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Theatre - Articles |
| Speaking Shakespeare: An Overview |
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By Dakin Matthews
I guess if I had to characterize my approach to speaking Shakespeare, it would be that meaning drives everything.
And by ‘meaning,’ I mean the meaning of the text—a meaning which is, however, not simple but very complex.
Thus I confess to being something of a fundamentalist, though not in the sense that ‘fundamentalist’ carries today. I mean that the meaning of the text, and therefore the meaning Shakespeare intended, should be the foundation of virtually all the choices an actor makes when he speaks Shakespeare.
I know this sounds obvious; but it is today only infrequently observed. Amidst all the bardolatry and even apotheosis of Shakespeare, and certainly among the popular deconstructions and “revisals” of Shakespeare’s plays, it is too often forgotten that he was a careful craftsman, who knew exactly what he was doing when he wrote these scripts, and that he clearly intended them to mean certain things and not others, and to be spoken and performed in a certain way.
Nonetheless, my kind of meaning-based fundamentalism is not much in vogue these days. Indeed, it is even suspect.
On the one hand, it invites the accusation of “intentionalism”—the idea that Shakespeare’s intentions have something to do with an actor’s, or even with a critic’s, job in interpreting the text. (This is an idea virtually heretical these days in most of academia; yet I continue to preach it religiously, though I be damned for it. Here I stand, I can do no other. A Shakespearean script is an intentional document—like a score or a blueprint; and if it does not embody the author’s intentions, then whose does it embody? And if you do not respect his intentions and follow his instructions, how can you call the result Shakespearean?)
On the other hand, it may also invite the accusation of “literalism”—as if the mere letter of the text is somehow sacred, and that there is no meaning beyond it. (That is not an idea I espouse. There are lots of meanings founded on and going beyond the literal meaning, but few or none legitimate, I think, apart from it.)
These two ideas can sometimes combine into “fundamentalist literalism”—surprisingly popular in some of our finest theatres—which canonizes and privileges a particular edition of the text, namely the First Folio--according its commas, colons, and capitals (among other typographical phenomena) an almost biblical force. (This is not one of the tenets of my religion either; I know too much about how the First Folio was printed to fall into that heresy.)
I am, if anything, a Thomist in my approach to text: the literal meaning is the fundamental—or foundational--meaning, anchoring all other meanings, of which there may be, depending upon the circumstances, many—some of them extraordinarily important for the actor to be aware of.
I can describe my approach in four simple statements:
1. The actor must know exactly what he says.
2. The actor must know exactly why he says what he says.
3. The actor must know exactly why he says it the way he says it.
4. Once he knows these, the actor will be on the right path to knowing how to say what he says.
You will notice, I hope, that there is no “exactly” in the final sentence. The reason is simple: even after an actor knows exactly the ‘what,’ ‘why,’ and ‘way,’ there is still plenty of room for personal interpretation—and that will color the ‘how.’ Also, if you look closely, you will notice that poetry—and especially verse—enter rather late into the picture, effectively only in statements three and four.
1. Vocabulary and grammar and a basic knowledge of Renaissance culture will dominate the activity of the first statement.
2. An understanding of human nature and of human interaction, and of the nature of dramatic writing, will dominate the activity of the second, because here the actor must apply all his skills of analysis, and all his instinct for circumstance and characterization, to a Shakespearean text, just as he would to any other dramatic text.
3. Rhetoric and Poetics and a working knowledge of the Renaissance mind will play largely in the activities of the third statement.
4. Add to all these a good sense of verse structure, and you have all the tools to tackle the activities in the fourth statement.
In this approach, I am an ardent disciple of Poel.
William Poel, the great reformer of Shakespearean acting at the turn of the twentieth century, thought that that the actor’s primary task was to deliver the meaning of the text to the audience. To do this and still maintain a kind of elevated or exaggerated naturalism in Shakespearean acting—which was Poel’s stated goal—required speech as close to the speed and natural cadence of English as was possible, coupled with the accurate stressing of the fewest possible syllables required to get the exact meaning across. The thought, he said, quoting Emerson, constructs the tune—not the other way around. Pausing, he thought, should be natural, syntactical, and--whenever possible--infrequent. Nowhere did he suggest that verse form, as distinct from meaning, should be a dominant factor in speaking the text. And certainly it should never override meaning. It was, in fact, partially in reaction against the overly sing-song, artificial, verse-driven stage speech of late nineteenth-century actor-managers that Poel developed his method.
