by Ben Crystal
Then it hits you. They’re not really listening to each other:
They’re both talking, and you assume (as there isn’t anyone else there to talk to, other than the audience) that they’re talking to each other. But, rather sadly, they seem trapped in their own thoughts and fears.
The next part is heartbreaking. Macbeth, when he approached Duncan’s room, heard the guards’ call God bless us, and the normal response Amen, but wasn’t able to join in. Which is probably just as well, as he wouldn’t have wanted to wake them. Waking them doesn’t seem as important to him as the blessing, though, and you can almost hear his desperation in the alliterative Hangmans hands:
After a line of seven, he stops, cannot continue speaking. Lady sees him struggle, and says Don’t think so much about it. Then there’s a pause before, out of the depths of himself, Macbeth asks her again.
He asks her in two careful lines of ten, but it has taken him that pause beforehand to summon up the energy to spit it out. (Note that the important word Blessing has a capital B in the Folio spelling.)
He doesn’t finish, perhaps can’t finish his third line of metre, and Lady jumps in, finishing the line of ten and adding another. Her two lines of ten could be seen as her taking control, but how right she is. Don’t think about what you’ve done in this way, or it will drive us mad …
And, as you may know, so it does …
This is what separated Shakespeare off from his contemporaries. They all knew about stichomythia, the Greek term for rapid fire dialogue, but nobody took it down to the level of words and breaths, with his accuracy and ostentation. He wrote speech, not speeches.
Dominic Dromgoole, Artistic Director of Shakespeare’s Globe, from his book Will and Me, 2006
* * *
Winning dialogue
The director and writer Michael Winner said in February 2008 that Shakespeare writes some ‘awful’ dialogue, and that he defies any actor to speak a certain line of Macduff’s in Macbeth (Act 4, Scene 3, lines 216–18) and make it believable. Told that Macbeth has had his wife and children slaughtered, Macduff asks over and over again if his wife, his children have all been killed:
All my pretty ones? Did you say all?
O hell-kite! All? What, all my pretty chickens
And their dam, at one fell swoop?
Winner argued that the ‘all my pretty chickens’ line is impossible to act without causing laughter, and indeed it isn’t the easiest of lines to get right. But it isn’t awful dialogue. It’s heartbreaking. The repetition of all, the broken lines of metre: spoken with truth, with the right emotion and passion, these lines aren’t troublesome, they’re a gift. Macduff’s whole life has been swept away from him, and Shakespeare brings this tough warrior to his knees, to face a terrible, terrible loss.
* * *
Scene 10
Checklist
What I’ve done with one scene of Macbeth you can do with any other scene or play. Not all the scenes of Shakespeare might have so much in them – some may have a lot more – but the methods I’ve used and the things I’ve looked for are the keys to unlocking anything that may stand in your way.
Here’s a checklist of things to look for:
Is the scene in verse or prose? Or both? If both, why does it switch from one to the other?
If it’s verse, is it regular iambic pentameter, or does the metre jump around all over the place? If it’s irregular, what might that be saying about a character’s state of mind?
Are the speeches complicated or simple – i.e., are there mid-line endings, shared or short lines of metre? If there are mid-line endings, what kind of emotions might be making the characters interrupt themselves?
If there are shared lines of metre, what does that say about the characters’ relationship?
If there are short lines of metre, what might the character be doing or thinking in the gap?
Do the characters use thou/you to each other? If they do, do they switch between the two? If they switch, why do they switch?
Are there any characters in the scene that don’t speak? Why are they there? How does it help the story to have them there?
That last point is worth picking up on. There are scenes in Shakespeare’s plays where characters are mentioned as entering, in the stage directions, yet they say nothing – the infamous spear-carriers. For example, in Act 1, Scene 4 of King Lear, the stage direction says Enter Lear and Attendants (the Penguin edition says Enter Lear and Knights). The Knights don’t have much to say, and most, if not all, get sent off to run errands and fetch people. But their presence is a demonstration of Lear’s ruling power, as king.
By Act 3, Scene 1, Kent meets a Gentleman on the moor. Lear is howling at the storm, and the Gentleman asks who follows the king. Kent’s reply is ‘None but the Fool’. A king without followers is no longer king, merely a madman shouting at the wind.
Thank goodness for the spear-carriers.
Epilogue
This book is by no means a complete guide. If it tried to be complete, it would be many times the size, and defeat the whole point. These are some of the basic things you should look for, to crack your way into Shakespeare. The clues will help you break up what may seem like an incomprehensible speech or scene, and give it a clear, dramatic direction. As Cicely Berry, the granddam of voice and Shakespeare once said, there are no rules about how to do Shakespeare, just clues.
There are some who think that ‘to follow the metre’ too closely can make Shakespeare too cerebral a process, that in so doing you miss the beauty of the words, the dramatic intentions. Others think that everything comes from the metre, that it’s the foundation on which to build a character, to let the poetry sing. There are directors who bury their heads in the text, others who barely look at it; actors who base their entire interpretation of a character on the metre, others who see it as a hindrance to their work.
