That would not alter from his dizzy rounds
Until I wished that one of us were deaf—
Still on they went, and I began to count:
The syllables were always one to ten;
Line endings landed ev’ry dull dismount;
With nary one that ended feminine.
O, how I wished for just a little break!
An anapaest, a trochee—or some prose!
Anything to rouse me, or to wake
This frightful verse from iambs in repose!
And here a fool, and there a frowning guard:
Still none would break the bonds so careful wrought;
Unheedful of the lessons that our Bard
Had with a varied rhythm firmly taught!
Then heed this stern advice, I beg you: list—
(Though it may be hard to break away)
There’s so much more that you will surely miss
If you only write iambic in your play.
No, seriously. Imagine three hours of that. For the love of God, vary the verse.
VERSE TRAP 3: Prosody
Once you get into the rhythm of writing verse, it can be ridiculously difficult to pull yourself out to write something in prose. There’s an insistence to strict iambic pentameter, the joy of rhyming couplets, the sheer audacity that you’re getting away with heightened text, and then—
You tend to start to think in metered feet,
And more: that little voice which men call Pride
Encourages you to stay within the beat
No matter that the remainder of the line
Is being spoken, let’s say, by a low class character
(In our world, a mortal) whose words have no reason
To be in verse. But by this point, you simply
Can’t stop yourself from sticking in two more
Useless syllables just to force this increasingly
Prosaic bit of dialogue into
Ten syllables (while utterly ditching
Any semblance to the poetry you
Started with). And half-way through, you think: “Good
God! Why don’t I just put the whole damn thing in prose?” Which then, please God, you do.
VERSE TRAP 4: Ding, Dong, Churchill’s Dead!
Richard Burton told the story on the Jack Parr show about how one night, while he was playing Hamlet, Winston Churchill came to sit in the middle of the front row. Now Churchill was an absolute Shakespeare nut, and had a bad habit of reciting along with the performance, rumbling under the actors attempting to play the same. Of course, this was very upsetting to the actors; particularly since hearing the Prime Minister correcting them from the audience is never particularly conducive to a good performance.
Fortunately, Churchill is dead.
Unfortunately, Churchill is not the only audience member guilty of this particular sin.
Which is why clever performers like Mark Rylance play with potential Churchillian expectations by allowing his Olivia from Twelfth Night to stutter, or—as I saw him play Hamlet at the Globe—begin such well-known speeches as “To be or not to be” off-stage, so that the audience misses the opportunity to take a collective breath and totally psych the actor out. (Like this.)
Fortunately, you are not Shakespeare, and no one’s going to recite along with your play (yet).
Unfortunately, you are not Shakespeare, and no one’s heard your play yet.
This is important.
No one’s heard your play.
No one already knows what the story is, no one’s waiting for the “big speech,” no one’s criticizing your performer’s iteration, or comparing it with last season’s version…everything’s new.
No student has studied your text, no Scholars have written complex “translations,” Folgers Library has put in no footnotes, and Sparknotes—for you—do not exist.
What this means is that the popularity of your piece will rest especially on the clarity of your verse.
Writing dramatic poetry is a thrill. You can delve into the scintillating sea of simile. Revivify obscure and ancient prose. The musings of Philosophy are not, to you, anathema.
And yet…
Consider which character introduction will strike a listening audience more.
(As an added experiment, before you look at the following, hand over this eBook to a friend and ask her to read the two speeches aloud to you. This is a good idea when having a reading of your verse in general: invite an audience member or two to listen to the reading without the text in hand. And then pay keen attention to the parts where they felt they “blacked out.”)
Just so you don’t cheat, I’ll put the character introductions on separate pages.
Speech the First
As a mouse perambulates, skittering
With nimble mains across a sea-flung vessel
Bound for terra incognita: which terror—
“Terra gnosis” now, may, like Aurora’s
Sun-speckled dapple-dewdrop ephemera
Dissolve and leave th’optical impression
Of far-flung terra firma, O! refulgent
In the wake of erubescent Eos!
I am adrift, a migratory swallow:
Pinion purloined upon cruel Zephyr’s wing.
Myself shall shadow-cast a compass point;
The Orient divine; and herewithal, with you,
Essay this brave new world wherein we meet.
Speech the Second
What country, friend, is this?
You see what I mean.
VERSE TRAP 5: Too Much Poetry, Not Enough Person
When you start writing verse—particularly when your senses are overloaded and you’re full of metaphor and the possibility of inventing words, and your eyes are swimming with thoughts that Scholars will go to great lengths to point out how you cleverly wrote such and such a bit in sonnet form, and the iambic is lulling you so that you can’t think in any other rhythm, and besides you just had a brilliant insight into the Nature of Time and Existence—
—you’re in very great danger of allowing the Poetry to Override the Person.
