the entire phrase and expressing it through your entire body, not just your vocal chords. And you need to use your body to do Shakespeare, any of the Greeks, and most classical language. Kicking the box makes you use your body. Also, by supporting the final syllable of a line, you can do things with that syllable. Later, we’ll talk about subtext in Shakespeare; you all know what subtext is—the thought under the line, the meaning that you really want to be heard. So, for example, you could implant in the audience’s mind a certain thought with the word “night.” What if you suggest that something horrible is going to happen here tonight? What would you do with “night?” Try it Joan. Kick the box. (She reads the line, inflecting a scary thought on “night.”) Well, she got scary with “night,” but notice how it infected the entire line—the entire line became scary. Try again. (She does, then Zach takes a turn. He makes “night” almost a question, as in, “why does he do his revels here?” All try it.) Do you see what you can do with that last word? (Marilyn reads the line, and we all hear, “he shouldn’t be doing it here.” Mike does the line, and “tonight” becomes party time.)
You all get the idea. Now we have to move along. I put the word “caesura” on the board. A caesura is a sense pause in a verse line. Or a realistic line. A sense pause sets up what you just said or sets up what you’re going to say. The caesura will help the audience understand you. You’re giving them a little air—listening space—wherever you think it’s needed. So, where in the first line might we put a caesura?
Marilyn: That’s what I was trying to do on the “tonight” line. I put a little pause before “tonight,” thinking that would set it up to be a little scary.
Coach: It did that. How about this? If you want me to (I pause) continue with (I pause again)—I just put little caesuras into my unfinished line that set up in your ear the question “what?” Now you’re listening.
Marilyn: If you put a caesura into a line, where do you kick the box?
Coach: You still kick on the first letter of the last syllable, the tenth syllable. Remember, kicking the box is only a rehearsal exercise. It would be in your way in performance. You could set up the word “sad.” (I demonstrate)
Dawn: Oh, the caesura can go anyplace.
Coach: Actor choice. Use it a lot in rehearsal and when you’re learning the lines, then not so much. You won’t need to. Muscle memory will put a tiny pause where you worked on putting a caesura.
So, use a caesura when you think a tiny pause will help the audience understand your thought. Mark it on your scansion with a double diagonal line. Break your lines down and use a lot of caesuras because this makes you deal with the phrase and the individual thought of each phrase. Later, get rid of them. (I mark three caesuras into the “sad” line. Zach reads it. He wants to rush, so we have him take long caesuras.) You see, it gets to the point where it’s too much. But it’s not too much in the sense that he’s playing each of the phrases, identifying them, and making them heard as separate thoughts.
Michael, do the next line. Where do you want the caesuras? (He tries five possible places for caesuras in the line “The king // does keep // his revels // here // tonight.”) Okay, you could use any of them, right? So now read the line with all five.
Michael: All five? Oh boy . . . (He does.)
Coach: Do you hear how the phrases identify each separate thought? An audience can understand those thoughts.
Dawn: It would drive them crazy.
Coach: And us, too, but it’s only a rehearsal exercise to get the actor to break up the line.
Dawn: Yeah, it’s a good thing.
Joan: So, do you do this to create the line the way you want to say it, where the caesuras will stick?
Coach: Well, they’re not going to stick around. Throw them out after you have all the phrases separated. Later, as mentioned, your voice will automatically put a tiny pause where a sense pause is needed, without you even thinking about it.
Joan: So, the thought is still in your mind, and it can reach the audience. You play around with it until it’s where you want it.
Coach: Where you want it, yes.
Joan: And that’s what you practice.
Coach: And then you throw out the caesura. It’s just for rehearsal—unless you select a spot where you always want the sense pause, and that one you keep in. That pause becomes part of the way you read the line. It could be needed for you to answer the important question: what is this line actually doing? Use an active verb to explain what the line is doing. (They ponder this.) Well, “The king doth keep his revels here tonight” is informing, right? It’s an informative line. What else?
Mike: Anticipating?
Marilyn: Forecasting.
Coach: Find active verbs. Try the top line: “In sooth I know not why I am so sad.”
Joan: It’s answering a question. Why are you unhappy?
Coach: Find active verbs.
Joan: Declaring.
Coach: Yes, it could be telling someone to get out of my face. It could be doing “leave me alone.”
