Acting Shakespeare

Bertram Leon Joseph

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317646242
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism of Shakespeare
• Index: Literature

How did the actors for whom Shakespeare wrote his plays make his characters come to life, how did they convey his words? Can modern directors, actors, and even library readers of Shakespeare learn from them?

Creating character and making the Elizabethan playwright's poetry compelling for the audience is a problem which has seldom been resolved in modern times. This book demonstrates the hard course a modern actor must follow to make real and truthful the words he speaks, and the action and emotion underlying them. With examples and simple exercises, this book helps with the preparation for the great task – providing the actor with a combination that unlocks the Bard's English. Starting with how theatrical speech was understood in Renaissance England, it looks at figures of speech, the powers of persuasion, and the passion and rhythm inherent in the language.

Five Character

DOI: 10.4324/9781315761794-5

Theoretically there are two processes involved in the preparation of a role; they are not really distinct in practice, of course, but it is useful to consider them separately in order to see some of the problems of creating character more clearly. One of these processes is a matter of attaining an intellectual knowledge of what the words mean and why the character has to use them; in this way we find out the emotion expressed in them and the character’s objective. This process is shared with students of Shakespeare who are not actors; but the other process referred to is one which the actor does not share with academic students of Shakespeare, who are usually content with a merely intellectual knowledge. The actor, however, has to progress to a point at which he feels in himself sincerely as his own emotion what he knows intellectually the imaginary character has been imagined as feeling. It is not a matter of seeming to feel the emotions, but of really feeling them; then he can seem to be the character. But all the time that he seems to be the very character come to life he is in fact really feeling the emotions expressed in the character’s words, and really wanting to attain the character’s objective. Every actor blends these two processes in the way which suits his individuality.

Here I have very little to say about the second of these two processes; and that little is best said after we have considered the other, the process whereby an actor comes to know intellectually what it is he must feel and want before he can speak his lines as if there is nothing else possible for him to do when playing the character on the stage. This book is not about how to act, but about some of the ways in which it is possible to prepare to act a Shakespearian role; acting is the same whether we act Shakespeare or John Osborne; but to prepare to act Shakespeare is a different matter from preparing to act John Osborne, because Shakespeare requires a different effort from us if we are to know intellectually what is to be felt, and what is the character’s objective. Words have changed their sense and their implications, and the real emotion and desires have been expressed unrealistically. For that reason a modern actor finds it harder to be certain exactly what it is Shakespeare’s words need him to feel and want if he is to speak them as one having no alternative but to speak them and in that way. It is with the attaining of the intellectual certainty (without insisting that it always can be attained) that I am concerned here. For when it has been found it gives a confidence and satisfaction both to the actor and his audience which cannot be produced any other way.

The earlier chapters of this book have been concerned with seeing intellectually the relation of arrangements of words and of the structure of the lines to the surface sense, its implications, the emotions and objectives. It has also been suggested that when this vision has been acquired the actor finds himself speaking the verse or prose in the way which is right both for it and for him; his voice gives the music which the lines ought to evoke from it and from his personality; and his audience is given more complete understanding of what is being spoken and acted, not because he is striving deliberately to make them hear the contrast between one word and another in the poet’s pattern, but because the absorbing of the text which allows him to feel the emotion and want the objective expressed in the pattern, also allows him to make the pattern ‘manifest’ to his audience. It would be truer to say that there is no alternative but to make the pattern manifest, but not because he is trying to. His success comes as an inevitable by-product of his confidence, his understanding of how everything works together to enable him to play the role to the satisfaction of his own conscience as an artist. That is what really matters to him; it is a lucky audience that hears him when his artistic conscience really is satisfied.

Clear and careful examination of the surface sense and the structure of the text is the first step to achieving the satisfaction of which we are thinking. And a good illustration of how precise reading leads to rich and satisfying portrayal of character can be found in the speech in which Othello likens his ‘bloody thoughts’ to the flow of water from the Black Sea through the Sea of Marmora to the Dardanelles (ill, iii, 457–464). The speech falls naturally into two parts, in the first of which there is concentration on the idea of a current running on without an indication of the slightest possibility that anything else could happen. The current is icy, but it does not freeze and become motionless; it runs on for ever in its compelled and compelling course.

Like to the Pontic sea,

Whose icy current and compulsive course

Ne’er feels retiring ebb, but keeps due on

To the Propontic and the Hellespont.

