Words Into Action

by William Gaskill

  You can hardly imagine that I and Lord Bracknell would dream of allowing our only daughter—a girl brought up with the utmost care—to marry into a cloak room, and form an alliance with a parcel.

  Here there is no question where the laugh comes.

  The use of the compound sentence and subordinate clauses dwindled in the twentieth century. Sentences became generally shorter. The dash, the parenthesis were less frequent and started to be replaced by enigmatic rows of dots, which mean different things to each individual writer. This is Foster, one of Hirst’s servants/hitmen in Pinter’s No Man’s Land, talking about how he came to be employed:

  I was in Bali when they sent for me. I didn’t have to leave, I didn’t have to come here. But I felt I was… called… I had no alternative. I didn’t have to leave that beautiful isle. But I was intrigued. I was only a boy. But I was nondescript and anonymous. A famous writer wanted me. He wanted me to be his secretary, his chauffeur, his housekeeper, his amanuensis. How did he know of me? Who told him?

  Pinter does not build a climax in the speech, there is no crescendo. The speech is over when the character stops speaking. It has, if anything, increased our area of unknowing but it is a kind of rhetoric.

  Edward Bond uses short sentences but he has a more catholic use of phrasing and sometimes will use accumulated phrases to make a sour rhetoric. This is from Early Morning, an allegorical fantasy of the court of Queen Victoria. Gladstone is seen as a ruthless and vicious trades union leader in charge of couple of thugs. He strolls round the stage as the thugs beat up a young Cockney lad, saying:

  Time! Time! Suddenly the birds come, it’s spring, suddenly they mate, suddenly they ’atch, the young fly, a few days and they’re gone, the sickle’s already in the corn, the fruit falls, the old man leans on ’is ’oe, suddenly ’e looks up, it’s winter, and the skull’s already on the window-sill.

  which is certainly rhetorical but surely ironic in the context of the scene.

  Much contemporary writing consists of simplifying the structure of rhetoric, while making it more ambiguous. Rhetoric for the Renaissance writer was so full of emotion it could express itself as powerfully in one line as over a long speech. My old tutor, F.W. Bateson, wrote this:

  With Renaissance literature, whether it is prose or verse, the words have all the immediacy and resonance of splendid speech—a speech that itself controls and determines the nature of the dramatic action. The literary unit, therefore, is a speech unit, a phrase or a single sentence, as is clearly demonstrated by the large number of memorable items bequeathed by English Renaissance literature to any dictionary of quotations.

  (F.W. Bateson, A Guide to English Literature)

  He gives the example of Duke Ferdinand’s famous line from Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi—

  Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle; she died young…

  which he says is like a miniature three-act play. In the play Ferdinand has tortured—and finally ordered the death of—his sister. He has vowed not to look upon her while she lives. Now she is dead he looks at her and then tells Bosola to cover her face. The sentence is made up of three phrases: the first an order, the second a description of his reaction to the sight of the dead body, the third a comment. The impact of the line depends on the separate identity of each phrase and the imaginative unity of the three phrases together. Only at the end of the line do we have the full experience, even if we are not sure what it means. Does it express Ferdinand’s remorse? That feels too simple an explanation and the line would be ruined if the actor tried to inject such a feeling into it. He has to give each part of the line equal value and let it speak for itself. The line has a magic even when one does not know the context, but the context at once limits and opens its potential meaning. Sometimes lines resonate regardless of their context. I can’t now remember either the speaker or the context of the line in Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta:

  But that was in another country,

  And besides, the wench is dead.

  And now it would spoil my appreciation of the line to find out. The line from Webster is a complex juxtaposition of simple phrases in an unusual order. How much more straightforward it would be if it read:

  Mine eyes dazzle; she died young; cover her face.

  Or:

  She died young; mine eyes dazzle; cover her face.

  It would also solve the problem of when exactly Bosola is to cover the face. But Webster wrote:

  Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle; she died young.

  The phrase order suggests the uncertainty and complexity of Ferdinand’s feelings. The need for the face to be covered comes first. Is he still looking at the face or does he turn away after the order? The preceding dialogue is:

  BOSOLA. Fix your eyes here.

  FERDINAND. Constantly.

  The ‘constantly’ suggests a fixed stare, difficult to break from. ‘Mine eyes dazzle’ suggests 1) tears, 2) reaction to her beauty. ‘She died young’ is the most puzzling. Regret that she has died too soon and it’s his fault? It is the supreme example of a line which has its own life and must not be coloured by the actor.

  Sometimes a speech in a play may not be rhetorical in the sense of an outgoing action, but is composed in a form which has a kind of internal rhetoric. In Hamlet’s ‘O, that this too, too solid flesh would melt’ soliloquy the development of the central line of thought is tortuous.

  That it should come to this—

  But two months dead—nay, not so much, not two—

  So excellent a king, that was to this

  Hyperion to a satyr, so loving to my mother

  That he might not beteem the winds of heaven

  Visit her face too roughly! Heaven and earth,

  Must I remember? Why, she would hang on him

  As if increase of appetite had grown

  By what it fed on, and yet within a month—

  Let me not think on’t; frailty thy name is woman—

  A little month, or ere those shoes were old

  With which she followed my poor father’s body,

  Like Niobe, all tears, why she, even she—

  O, God, a beast that wants discourse of reason

  Would have mourned longer!—married with mine uncle,

  My father’s brother, but no more like my father

  Than I to Hercules; within a month,

  Ere yet the salt of most unrighteous tears

  Had left the flushing of her gallèd eyes,

  She married.

