You aren’t just a fighter: you are an actor combatant.
We won’t worry in this section about the challenges of changing the weaponry requirements when a Shakespeare play is reset in a nontraditional time or place. That is part of the fun of mounting a production and there is a brief set of suggestions at the end. But we do need to be very sure of what the references are within the text so we can make an appropriate substitution for a different weapon or fighting style.
For example, in the film version of Romeo & Juliet with Leonardo DiCaprio, seeing all of the changes made when they modernized the design elements was great fun, but of course compromises had to be made. When Tybalt referred to his rapier, the production team had that changed from a sword to a handgun of a fictitious “Rapier” brand. That’s fine, but it does mean that all of the references to Tybalt’s fighting style (and therefore a reflection of his personality) take on a different tone. Shooting with a gun is just not the same as challenging someone with a sword. And certainly if someone draws a sword or a knife on you, you always have the option of running away. That option is always there, so getting involved in a fight is always a choice by both participants. But you can’t run away from a bullet – and when that option is gone the character’s motivations for that scene have changed. Pointing a gun takes command of distance; drawing a sword is an invitation to close in on distance. So although we should feel free to stray from the original intent if it helps our production, we should do it knowingly. I’ve seen too many shows where things were changed simply from ignorance, and the absence of thought showed.
Shakespeare always wrote about the people of his own time, even when the story takes place in other historic periods. When he needed a clock to chime in Julius Caesar to mark the hour, then a clock simply chimes. That the mechanical clock didn’t exist in ancient Rome was not a concern. The same goes for weaponry. He knew about rapiers and broadswords, and he makes free use of them with complete disregard to historical or regional accuracy. So when we try to do one of his plays “in period,” we have to be careful that in trying to stick to historical accuracy we don’t gut the author’s intent.
I am going to make a huge digression here [you shouldn’t be surprised by now] and take some time to talk about …
Acting in Period Plays
Many of the actors reading this book are trying to find an edge, something that can set them apart from other actors as they compete for the same parts, or something that can help them get a handle on tackling plays that seem so foreign. So in addition to explaining some elements of period style and stage combat and prop weaponry, it certainly hasn’t escaped my notice that most actors can use some help in simply acting the plays written before the twentieth century, especially those of Shakespeare. I’ve worked with a lot of actors over the years, and the same hindrances keep popping up, so read through this section even if you feel that it may not apply to you. You never know; you may find a little nugget that can help you or someone else out of an acting dead-end. As Shakespeare’s works are the most commonly performed plays of any playwright, the likelihood is that every actor is going to perform in one of his plays at least once in his or her career.
Please don’t let another actor tell you that Shakespeare wrote in a foreign language. It is most definitely English, just one that we are not accustomed to hearing. Only a few generations ago that wasn’t the case. When hardscrabble 49er’s climbed down from the Sierras to take a break at the nearest one-horse town during the California Gold Rush, viewing a traveling acting troupe performing “King Lear” was a treat few would miss. Even the least educated could follow the play, feeling completely comfortable with the elevated language, vocabulary and convoluted sentence structure. For today’s audiences, that is no longer the case. We just don’t routinely use words of more than one or two syllables anymore, and certainly don’t follow complicated syntax or poetic imagery. So the modern actor’s job is to parse out the thoughts within the language so that the audience can follow what you’re saying. In order to do that, you have to know what you are saying. Naturally, this may take some homework because not all of the words will be familiar to you. It’s not as though you’re reciting “Little Miss Muffet”.
Actually, let’s take a look at Little Miss Muffet.
Little Miss Muffet
Sat on a tuffet
Eating her curds and whey.
Along came a spider
That sat down beside her,
And frightened Miss Muffet away.
Pretty straight forward, right? We don’t have to break that down the way we would Shakespeare’s poetry because this is just regular language. Everything is easily understandable to anyone. Little Miss Muffet sat on a tuffet – what could be simpler?
