“It was Barton and Hall who inspired me to look at the verse one line at a time, and then as I worked with actors,” Edelstein continued, he found “the whole thing is to make them find the thought, live in the moment in front of the audience, and Barton has a saying, ‘Why am I using these words now?’ And it eventually then occurred to me that there’s a moment there at the end of each line, that pause, a moment to reach into yourself and find the next set of words. It’s in that pause that, given the idea that you’re trying to express, you choose words to express them.” In Edelstein’s interpretation the pause is a moment of poise—not unlike what Frank Kermode has called “the beautifully poised” moment in Shakespeare in which one finds oneself on the very “threshold of comprehension.”
It sounds simple but it’s transformative; it makes the end of each line not a dead pause but a live pause, a kind of kinetic (linguistically and intellectually) poised springboard to launch with new energy and momentum into the line following. A moment of dramatic suspense or suspension at the end of every line.
In some ways this was one of the most exciting moments in my peregrinations among Shakespeareans, the realization that every line is a self-contained drama, or more precisely a self-contained first act, one that made that pause a pivotal moment of dramatic reflection. A delicate moment of silent stasis and realization that conceives, gives birth to the second act, the next thought, the next line, the next threshold of comprehension.
Edelstein told me he used three Shakespearean passages to get this point across: “I use Portia’s third-act speech in Merchant of Venice, ‘You see me, Lord Bassanio, where I stand,’ and I also used Leontes’ ‘Inch-thick, knee-deep, head-and-ears a forked one,’ from Winter’s Tale, and sometimes I will go through the opening chorus of Henry V as well.…”
For reasons that will soon become apparent, I’d like to look more closely at that “Muse of fire” prologue from Henry V. In part because it suggests Shakespeare talking about his art, in part because the next chapter examines the way Shakespeare’s “Muse of fire” relates to the New Testament “tongues of flame.” And in a subsequent chapter, the relation between the “Muse of fire” and the flickering muse of film becomes an issue. It’s a remarkable passage, the “Muse of fire” speech, not least because it embodies what it disclaims it possesses.
I’d suggest as an experiment: read these opening lines of Henry V, the passage delivered by a character called “Chorus.” Read it with Barry Edelstein’s injunction in mind: the pause at the end of each line is a moment of invention. In fact invention is the subject of the first two lines:
O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend
The brightest heaven of invention!
A kingdom for a stage, princes to act,
And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!
Then should the warlike Harry, like himself,
Assume the port of Mars, and at his heels
(Leash’d in, like hounds) should famine, sword, and fire
Crouch for employment. But pardon, gentles all,
The flat unraised spirits that hath dar’d
On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth
So great an object. Can this cockpit hold
The vasty fields of France? Or may we cram
Within this wooden O the very casques
That did affright the air at Agincourt?
O, pardon! since a crooked figure may
Attest in little place a million
And let us, ciphers to this great accompt,
On your imaginary forces work.
Suppose within the girdle of these walls
Are now confin’d two mighty monarchies,
Whose high, upreared, and abutting fronts
The perilous narrow ocean parts asunder.
Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts;
Into a thousand parts divide one man,
And make imaginary puissance;
Think, when we talk of horses, that you see them
Printing their proud hoofs i’ th’ receiving earth;
For ‘tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings,
Carry them here and there, jumping o’er times,
Turning th’ accomplishment of many years
Into an hour-glass: for the which supply,
Admit me Chorus to this history;
Who, Prologue-like, your humble patience pray,
Gently to hear, kindly to judge, our play..
Just consider the first four lines:
O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend
The brightest heaven of invention!
A kingdom for a stage, princes to act,
And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!
“Invention,” the Riverside edition notes remind us, was more than its modern meaning suggests. It was back then, “in rhetorical theory, the ‘finding’ of suitable topics.” The finding. This is what Barry Edelstein is suggesting one does or what a skilled actor suggests in that end-of-line pause: a finding, a reaching into oneself to find what comes next.
So if one reads aloud the first line with the idea that when one comes to the word “ascend” at the end of the line, one pauses to invent, one pauses to find, to ascend to the stunning notion of the “brightest heaven of invention.” One invents invention in this ascension, one is almost being instructed by the verse in how to speak it, how to leap it.
Something similar seems to happen in the second set of two lines:
A kingdom for a stage, princes to act …
It’s a line that seems to call for sweeping gestures by the Chorus, gestures of a magician of invention. One can see the Chorus flourishing his hand at the stage to accompany “a kingdom for a stage.” One can imagine him summoning into being with a flourish the entrance of the players on “princes to act”—and then a moment of invention. One can imagine the inventive Chorus thinking up—in that all-important pause after “princes to act”—a gesture to accompany, to transform, the next line:
And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!
One can imagine him finding, inventing the idea of a flourishing gesture of comic grandiose flattery at the audience on “monarchs to behold”: they are the real kings. It’s a lovely way to curry favor and to conjure up the true rulers of the Globe, the inhabitants of this bright heaven of invention, the audience.