Once you have the verb, you’ve pretty much got your character. The line is helping you determine what the character is doing, as well as what the line is doing. When we ask, “What is the language doing?,” we need to find the verb that explains it.
I explain the context of The Merchant of Venice line, then the context of Dawn’s Twelfth Night line, and then we explore the context of the speeches in each play, which includes Romeo and Juliet, Henry V, Macbeth, Othello, a different spot in The Merchant of Venice, and the speech Dude’s working on from As You Like It. The actors seem unfamiliar with the context of their speeches within the plays, which indicates to me that, as of today, the plays haven’t yet been carefully read.
Coach: Finding the verb is not an easy thing to do, but it’s one of the most important skills in acting. It allows you to play the correct action, to not be passive, and to work with confidence. So, next time, we will find the active verb for each speech.
Now let’s get to the irregular lines, like the most famous line in Shakespeare. Count the syllables: “To be, or not to be—that is the question.”
All: Eleven.
Coach: What do we do with that? The first thing to be considered is this: is the last syllable something we would kick the box on? What’s the last syllable?
Coach: How would this read if you kicked on the last syllable. Go ahead and try. (They do vocally.) Right away, we hear the problem. Now read it as if “ques-” is the last syllable. (They do, and hear the line correctly.) There are lots of these types of lines in Shakespeare. This is a soft ending—called a feminine ending. Who wants to scan this line? (Joan does.) Now you can speak the line with “-tion” as a soft syllable at the end, and the line still works. The extra syllable doesn’t even mess up the beat. You might find some of these in your speeches. Just work them like this line and mark the feminine ending as a soft syllable. Sometimes the little “u” is put in brackets to designate the feminine ending, like this (). (I demonstrate on the board.)
Dawn: I actually had an English professor tell me to compress the final foot to two syllables. It came out so awkward. Glad to see how it’s supposed to be.
Coach: Do you know what she was telling you to do?
Dawn: I have no idea.
Coach: She was telling you to elide. Who has an example of elision—a new skill we just went into.
Mike: I’ve got one in the R and J speech.
Coach: Right, but don’t do that one just yet. Find one from everyday life. What’s an example of an elision?
Dawn: I’m instead of I am.
Michael: It’s just a contraction.
Coach: Right. Contract a three-syllable word into two syllables, or a two-syllable word into one, or even four into three. How is it done?
Dude: Take out a letter, usually a vowel.
Coach: Right. We’ll do a bunch of elisions as we go along. See the line, “Nor heaven nor earth have been at peace tonight.” We’ll get to it. But let’s continue with caesura. What about caesuras in this famous line: “To be, or not to be—that is the question.”
All: After “to be.”
Coach: You could place one there. Of course, there’s already a comma.
Dawn: After the next “to be.” (They suggest other places where caesuras could be used.)
Coach: If you put one after “that,” let’s read the line. (We all read it aloud.) Many actors prefer to read the line with stress on “that.” Now you have what’s called a trochee, a foot where the first syllable is stressed and the second syllable is soft. The stress is inverted. Shakespeare sometimes inverts a foot for specific kinds of stress, or maybe just to capture your ear by breaking the rhythm. In this line, both ways of handling this foot will work—actor choice.
Dude: There was a wonderful PBS program recently where a group of famous actors all read the line in a different way. All readings made sense, even if some were hilarious.
Michael: Lester Scruggs did the same thing with music. He invited twenty banjo players to play the same part, each a different way. And all were right.
Coach: For our purposes, we write out our scansion the way we decide to do the line. If we choose to invert a foot, reversing the scansion, we’ve simply created an irregular line.
Joan: Does that only happen when the line is irregular?
Coach: It’s the creation of the trochee that makes the line irregular, or it’s the feminine ending, or the elision, or twelve syllables, or one or more of a few other changes in the rhythm. Anything that changes the blank verse from its regular dee-dum structure makes a line irregular. Mike is doing a speech from Romeo and Juliet, and one of his lines, which is irregular, is here on the board: “From ancient grudge break to new mutiny.” This seems to be a regular ten-syllable blank verse line, except it isn’t. It becomes irregular when you figure out that “break” is a trochee.
Look at the second line: “Nor heaven nor earth have been at peace tonight.” How many syllables?
All: Eleven.
