Including the poems you are now to write.
Which should rhyme.
Lessons on Shakespeare boiled down to:
1) You will never understand him.
2) You will not enjoy him.
3) We are going to read him anyway.
It’s a wonder I became an English major.
It’s something of a minor miracle I ever fell into Theatre!
But as I said, I’ve also had more than my fair share of wonderful English teachers, who encouraged me to attempt Wildean comedies, and critical essays, and fantasy novels, and all sorts of experimental forms.
However, it took some legitimate Brits to teach me a thing or two worth knowing about blank verse.
Never Underestimate the Power of Fingerpaint
Immediately after graduating college, I fell into a secretarial position at a major corporation wherein my lovely boss was almost never present and I was bored out of my brain (as I believe most people often are when surrounded by four padded walls).
So, when my mother called me one day out of the blue to ask: “Emily, how would you like to go and study in England?”
I immediately said, “Yes!”
It turns out that while my mother was laying down newspaper for my youngest brother to fingerpaint, her eye lit upon an article about a group called Theatre In England which travelled to London and Stratford-upon-Avon for a month and took in nearly a play a day. The following day, an actor from the previous night’s excursion would come and speak to us. (And that’s how I met David Tennant before he was David Tennant.)
Attached to this program was something called The Shakespeare School, which was supposed to be for college students only—but my mother being a particularly mothery sort of mother called the fellow who ran the program and convinced him that he was the sole means of salvation for her culturally deprived daughter.
The man bit, I quit, and off I went to Merrie Olde Englande.
We had been sent essays to read prior to our journey which were mind-bogglingly fascinating about different approaches to the various shows we were going to see—and about two weeks before my flight, I was sent a scene to memorize for The Shakespeare School.
It was Rosalind from As You Like It, Act III, Scene 2 from Orlando’s final entrance.
I was thrilled.
Being a woman of a…curvy…stature, I’d most often been cast in the “curvy” roles—that is to say, I’d played a lot of women with the first name: “Mrs.” I never got to play the pretty young thing. But O, was Rosalind ever more than just a pretty young thing!
I delved into the play. I read the scene backwards and forwards. I memorized. I experimented.
And when we arrived for our first day of class, I sat eagerly and nervously in the first row, half sure that the almost unbearably svelte, classically trained, O-so-educated teacher would raise one patrician brow at my poor little dumply self, and say with a wave of her hand: “Oh, there’s been some terrible mistake, my dear. We meant to give your role to that charming young girl over there.”
Instead, we all sat down and Vivien Heilbron said, “Now, dears, which one of you is Emily?”
I raised my hand.
“Excellent,” she said, and handed me a sheet of paper with dialogue I had never seen before. “You’ve got the first line of the show.”
I looked at the paper. Cleared my throat nervously. And spoke:
“Good shepherd, tell this youth what ‘tis to love.”
Vivien sighed.
I had messed up. I had somehow messed up. Somehow I had been less than perfect.
“Good. Good,” she said. “But do you think you could a capital L on ‘Love,’ dear? Hm? Do you think you could do that?”
I tried again.
“Good shepherd, tell this youth what ‘tis to LLLLLLLove.”
Like I was wading through peanut butter.
Vivien exchanged a glance with her co-teacher, the wonderful and wonderfully grumpy Bernard Lloyd, who sighed and sat back.
“Not quite,” Vivien said. “Try raising your voice a bit on Love. Can you?”
I nodded. Tried again.
“Good shepherd, tell this youth what ‘tis to la-ha-ha-ha-hooove?”
Bernard made the sort of lemon-squeezy face one does when trying not to laugh at a young girl’s operatic attempts at Shakespeare. He waved his hand, and muttered genially, “Whatever, whatever,” which was his way of letting one person off the hook and putting someone else on it.
What the good teachers were attempting to get through our collective cranium—and what we eventually learned—was the importance of line endings in verse drama. It’s a technique that’s particular to England and the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), put forth by the venerable John Barton.
You can see his technique here—along with a look at the Twelve British Actors, all very young and mostly with hair! If you can only watch one episode, though, I highly recommend spending some quality time with his episode on Using the Verse. For the completest, you can read his book Playing Shakespeare here or purchase the entire videos series here.
(Or if you prefer a good laugh, check out this bit of Fry and Laurie lampooning the same. Equally delightful, if only slightly less instructive.)
What John Barton did, and what is generally taught now throughout England and much of America, is to break down just how Shakespeare seems to have uniquely developed the rules of blank verse.
In very brief:
The Rules of Blank Verse
(To Be Omitted by All But the Most Ardent Scholar)
A line of blank verse is typically made up of five strong stresses.
Most often, these stresses fall into iambic feet: which SOUND a BIT like THIS. Most of English tends to fall into iambs:
Would YOU like FRIES with THAT?
