Shakespeare's Advice to the Players

(2nd Edition)

Sir Peter Hall

• Publisher: Oberon Books
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781840029192
• eBook ISBN: 9781849433556
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Schauspielerei & Vorsprechen

The best-selling guide to acting Shakespeare in a new smaller and lighter handbook size. Shakespeare tells the actor when to go fast and when to go slow; when to pause, when to come in on cue and when to accent a word. His text is full of such clues. He tells the actor when but never tells him why or how. That is up to the actor. Much like bringing a musical score to life, Peter Hall guides us to 'speak the speech'. An essential text for classical training at drama school and an invaluable reference book for actors and directors working on Shakespeare productions. Peter Hall makes watching or reading Shakespeare a richer experience, for audiences as well as actors.

PART ONE

PROLOGUE

Can we mount an authentic performance as Shakespeare would have seen it? No. Authenticity in the performing arts is ultimately impossible. We cannot perform anything, be it dance, music or drama, with any certainty either that we are performing in the right style (we are different people, with different attitudes and different sensibilities) or that we will understand even in approximately the same way as the original spectators.

The Shakespeare problem is particularly sensitive. Our language has changed, our accents have altered and our religious, political and social preoccupations have been transformed in the last 400 years. We are literally different people, in scale, appetite and morality.

In another 200 or so years, Shakespeare will only be faintly visible – rather as Chaucer is to us. Language must change or die. And Shakespeare’s language will not always be readily comprehensible; he will soon need translating. A book like this will then be useless, because with the disappearance of the original words goes the disappearance of the form. It is also why translated Shakespeare is so much modified, if not simplified.

But for the moment we can pursue in Shakespeare (as we can in performing Baroque music) a creative compromise. If we understand the author’s formal demands, we have some chance of representing them in modern terms. Of course performance fashions change; they must, in order to keep up with the subtle alterations in the audience’s sensibilities. But an iambic beat is still an iambic beat; a legato phrase in Mozart is still a legato phrase. The speech doesn’t need sentimental Victorian booming, or the music string-playing with a 19th century vibrato. The modern equivalent can be found providing we honour every part of the original that still speaks to us. What 2003 means by ‘trippingly on the tongue’ (which is to Hamlet’s taste in his advice to the players) will become something very different by 2053. But it should still trip.

Nonetheless, there are major difficulties. I have done many productions of Shakespeare where the verse speaking has been highly praised by some critics and roundly condemned by others. Someone must have been wrong. The reason for these contradictions is that there are no accepted standards of verse speaking and not much agreement on the old rhetorical forms. Some people like emotional Shakespeare which is almost sung; some don’t. Those who like the singing often think it is poetic. I like wit and restraint, and I believe Shakespeare liked them too. Hamlet again:

Speak the speech I pray you as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue; but if you mouth it as many of your players do, I had as lief the town crier had spoke my lines.

Today, rhetoric is not trusted. It is no longer taught in schools, nor do most of us listen to its rhythms in a Sunday morning sermon. This is partly why there are no longer any accepted standards for verse speaking. Well-spoken productions don’t usually get commented on: they are just thought of as good. It is the productions which don’t communicate whose verse gets every kind of comment from the tolerant to the critical. I once read a critic who condemned an actor for his appalling verse speaking as Shylock in the Tubal scene. Clearly nobody had pointed out to him that in this scene Shylock and Tubal speak entirely in prose. The rhythm should be different.

In our society, to be rhetorical is a term of abuse. A hundred years ago a politician would depend on rhetoric in his public speeches in order to stress his points. He would use repetitions, balanced answering phrases and antitheses. It was his way of defining a clear and formal argument. Today politicians want to be seen on television, chatting away like any other man in the street, with as many ‘you knows’ and ‘reallys’ as they can muster. Informality is thought to be honest; formality is considered artificial and untrustworthy.

But if Shakespeare’s form is observed, an audience is still held; if it is not observed, the audience’s attention strays and strays very quickly. So Shakespeare lives. And if an actor understands a speech and expresses its meaning through the form, the audience will understand also, even if they might not understand if they read the speech through once to themselves.

These are difficult times for the classical actor because there is little technical consistency. I have worked in a theatre where the director before me urged the actors to run on from one line to the next, speak the text like prose, and to take breaths whenever they felt like it. He wanted them, he said, to be ‘real’. They were; but they weren’t comprehensible. I then arrived and said just the opposite – that the line structure was the main instrument of communication. Its five beats made up a phrase which was by and large as much as an audience could take in without a sense break.