In the second half of the speech, Othello lets us know that what he has really had in mind when concentrating on the undeviating current is the implacability of his ‘bloody thoughts’.

Even so my bloody thoughts, with violent pace,

Shall ne’er look back, ne’er ebb to humble love,

Till that a capable and wide revenge

Swallow them up.

Some of the details of the second half of the simile are the equivalents of details in the first: the bloody thoughts are like the Pontic sea; ‘ne’er feels retiring ebb’ has as its counterpart ‘ne’er ebb to humble love’, and the equivalent of ‘but keeps due on’ is ‘shall ne’er look back’. But the correspondence between the two halves of the simile is not exact. While the progress of the Pontic sea goes no farther than the Hellespont, that of the bloody thoughts goes on into what is the equivalent of the Mediterranean, which is not even mentioned explicitly. These thoughts must drive on until they enter something large enough to absorb their current—‘TUI that a capable and wide revenge/Swallow them up.’ Careful comparison of the two halves makes us see that in fact the narrowness of the channel for the Pontic sea makes depth no brake on its movement; and similarly it is useless for Othello to have anything less than a comprehensive and ‘wide’ revenge if his resentment is to be swallowed up. He is not yearning for a deep revenge; the word ‘wide’ is used precisely; it is the word which Othello must use to express his need. The same need is expressed in the word ‘capable’, which in Shakespeare’s time had the sense ‘comprehensive’. Othello does not know how many people are involved, not in the enjoyment of Desdemona’s favours, but in making a fool of him, in making use of him for the good of the Venetian state, in concealing from him the truth about Desdemona, and letting him think he was being encouraged in the love of a splendid woman, when all the time there was really a sort of unspoken conspiracy to use him. It is from this that his resentment springs; and the resentment wants vengeance on all, however many they are, who have made a fool of him. In this sense of isolation, only Iago seems a true friend; everyone else is the potential object of Othello’s bloody thoughts; they will be assuaged by nothing less than all-inclusive and utter revenge on everyone who can be shown to have been involved in the conspiracy against him.

Examination of the surface sense leads to other important implications for the person who is preparing to act Othello. The emotive ‘feels’ does not really apply to the Pontic sea but to the resolution to have nothing less than a ‘capable and wide revenge’, which itself can only be expressed in the image of the sea. ‘Retiring ebb’ in the first half of the simile is not rendered exactly by ‘look back’ in the second; the exact equivalent here is ‘turn back’ or ‘draw back’. Yet the word ‘look’ is not used loosely; if his thoughts were directed away from the imagined vengeance, back to the image of his past love for Desdemona, they and he would be softened; they literally must not look back. There is equal precision in the choice of the word humble in ‘ne’er ebb to humble love’. To look back would mean to turn back, to ebb; instead of sweeping on to their goal in outraged pride, the soldier’s emotion, they would turn back to loving humility, to ‘humble love’ where resentment and revenge have no life. Knowing what his feeling for Desdemona has been, however bloody his thoughts may be now, Othello also knows that if he thinks of his life as a happy lover dedicated to the soft, delicate servitude of his lady, they will never be swallowed in a ‘capable and full revenge’.

Othello is speaking ostensibly in answer to Iago’s ‘Patience, I say; your mind may change’. But he is not really trying to convince Iago that he will never change; instead he is expressing both his emotions and his objective. He is feeling not jealousy but hatred; and his objective is revenge. There is no place for patience in his mind. Humility and patience are not the salves which he wants for his hurt pride; all that he will let himself consider is vengeance. He must cast love out and fill his thoughts with hatred.

An equally unchanging purpose, but a gentler one, an expression of love not of hatred, comes from Julia in The Two Gentlemen of Verona. Again there is concentration on the way in which a current reaches its goal inescapably in the first half of the simile; but this way is a gentle, loving, devious one, not a swift, violent dash.

The current that with gentle murmur glides,

Thou know’st, being stopp’d, impatiently doth rage;

But when his fair course is not hindered,

He makes sweet music with th’ enamell’d stones,

Giving a gentle kiss to every sedge

He overtaketh in his pilgrimage;

And so by many winding nooks he strays,

With willing sport, to the wild ocean.

Here, while Julia is describing the stream, she is really expressing the quality of her own love, and of her intention to reach her goal. Having established firmly what happens to the stream, while thinking of her love, she now concentrates explicitly, not obliquely, on her own intentions:

Then let me go, and hinder not my course.