(Lots of people, by the way, claim to be Poel’s disciples, but if they do not adhere to these simple principles, they must be considered pretenders.)
Practically, what does all this mean?
1. It means that Shakespeare’s verse must be treated first as human speech before it is treated as versed speech.
2. It means that naturally spoken English has a natural rhythm or cadence that marks it as human speech. (It is partially by recognizing that rhythm that listeners identify it as fully human English speech. Compare “robotic” speech.)
3. It means that meaning creates that natural rhythm—“the thought constructs the tune,” in Emerson’s words; the meaning creates the melody; or to quote Poel (quoting Emerson) further: “reading for sense will best bring out the rhythms.”
Now that rhythm or cadence of spoken English, which is created by the sense, consists of a more or less regular rise and fall of stressed and unstressed syllables.
In fact, it turns out that early modern English—which Shakespeare wrote and spoke—is particularly consonant with an iambic rhythm—a more or less regular alternation of unstressed and stressed syllables; and that—because of its use of articles (‘a’ and ‘the’) and of prepositional phrases (‘of mine’ or, for example, ‘for love’) and because of the typical accentual pattern of English vocabulary and the typical emphasis pattern of simple English syntax—a very common shape of a spoken English phrase or clause is ten syllables in an iambic rhythm. As a result, iambic pentameter—a ten-syllable line of unstressed and stressed syllables (the stresses falling on the even numbered syllables) is a particularly consonant verse form for English dramatic verse.
But--and this is a large ‘but’—the rhythm created by meaning, and the metrical regularity of the strict iambic pentameter are two entirely different things in English poetry. Rhythm and meter are two separate renderings of the same phenomenon—the rise and fall of stressed and unstressed syllables. In rhythm, that rise and fall is created by the meaning and is only more or less regular; in meter, the regular alternation of rise (ictus) and fall (non-ictus) is superimposed by the verse form onto the speech and is therefore artificial and paradigmatic. That is to say, meter is an abstract norm, to which the specific rhythm of any given line of English dramatic pentameter verse may or may not adhere.
In my approach, the actor always speaks the rhythm; the poet provides the meter, against which the rhythm plays in a kind of counterpoint. The actor does not speak the meter; he does not choose his stress because the syllable falls on the ictus. He chooses his stress because stressing that syllable or that word makes the most sense, conveys the clearest specific meaning. If it falls on the ictus (called ‘coincidence’), so be it; if it does not, so be it. Most likely, falling or not falling on the ictus is an important part of the poet’s purpose, and therefore part of the meaning he intends the actor to convey when he speaks verse rather than prose.
Thus, meaning is not simply literal or ‘notional’—not merely the sum total of information gleaned from vocabulary and syntax. For one thing, the relationship between rhythm and meter conveys a kind of meaning as well, one not drawn from vocabulary and syntax, but inhering in the manipulation of the music of the English language and in the expectations created by a regular metical form which may or may not be observed in particular cases. There is one kind of information—one kind of meaning—relayed by rhythmical predictability and creating aural satisfaction, and another kind of meaning relayed by unexpected rhythmical deviation, creating surprise and perhaps even aural anxiety.
And there are further meanings, which arise from the relationship between literal meaning and the circumstances, intentions, emotions, experiences, and desires of the characters speaking or spoken to—subtextual meanings tied to the literal, but spreading deep under it and expanding it. For all human speech—if it is truly human—floats, moored or unmoored, on a psychic ocean of human thoughts and feelings, not all of which we are equally aware of. Shakespeare did not have to know Freud to know this.
And there are meanings that arise from the entire cultural context of the play or the playwright, because some of the literal meanings he conveys evoke whole worlds of meaning beyond the literal. If, for example, the playwright writes in a Christian context for a Christian audience—whether he is himself a Christian or not—his use (to take one example) of the word ‘grace’ will create religious and theological resonances—or connotations--far beyond the literal, which the actor must, at some level, be aware of if he is to convey their full meaning—or at least if he is not to block that conveyance.
And there are meanings that may exceed even the character’s awareness—though not the actor’s: as in the case of dramatic irony (when the character speaks more truly than he knows) or of patterns of imagery spread across a whole play. The actor must recognize them so that he can speak them in a way that will convey their full import in the play as a whole, even though his character may have little or no awareness of that import.