We can see Shakespeare himself fall into this trap time and again. For example, I have to wonder if Horatio, even though a Scholar himself, having just seen a ghost would really take the time to describe the dawn as:
But, look, the morn, in russet mantle clad,
Walks o'er the dew of yon high eastward hill:
When all his other language surrounding is rather matter of fact, as language typically becomes when one is in desperate straits.
Or again (and I know I’ll catch flack for this) but why does Romeo go into his famous: “O brawling love! O loving hate!” when he’s trying to convince Benvolio…who’s just come from a fight…that love and hate should have little to do with each other? (I grant you, it’s redeemed by Romeo’s “Dost thou not laugh” at the end. But still…)
While I won’t print my fellow playwright’s examples here, I’ll happily show a few bits where my own first draft of poetry overrode the person. For example, while writing Cupid’s original opening speech in Act II, it struck me that I could maybe emulate Shakespeare’s sneaky-sonnets (see Romeo and Juliet’s meet-cute, or most of Love’s Labour’s Lost).
While that might sound (or at least read) great on paper, it’s not so much for performing:
[Extended Speech] “Take Aim”
Return to Text
CUPID.
Take aim, my bow, take aim. For I cannot.
My soul she hath bewitched, my mind beguiled—
Take aim, my bow, take aim. Hold steady heart.
Thus mortals by immortal hands are slain
For the crime of causing Love to love—take aim.
Fly swift and true to pierce the snowy breast
Wherein my wanton will doth captive lie
Enfettered and encarnal-bound by she—
A mortal! And no fairer than the sky
When stormclouds cumber lightning-bellie
d bright,
And last so—whist! A breath, and they are gone.
Vanished like a shadow in the swift and sullen night.
No more is she. Take aim and let her fall.
For happiest they who never loved at all.
Let loose, my arrow, fly!
It’s not hideous poetry, but it’s not character-driven poetry.
Cupid might indeed have used the argument, “She’s going to die anyway!” But he wouldn’t philosophize about it. Cupid is a creature of passion, an infant, driven by instinct and not by reason. Moreover, he’s selfish: he takes things personally. So Psyche’s inevitable mortality would be less compelling to him than, say, “She did this to me!”
Once I realized who Cupid was—that he spoke more in reaction than in action, and more in action than in thought—it helped me to prune not only his dialogue, but also helped to shape his through-line so that his language “grows up” along with his Self.
VERSE TRAP 6: ‘Til the Philosophers are Playwrights
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The next most common verse trap is when the author allows the philosophy to override the plot.
Verse drama deals almost inevitably with “big themes and ideas”—and more, the author is allowed to stop everything and express those big themes and ideas. Hamlet would be less of a play if the titular character didn’t take a moment to ponder “What a piece of work is man!”
These philosophic poetical ponderings can act like arias in a musical. Think of “Rose’s Turn” from Gypsy, or “Jean Valjean’s Soliloquy” from Les Misérables.
You’ll notice, though, that both of these musical monologues match how the character would speak; how the character thinks; reveals the character’s—not the author’s—expression of philosophy.
Basically, it’s that old chestnut:
Show, don’t tell.
Recently, I’ve had the great pleasure of reading and/or seeing several modern verse plays, and have found this trap over and over again. Two characters will have someone literally beating down the door, and take the time to stop and ponder the universe to each other. Or a character will express how they’re in pain and consider and comment on what pain is...when they should probably just shake uncontrollably and smash a wall.
As I mentioned, I fell into this trap again and again and again.
Which got me curious.
Why were so many writers hiding behind their philosophy? After all, every good classical playwright ought to have studied their Aristotle and therefore realize that “thought” is the third element of drama—the skeleton, if you will, layered beneath the muscle and skin of plot and character. And yet, verse playwrights were wearing their philosophy like an exoskeleton…just at the point when they ought to be most vulnerable.
Take, for example, the first draft of the “Cupid as the Beast” speech. As so:
[Deleted Speech] “A god of Passions—aye!”
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CUPID.
A god of Passions, aye!—No more.
Two or five or twenty-five or fifty-two
Or more I’ve slain in search of Psyche’s heart
Which she, with cunning, hath safe hid away.
My every step Persephone hath shadowed,
And every murder hath been a deal with Death
Who is most hungry for Psyche’s soul…
Psyche, whom every day reviles me more.
O, she hath made a monster out of me!
Revealed me for what I truly am—a Beast,
A wretch, a god of lusts unsated.
For never was I a god of Love—O, no!
No god of Love could do what I have done.