Give ME a DI-et COKE.
I’m EAT-ing WHILE i WRITE.
And so on and so on.
However, contrary to what our well-meaning but misinformed teachers taught us, blank verse does not necessarily equal ten syllables. Nor do ten syllables necessarily equal iambic pentameter. For example, there are ten syllables in trochaic pentameter, too.
THANK you FOR the GLASS of LEM-on-ADE, Bill.
And there are fifteen syllables in anapaestic pentameter!
If i GIVE you a BACK-rub will YOU wash the DISH-es to-NIGHT?
The metre of the verse doesn’t matter as much as the possession of five strong stresses. So, now like Maria von Trapp taught us, we can mix it all together to sound something like this:
We’re OUT of de-TER-gent. GO! GET some, right NOW.
It’s like writing music in common time. If you’re writing in 4/4, you can have one note on each beat, or you can two notes on each beat, or any combination in between. But the underlying pulse of four beats remains.
For example, compare “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” with “Una Voce Poco Fa.” Four strong stresses per measure; lots of varied stresses all over the place.
So in blank verse, the artist is feeling for five strong beats, and playing whatever rhythm seems natural over it.
For myself, I found that “normal” was iambic pentameter, the gods tended to speak in trochees, and the mortals tended to prance along in anapaest. What may be interesting to the scholar was that I didn’t set out to write the characters metrically different: although, about half-way through the process, I became aware of how the mortals were versifying differently from the gods. I believe it was about four in the morning. I went, “Huh.” And kept writing.
Incidentally, the easiest way to feel for five strong stresses while reading (or writing) verse, is to tap them out on the fingers of one hand. You’ll look like a really savvy person in rehearsal—or a really insane person in Starbucks.
Not that I would know anything about that…
Lines can be shared between characters…and characters may pause in their lines.
When a line is shared between two characters—such as the second line of th
is entire play—the interjection should remain metrically within the beat. It’s like jazz. You don’t take a huge pause for person number two to throw in their two beats; they keep in time. I refer you, because I’m feeling whimsical, to this gem from Hello, Dolly!
Similarly, if a line is missing beats, that’s most usually a clue for silence. It may be silence filled up with action; it may be a dramatic pause (it may be that the author couldn’t justify any more talking from that character and just gave up—that’s right Scholars, despair!).
These two rules of thumb should be mostly self-evident from simply looking at a page and reading page almost like a work of art in itself. With shared lines, one actor can visually see how he picks up another actor’s line—or how they both struggle for control over the line. With missing beats, actors are given reign to collect themselves emotionally, stew, wait for a response from their fellow actor—literally, to read (or act) between the lines.
Respect your line endings and the verse will play itself.
When you first read a line of poetry,
The tendency between the lines, most often
Is to stop. However, we poor modernists
Have been modern trained to always enjamb
The line. While this is fine for Eliot
(Although, not always so), in blank verse—no.
The line will end itself! And if it seems
To run on to the sentence following,
Still give that last word pause. I swear you’ll find,
If on that word you lean, or raise your voice,
Pretends its spelling’s something Capital,
The line will play itself. The final word,
(That is to say, the ending of your thought)
Will crash you like a tidalwave of woe—
Then O!
How sweet to savour silences between!
Thus ends the lesson, if you see what I mean.
Reviving the Renaissance
Recently, there has been a revival of interest in writing verse drama. And not just any verse drama—but blank verse drama, Elizabethan drama, Renaissance drama…Shakespeare’s drama.
As Lucy Nordberg, British author of the modern verse play King Arthur wrote:
On these terms, this paper could also be titled “Why don’t poets write plays in the [R]enaissance form?” The answer then would be bound up with why it is no longer ‘usual’ for a poet to write plays. The spread of the printed word means that poetry has, in general, become more personal than dramatic, charting more the poet’s relationship to the world and their interaction with it. Performance poetry is also usually written from the poet’s point of view: for example, a beat generation influenced poetry reading will not generally include two or more characters interacting. The other expected way to encounter poetry is on the written page in a private dialogue between writer and reader, with the poems being sometimes read aloud as a novel might be converted to an audio book. These are not inherently theatrical forms.
In reviving a form—or rather, in reclaiming a form—what’s needed first is for the poets to become playwrights again. Or for the playwrights to explore the realm of poetry.
Much of our work has been done for us. Thanks to John Barton, the world is teeming with actors, directors, dramaturgs, and Scholars who are knowledgeable to the point of extreme boredom about how to approach verse drama.
They’re knowledgeable to the point of filling an entire library with commentary on the Bard of Stratford-upon-Avon.
They’re knowledgeable to the point that actresses, desperate to play more than the victim roles, are creating all-female companies by the hundreds.