  The repetition of ‘month’ holds the speech together. To begin with we are unclear as to who is the subject of the action. Is it the father or the mother? But by the time we get to ‘why she, even she’ we are in no doubt. There is a simple sentence running through the speech which struggles for expression:

  But two months dead—nay, not so much, not two …………. and yet within a month

  A little month……………………………………… ……………………………………she, even she …………………………married with mine uncle ……………………………………within a month

  She married.

  We have been taken on a journey with the character in which he has forced himself to relive what hurts him to remember, but the dreadful fact has to be spoken.

  When Churchill was preparing his wartime speeches he would set them out on the page like poetry, with the phrasing with which he would deliver them. This is an example from his notes:

  We shall fight on the beaches,

  we shall fight on the landing grounds,

  we shall fight in the fields and in the streets,

  we shall fight in the hills;

  we shall never surrender.

  He was using the means of the actor: employing a literary form to have an emotional—in his case a political—effect. As he prepared the speech he was already hearing how it would sound when spoken. He sets his text out for that purpose:

  Not only great dangers,

  but many more m
isfortunes,

  many shortcomings,

  many mistakes,

  many disappointments

  will surely be our lot.

  Death and sorrow will be the companions

  of our journey,

  hardship our garment:

  constancy and valour are our

  only shield.

  We must be united:

  we must be undaunted.

  Now it exists as a piece of history, a passage of literature; then it was an immediate response to a critical situation. The success of its rhetoric depends on the listener being aware of the speaker’s purpose, that the phrases are building to a resolution. Something is expected of us. The literary form is experienced as waves of energy, which is how we received it in 1940. When we heard Tony Blair in the House of Commons persuading us of the necessity of the war with Iraq, we knew that his rhetorical phrases had no development. They were accompanied by the two hands pushing the lies into us, with that peculiar, downward, chopping motion which is typical of politicians today. He was not in an historic moment to which we had to respond; he was creating a false one.

  An actor has to expand or contract his energy span with the writing. In the process he will start to feel the style of the period, the writer and perhaps the character, but most of all the movement of the action. Each phrase has its own life and must be experienced:

  We shall fight on the beaches…

  But it is the conclusion of the sentence:

  we shall never surrender.

  which completes the thought and moves the action forward. At the full stop we grit our teeth in 1940 or charge into the breach at Harfleur or rush out to kill the murderers of Caesar. In each case a master rhetorician—Churchill, Henry V, Mark Antony—has worked upon us.

  Churchill was a man steeped in literature who could quote huge passages of Paradise Lost from memory and constantly modelled his rhetoric on the Bible:

  The earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof;

  the world, and they that dwell therein.

  For he hath founded it upon the seas,

  and established it upon the floods.

  (Psalm 24)

  The Psalm is not active. It doesn’t incite or lead to an action, like Churchill’s speech. It expresses a spacious certainty which comes from the formal repetition of the same ideas in different words. It is incantatory not dynamic. But its rhythmic weight is the same. Political rhetoric depends on the massing of idea on idea until there is no escape.

  Sometimes the rhetoric is just one sentence, as in John of Gaunt’s famous speech about England in Richard II, Act 2, Scene 1. Gaunt is old and dying and is visited by the King. Gaunt says he is ‘a prophet new inspired’ and has a vision of the state of the nation. We don’t know what form this prophecy will take. The sentence, which lasts twenty lines, begins ‘This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle…’ During the Second World War it was used as a paean of nationalism, an encouragement to patriotism; it was even set to music. To achieve this it had to be discreetly edited so that it became a list of subjects without a main verb. In the play when the verb arrives it is devastating and alters the meaning of everything that precedes it. The list of subjects, all in apposition, is like this:

  This royal throne of kings,

  this sceptred isle,

  This earth of majesty,

  this seat of Mars,

  This other Eden…

  This fortress…

  This happy breed…

  this little world,

  This precious stone…

  This blessed plot,

  this earth,

  this realm,

  this England,

  this nurse,

  this teeming womb of royal kings…

  This land of such dear souls,

  this dear, dear land

  and then the verb arrives (I have cut out the subordinate clauses which make it even more dense):

  IS NOW LEASED OUT—I die pronouncing it—

  Like to a tenement or pelting farm.

  One more sentence recapitulates the whole idea, ending with:

  That England that was wont to conquer others

  Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.

  Hardly a sentiment for wartime. The rhetorical device is excessive but effective if the actor can sustain it with variety and power. The richness of each individual phrase must not clog the movement of the sentence. The extended list of subjects is shattered by the brutality of the verb ‘is now leased out’, which is intensified by the parenthesis of ‘I die pronouncing it’. That does not mean that Gaunt’s despair must be anticipated. The knowledge of where the sentence is going will colour the actor’s feeling but it must not become clear until we hit the verb.