In the past it was hardly necessary to train actors to speak verse. They had – all of them – been marinated in so much Shakespeare during their early years in regional theatres or on classical tours that the rhythm came naturally to them. It played in their heads all the time – like an insistent backing group. Young actors are now exposed to little Shakespeare because most regional theatres cannot afford to do plays that require more than a dozen actors. And drama schools spend little time training young actors in Shakespeare because they know it is unlikely to be used in the professional theatre. Only a small percentage of actors will ever actually do Shakespeare and that will be because they have joined the Royal Shakespeare Company or the National Theatre. Shakespeare, it is thought, is of little use for the behavioural understatement of television acting. The fact that it is still the best training for any actor or any style is overlooked. There is no better way for an actor to train his intellect, his body, his breathing, his voice, and his skills in communicating with an audience than by playing Shakespeare. It is an Olympic course in acting. If the resulting performer is a rough and crude actor who is full of overstatement, then he is no true Shakespearean and he has not been well taught. He is distorting the form by overstating it. Shakespeare demands that we delicately fulfil it.

Some actors confuse verse with ‘poetry’ – which they take to be the indulgent and often sentimental use of high emotion to support lyrical lines. ‘Purple passages’ they may with justice call them. But verse is not necessarily ‘poetical’ or even ‘purple’. And it certainly isn’t in Shakespeare. The main purpose of his verse is to represent ordinary speech and tell a story lucidly. At its best, it is quick and clear. And if it is delivered with five accents as written, and with a tiny sense break (not a stop) at the end of each line, communication with an audience is immediate. That is why Shakespeare wrote in iambic pentameters; he didn’t want to be ‘poetic’, he wanted to be understood. He earns his poetry and his metaphors when the emotions become intense. He can then move from plain speech to intricate images with ease. And he is able to use the most banal things – Lear’s button, or Cleopatra’s corset – to break our hearts. Most of his great moment are based on the mundane and the concrete, rather than the hyperbolical.

SHAKESPEARE’S ADVICE TO THE PLAYERS

Speaking Shakespeare’s verse and prose is an easily learned technique. It takes about three days for an actor to familiarise himself with what he has to look for; and it takes a few weeks more for him to become comfortable in the techniques.

Shakespeare tells the actor when to go fast and when to go slow; when to come in on cue, and when to accent a particular word or series of words. He tells the actor much else; and he always tells him when to do it (provided the actor knows where to look). But he never tells him why. The motive, the why, remains the creative task of the actor. He has to endorse feelings in himself which support the form that Shakespeare’s text has given him. For instance, the words may tell the actor to speak slowly because they are monosyllabic; but they will not tell him why. The actor’s emotions must do that. A measured speech must be credible because it is supported by the appropriate emotion; otherwise it will seem imposed and unreal. But this gives the actor an almost infinite number of choices. And, once achieved, form and feeling interreact on each other and become one. So form comes first and, if it is observed, it helps provoke the feeling.

There are some fifty actors who practise this technique in Britain and there are a handful of directors. Many of this select band are of the older generation and know how to do it simply because they performed so much Shakespeare in their youth. Some might be hard put to tell you the techniques. They shape the structure of the lines and the rhythms naturally, almost without thinking. Many of the younger actors are eager to learn, but they can easily be put off by the sound of the technical terms or the indifference of directors. Demystification and practice are, as usual, the main needs. When all the analysis has been done, speaking Shakespeare is like riding a bicycle or skating at the local ice rink – it suddenly happens.

Actors quickly understand that, if they know the technique, they have a better chance to make the text work. They are empowered then to make the audience listen and understand. This desire to achieve the form is weaker in directors, perhaps because they sometimes feel (wrongly in my opinion) that they are being forced into old patterns rather than allowed to pursue the new. Yet they need to understand that even though a musical phrase has a number of defined and unalterable notes, it is capable of infinite variety; it can express anything. The same is true of a line of Shakespeare’s. But neither those who put on the plays nor those who study the plays have recognised how much Shakespeare tells us about his form, and therefore how he should be performed. Scholarship over the centuries has paid little attention to Shakespeare’s verse structure or to the balance of his prose. But then scholarship, I suppose, has usually been dealing with the written rather than the spoken word. With few exceptions, scholarship reads the text, it does not hear it.

I have been trying to direct Shakespeare for over fifty years. What I have recorded in this book are not techniques that I have invented; I have been taught them by others as part of a living tradition, which has been handed down willingly to my generation. Those who taught me believed that what they said was self-evident. I believe in my turn that it needs recording and handing on to the future. What he demands always works. And his notation is amazingly accurate.