Despite the fact that he was as human, flawed and fallible as the rest of us, the one rule that has always guided me straight and true with Shakespeare is this:
There is always a reason for it.
No matter how complicated, no matter how ostensibly random, how annoying, boring or just plain bad a scene or a line seems to be, there is always a reason for it being there.
You just have to find out what it is.
And I promise: the search is always worth it.
Props
Herein ye shall find a chronology of Shakespeare’s works, and a list of poetical terms. Be warned, though: the list of poetical terms features some concepts that I didn’t discuss in the book, and some are a little tricky.
A chronology of Shakespeare’s works
A list of useful concepts for describing Shakespeare’s verse (from The Shakespeare Miscellany)
English rhythm
In the English language, the basis of rhythm is an alternating contrast between syllables which are perceived to be strong and syllables which are perceived to be weak.
Metre or Meter
The rhythmical organisation of lines of poetry, defined with reference to the number of rhythmical units allowed in a line and by the combinations of strong and weak syllables allowed within those units.
Verse
Any text written in lines which have a metrical structure. The term contrasts with prose, where the lines have no predictable rhythmical length or structure, simply reflecting the rhythm of everyday speech.
Prose
Writing that reflects the rhythm of everyday English speech – it doesn’t have the issue of rhythmical units and there aren’t structured rules for the number of syllables per line.
Blank verse
Verse which has a metrical structure but does not rhyme.
Foot
A unit of rhythm within a metrical line. Lines can consist of any number of feet, but rarely more than six:
monometer
a line consisting of a single foot
dimeter
a line consisting of two feet
trimeter
tetrameter
a line consisting of four feet
pentameter
a line consisting of five feet
hexameter
a line consisting of six feet
In Shakespeare’s works, most lines are pentameters.
Types of foot
There are only so many ways in which strong and weak syllables can be combined to make a foot. Five types are most widely recognised in English verse, but it is not always easy to identify these units in a Shakespearian line, because of the many rhythmical variations found there.
Weak + Strong – the iamb (an iambic foot) – the commonest type in English, and the usual one in Shakespeare:
Once more/unto/the breach,/dear friends,/once more,/
Strong + Weak – the trochee (a trochaic foot):
Wherefore / art thou / Romeo?
Two Weak + one Strong – the anapaest (an anapaestic foot), spelled anapest in American English:
I am dead, / Horatio …
One Strong + two Weak – the dactyl (a dactylic foot):
See what a / grace was seated on this brow …
Two strong – the spondee (a spondaic foot):
On, on, / you noblest English …
Feminine ending
Extra unaccented syllables at the end of an iambic or anapaestic line of poetry, often used in blank verse:
My lord, as I was sewing in my closet,
Caesura
A rhythmical break in a line of verse, often in the middle of a line:
To be, or not to be – that is the question
Love? His affections do not that way tend
End-stopped line
A line of verse in which there is a natural pause, suggested by the meaning, at the end of a line, usually indicated by punctuation:
He took me by the wrist and held me hard.
Run-on lines
A line of verse in which it would be unnatural to pause at the end of a line because the thought continues into the next line:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune …
Stanza
A division of a poem consisting of a series of lines separated from the rest of the poem by lines of white space above and below. In the Shakespearian narrative poems, the stanzas all have the same number of lines and a recurrent pattern of metre and rhyme. In Venus and Adonis, for example, each stanza consists of six lines, each in iambic pentameter, with rhymes linking lines 1 / 3, 2 / 4, and 5 / 6. Repeated letters are commonly used to show the rhyming pattern – in this case, ababcc. In everyday usage, the term verse is loosely used instead of stanza, but this conflicts with the more general meaning of verse given above.
Stanza lengths
Stanzas typically run from two to eight lines:
couplet
2 lines
tercet
3 lines
quatrain
4 lines
quintet
5 lines
sestet
6 lines
septet
7 lines
octave
8 lines
Sonnet
A verse form consisting of fourteen lines of iambic pentameter. In the sonnet form that developed in England, the lines are grouped in three quatrains with six alternating rhymes, followed by a final rhymed couplet:
abab cdcd efef gg.
