Freeing Shakespeare's Voice

The Actor's Guide to Talking the Text

Kristin Linklater

• Publisher: Theatre Communications Group
• Year: 1993
• ISBN:
  9781559366380
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Shakespeare Drama
• Index: Literature

A passionate exploration of the process of comprehending and speaking the words of William Shakespeare. Detailing exercises and analyzing characters' speech and rhythms, Linklater provides the tools to increase understanding and make Shakespeare's words one's own.

THE CONTENT

Language

dp n="20" folio="10" ?dp n="21" folio="11" ?

1

Vowels and Consonants

Within the structure of words is encoded the evolution of language and therefore of thought. Vowels and consonants in one form or another have been around for tens (perhaps hundreds) of thousands of years and, taking that perspective, it is only in the last millisecond of time that they have moved from an oral to a written culture, from the body to the printed page.

Within the last two hundred years the growing influence of print has increasingly cut language off from the sensorium. One might say that language, thus denied emotional and sensual nourishment, has become anemic. The severance creates for the actor a chasm between creativity and verbal communication which poses a major obstacle to playing Shakespeare. When words are mainly experienced in the head and the mouth they convey cerebral meaning. In order to transfer Shakespeare’s full emotional, intellectual and philosophical intent from the page to the stage, words must connect with the full human range of intellect and emotion, body and voice. They must be allowed to rediscover old neuro-physiological routes of appetite to bring back taste and texture to speaking, and to spark the animal response mechanisms which fire creative processes long buried under layers of “civilized” and “rational” behavior. Only the fullest access to the humanity of the speaker allows one to speak Shakespeare fully.

Nobody knows how language began. According to my own constantly shifting state of mind and being, I can subscribe one day to the idea that language descended to us from the gods and on another day be convinced that it began as open-throated, appetite-related grunts and groans dealing with life and death issues such as food and the procreation of the species; hunger and sex; pure appetite; hunger and lust experienced in the belly and the groin, expressed with a roar that originated deep in the body, indivisible from the experience. The quantum leap (or crawl) in the evolution of speech, if speech began thus, was articulation, and the agents that articulated, interrupted and shaped the flow of roaring sound were parts of the mouth which had hitherto been used for appetite-related functions: chewing, biting, licking, sucking. Appetite and communication presumably occupied the same brain cells until the tongue, the teeth and the lips were fully adapted to new demands. Taste, smell and texture—pleasure, desire and satisfaction—must have permeated the process of speech for thousands of years. Speaking would have been on a par with sex and eating—an extreme experience.

But I think that Lewis Thomas, in his book Et Cetera, Et Cetera, has a more imaginative vision of language origins and therefore probably a truer one. Looking at a two-hundred-year-old horse-chestnut tree in his backyard he says:

If I were an early, primitive man, instead of the man that I feel these days, and if I had not yet built a language for naming my tree, dumbstruck, I would go looking for a small child. What is it, I would ask. The child would say a word never heard before, pointing up into the tree in eagerness for my attention. The word would have the sound of ai, then a gentle breath, aiw, and it would sound right for this tree. The word would then enter the language by way of me, I would tell it to my friends, and thousands of generations later, long after my time, it would be used to describe many things, not trees but the feeling that was contained in that particular tree. Aiw would become EVER, and AYE, and EON and AGE. The Sanskrit language would have built it into the word ayua, meaning life. Gothic would have used it for a word, aiwos, eternity. Latin would have placed it in aevem and aetas, for the connected ideas of age and eternity. The Greeks would put it into aion, vital force, and we would receive it in our word EON. German would have it as ewig, the word sung over and over in a high voice in Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde. And some of the languages, in their hopes, would insert a yeu sound as a prefix, and the new sound would form words for YOUTH, YOUNG, JUVENILE. By this time all trace of meaning of the chestnut tree would be gone.

In order to get a language really to work from the outset, as a means of human communication by speech, it must have been technically obligatory to make, first off, the words needed to express the feelings aroused by things, particularly living things in the world. Naming as a taxonomic problem could come later and would take care of itself. But for ideas to begin flowing in and out of minds, so that the deepest indispensability of language could take hold, the feelings would have to come first into speech, and that sense of the roots must persist like genes in all the words to follow.

Lewis Thomas, scientist and artist, reminds us that words connect us with the natural world around us as well as with each other, and tales are told of Eskimo tribes that have only recently lost their ability to find their way home after three- or four-month long hunting treks into uncharted wilds by “singing the landscape.” Their voices and the shapes of the hills, rivers and valleys, merged to make a journey-song which mapped and navigated their travels. When they were taught to read, this skill was erased. The Australian Aborigines were similarly gifted. These people are of a tribe to which we all once belonged.

Those who dig below the surface of history in a search for traces of lost knowledge, esoteric truths or gnostic religion unearth clear evidence of earlier times when human beings experienced themselves as part of the fabric of nature and the cosmos. As late as Shakespeare’s day men and women spoke of the harmony of the spheres and the desire to be in harmony with them. The music within us still sings and so does Nature’s music, but we seldom listen to ourselves or Nature with an ear tuned to such subtle vibrations. If we could actually experience that we live in a universe made of sound and light waves, there might be a reunion between the body and the brain and the world around us.

The neuro-physiological pathways connecting words with the sensory apparatus of the body and with nature have not disappeared, but they have been short-circuited as the technology of communication has “progressed.” It is not difficult to re-wire the circuitry. Not, of course, with the intention of reviving an old and incomprehensible way of speaking, but to awaken dormant energies of speech and tap into subterranean channels that may reverberate with unsuspected, sub-verbal meaning. By indulging sensory, sensual, emotional and physical responses to vowels and consonants—the component parts of words—we begin to resurrect the life of language.

The vowels and consonants of the English language have been badly treated over the last hundred years. I don’t mean that “good speech has deteriorated,” I mean that artificial standards of “correct speech” have associated any mention of vowels and consonants with judgments of correct and incorrect, good or bad, upper or lower class, intelligent or stupid, educated or illiterate. Most speech training employs the International Phonetics Alphabet to analyze regionalisms and train the ear to change individual usage. Phonetics is the science of sounds, the orthographic representation of vocal sounds. It was invented some hundred fifty years ago to attempt a more accurate spelling system for the English language. It failed to catch on as spelling but remained to be refined as a system for distinguishing the different sound usage in different languages and dialects. The I.P.A. is a sophisticated scientific language tool which has been overused in speech-training for actors to the detriment of the aesthetics of language.

The beauty of a vowel does not lie in the correctness of its pronunciation according to some arbitrary standard; it lies in its intrinsic musicality, its sensuality, its expressiveness. Vowels are compounded from the vibrations of the human voice molded by subtle changes in the shape of the channels through which those vibrations ...