So meaning is a complex concept; yet the Shakespearean actor must take it as his task to communicate this entire panoply of meanings, always rooted in the literal, without losing the elevated naturalness that Poel sought for, the humanity that Hamlet insisted upon in his famous “advice to the players.” He must, if he is to speak Shakespeare as Shakespeare wanted Shakespeare spoken, speak only—even when Shakespeare is at his most poetic—meaningful, naturally rhythmic human speech.
Still, the question remains: how does this differ from simply speaking highly energetic prose? And here we meet the essence of Shakespearean verse-speaking.
I think of Shakespearean verse as a kind of complex harmony for two voices, in which the actor sings one line and Shakespeare himself sings the other. When two voices blend in two-part harmony, each sings his own line; neither must stray into the other’s territory; yet, when singing his line, each must be aware of the other’s line so as to blend with it.
Something similar happens with the Shakespearean line. The poet has constructed his verse in a certain way, using iambic pentameter as the abstract norm and writing enough lines that meet or approach that norm so that it becomes something that the listener will recognize and have certain expectations about. (It helps that early modern English already has a rhythmic disposition consonant with that particular meter.) But Shakespeare also constructs a number of lines that deviate from the norm, sometimes mildly, sometimes wildly, with the effect that the listener’s expectations are sometimes met, sometimes not. When they are, the result is a kind of aesthetic resolution or satisfaction; when they are not, the result is a kind of aesthetic discord or alert to the listener to pay closer attention, perhaps, or to understand that what is being said is meant to give the listener some experience (pleasant or unpleasant) other than resolution or satisfaction—anxiety, disorientation, shock, dismay, anticipation, heightened awareness, appreciation, awe--any number of reactions created not just by the words spoken but by the unexpected rhythms in which they are spoken. And these effects are most frequently achieved not in single lines but in extended passages where longer rhythmic waves build and crest and break.
If the actor, instead of “singing” his own rhythmic line, tries to “sing” the author’s metrical norm, all these effects will be lost in a kind of mechanical reproduction of iambic pentameter which Shakespeare never intended. Indeed, such a reading will frustrate and destroy Shakespeare’s specific poetic and dramatic intentions.
If we learn anything from a chronological study of Shakespeare’s plays, we learn that he experimented over his artistic lifetime with the relation between meter and rhythm, gradually but firmly disentangling them, and creating, through an ever-growing manipulation of non-iambic rhythms meant to play against meter, the dense, vigorous, human speech that marks his greatest achievement in dramatic writing.
And we must understand that just because this kind of verse writing is less metrical does not mean it is less poetic. Indeed, many of Shakespeare’s greatest poetic effects are achieved precisely in the deliberate disjunction between rhythm and meter. (And, we also learn, from a chronological study, in other disjunctions as well: between line length and phrase length, for example; or between line-end breaks and mid-line breaks; or between the beginnings and ends of lines and the beginnings and ends of speeches.)
What all this means for the actor is that complex meaning, not verse form, must help him to pick his stresses, must drive his rhythms—sense, not standard meter, must create the shape of his speech. And that the actor is truly doing the work Shakespeare intended him to do when, with one ear tuned to the harmonics arising from the interplay with meter, he speaks natural, rhythmical, human speech.
Los Angeles, 2007
The handbook, called Shakespeare Spoken Here, is about to be re-published in its fifth edition, in January, 2008.
Interested readers can purchase it directly from me (DakinM@mac.com)The price is $30.
Dakin Matthews is the Artistic Director of the Andak Stage Company in residence in the NoHo Arts District at NewPlace Studio Theatre. He is also a multiple award-winning actor and teacher who specializes in Shakespearean roles, and an award-winning Shakespearean dramaturge and scholar, who has worked on Broadway and in the regional theatres and Shakespeare festivals for over forty years. Recently, he won a Drama Desk Award for adapting the Broadway production of Shakespeare's Henry IV at Lincoln Center and a Bayfield Award for his acting in the same production; he was a text consultant on the Acting Company's upcoming production of The Tempest; he coached Denzel Washington and served as dramaturge for the Broadway production of Julius Caesar directed by Dan Sullivan; he played Polonius and dramaturged for Dan Sullivan in his production of Hamlet at South Coast Rep; he played Sir Toby Belch for Jack O'Brien in his Old Globe production of Twelfth Night; and he directed the Antaeus Company workshop presentation of Coriolanus. This January, he will be leading a masterclass in Shakespearean verse for the Actors Center in Manhattan and publishing the fifth edition of his handbook Shakespeare Spoken Here.
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