More Shakespeare . . .

How to speak him. Well part of what you need to know, anyway.

Shakespeare wrote in three modalities.

Iambic Pentameter

Rhymed Couplets

Prose

Which mode he chose depended on many things, chief among them, the status of the character, the nature of the drama (or comedy) and the issue at hand.

In this post, I'm going to concern myself, primarily, with how the great man used Iambic Pentameter. To begin, Iambic Pentameter is usually spoken by noble or high-born characters. Prose, as a general rule, is reserved for lower born characters. A regular Iambic line has five "feet", or stressed syllables. There are irregular lines, but that's a subject for another day.

In a regular line - such as "O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!" (Hamlet, II,2)the stresses fall on O, Rogue, Peasant, Slave and I. The actor should find the pulse of the 5 beats in the line and be guided by them as he speaks it.

Amazingly, more often than not, the actor finds that the emotional content of the line is amplified by how he speaks/stresses the words. This isn't some airy-fairy fiction. It's fact. If you try it, you'll believe. It's not mysterious, but it's absolutely beyond the realm of imagining that Shakespeare was able, time and time again, to produce dramatic fiction, constrained by the rules of Iambic Pentameter, and create dialogue that surpasses anything ever written. That's genius, alright.

Anyway. In order to keep the meter, the actor can't take pauses, moments for reflection etc. as he might in a modern text. Shakespearean text depends on momentum in order to achieve its effect. The actor, therefore, must make his transitions either on the line itself or while other characters are speaking. But, in any event, he must make all the appropriate emotional shifts. The most important thing in this regard is to use the punctuation marks as keys for when emotion shifts - and you have to do it in rhythm. It's often appropriate to take a "breath" beat when you hit a period.

A fine example of a very good actor doing a breathtaking job with text can be found in Kenneth Branagh's delivery of the St. Crispin's day speech from Henry V. With a minor exception here and there, that, dear friends is how you do it! More about build and release in Shakespeare - "Surfing the Text" in a later post.