Coach: So now what do we do—where do we kick? This line is not a feminine ending is it? Because “night” is a strong word on which we have to kick. It’s not like “-tion” in “question.” The problem has to be somewhere earlier in the line.
Marilyn: Elide “heaven” to one syllable.
Coach: Yes. It becomes “heav’n,” pronounced “heavn.” You’ll find many of these elisions. So, when you’re working on your speeches, when you come to a line you can’t figure out, bring them to the next workshop, put them on the board, and we’ll work them out together. It’ll be fun for everyone to work out the scansion on the hard lines. Marilyn, would you do the scansion on this line? (She does the scansion on “Nor heaven nor earth have been at peace tonight.”) Where would the caesuras go? (She selects two places—after “earth” and after “peace”—and reads the line with the two caesuras.)
Dude: I’d take one after “heaven” because of the antithesis, which we haven’t studied yet.
Joan: Would our pitch make a difference?
Coach: It would make a difference on what the audience hears.
Dude brought up antithesis. Let’s insert this skill into our work right now. We’re sure covering a lot of different bases in this first workshop, aren’t we? Anyway, antithesis is placing one word against its opposite. So here, we have “heaven” and “earth.” Zach, read the line and play the antithesis. (He does.) But you made two syllables out of “heav’n”—did you hear it? (He did.) You all can see how easy it is to forget one skill as you work on another. You’ll discover that when you stand up here to read some of your lines, some of you may actually forget to kick the box—the simplest of our skills. That’s something I mentioned in one of our pre-workshop meetings—that if you’re going to be in a Shakespearean play, the smaller the part the fewer the lines, usually. And each line needs the kind of attention we’ve been giving them here today. If you don’t have the time, take a very small part. Do you realize the amount of time it would take to prepare to play Hamlet? You’d have 1,495 lines!
Dawn: Take a sabbatical to prepare it.
Coach: Exactly right. (Zach tries the line again, making “heav’n” one syllable.) This time, he’s concentrating on the antithesis, and he stressed the two “nor,” and then “earth” got dropped. Did you all hear it?
Joan: It’s hard.
Coach: Yes, but that’s what your ears have to do. You have to hear it. If you can’t hear it, you can’t direct Shakespeare because you can’t help your actors.
Dude: Well, a lot of directors can’t hear it.
Coach: And direct anyway, I know. Dude, please read the line. (She does but puts two syllables in “heaven.”) Go ahead, try again. (She does and gets it right.) Just say “heavn,” and it will take care of itself.
Dude: In my mind, I’m hearing one syllable, and you hear two.
Marilyn: Just leave off the entire “en.”
Dude: Terrific. (She does it again, more easily.) And there’s another “n” coming, so I’ll use that: “Nor heav nor earth—”
Coach: Yes, now do the antithesis. (She does.) Even more. (She does. Everyone can clearly hear it.)
Dude: Break time.
Coach: Yes, then each of you put two of your lines on the boards, and we’ll work out the scansion. Break time.
After the break, Dude erases some of the lines we had on the two white boards. Then she writes these terms on one of the boards: blank verse, ten syllables, scansion, end support, caesura, elision, feminine endings, antithesis. On the other board she writes:
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
Coach: Shall we begin? We have one more irregular line. This is from the prologue to Romeo and Juliet:
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Who can see the problem here?
Dawn: Mutiny is a three-syllable word.
Marilyn: Is this a nine-syllable line? (All count)
All: No, it’s ten.
Dawn: Isn’t there a trochee?
Coach: Yes. “Break” has to be stressed, and it’s not in the stressed position. (We work out the scansion and try the line as a regular line. Dawn reads it aloud.) Does that make sense?
Mike: The emphasis is on the wrong word.
Michael: “Break” is the action word.
Coach: Right. What Shakespeare has done here is to place the action word in the soft position, which means we have to reverse the stresses and mark it “
.” (I do the scansion on the line.) Some editions place a comma after “grudge,” which would give you a short pause before “break.” Our edition doesn’t do that, so we use the caesura. (Mike reads the line and makes it work. Joan reads the line and doesn’t want the pause before “break.” She tries it a few times.)
Try adding a caesura after “break.” (She tries that, and finds that the pause both before and after the word helps her. She reads it well a few times. Mike reads it also.)