I’ll be as patient as a gentle stream,

And make a pastime of each weary step,

Till the last step have brought me to my love;

And there I’ll rest as, after much turmoil,

A blessed soul doth in Elysium.

(ii, vii, 25–38)

The actress has not quite such an easy task here as has the actor of Othello. Language is not used quite so precisely; the correspondence between the first and second halves of the comparison is not so exact. For while the current of the first part ‘strays/With willing sport to the wild ocean’, Julia says she herself will rest when she has reach’d her love ‘as, after much turmoil/A blessed soul doth in Elysium’. Leaving apart the possibility of emending ‘wild’ to ‘wide’, the actress will solve her problem by thinking of the ocean in itself as something free and vital. While the stream is not turbulent in its course, Julia for all her outward patience will have been undergoing turmoil. She is not really unperturbed herself, however little she may perturb others; this is what emerges from the discrepancy between the ‘wild ocean’ and resting after turmoil like a soul in bliss.

Whenever the actor’s difficulties are connected with the unrealistic style of the text, he will find help in carefully mastering the surface sense of his lines as the first step to knowing the emotion they express and the objective they reveal. This is particularly true of the very unrealistic lines in which the very real meeting of Romeo and Juliet has been imagined by Shakespeare. Both actor and actress nowadays find themselves affected by the romantic tradition of a deep and overwhelming love, which sweeps the two young people away in its path; and this is the way in which only too often the modern actor and actress want to play the lines, perhaps because only such a conception of the awakening of this love can make sense of the incident for the modern mind. It seems as if safety lies only in a flaming intensity of passionate sincerity, in which reason and everyday thinking have no part. But the lines will not let the actors play them in this way successfully. The encounter is actually composed formally as a sonnet with octave and sestet; Romeo makes his first advances in the first quatrain; they are evaded by Juliet in the second; after a fresh attempt in the beginning of the sestet, Romeo eventually gains his immediate objective in the fined couplet which is also the conventional resolution of the subject of a sonnet. Romeo’s intellect is engaged as well as his passion; he is certainly sincerely in love with as little as he knows of Juliet, quite confident that all that he shall ever experience of peace and joy in life is dependent on winning the love of this, to him, truly angelic lady. When he first saw her his determination in touching hers to ‘make blessed my rude hand’ expressed more than a conventional Petrarchan conceit; he had a vision at that moment of what his life had been, and what it would be in the future without her love, and of what it could be in that same future blessed with her benevolence.

This is what Romeo is working for, his own sanity, his own bliss, when he first addresses Juliet. But circumstances do not allow him to make an open and passionate declaration; they do, however, let him take advantage of the conventional elegant badinage appropriate to conversation before the unmasking—the kind of badinage which is indulged in Love’s Labour’s Lost and Much Ado About Nothing. The surface sense of his first quatrain amounts, therefore, to a declaration that if she objects to his hand touching hers he is ready to pay her compensation in the shape of a kiss (on her hand, not her lips).

If I profane with my unworthiest hand

This holy shrine, the gentle fine is this:

My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand

To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.

It must be remembered that whatever else the actor does, he must speak this sense in a way which will in his opinion lead to the attaining of his objective, and that is not just a kiss, but Juliet as the centre and salvation of his earthly life. The implications of the imagery, that he is a pilgrim and she a saint, as they are in play in the mask, allow him to be light and jesting on the surface while really expressing what he sincerely feels at the same time. When preparing to play this passage, moreover, the actor may possibly be helped by noticing clearly how the antithetical ideas and emotions are expressed in the structure of the lines. ‘Profane’—‘the gentle fine’; ‘unworthiest hand’—‘lips’; ‘this holy shrine’—‘two blushing pilgrims’; ‘smooth’—‘rough’; ‘rough touch’—‘tender kiss’. Finally, it may be observed that the acting (which includes the speaking) of this passage by the actor ought to be such as makes the actress playing Juliet want to answer in the lines given to her by Shakespeare. If he and she are both playing as they should, then Shakespeare’s lines, unrealistic as they are, will be the only way possible for her to express the reality of her reaction to Romeo’s advances.

Juliet’s mind, too, is engaged in her reply; in fact her emotions have hardly been touched as yet. She neither concedes the kiss, nor takes umbrage, allowing disdain to deal with him summari...