Little Miss Muffet.
Little Miss.
Little.
But, by the way, what does it mean to be “little”? Is it short? Thin? Young? Can one be tall and young and still be little? Short and old?
How about “miss”? An unmarried female, right? A child? A spinster? And why the name “Muffet”? Just to rhyme with “tuffet”? So we go to the dictionary and find that the “et” ending is a common diminutive form, so Muffet might have something to do with muff. We check the dictionary again and find that the muff is that fur tube that people use to keep their hands warm when they are outside in cold weather. When does one wear a muff? Certainly not while eating curds and whey, I’ll warrant. So is Muffet a descriptive nickname, perhaps? If it is, it’s pointing out that this is not someone who is accustomed to doing manual labor. [Take a breath, we’ve only done the first three words.]
“Sat on a tuffet”. How do you do that? Do you perch on the edge? Lean way back? What is a “tuffet”, anyway? Is it cushioned or hard? Is it low or high? We have to go back to our Webster’s Collegiate dictionary to find that it is a three legged milking stool. But we note that the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) includes information that the word has that definition only because of a rather famous painting from the eighteenth century. It captured the moment that Little Miss Muffet is startled by seeing the spider. It is from that painting that people got the idea that a tuffet is a three-legged milking stool. Obviously, we can’t settle for this circular definition, so we dig deeper. It turns out that tuffet is a variation of “tuft”, which means not only a small bulge of grass, but also a low rise of earth, a very small hill, much like the term “grassy knoll”. So she isn’t sitting on a piece of furniture at all!
Let’s move a little faster through the third line. After digging a bit, we find that curds and whey is something like cottage cheese before they drain out all of the liquid, and that it was often prepared as a special treat when there was plenty of fresh milk available. The milk would be left to curdle overnight and then strained out in cheese cloth, separating the curds from the fluid (the whey), and would be served at breakfast, before it could spoil. This is not a worker’s meal. So who is this person out on a hill eating a meal prepared for her in the early morning?
It seems that this bit of doggerel goes back to the 16th century and may very well refer to Mary, Queen of Scots. The scenario is that of Mary, on campaign with her army, making camp overnight on some unnamed high-ground, which makes perfect tactical sense. In the early morning, just as the camp was stirring, they were attacked by an opposing force (one led by a commander hairy enough to warrant the sobriquet of “spider”). Mary’s forces probably fled the hillock before any combat was engaged, but at least one member of the attacking force was so pleased with the results of the attack that he composed this little soldier’s poem, one that the other soldiers would repeat as they marched to the next engagement. They surely would have taken the story, with its catchy singsong rhyme, back home with them, and like all good nursery rhymes it slowly lost all of it’s original meaning as it was repeated by generations of toddlers.
Is it necessary for the audience to know all of that information? No, but it is important to you, for your ability to transmit meaning to them starts with you having a crystal clear idea of what it is you are saying. The more sparklingly exact is your image, the easier it is for your audience to capture.
Ok, let’s move from a nursery rhyme to something a little more performance based. Most of you have heard the song “My Favorite Things” from The Sound of Music. Maria very quickly goes through a quaint little list:
Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens
Bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens
Brown paper packages tied up with strings …
Cream colored ponies and crisp apple strudels
Doorbells and sleigh bells and schnitzel with noodles
Wild geese that fly with the moon on their wings …
Girls in white dresses with blue satin sashes
Snowflakes that stay on my nose and eyelashes
Silver white winters that melt into springs …
In the stage version, this song is presented as merely an old county song, shared between the Reverend Mother and Maria. This is unfortunate, for it destroys any sense of discovery within the song. They both end up merely singing a quaint little song from their childhood, but have no emotional commitment to creating the images. It can be a nice moment that the two can share, but there is nothing special about the song itself.