Supporting Artists (Recommended Reading)
Playing Shakespeare, by John Barton (Methuen, 1984)
The RSC Shakespeare: The Complete Works, edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007)
Soul of the Age: The Life, Mind and World of William Shakespeare, by Jonathan Bate (Viking 2008)
Think On My Words, by David Crystal (Cambridge University Press, 2008)
Shakespeare’s Words, by David Crystal and Ben Crystal (Penguin, 2002)
The Shakespeare Miscellany, by David Crystal and Ben Crystal (Penguin, 2005)
Will and Me, by Dominic Dromgoole (Penguin, 2006)
Shakespeare’s Advice to the Players, by Peter Hall (Oberon, 2003)
Speaking Shakespeare, by Patsy Rodenburg (Methuen Drama, 2002)
Secrets of Acting Shakespeare, by Patrick Tucker (Routledge, 2002)
Websites
Online glossary, language companion, and concordance: www.shakespeareswords.com
Online edition of the First Folio: http://etext.virginia.edu/shakespeare/folio/
Stage Management (Acknowledgements)
Dedicated, to:
Mum and Dad, for constantly giving their all
My sister Lucy, for always having time to proof-read
Jim Alexander, for keeping me sane in times of metrical madness, and whose notes and suggestions were utterly invaluable
Will Sutton, for talking all this out with me in several bars and cafes around the world
And for Charlotte, who showed me there was more than one way to climb a mountain, and write a book
My deepest thanks to:
My agent Julia Churchill, who hit the bullseye every time
My editor Duncan Heath, for his wise pointers; Andrew Furlow, Najma Finlay, and all at Icon Books, for their tireless work in bringing this book into existence
Adam Russ, for his work on the TV series
Patrick Tucker, for teaching me what it’s all really about
Patrick Spottiswoode, the Head of Education at Shakespeare’s Globe, and his team, the experts in bringing down the walls around Shakespeare
Judi Dench, Kenneth Branagh, Richard Eyre, Dominic Dromgoole, Greg Doran, Thelma Holt, Michael Maloney, Sam West, Giles Block, Glynn MacDonald, Annabel Arden, Stanley Wells, Paul Edmondson, Gerald Hewitson, Stan Pretty and Jonathan Milton, and Myrrha Stanford-Smith who have all played such an influential part in getting me to this point
And mes amis: they know who they are, and they know why
Index
accents (i)
actors
acting tradition (i)
at the Globe (i)
confused with real people (i), (ii)
in Elizabethan times (i)
rehearsing (i), (ii)
acts and scenes (i)
Akala (i)
Armin, Robert (i)
Artificial Intelligence (i)
authorship of the plays (i)
Bacon, Sir Francis (i)
bad quartos (i), (ii)
Beatles, The (i)
Benedick in prose or poetry (i)
Berry, Cicely (i)
Big Brother Live (i)
Black Death, The (i)
blank verse (i)
Boyd, Michael (i)
brain lighting up (i)
Braveheart (1995) (i)
Brown, June (Dot Cotton) (i)
capital letters in the First Folio (i)
Caxton, William (i)
characters, Shakespearian (i)
Chaucer, Geoffrey (i), (ii)
checklist (i)
Cher (i)
Chettle, Henry (i)
Chorus in Henry V (i), (ii)
chronology (of plays) (i)
Comedy of Errors at the Globe (i)
commandments of Shakespeare (i)
Conan Doyle, Arthur (i)
Condell, Henry (i), (ii), (iii)
contractions (i)
copyright of plays (i)
Coronation Street (i), (ii)
costumes (i)
Cotton, Dot (June Brown) (i)
Court (i), (ii), (iii)
Crucible, The (i)
curse of Macbeth (i)
Da Vinci Code, The (i), (ii)
Dallas (i)
Davis, Miles (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Days of Our Lives (i)
dialects (i)
Dickens, Charles (i)
difficulty (supposed) of
Shakespearian English (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Dream Team
(i), (ii)
Dromgoole, Dominic (i)
Dr Who (i)
Early Modern English (i), (ii)
EastEnders (i), (ii), (iii)
editions, modern (i), (ii)
compared to the First Folio (i), (ii)
Einstein, Albert (i), (ii)
Elizabeth I (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)
death of (i)
fan of Falstaff (i), (ii)
Elizabethan
period (i)
religions (i)
speech (i)
European Witch Craze (i)
false friends (i)
Falstaff (i)
Fawkes, Guy (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
feminine endings (i)
fiction, believing in (i), (ii)
Fiennes, Joseph (i)
films of the plays (i)
O (i)
Romeo + Juliet (i)
First Folio (i), (ii), (iii)
compared to modern editions (i), (ii)
flaws (i), (ii)
guiding actors (i), (ii), (iii)
spellings (i), (ii)
typesetters (i)
use of capital letters (i)
folio vs. quarto (i)
Follett, Ken (i)
foot/feet in verse (i)
Friends (i)
Garrick, David (i), (ii)
geography, Shakespeare’s (i)
Gibson, Mel (i)
Gielgud, John (i), (ii)
Glass, Philip (i)
Globe Theatre (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
Goth, Second (in Titus Andronicus) (i)
Gothic Nightmares (i)
Greek, Shakespeare’s knowledge of (i)
Hamlet
acting in (i)
difficult words in (i)
plot of (i)
Schwarzenegger as (i)
thou and you in (i)
versions of (i)
Harwood, Kate (i)
hearing (vs. seeing) a play (i)
heartbeat rhythm (i), (ii)
heckling at the Globe (i)
Hemmings, John (i), (ii), (iii)