It’s a compliment that works best dramatically if it invents its own authenticity, if it seems to come from a spontaneous end-line pause in which the notion is invented to turn from the players to the beholders, to turn on a dime and turn it into a charming act of generosity as well as flattery. A fusion or bonding of the audience’s “imaginary forces” with the players. “Swelling” with a hint of metaphoric pregnancy in the intercourse between their good will of invention and the players’ Good Will (Shakespeare).
Did Shakespeare think this way or expect his actors to deliver their lines with the Hall-Edelstein end-stopped springboard pause? It’s impossible to know. But it’s possible to experience the heuristic value of the Hall-Edelstein concept. It seems to energize the language in such a way that it doesn’t become mere recitation. And certainly, at one point, when Shakespeare was writing, there was a moment of invention at the end of each line when he thought up what came next and how to contain it within the pentameter line structure. So in speaking the lines this way, theoretically, one is returning, or getting closer, in some way, to that moment of Shakespeare’s creation.
EPILOGUE: JUDI DENCH DEFENDS THE PAUSE
There are dissenters to Hall’s fundamentalism. His longtime collaborator and acting teacher John Barton for instance. Barton does not deny the importance of the pause, but argues that it must at times give way to the flow of emotion and passion that spills over into the following line. There are reports that the pause has at times caused a division (a “slight sense break”?) between the two, although they still work together closely and the difference is more one of emphasis than of theory.
And, it must be said, there are pauses and there are pauses. One could envision an entire Ph.D. thesis devoted to “The Pause in Shakespeare.” About the way brief moments of silence can speak, or be made to speak, so eloquently. (Actually whole books have been written about Shakespeare’s silences.)
Peter Brook virtually made his reputation as a director with an eloquent pause: the pause he drew out into an extended silent rebellion at the end of his 1954 Measure for Measure, when Isabella draws out her silence in response to the duke’s marriage proposal. A controversial pause that made her silence a repudiation of the conventional assumption that the play would end in a reconciliatory marriage.
There are, as well, the two pivotal pauses in Hamlet: the moment in the Player King’s recitation of the melodramatic description of the death of Priam when his executioner, the bloody Pyrrhus, raises his sword—and then pauses—before slaughtering the king of Troy. And the corresponding moment when Hamlet himself draws his sword prepared to slaughter Claudius, King of Denmark—and then pauses and, unlike Pyrrhus, forgoes the fatal stroke.
In his book Shakespeare’s Advice to the Players, Hall has strong words about that pause. The passage goes thus:
HAMLET: And now I’ll do’t—and so ’a goes to heaven,
And so am I reveng’d. That would be scanned …
For Hall it’s all about when Hamlet draws his sword in the course of the line, and thus when that act creates a pause.
Hamlet must draw his sword at the end of the line, not in the middle after “And now I’ll do’t,” Hall insists.
“There is no justification for the stage practice of breaking the line to draw the sword,” he maintains quite sharply.
In fact Hall’s insistence on this is problematical. He wants Hamlet to stop and reflect only after the end of the line, at the beginning of the next: so that “and so ’a goes to heaven” is merely a conventional way of saying “and so he dies,” not, as some see it, an ironic reflection on the fact that a murderer will end up in heaven among the blessed. Which would make the following line, especially “reveng’d,” already consciously ironic, rather than an utterance that discovers the irony of “reveng’d” in the course of thinking it up and speaking it.
And so am I reveng’d. That would be scanned …
“Scanned,” indeed: a pause in the middle rather than the end of the preceding line, a pause after “And now I’ll do’t” rather than after “and so ’a goes to heaven” suggests that Hamlet’s second thoughts begin with “and so ’a goes to heaven,” rather than undergoing a metaphysical double-take after “heaven,” as Hall insists.
It’s a subtle, important distinction; one can agree with Hall’s interpretation, though, without thinking it’s the only alternative. He can tend to be absolutist about what his pause dictates, and in this instance, I tend to disagree.
But if Hall has a reputation of being all about pauses, in his book Shakespeare’s Advice to the Players he insists he is really all about “smoothness.” That Shakespeare was about smoothness. “Speak the speech … trippingly on the tongue,” yes, but even within a whirlwind of passion find “a temperance that may give it smoothness,” Hamlet says. In other words, Hall now seeks to emphasize that his pause, which he now calls “slight sensory break,” is not the problem, does not ruffle the smoothness he seeks. What’s wrong with contemporary Shakespeare, he tells us, are unnecessary, self-indulgently actorish pauses that chop up and slow down the lines, which should go smoothly and swiftly with just a hint of a hesitation.
Hall blames American Method acting with its heavy emotive underlining of each word.
Shakespeare’s “form is destroyed by acting single words rather than lines … chopping up lines into little naturalistic gobbets may sound ‘modern,’ but it plays hell with the meaning … the sanctity of the line is betrayed and Shakespeare’s primary means of giving out information rapidly and holding our attention is destroyed.”
“The sanctity of the line”: the man is possessed, he is a priest of the pause.
But Hall has supporters among academics as well as directors such as Edelstein and the “fifty actors” Hall cited as truly understanding the importance of the deceptively evanescent pause. Perhaps the most impressive testament to the pause from a mainstream scholar was the one I elicited a few years later from Russ McDonald, who I suspect will be remembered as one of the most illuminating Shakespearean scholars of the twenty-first century.