Now consider that same song as it is introduced in the film version. There, Maria invents this little ditty while comforting the children, trying to get them to think happy thoughts instead of focusing on the thunder and lightening. What separates the average performance from one that soars is the attention to detail. Each image that Maria conjures comes from her own experiences and desires. Notice how pedestrian are the examples she gives. Doorbells? To a girl raised in a poor country village, electric doorbells were an unheard of luxury, the sound of which was proof of wealth beyond her imaginings. But to the Von Trapp children such a thing is commonplace. The image resonates with her but not with them. Sleigh bells? She obviously loves the memories that they bring, and perhaps some of the children share some happy thoughts, but it is also likely that they summon darker responses for some of the others. Have you ever ridden in the snow during a light storm in an open sleigh? It’s cold, it’s damp, and it can be miserable. So perhaps Maria senses that she isn’t doing too well with these “favorite” things, so she jumps to something that all Austrians enjoy – schnitzel with noodles.
And then, something remarkable. She somehow lands on an image of lyrical beauty. Imagine walking alone on a country road during a fall twilight, that magical moment when the last rays of the sun still glow in a dusty umber low on the western sky, but directly above the first stars are blinking on in the indigo expanse. The moon, almost full, has risen on the east, but is still low on the horizon. Suddenly, the flutter of wings as a flock of geese lifts from the dirt of a gleaned wheat field, and as they climb in front of you, the reflection of moonglow outlines the wings closest to you, the rest of their bodies black silhouette.
She makes a point of calling them wild geese. Does she rejoice in their freedom? Does she envy them? Does she compare them to the geese raised in her village? Does she long for a time and place where she can finally lift off and free herself from the drudgery of the farm?
“Wild geese that fly with the moon on their wings” can be simply a little bit of filler that the songwriter needed to fill out the phrase, but if the singer is intelligent she can turn it into an intensely personal image that will resonate with her, with her fellow actors, and with all of the audience. It doesn’t matter that no one else will understand what that image is. It only matters that it is meaningful to the actor.
The song must be sung at the speed of the music, so the images must be produced by the singer quickly and fully formed. This is excellent training for the actor as well. All too often, novice actors will pause between each image, laboriously conjuring each mental picture while putting their mouths on hold. But human beings don’t do that in real life, and it is very boring for the audience to watch an actor contort his brow in silence while searching for the next descriptive word or phrase. If the image arrives clear and fully formed, the words will instantly tumble out, but this can only happen by doing a lot of scriptwork.
If this kind of digging can bring out so much from a simple nursery rhyme or standard musical number, imagine what some concentrated homework can do for Shakespeare? Now on the one hand you might find part of that work a little easier than it was for Little Miss Muffet, because most good editions of the Shakespeare plays will have lots of footnotes to describe and define the more obtuse references and obsolete words. But different editions will have different words defined, and sometimes defined differently. And none of them will have a word explained if the editor thinks that you should know it already.
For example: “thou”. A fancy way of saying “you”; everybody knows that. Why two words for the same thought? It comes from the Romance language tradition of having both a formal and an informal way of speaking to people. It is similar to the “usted” and “tu” forms found in Spanish. But what most people don’t know is that in English, “you” is the formal version, “thou” is the informal. So in general one would address someone younger or of lower social class or a relative in the “thou” form, and use “you” to address a stranger, a social superior, or someone older. But these are not hard and fast rules, and we can learn a lot about the relationship between two characters by what pronoun they choose to use.
Let’s take some examples from Romeo & Juliet. In the opening scene, Samson and Gregory use the “thou” form almost exclusively. We recognize from this that the two know each other quite well and are of the same social class. But when speaking to Abram and Balthazar, both sides speak in the more respectful “you” form, even though they are trying to start a fight. When Tybalt rushes in, he immediately uses the “thou” form, but not because he is friends with Abram and Balthazar, but because he treats them as inferiors.