The caesura almost always comes in the middle of a line, but sometimes it’s at the beginning. If the first word in a line is a verb, it will probably be stressed and a trochee. You’ll find lines in your speeches that may begin with a stressed syllable. In that case, your scansion is stress, soft, soft, stress—and then you return to normal rhythm.
Now, let’s beat out the rhythm on the first irregular line. (We beat out “To be, or not to be—that is the question.”) Pound on something as you beat it out. (We all do, most pounding on a leg or a chair.) Now, do the line with a trochee for “that.” (We beat it out.) Beat it into your system; it will stay there.
Let’s beat out the second line: “Nor heaven nor earth have been at peace tonight.” (We beat out the rhythm.) Now find a place to stand and walk. Walk out the beat of that last line. (We all do.) Let your body memorize where the stresses are. You can also just use your feet. (We all try that.) Okay, spread out and work on beating out the rhythm on all three lines. (They do, but “break” is hard to walk out because the heel is usually soft.)
Let’s pair up and do your kick boxes on all three irregular lines. Kick on “ques-,” “-night,” and “-y.”
The actors spread out and kick the boxes back and forth. Their bodies are getting into the kicking motion, which gives them added power with the entire line. They work ten minutes on these three lines, correcting each other when the kick is wrong. I hear them discovering their own mistakes and correcting them.
Coach: Good. Let’s assemble now. Everyone feel the rhythm? Well, for a change, let’s check out something different. Here’s another form of verse. (I use the Robert Frost poem on the board.) How many syllables per line?
All: Eight.
Coach: Let’s beat out the eight-syllable line. (We do.) Frost also has other rhythms. Does anyone remember the term for a four-foot line? Nobody does. (Later, I look it up: tetrameter.)
Authors use many schemes for poems. A four-foot structure is certainly not necessary, but some structure is. Four feet is similar to blank verse but different. (We talk about the meaning of “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” Michael finds the entire poem on his computer and reads it.)
Wait a moment. Michael, don’t lose the final words of the lines. (He starts again, and this time supports the end words.)
Michael: (Pausing.) I’ve never tried to emphasize the last word before, but it helps to read the poem.
Coach: But don’t emphasize the final word too much, or it gets overdone and sing-songy.
Michael reads the poem, and we all enjoy it. Then, after discussion about interpretation—with Mike throwing in the idea that the last line might be about permanent sleep—we go back to Shakespeare.
Coach: Now, everyone write two lines on the boards, probably your first two. (They take turns as there isn’t room for all six at once.)
Dude erases the poem and other lines and clears space for them. As they put lines on the boards, I figure out what else can be accomplished in the final twenty minutes—and realize it will take the entire time to do the line scansions.
Coach: Dawn will go first, as she has to leave early for her job. (Dawn has two lines from Twelfth Night and begins the scansion, but she has trouble with the first line because she wants to make two syllables of “lady.”)
I left no ring with her, what means this lady?
Heaven forbid my outside hath not charmed her.
Coach: I’m not sure I agree with your scansion. (Dawn starts beating out the rhythm.) Anyone have comments?
Coach: Yes, I’d just allow the “-y” to fall off and say “lad-y.” It won’t mess up anything. (Dawn fixes the first line, then has trouble with the second. We try different ways to scan the line.) Remember, sometimes it works to go backwards. If we leave “charmed her” as a strong foot, stressing both words, what else would we do? (Different ideas are tried.) What if we leave “her” a feminine ending? (We try it, and most agree it’s effective.) So, its actor’s choice—we can stress both “charmed” and “her”—and that’s actually what the play is about, or we can assume Shakespeare used two feminine endings back to back: the “-y” and the “her.” After more thought, I’d probably stay with the feminine endings, then you can use a regular beat for both lines. Everyone beat out the lines using feminine endings. (They do. Dawn agrees to use this scansion.)
Coach: What about caesuras? (Dawn marks two: after “forbid” and after “not.” Then reads the lines with the caesuras.) That’s fine for rehearsal, but then you want to drop them. Right?
Dawn: Yeah. I haven’t yet read this play.
Coach: Please do. And there is a beautiful video of Twelfth Night, directed by Trever Nunn. It’s just fabulous. If you can’t find a copy, I’ll loan you mine. Bye Dawn, go to work. (She leaves.) Who’s next? Mike? (Mike has written out the first two lines from Romeo and Juliet. He marks the scansion, then reads them, emphasizing the stresses. We discuss his choices; all are acceptable.)