They’re knowledgeable to the point that schools have arisen around the country expressly for the purpose of teaching actors how to embody verse.
They’re knowledgeable to the point that critics have begun to beg companies to put on something other than Shakespeare, because every five year old can quote along with Oberon.
Everyone’s ready for new verse plays…except the playwrights.
Who are floundering around like Monty Python’s French Taunter.
It’s rather as though the orchestra were trained and ready to play…and the composers were off carving hieroglyphics into stone and staring with stupidity at the purpose of five lines on a page.
The simple fact is, while knowing how to tell a story—and more, having the impetus to tell just the bits in dialogue—may be a gift of Nature, in point of fact there are rules to writing verse drama which can be learnt.
To employ the musician metaphor again, while nothing but the Grace of God can transform you into a Mozart, anybody can be a Salieri.
Or, to quote the inimitable G. K. Chesterton, “Anything worth doing is worth doing badly.”
VERSE TRAPS (And How to Avoid Them)
What follows is a brief primer on the Verse Traps I’ve discovered thus far, whether through my own writing, or through the privilege of interacting with other authors’ new verse drama.
While I’m sure there are more “rules” than the few outlined here, I hope that what follows proves helpful for my fellow playwrights, and begins a national dialogue about reclaiming verse drama in our modern age.
VERSE TRAP 1: Content Dictates Form
Before we begin, it’s important to ask yourself the question:
Does this play need to be in verse?
If you’re not sure, take a moment to grab a copy of Stephen Sondheim’s collected lyrics, Volume 1: Finishing the Hat.
Read it.
Then come back.
Done? Great!
Then you know Sondheim by way of Oscar Hammerstein II’s first rule:
Content dictates form.
That is: What you’re writing about, dictates how you write it.
This is so important, I’m going to print it again:
CONTENT DICTATES FORM:
What you’re writing about, dictates how you write it.
Burn this on your brain. Sear it on your cerebellum. Write it on your mirror and pin it on your fridge.
CONTENT
DICTATES
FORM
In the case of Cupid and Psyche, as has been detailed elsewhere, when first I agreed to write about the gods and mortals and love and sex and passion, my first inclination was to write an opera. After all, these characters are larger than life! They wouldn’t speak in the same tones as someone who asks if I want fries with that.
Unfortunately, my director nixed that idea, and so I answered that in that case, the play had to be in verse.
Because content dictates form.
And if the gods couldn’t sing it, they’d say it metrically.
Now, take another look at the subject matter of the play you’re about to write, and honestly ask yourself again:
Does this play absolutely need to be in verse?
If your play is about Joe Schmoe and Jane Doe sharing a cigarette outside a Wal-Mart while talking about switching work shifts…chances are Joe and Jane are not going to wax metrically poetic. Or perhaps you’re writing a true-life story about school shootings, culled from interviews and newspaper articles. I can guarantee you, none of those people spoke in verse.
Now, is your play about epic themes with epic characters who would be likely to burst out the iambic? Does your play include gods or princes or mythical beings? Historical figures or anthropomorphised animals? Heck, even outsized Wall Street investors, or petty crooks with a florid turn of phrase? Or maybe Joe Schmoe and Jane Doe are two lost souls in Purgatory and you’re Waiting for Godot by way of Billy Shakes. Then certainly, break out the verse.
But always, always, content should dictate form.
Think of it another way: if you were writing a musical about Joe and Jane sharing that cigarette, what would the music sound like: Pop hits? Muzak? Early folk? How about your school shootings musical: Punk? Grunge rock? Gospel?
Content dictates form.
Or imagine if you swapped composers, each keeping to the s
tyle that made him famous. What if Rogers and Hammerstein wrote Rent? Or Jonathan Larson took on Oklahoma!?
(The great, late Tom Lehrer demonstrated this brilliantly with his variations on the folk song “Clementine” if it were composed by Cole Porter, Mozart, Gilbert and Sullivan, etc.)
Content dictates form.
Your play is not automatically improved by including line endings. Your characters are not necessarily drawn better, your text is not immediately elevated, your credentials as a playwright are not inevitably established.
In fact, it’s quite possible to do your play and yourself a disservice if you insist on verse drama for a play that wants to be told, say, in sparse, subtextual prose. Or in silence. There is a lyricism to Beckett and O’Neill, but not a meter—and that’s important.
Now, take a look again at your play.
And if, after all these dire warnings you still feel that the piece embraces iambs, read on. And thank God. Because the world really needs you.
VERSE TRAP 2: Stuck in Iambic With You
Recently, I saw a new verse play
That carefully with each and ev’ry line
Kept strictly to a metre, so I swayed
Along with all the actors, strict in time.
Three hours passed, three hours up and down,
Three hours like a madd’ning Swedish chef,
Cupid and Psyche Page 2