Later on, just before the fight with Mercutio, there is an interesting bit of dialogue between Tybalt and Romeo. Tybalt uses the “thou” form as an insult, while Romeo uses “thou” as a relative would, in a familiar and friendly way. But Tybalt, ignorant of Juliet’s marriage to Romeo, can only take it as an insult.
In other plays, note when the formal “you” slides into the familiar “thou”. What provoked the shift? Growing love? A drop in respect? And note also that when speaking to a great lord or to a king, only the “you” form is used, and yet when praying to God, the intimate and familiar “thou” form is used, not the more respectful and distancing “you”.
How about words that are still commonly used today? Consider these two images of the moon. Which one is the crescent moon?
Only the one with the curve on the right (the one on the right side of the page) is really a crescent. The one with the curve on the left is the waning moon. Not many people in the United States would know that crescent comes from the Latin word that means “growing”, and fewer still will have ever heard the phrase “curve on the right, moon grows each night.” When you see the moon that has the curve on the right, it means that each night from then on it will appear bigger and bigger until it is the full moon. If the curve is on the left, it means that it will be getting smaller until it disappears completely into the new moon. When we still lived a primarily agricultural lifestyle we used to know that too, but the night sky is now alien to us. What we miss in a Shakespeare play is that when he casually makes a reference to the crescent moon, he is also inviting a comparison to other things that grow, things full of promise and anticipation. How much we miss from Shakespeare often has more to do with how distant we are from the world around us than any lack of clarity on his part.
Then again, he does use a lot of words. Why couldn’t he just say what he meant without gussying it up? Sometimes what seems like extra filigree is actually some crucial information, depth that the actor can use to help us, the audience, better understand the character and the moment. Consider in Romeo & Juliet, the moment that Romeo kills Tybalt. In that one moment he has destroyed his own life, killing the cousin of his newlywed bride and incurring the wrath of the Prince. When he realizes the enormity of what he has done, he cries out “Oh, I am fortune’s fool!”. But he’s not castigating himself for being an idiot, which unfortunately is the way most actors play it. If you do your homework you’ll see that, to paraphrase, he’s saying that he is Destiny’s plaything, “fool” being used in the sense of a court jester, someone that can be abused for the pleasure of someone more powerful. He utterly fails to see any culpability on his part to any of the tragedy. Instead he blames blind Fate for once again making his life miserable, without seeing that his impetuosity in anger is just as prone to create tragedy as his impetuosity in love. A casual reading of this one line changes the way you approach the character, and indeed can affect the entire message of the play.
Shakespeare could have used any words he wanted at that moment, but chose these. Why? Wouldn’t he have been better served if he had made this crucial line more clear? Perhaps, but say the phrase slowly and out loud, and really listen to the sounds. Say it again, even more slowly. Hear how there are almost no hard stops or voiceless consonants to get in the way of one continuously voiced exhalation. The first three words become a plaintive vowel-only moan of a trapped and wounded animal, and allow the audience to feel at a deeper level the pure emotional agony that Romeo feels.
The choice of words illuminates not only the character’s state of mind but his or her larger persona as well. When Caliban voices his hatred of Prospero in The Tempest, he curses him using the only imagery available to him. “All the infections that the sun sucks up from bogs, fens, flats on Prosper fall and make him by inchmeal a disease.” Caliban is a demi-being, half way between animal and human. He cannot call on “angels and ministers of grace” from the ethereal plane, because he has no true awareness of them. He lives on the earthly plane only. And speaking of the profane, say his line out loud and listen to the series of consonants and vowels. How similar to good old-fashion Anglo-Saxon profanity! Shakespeare lets his character spout off a full line of invective without actually using a single curse word, but the audience still can get the full effect as though they had heard every filthy word in a sailor’s oratory.
