Shakespearean Rhetoric

A Practical Guide for Actors, Directors, Students and Teachers

Benet Brandreth

• Publisher: The Arden Shakespeare
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781350087965
• eBook ISBN: 9781350088009
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism of Shakespeare
• Index: Literature

Classical Rhetoric, the art of persuasion, formed the sum and substance of Shakespeare's education and was the basis of his understanding of the power of language and how it worked to move, delight and teach. Rhetoric, which seeks to explain the way that language works to influence others, provides a powerful, transformative tool for approaching text in performance. This book helps you understand the key concepts of rhetoric. It gives clear explanations, stripped of jargon, and examples of rhetorical technique in the plays. It also provides engaging, practical exercises to unlock character and to identify themes in the plays through the lens of rhetoric. Academically rigorous, based on more than a decade of practical experience in the use of rhetoric in drama at the highest level, it is an ideal companion for anyone engaging with Shakespeare in performance.

1

Why this book?

And shall I lose my life for want of language?

AW 4.1

This is a book about a particular understanding of language and how it works on the mind and emotions. That understanding will give anyone engaging with Shakespeare’s plays a powerful tool for bringing them alive in performance. That tool is classical rhetoric.

What is rhetoric?

Rhetoric is the study of how language and ideas influence other people. It seeks to provide an organised way of thinking about how to persuade most effectively in any situation. As such, rhetoric encompasses within it psychology, poetry and philosophy but is unique in trying to explain how these three interact in the minds of others. That unique combination gives rhetoric tremendous power to reveal the meaning of a text, to unpick the thinking behind an argument.

Consider President Obama speaking in 2004:

That is the true genius of America, a faith, a faith in simple dreams, an insistence on small miracles.

And Constance in King John 3.1:

Gone to be married? Gone to swear a peace?

False blood to false blood join’d. Gone to be friends?

Why does President Obama repeat ‘a faith’? What did he hope to convey to his audience by the repetition? Is it connected to the missing ‘and’ between ‘simple dreams’ and ‘small miracles’? Is the repetition of ‘gone’ by Constance to the same effect? If not, how can we recognise the difference? What of the repetition of ‘false blood’? What do these repetitions tell us about the character of Constance in that moment? What do they convey about her mental and emotional state?

Rhetoric gives us the answers to all these questions and more.¹

What is rhetoric not?

Rhetoric is not simply public speaking, oratory. Although it was the need to speak well and effectively in the ancient law courts and political forums that historically prompted the study of rhetoric its scope is, and was from the start, much broader. Its insights apply whenever we communicate, whether by speech, in writing, or even by gesture.

Nor is rhetoric only applicable to politics or philosophy or the law. Its first application may have been in the ancient law courts or political forums but it applies to any subject. We can use it whenever we seek to move others – whether to urge them to go to war, to find our client innocent, or to spare our brother the penalty of death (Isabella), convince our lover to kill his best friend to avenge a young girl’s honour (Beatrice), that our new wife is not mad to love us (Sebastian), or that the king is mad (Paulina).

Finally, rhetoric is not simply about style, that is to say, how to make our words sound beautiful or memorable. Style is an important aspect of rhetoric but only one part of it. After all, as we shall see, you can only decide how to say something after you have worked out what it is that you want to say.

There are good historical reasons for all these mistaken beliefs about the scope and focus of rhetoric. However, their existence is a sadness because it has led to rhetoric having a diminished status and appreciation. Rhetoric is much more than just oratory, or beautiful expression, or the tool of politicians. It offers huge insights for performers, particularly when it comes to understanding a play’s text. That is not just theory speaking – in fifteen years of giving workshops on rhetoric at the RSC, the Donmar Warehouse, the Sheffield Crucible, RADA and elsewhere I have been struck both by how unfamiliar many actors, directors and writers are with rhetoric and also with how readily the insights it offers are absorbed and put to good use. It is with the aim of making those insights more widely available that this book is written.

Why aren’t we more familiar with classical rhetoric?

As this book unfolds you will realise that you are already familiar with many of the ideas of classical rhetoric. It would be surprising if you weren’t. After all rhetoric is about communication, which we all do, all the time. What rhetoric seeks to do is to analyse communication so that we can think about it systematically and spot rules for communicating persuasively. Rhetoric simply identifies and gives a name to many of these already familiar ideas.

Despite their continued use the ideas and insights of rhetoric have become obscure to many in the twenty-first century. It is no longer any part of most people’s education; let alone at its heart. It has come to be seen as an academic subject of study rather than appreciated as a powerful, practical tool for approaching language. Shrouded in academic jargon and confined to academic journals, the simplicity and profundity of its key insights have been hidden. Yet, once jargon is stripped away, the concepts of rhetoric are easily grasped.

The aim of this book is not to present new ideas. Its aim is simply to make a two-and-a-half-thousand-year-old subject more widely accessible, modern, and relevant to contemporary productions.

What does rhetoric have to do with Shakespeare?

William Shakespeare’s writing is grounded in rhetoric. It was the sum and substance of Shakespeare’s education at the grammar school in Stratford. It was the lens through which every educated Elizabethan viewed literature, poetry, history, politics, morality. Unsurprising then that Shakespeare’s plays are shot through with references to rhetoric and rhetorical education. This book will help you recognise those references.²

More than that, the use of language in the plays is based on rhetorical theory about how words work to convey meaning or emotion or argument. Understanding the theory of rhetoric therefore tells us how Shakespeare thought language worked. It tells us what effect Shakespeare intended to create when using particular words in a particular order.

And what does Shakespeare have to do with rhetoric?

