Thinking Shakespeare (Revised Edition)

A working guide for actors, directors, students…and anyone else interested in the Bard

Barry Edelstein

• Publisher: Theatre Communications Group
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781559368902
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Acting & Auditioning

Thinking Shakespeare gives theater artists practical advice about how to make Shakespeare's words feel spontaneous, passionate, and real. Based on Barry Edelstein's thirty-year career directing Shakespeare's plays, this book provides the tools that artists need to fully understand and express the power of Shakespeare's language.

ACT III

ACT III

CHAPTER —No— 9

SWEET, VARIED NOTES

THE MUSIC OF THE LANGUAGE, AND ITS RHYTHM, TEMPO, AND PACE

In Shakespeare’s violent early tragedy Titus Andronicus, the beautiful and innocent Lavinia, daughter of the title character, is brutally raped. Reenacting a famous story from Greek mythology, her attackers cut her tongue out of her mouth so that she won’t be able to name them. (Rough justice is dispensed to them later when they are hacked to bits, baked into a pie, and served to their mother for dessert!) Lavinia’s uncle Marcus is devastated by the sight of his bloody niece. He remembers the lovely sound of her now-silenced voice:

O, that delightful engine of her thoughts,

That blabbed them with such pleasing eloquence,

Is torn from forth that pretty hollow cage

Where, like a sweet melodious bird, it sung

Sweet, varied notes, enchanting every ear.

(3.1.82–86)

These lines draw upon the idea at the heart of Thinking Shakespeare: we think, and then we speak. Or, as Marcus puts it, the tongue is the engine that blabs our thoughts with pleasing eloquence. His lovely notion, that words are sweet, varied notes that enchant the ear, is the subject of this chapter.

Shakespearean Language Has a Musical Dimension

Variety is at the core of Shakespeare’s technique. We have seen that his writing never stays in the same place for long. Knotty, intricate vocabulary is quickly followed by something direct and unaffected. If a passage is stern and serious, a deflating joke or flash of humor is surely right around the corner. If it’s polysyllabic and fast, slow monosyllables aren’t far behind, and if it’s slow, you can bet it will pick up speed again soon.

This ever-changing, kaleidoscopic effect gives Shakespeare’s writing a certain music—“varied notes,” as Marcus puts it—of an “infinite variety,” as Enobarbus says of Cleopatra. Shakespeare creates rhythms, tempi, and sounds that are his and his alone. Call it the Swan of Avon Swing, the Backbeat of the Bard, the Stratfordian Stomp. Actors need to learn how to jam on it, to bust a move or two when they hear it. The music of Shakespeare—the rhythm, tempo, and pace of his language—adds dimension and nuance to the audience’s experience of his plays. The musical aspect of the writing is not to be overlooked. It is our next area of focus.

REHEARSAL TIME

This speech from Richard II amply demonstrates the important contributions of rhythm and tempo to the Shakespearean music.

The given circumstances: King Richard II has plunged England’s economy into ruin through excessive spending and too much debt. John of Gaunt, uncle to King Richard, is on his deathbed. In the Elizabethan age, folk wisdom had it that dying men are given the gift of clairvoyance. Gaunt welcomes this gift and makes a prophecy about what will happen to his beloved England if his nephew continues his disastrous economic policies.

(Note that for the remaining three acts of Thinking Shakespeare, unfamiliar words and ideas in our rehearsal speeches will be glossed with marginal notes signaled by the symbol ° and footnotes, rather than with the more discursive explanations found in Acts I and II. This will allow the emphasis to be placed more squarely on the main point of each chapter, rather than on line-by-line exegesis and supporting observations. You now have all the tools you need to scan the text, piece its argument together, find and use its antitheses, exploit all the changes in the language’s height, and phrase it a line at a time. You are ready to look at it from some new perspectives.)

JOHN OF GAUNT	Methinks I am a prophet new-inspired,
	And thus, expiring, do foretell of him.
wastefulness	His rash, fierce blaze of riot° cannot last,
	For violent fires soon burn out themselves. ...