By carefully choosing combinations of words, Shakespeare provides several levels of understanding of a character’s feelings. This is not limited to consonants and vowels, and is most especially explored in the rhythm that springs from the flow of stressed and unstressed syllables within a phrase or sentence. I’m not going to get into an explanation of iambic pentameter, for you should all be aware by now of the “heroic meter” that was Shakespeare’s favored form of laying out blank verse. And if you know that that rhythm [de-Dum, de-Dum, de-Dum, de-Dum, de-Dum] is going to be the base line, look for those places where he breaks away from it. When Juliet, waiting for Romeo, cries out “Gallop apace, you fiery footed steeds!”, you can hear in those first four syllables the beat of horses hooves clattering on cobblestone roads, running to bring her love closer. When King Lear stammers out “Never, never, never, never, never”, we get a glimpse of his madness not only from the numb repetition of the word but also from the harsh break with the iambic meter. The more you explore how Shakespeare plays with meter, the more you’ll see that he can stick to it religiously or dramatically break from it the same way a brilliant jazz musician will play with a melody line to give a deeper insight into the music.
You should be ready to break the meter as well. It is sometimes painful to hear an actor stuck in the drone of the meter, sounding more like a coffeehouse poetry reading than a real person talking to another. We are also often taught that we can figure out how to pronounce certain words in a metered line by counting the number of syllables. In Macbeth, when Young Siward says “No; though thou callest thyself a hotter name …” that line works in ten syllables only if the two-syllable word “callest” is pronounced as a one-syllable “call’st”. That works up to a point, but there are times when this can be hard on the audience. The same character a few lines later says “Thou liest, abhorred tyrant; with my sword…” and that can be forced into ten syllables by truncating either “liest” or “abhorred”, but I would argue that for the sake of the audience, “liest” should be left as two-syllables and “abhorred” at three. If not, it can sound to modern audiences like some sort of incomprehensible insect/nautical insult: “Thou liced-aboard tyrant;”
So rather than using too many words, Shakespeare packs a tremendous amount of information with every line. And, indeed, especially for the male characters, the very ability and facility in commanding elaborate speech is often a sign of his intelligence, even of his virility. Only in this post-cinema age have we accepted the stereotype of the strong and silent hero. Certainly when approaching Shakespeare we have to toss out that idea. In these plays, every single character is the finest proponent of his or her particular viewpoint. There is no room for an inarticulate spokesman. If a character is muddleheaded, out the words come in a jumble, as with Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing, but he is not shy about uttering them. So when in the same play Don John speaks his very first line, “I thank you. I am of few words, but I thank you”, we the audience already know that there is something untrustworthy about him.
Let the meter clue you in as to who and what is of importance. Many scenes will start in simple speech, and then shift into blank verse. Why? What changed? If you take note of the changes you’ll see that the relative importance of either the characters or the situation is supported by the rise in poetic intricacy. So you can follow the progression starting with simple writing, which is just the basic idea. Then the author adds force through the use of logic, in other words rhetoric. When the author then adds beauty to the rhetoric it becomes poetry, and that can be heightened yet again by the addition of rhythm, and in Shakespeare’s time was specifically blank verse – iambic pentameter. At certain stages of the play, even this is insufficient, and then he adds rhymed couplets, and then finally goes away from iambic pentameter and into true rhymed verse in trochaic quatrameter, ending up with music.
The increasing level of complexity as the emotional stakes rise is the polar opposite of what we have now, where the character is not thought to be telling the truth unless he has dropped down to only monosyllabic words – with plenty of curse words to show how “real” the dialogue is.
You also have to be ready to play the opposites. Find the comedy in the drama, the love in the hate. A great example is Richard III. The role of Anne during the “wooing” scene is usually played as simple revulsion slowly turning into acquiescence. That’s a bit boring, really, and not believable. Much more interesting is to have her actually be guiltily attracted to Richard on some level right from the start, so that her revulsion is as much with herself as it is with Richard.