Shakespeare’s understanding of drama is closely linked to rhetoric. Three arguments illustrate the point:

First, the argument that Shakespeare represents a significant advance in dramatic form because he takes the oration and makes it integral to plot and character developments where before it stood apart as display (see Kennedy 1942). If that argument is correct, it reinforces how carefully a production must view Shakespeare’s moments of oratory – looking in them for either a significant moment of dramatic change or character revelation.

Second, the argument that there is a period in Shakespeare’s career where his works not only make use of rhetoric but are also heavily influenced by the theories of rhetoric and, in particular, the kind of rhetoric encountered in judicial³ deliberation (see Skinner 2014 and McDonald 2017). During this period plays like Hamlet, Othello and Measure for Measure are consciously creating debates that are left unresolved, for the audience to answer as they think right. If correct, this argument emphasises the intended ambiguity of the resolution of the debates within these plays. Answers are deliberately left for the audience to find.

Third, the argument that throughout his career Shakespeare shows a particular interest in the central question of rhetoric: what is the power of language to affect change in the world? The context in which Shakespeare asks that question is the creation of art. If correct, this argument reinforces the central importance of Shakespeare’s choice of language, image and argument for the characters. Shakespeare is exploring the difference that language can make and his characters do so too.

These are all reasons why understanding rhetoric help us understand Shakespeare in performance, but it cuts both ways: Shakespeare, because he is a master of it, is the perfect subject-matter from which to learn rhetoric.

Understanding rhetoric is valuable in itself because it provides a framework for analysing language, ideas and arguments that can be applied to the text of any play, including but not limited to Shakespeare’s. Learning about rhetoric in the context of Shakespeare in performance, one becomes equipped with a powerful framework for thinking and for understanding language in general, for analysing questions of identity, of power, of manipulation, and for communicating persuasively. All of which has application beyond Shakespeare, beyond acting – to life in general.⁴

What does rhetoric have to do with drama?

Drama is, much simplified, about conflict, about the desires of a character and the obstacles to the achievement of that desire. Often the obstacle they wish to overcome is the conflicting desire of another character. Sometimes the obstacle is ignorance of the desires of another character. Sometimes the conflicting desires are internal. Rhetoric asks questions that go to the heart of these dramas – understanding motives, conflict, action and reaction, intention and obstacle. That is because rhetoric, again much simplified, is about persuasion. When we consider how best to persuade we are inherently concerned with the persuader’s understanding of the relationship between persuader and the audience they seek to persuade.

Characters alive in the moment

Rhetoric provides an easy and structured way of framing those questions of the text that generate insights for performers. In particular, identifying the arguments, the patterns of language, results in an approach to the text that is granular. That is particularly helpful in addressing one of the challenges of approaching Shakespeare in the twenty-first century: Shakespeare’s plays are to us now so familiar as to seem over-familiar. A play like Hamlet may now seem almost a tapestry of clichés. Rhetorical analysis can make the language appear alive and fresh again. In their introduction to the Arden Third Edition of the play, the editors Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor make this very point:

Another problematic legacy of the formidable ‘Hamlet tradition’ is the sheer (over-) familiarity of the play’s language: it can seem a mere tissue of quotations, causing actors difficulty in making the lines sound fresh. We have lost the rhetorical training of Shakespeare’s time and the technical vocabulary of linguistic effects which went with it: we are often impatient with studies of style, rhetoric and metre, preferring to move straight to ‘the meaning of the play’, that is, to larger patterns relating to themes, characters, historical and religious contexts.

A consequence of that loss of intricate understanding is that too often we see performances in which the actor simply plays an attitude: Hamlet is melancholy and thus his speech is delivered with that over-arching emotion infusing it, leaving the speech itself inadequately differentiated. The greatest performances always convey the sense that the actor is discovering each word, each sentence, each thought in the moment – thinking it, hearing it, for the first time. It is in this way that the words become alive again. Understanding the rhetorical techniques underlying the words encourages and makes easier performances of this kind. Facilitating that understanding is a key objective of this book.

An intellectual exercise?

As an actor you are looking for character. Who is this person that I am to play? The clues are in the text. Rhetoric is a tool for unpicking that text. Some actors think, mistakenly, that this means treating the text as separate to living the part, being the character. It isn’t. Rhetoric simply allows the actor to appreciate the full message of the text. In particular it brings out how much of the message of language arises from things other than the simple meanings of the words: It is also to be found in the way those words are ordered, where and how the stress is created and placed and in the choice to use some words rather than others. Ultimately, a rhetorical analysis of the text is simply a scaffold that allows the construction of a full understanding of character. Once the edifice is built the intellectual scaffolding is no longer needed. Yet, without it, the building is never as high or as beautiful as it might have been.

What of instinct?

Many acto...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Dedicaton
• Series
• Title Page
• Contents
• Series preface
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on text
• Abbreviations
• 1 Why this book?
• 2 How to read this book
• 3 What is rhetoric?
• 4 Memory and Delivery
• 5 Invention
• 6 The Modes of Persuasion
• 7 Logos
• 8 Ethos
• 9 Pathos
• 10 Disposition
• 11 Using Invention and Disposition in performance
• 12 Worked examples
• 13 Invention and Disposition in rehearsal
• 14 Style
• 15 The purposes of Style
• 16 Emotional state
• 17 Structures of thought
• 18 Illusions of logic
• 19 Style and Tone
• 20 Reverse dictionary
• 21 Style in performance
• 22 Style in rehearsal
• Appendix: What Shakespeare learned at school
• Notes
• Suggested further reading
• Partial bibliography
• Glossary
• About the author
• Copyright