  In ‘What a piece of work is a man’, Hamlet’s disillusion gives an overall key to the speech, but the extent of his bitterness must not be apparent until:

  And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me…

  We must be seduced by the words with which Hamlet describes the wonder of man before we encounter his bitterness. When Nicol Williamson played it, he snarled his way all through the speech. There was no doubt from the beginning of Hamlet’s misanthropy and no surprise at the development of his thought. The phrases must be sweet while they are sweet, and become sour with the feeling. All musicians are aware of this as one of the basic elements of their work. They live within the smaller phrase without losing the overall direction of the music. For the actor it’s the phrase in the sentence, the sentence in the speech, the speech in the action of the play. But an actor, even an actor playing Hamlet, is only responsible for the dynamic movement of his own part. He has to know where his character is going, but the play itself has its own momentum.

  The movement of a sentence is the same in verse or prose. The sense of a line moves towards the full stop even if it is in the middle of a blank verse line. (I totally disagree with Peter Hall who thinks you should stop at the end of every line of blank verse and never pause in the middle of a line.) Shakespeare spent his working life exploring the flexibility of the iambic pentameter. As he matured he not only the dropped the use of rhyme but ‘end-stopping’, in which the thought is completed at the end of the line and a pause is natural, becomes less frequent. The sense spills over from line to line, the syntax becomes more fluid, more expressive. The sentence moves against the pattern of the verse; moves, not nearer to prose, but to a greater poetic complexity.

  In The Winter’s Tale, Leontes is with his son, Mamillius, and watches his wife, Hermione, and his friend, Polixenes, leaving the stage. He mistakenly believes they are lovers and he tells us what he feels. The speech has moments in which he talks to the boy, who is too young to know the meaning of the rest of the speech.

  Gone already.

  Inch thick, knee deep, o’er head and ears a forked one!

  Go play, boy, play Thy mother plays, and I

  Play too, but so disgraced a part, whose issue

  Will hiss me to my grave. Contempt and clamour

  Will be my knell. Go play, boy, play. There have been,

  Or I am much deceived, cuckolds ere now,

  And many a man there is, even at this present,

  Now while I speak this, holds his wife by th’arm.

  That little thinks she has been sluiced in’s absence,

  And his pond fished by his next neighbour, by

  Sir Smile, his neighbour.

  (The Winter’s Tale 1.2)

  The second line is a sentence without a verb or an object and a very cryptic subject. It is the spilling-out of passion and unleashes the rest of the speech. No actor would pause after ‘I’ in line three, or ‘issue’ in line four and certainly not after ‘by’ in line eleven. The actor must go with the sentences. The irregular rhythm and structure exactly convey the turmoil that Leontes is in. Keeping the boy on the stage and making him part of the soliloquy is pure genius. The way the sentences break the verse, and the
short phrases and repetitions break the sentences, are the actor’s musical markings. The blank verse norm is necessary for the breaking of it to be expressive.

  Sentences in plays used to be longer than they are now. Probably sentences in life were longer than they are now. The increased speed of travel and communication has led to the sound bite and the clipped phrase. The attention span necessary to hold on to the thought of a long sentence has diminished. The First World War marked the death of the long sentence, or at least its decline. The elaborate sentences of Proust are part of a nostalgia for a world that no longer exists. In dramatic writing the world of Oscar Wilde is one of summer afternoons, cucumber sandwiches and arching phrases. It was not to last for him after his trial in 1895, or for anyone else after 1914. Most of George Bernard Shaw’s best plays were written before the First World War, and, though he continued to write with assured rhetorical flourish, he was increasingly out of step. The short, clipped sentences of Noël Coward, the most successful writer of the inter-war years, marked a huge change in playwriting and consequently in actors’ speaking. From the point of view of style, there is a much bigger gap between Wilde and Coward than there is between Coward and Pinter.

  11

  Phrasing and Pauses—Congreve and Beckett

  When I listen to actors reading I don’t look at the text but try to understand what is being said, as if I were hearing it for the first time. Occasionally I stop and say, ‘Is that a full stop or a comma? I can’t tell.’ I don’t mean, ‘Have you observed the punctuation?’ but rather, ‘I can’t hear whether your thought has got anywhere. Is it complete?’ Too often a sentence is left hanging in mid-air. For me the only punctuation invariably to be marked by a pause is the full stop. Commas, colons, semicolons, are aids to understanding, and sometimes breathing, but only the full stop shows whether the actor has understood the progression of the writing. In that sense the believers in ‘actioning’ are right. If the actor is not living in the moment and is already thinking of his next sentence he will not finish the thought of the one he is in. He does not commit himself to the line as part of the development of the play. A text is built up of phrases, of which the most defined is the sentence, and the phrases may need pauses either for breath or clarification. It is the actor’s business to find them and to build his performance from them. A play is like a score, but, unlike music, it translates not only into sound, but into the action of which sound is a part. And it is not the sound of the words but their meaning which makes it part of the action. The audiences of today may have less response to words than previous generations, but actors must still learn the relationship between text and action, between the shape of the words on the page and their performance on stage.