McDonald’s study—in the Oxford University Press book Shakespeare and the Arts of Language—was, to me, the epitome of contemporary scholarship at its best, both post-postmodern and premodern you might say. His careful reading of Renaissance books on Greek and Latin rhetorical tropes (antanaclasis, hyperbaton, and the like) and the way they are echoed and transmuted in Shakespeare’s figures of speech and linguistic patternings was exhilarating in its lucidity and sophistication.
I raised the question of Hall’s pause with McDonald in the course of asking him about the research he was then doing at the British Library in London. He told me in an e-mail that he was studying the culture of visual symmetry in Elizabethan England, the belief among sixteenth-century theorists of art and architecture that repetition, and patterning, order and rhythm—correspondence in its largest sense—were somehow fundamental to esthetic pleasure. He said he believed that Elizabethan poets and Shakespeare in particular were deeply concerned with the “aural equivalents of such visual patternings” and that the discourse of visual symmetries was an important context for the way sounds and words were arranged, patterned and correlated in Shakespeare’s poetry.
Something in what he was saying led me to mention to McDonald my evening with Peter Hall, and his ferocious insistence on “line structure” and the importance of the pause to maintaining it. I wondered if that might relate to McDonald’s work on the discourse of formal gardens and visually pleasing symmetries. Invoking a term I’d recalled from a long-ago college seminar on Edmund Spenser, I suggested to McDonald that Hall’s pause transformed each individual line of Shakespeare into a hortus conclusus, Latin for “enclosed garden,” whose very closure was necessary to structure its visual symmetries.
“I never quite believed Hall’s rabid argument either,” at least at first, McDonald replied, “but then something convinced me. I have a book coming out this month called Look to the Lady: Sarah Siddons, Ellen Terry and Judi Dench on the Shakespearean Stage. In order to do the thing I managed to arrange an interview with Judi Dench and so I asked her about verse-speaking, who taught her. She immediately mentioned Trevor Nunn, and John Barton and Peter Hall, all of whom, as she said, learned from Dadie [George] Rylands [Poel’s disciple at Cambridge]….
“And she gave the Hall line about pausing and then she launched into ‘I dreamt there was an Emperor Antony …’ and gave the whole speech and I nearly [lost control].”
Hearing Judi Dench, one of the great Shakespearean actresses of the past century, insist the pause was essential to the delivery of one of Shakespeare’s most impassioned dramatic arias was a kind of conversion experience for McDonald, as hearing Edelstein’s explication of Hall had been for me.
Dame Judi, he continued, “went on to explain the pause, and the way she talked about it made me see it in a new way. The very slight, almost inaudible pause seems to segment the speech into equivalent units, serves very delicately to underline the ten-syllable unit without insisting on it or making it sound clunky. This pretty much convinced me, partly because I’d been thinking in just those terms of balance or equivalence. I am looking at visual symmetries in this project [at the British Library] but mainly as a means of establishing a cultural context for further understanding the pleasing units of the aural text.”
Here are the lines Judi Dench recited, from Antony and Cleopatra, to illustrate the Hall pause, the lines that put Russ McDonald into an altered state. It’s the fifth-act speech, shortly after Antony’s death, the one in which Cleopatra tells Caesar’s messenger:
I dream
t there was an Emperor Antony.
O, such another sleep, that I might see
But such another man!…
His face was as the heav’ns, and therein stuck
A sun and moon, which kept their course, and lighted
The little O, th’ earth.…
His legs bestrid the ocean, his rear’d arm
Crested the world, his voice was propertied
As all the tuned spheres, and that to friends;
But when he meant to quail and shake the orb,
He was as rattling thunder. For his bounty,
There was no winter in’t; an [autumn] it was
That grew the more by reaping. His delights
Were dolphin-like, they show’d his back above
The element they liv’d in. In his livery
Walk’d crowns and crownets; realms and islands were
As plates dropp’d from his pocket.…
Think you there was or might be such a man
As this I dreamt of?
At this point Caesar’s messenger says “Gentle madam, no.” Which provokes this final outburst:
You lie up to the hearing of the gods!
But if there be, nor ever were one such,
It’s past the size of dreaming. Nature wants stuff
To vie strange forms with fancy; yet t’ imagine
An Antony were nature’s piece ‘gainst fancy,
Condemning shadows quite.
One could imagine that hearing these lines read by Judi Dench would make one amenable to any theory they were said to confirm. But before returning to the question of the pause I cannot resist pointing out the echoes of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Bottom’s Dream in particular, in this dream-besotted invocation.
Cleopatra’s dream is “past the size of dreaming.” Bottom’s Dream is “past the wit of man to say what dream it was.”
Both dreams suggest the possibility of the power, of something beyond nature to confuse sight and sound, hearing and seeing, as the dream does for Bottom. These are, one might say, “exceptionalist” dreams, off the continuum of all other dreams ever dreamed or dreamable. The very notion of an undreamable dream is itself an almost impossible paradox whose contemplation destabilizes our notion of the finite limits of the dreaming imagination.
The Shakespeare Wars Page 32