Lastly, don’t get lost in the parentheticals, but let them take you to your final image. By parentheticals I am referring to all of the little subordinate sections within a sentence that add nuance to the main idea, but could be encased in parenthesis or even cut from the sentence entirely without losing the central idea. The best example of this is actually from the preamble of the United States Constitution:
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
This is a run-on sentence where the essence of it is really “we ordain this constitution”, everything else being filler. But what filler! All of those parentheticals describe who we are and what our dreams, fears, aspirations and challenges are, and that somehow we’re going to try to meet them head-on. But none of that is going to be clear by just reading the laundry list that it seems to be. Instead, even as we visualize each possibility of those challenges we enumerate (what is the visible proof of having established justice?) our force is leading to the audacious pronouncement to the world that we have ordained and established a written reason for being.
See that last sentence? It had two parentheticals in it. The second one (with actual parenthesis) was subordinate to the first (the “even as we visualize” part). If you read it out loud, you’ll probably hear yourself dropping in pitch when you read those sections, because you don’t want to lose the hearer in trying to get from “Instead” all the way to “our force”, and then we need to carry them all the way to the end of the sentence. The modern American speech patterns make it difficult for us to do this naturally. We tend to speak loudly and in higher pitch at the beginning of each sentence, and then trail off in both pitch and volume by the time we reach the end. Some of us exacerbate this by speeding up during the end, as if we’ve run out of air. Unfortunately, most of the important information is usually at the end of sentences. In modern speech, the listener makes allowances for this and can fill in the gaps. But we can’t ask audiences to do the same when watching Hamlet – they won’t make it through the first five minutes. Instead, we have to be generous with our speech, lifting the pitch as we deliver the character’s thoughts, using up-endings throughout instead of allowing the energy to drop to the ground as we finish each phrase.
I should try to explain a little about this “up-ending” business. Listen to some of the shows on BBC America if you get the chance. Unlike Americans, the English are much more likely to use up-endings for their phrasing. At first, it almost sounds as if they are turning every phrase into a question. But what happens is that the slight lift at the end of each sentence invites the listener to subtly participate in the conversation without actually requiring a response. It is a way of checking in, making sure that the listener is still along for the ride. American down-ending speech, on the other hand, makes every statement a final pronouncement, unassailable and not open to further discussion.
And through all of this, we have to feel the emotions that are appropriate to the moment. But what does it mean for an actor to feel? Not to wallow in facile emotion, which is the all-too-common default mode for American actors. In order to FEEL a moment, the character must find it, experience it, express it, and then learn from it. (Thank you, Ada Brown Mather.) All in a split second – no “dramatic pause” because people don’t pause dramatically in real life. And if the scene is well-written there may be hundreds such moments in each page or even paragraph. You have a lot of work to do, which is why actors love Shakespeare compared to standard television fare. There is always more to learn from and explore in even his silliest plays.
In addition to the danger of being blinded by our own modern perspectives, we can also have some incorrect preconceptions of what life was like “back then”. This brings us to something that just drives me crazy. I often hear some variation of the following: “You know, people only lived to fifty years old back then – someone at thirty-five was already considered an old man.” This is an interesting and common misunderstanding of actuarial statistics.
People live longer now. That is not in dispute. Human longevity has steadily increased since as far back as we can get data. But what is really being measured is life expectancy, literally how long one can expect a person to live once that person is born. It is an average from the entire population, not a measure of physical aging. If a country has a very high infant mortality rate, the life expectancy overall is going to be a low number, because the mathematical average age at death is pushed lower with all of those infants dying before their first birthday. Likewise, poor sanitation and lack of antibiotics killed large number of young people, so the life expectancy of Ancient Rome for the population as a whole was about thirty years old. But that doesn’t mean that someone at twenty nine was considered an old man. Then, as now, someone who survived into his fifties was hardly a withered relic. An “old man” was generally considered to be someone in his late sixties or seventies. The body aged then just as it does now. Wrinkles and creaking bones happen on their own schedule, having nothing to do with life expectancy.
* * *
Ok, now let’s get down to…