Tips for Acting Shakespeare
When I am teaching Shakespeare, I learn something new. It’s as if Shakespeare is this vast endlessly subject that can be taught and learned forever, and I’m happy to say that it’s probably true.
Most people’s experience of Shakespeare was negative, it was in school, painfully read aloud in an English class. If you were lucky to have a positive experience, I salute you, mine was agonising.
I’ve just finished giving a Masterclass on Shakespeare in Sydney, Australia and I thought I would give some tips on acting shakespeare.
TIP 1: Shakespeare is 400 year old poetry, if you struggle to understand it, translate it to make it more accessible. People say it ‘loses its power’ when it’s translated, well of course it does, but I would rather actors understood what they were saying BEFORE they had to say it. A book like A Shakespeare Glossary by CT Onions may be of use to you, otherwise a good dictionary or dictionary.com might help too. (remember words change their meaning, generous was once something only noblemen could be…)
TIP 2: Scan the lines, there should be 10 syllables on each line. When there is more or less, several things can be happening. 1) Shakespeare is cheating, he has to make a single line say what he wants to say in only 10 syllables, but he cheats the line and turns ‘even’ into ‘e’en’ or something like that to reduce the syllables. 2) the word has changed it’s pronunciation – words like marriage was pronounced MAR-EE-AGE and not MA-RIJ as it is today. (and he cheats this again if he can’t make it work too!) If you need help with this, there’s Sir Peter Hall’s Shakespeare’s Advice to the Players or the John Barton epic tv series Playing Shakespeare on DVD (there is a book too)
TIP 3: Work out the Iambic Pentameter, the dee dum dee dum rhythm, so that you know precisely how Shakespeare intended it to be performed. It is true that subsequent editors have messed with it a little and if you read my former colleague Abigail Rokison’s new book Shakespearean Verse Speaking: Text and Theatre Practice you will become aware of many of the problems and some of the solutions.
TIP 4: Learn to find the poet working in the text, Shakespeare was a dramatic poet, and not a playwright in the modern sense. He was made famous with poetry. And his plays are crammed full of poetic devices such as simile, metaphor, assonance, dissonance, consonance, antithesis and many more. When you can sense these, you can use them, as the characters are aware of what they are saying and doing! (Shakespeare’s characters often seem immensely able in arguing a case, maybe they should be lawyers!)
TIP 5: You need to marry the heightened verse style to a style of performance that the audience can accept in the 21st Century. We do this by asking simple dramatic questions, such as: what does my character want the other character to do? and what do I have to do to look like I’m doing that too? Working out what tactics might help you achieve this will also bring the verse to life beyond the poetry as you get inside the text itself, to the psychology of Shakespeare’s truly ‘before-their-time’ characters.
By marrying together the scansion of the line, the poetic devices and contemporary acting technique, we can bring Shakepeare’s poetic drama to life for a modern audience.
COACH