Armed with a facsimile of the Folio, a simply edited but not-too-punctuated modern text, a glossary of archaic words and those that have changed their meaning, and an understanding of how Shakespeare guides his actors with his form, it is still possible to approach any of his texts with the confidence that they will be understood. Shakespeare’s advice to the players is still potent.

BLANK VERSE

Shakespeare himself only uses the term ‘blank verse’ three times:

HAMLET

The lady shall say her mind freely, or the blank verse shall halt for it.

JAQUES (in As You Like It)

Nay then, God b’ wi’ you an you talk in blank verse.

And Benedick (in Much Ado About Nothing) when he speaks of running ‘smoothly in the even road of a blank verse’. ‘Smoothness’ seems to be a prerequisite of good verse speaking for Shakespeare: Hamlet also asks his actors to ‘beget a smoothness’. The line presumably must be unbroken, not halting. Whenever Shakespeare speaks of blank verse, the need for smoothness seems to follow.

Shakespeare writes in blank verse using an unrhymed line of ten syllables, made up of five iambic feet:

di-DUM di-DUM di-DUM di-DUM di-DUM

This is a blank verse line – called blank because it doesn’t rhyme with its adjacent lines. To Shakespeare, it represents the speech of everyday life. It is fleet, informative, and usually unpretentious. Its simplicity and directness make it paradoxically more transparent and colloquial than Shakespeare’s prose. It is certainly more flexible. But then it is designed to be. An iambic measure, or foot, is ‘di-Dum’. Five such feet make up an iambic pentameter. In ordinary English speech there are usually five beats or so to each spoken phrase. Perhaps that is why the common utterance of English verse and English dramatic poetry is a five-beat iambic line. French speech, by contrast, usually has six beats and that is the basic structure of the commonest French verse form – the Alexandrine. However complex in rhythm or clotted with imagery, the iambic lines of Shakespeare are never far away from the rhythms of ordinary English speech. This is why it can still sound so natural.

Take the lines that start The Two Gentlemen of Verona – a play which is one of Shakespeare’s earliest, if not the earliest:

Cease to persuade, my loving Proteus.

Home-keeping youths have ever homely wits.

Shakespeare’s prowess as a master of Elizabethan rhetoric is already impressive and can provoke a few scholarly terms to substantiate the claim. The two lines are regular iambic pentameters that both begin with an irregular inversion called a trochee: DUM-di instead of di-DUM. Both lines are end-stopped and use pun, antithesis, alliteration, oxymoron and a highly developed use of assonance.

But let me rely less on the technical terms. They are enough to frighten anyone away from Shakespeare – especially young actors who value spontaneity, or readers who are made to feel inferior by academic jargon. Who cares? Why bother? What do all these archaic words have to do with the speaking of the lines or the necessary business of the play? How can they help? Well, these terms can be off-putting, but what they represent can still help us understand in the theatre or the study.

We must therefore demystify the old rhetorical terms and show them for what they are: highly practical tools that lead directly to some knowledge of what Shakespeare actually heard when he wrote the line. From them, we can deduce what formal shape (rhythm, emphasis, tempo) he was demanding. And all these clues teach us how to make the plays into public utterance, and finally how to act them.

Take the second line. It is a regular five-beat iambic line with an inversion, or trochee, on the first foot (‘Home-keeping’ instead of ‘Home-keeping’) to give emphasis to the word ‘home’. There is a startling antithesis (the balance of opposites) between ‘Home-keeping’ and ‘homely wits’ and a pun or quibble on ‘home’ and ‘homely’. If a young man stays at home instead of taking on the world, he will be ‘homely’ – that is, domestic, unexceptional, even boring. There is an oxymoron (a flat contradiction between two opposites) between ‘homely’ and ‘wit’. The young man is unlikely to be witty if he is homely; or homely if he is witty. He can’t be both. And wit belongs to the world, and usually to the city. The stay-at-home will not have it.

These two lines give a complete philosophy of why the nest has to be vacated by the young. ‘Wit’ is knowledge, brain power, intellect (as well as plainly being smart). Homely wits are also not likely to get on in the world. There are many more clues buried in these tw...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• Dedication page
• Acknowledgements
• Part One
• Prologue
• Shakespeare’s Advice to the Players
• Blank Verse
• Improvisation
• The Text
• The Sanctity of the Line
• Verse
• The Structure of the Line
• The Caesura
• Monosyllables
• Pauses
• Rhyme
• Prose
• Rhetorical devices
• Pronunciation
• Bawdy
• The Actor’s work on himself
• Telling
• Part Two Analyses of twenty key speeches from Shakespeare
• Part Three On a Personal Note