Nor will she love, ‘til loving I become.
O, let me patient be. But soft. Her sisters.
What was going through my mind—what I wanted as a playwright to explore—was the idea of the “virtues gone mad,” as described by my beloved G. K. Chesterton:
The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues. When a religious scheme is shattered…it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad…they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. (Orthodoxy, Chapter III)
The problem, of course, is that while I was willing as a playwright to explore this idea, the destructiveness of virtues unhinged, I was unwilling to become unhinged myself. Although I heartily agreed that Lust Unbound was dangerous, I was unwilling to incur any danger on my own behalf.
Barabara Nicolosi warns against this sort of “niceness,” when she encourages screenwriters to consider what stories they “need to get naked with.”
The truth is, the tragic note that should be given about many scripts that are on the floors, desks, chairs and trunks in Hollywood is, “This script should never have been written.” Scripts get written that shouldn’t, in the same way unplanned pregnancies happen. People who may or may not be writers have a one night stand with a cheap idea and then, a few weeks or months later, push out a draft. What should have happened is a hard conversation between the person and their story idea before they jumped into Final Draft together. “Are you really the one for me?” “Are you going to be able to support a whole screenplay?” “Is there any theme underneath your spectacle?” “Is it really you I love, or is it because you remind me of somebody else?” “Is this going to be something we both get sick of in a few months?” The only good news is, you never really get naked with a bad story, but you are rarely better for having let yourself get seduced by a sexy pitch. (Church of the Masses, Practice Safe Storytelling)
I heartily encourage all writers out there—myself included—to stop wearing our philosophical spines as armor, and get mighty vulnerable with our text.
VERSE TRAP 7: Stuck On Shakespeare
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One last thought:
There’s a belief among most Shakespeareans that Everything You Ever Need To Know Is In The Text. Which is a polite way of snobbily saying: “For God’s sake, don’t add anything!”
Which is a ridiculous thing to believe when you work in theatre.
Every act of theatre is an addition to the play. And as a playwright, one is constantly aware that—unlike a novel—your play will be produced numerous times at a variety of levels with an array of different talent (or lack thereof), who will at least add to the production history of your work, if not actually adding dialogue through physical responses (or just, y’know, words).
Because theatre is not literature. When I write a play, I write with spaces. I’m drawing up blueprints that someone else will actually assemble. And they may use duct tape in place of wood glue, or decide they didn’t want a breakfast nook after all.
And that’s okay.
It may be ugly as hell, but it’s okay.
It’s better than okay, because Jane Doe who sees how Joe Schmoe varied from the plans will throw up her hands in disgust and say, “Ugh! You got it all wrong!” And put on your play again.
In which case, in our metaphor, she’ll keep the breakfast nook, and use the wood glue—but she’ll also hang curtains, and add an atrium.
Your text is not sacred. It’s not scripture. As much as you’d like it to be sacred, if it’s worth doing, it will be done against your tastes. (Wouldn’t you love to know what Billy Shakes thinks of your zombie-apocalypse rendition of Timon of Athens? Hm?)
However, what we modern authors have going for us is the judicious use of stage directions.
There is, of course, a great joy in seeing how many stage directions we can add into the dialogue (see the first half of Act II). And lines like: “Pyramus draws near the wall. Silence!” are half the fun of sorting out the physical givens of a show.
Yet entrances and exits and the occasional b
it of motion as described by the dialogue are not our only tools. Nor are they a necessary component to verse drama. The only necessary component to verse drama is that most of the play is in verse.
That doesn’t mean some of the play can’t be in prose, as Shakespeare innovated.
That doesn’t mean that some of the play can’t be in silence or song or shadows.
That doesn’t mean you must put everything in the dialogue.
You can, in fact, innovate.
Why?
Because you’re not Shakespeare.
You’re you. You’re a modern author with access to all the theatrical developments of the past several centuries. You’ve embraced having women play women—why not embrace stage directions? Why not experiment with silent scenes? With music? With dance? With multimedia? Whatever your little heart desires.
In the full knowledge and the ardent hope that Jane Doe will come along in another five hundred years with another five hundred years of theatrical development and say: “Metaphoric wood glue? No! We have access to Intergalactic Laser-Stars to hold this play together!”
Go forth and innovate.
Thank God, you’re not Shakespeare.
Thank God, you’re You.
In short, remember this rule:
You are writing drama first.
(It only happens to be in verse.)
On This Edition and Endnotes
Throughout the course of the play proper, certain pieces of text will be hyperlinked to a “behind the scenes” segment, such as an altered, deleted or extended scene, or a glimpse into writing or rehearsing the play.
Cupid and Psyche Page 3