Two house / holds, both / alike / in dig / nity
In fair / Vero / na, where / we lay / our scene,
Coach: What about caesuras to break up the phrases? (Mike places them after “alike” and “lay”—for rehearsal—and breaks up the phrases. He notes that he won’t need the caesuras if he handles the words correctly. I agree.)
Be sure to look up the word “household.” It refers more to generations than to a structure down the street. You’ll discover, when working on this speech, that it’s actually a sonnet, and the last two lines are a rhyming couplet. Good work. Who’s next? (Michael steps up to his written-out two lines from Othello—an Iago speech. He begins to tell us about Iago’s character.)
Wait, I have to stop you. We’re not into character yet. We’re just working on the words and line structure. (He begins again, scans the lines, and reads them both. We work on the second line.)
What wound / did e / ver heal / but by / degrees?
At first I thought “heal” might be a trochee, but I see it’s a regular ten-syllable line. One thing about working out the scansion: it makes you figure out the structure of the line.
Dude: Always use pencil. (Laughs.)
Coach: What about the scansion? (Michael marks it, and we read the line. Everyone is satisfied that we have it right and could use a caesura after “heal.”) Good. Next. (Zach works on his two lines from Henry V.)
Oh god / of bat / tles, steel / my sol / diers’ hearts,
Possess / them not / with fear! / Take from / them now
Coach: This is a beautiful speech, and there’s a first-class video made by Kenneth Branagh you might watch. If you do, ignore the first scene, which is unintelligible. After that, it rolls right along. (Zach scans and reads the lines. “Take” is a trochee, and he finds it. Both lines work well.) Thank you, Zach. Joan, working on Lady Macbeth. (Joan has two lines on the board. She scans and reads them.)
He brings / great news.
The rav’n / himself / is hoarse
That croaks / the fa / tal en / trance of / Duncan
Coach: The first is a short line. Lady M remarks about the news, then dismisses the messenger. She begins her soliloquy with the audience. Notice that Joan has figured out that “raven” is not two syllables, but elided to “rav’n.” In the second line, the “entrance of Duncan” is probably “
”—two soft syllables—as we don’t want “of” to be stressed. Sometimes you just do the line in the way that makes it work, which she has done. Thanks, Joan. Marilyn, you’re next. We all know her first line. (Marilyn has two lines from The Merchant of Venice on the board. Marilyn works out the scansion, leaving “heaven” a feminine ending.)
The qual / ity / of mer / cy is / not strained,
It drop / peth as / the gen / tle rain / from heaven
Coach: Any caesuras? (She inserts one after “mercy,” and we try it. We encourage her to try one after “droppeth,” and she does. She suggests that she doesn’t really need either caesura, and we agree with her.) Great. We got it. Who’s left?
Dude: Just me.
Coach: Okay. Let’s do them. (Dude has two lines from As You Like It on the board.)
Now, my / co-mates /and broth / ers in / exile,
Hath not / old cus / tom made / this the / more sweet
Coach: The first line appears to be difficult. Let’s experiment. Try a pause after “now” to complete a foot. (We try various ways to read the line with the pause. We then try “exile” as one syllable with a pause after it, using the pauses to help the character draw the people closer to her.) But if “now” is a trochee, and we allow “my” to complete the first foot, even though there is a comma between the two syllables, we can have a regular line, and “exile” is two syllables. (We try that and like it. Dude gets the second line right away and reads it.) “This” is a trochee. Nice work.
We got through everyone. Next time: phrasing and breathing. By the way, everything we’ll be doing in here is in the first five chapters of the book, should you find time to look at it. Any questions?
Zach: What about for next week?
Coach: I’m not giving you any assignments other than to apply the skills to your lines as we learn the skills. You folks are too busy with family and full-time jobs to have assignments. But now you should work out the scansion of your first six to eight lines. These are the lines you’ll work with on every exercise and read at the end. Once you’ve applied all the skills, as I said earlier, you’ll be pretty much memorized. But memorization isn’t necessary, as we’re just applying skills to language. Good start. We’ll stick to the 2:00 p.m. starting time from now on, then Dawn won’t have to leave early for her job. See you next week. (We never did get to introductions, but nobody seemed to mind.)