Some actors spend a lifetime studying Shakespeare. Volumes have been written on Shakespearean acting technique. This brief article won't replace all that. It will outline an approach to his works and help you avoid some mistakes commonly made by actors whether you are working on an audition monologue or have been cast in a play.
Step 1
Follow direction. What your director tells you takes precedence over anything you read below. If he wants you to play Hamlet while patting your head and rubbing your tummy, that's the way you should play Hamlet in his production. (Of course, you would also be justified in running away from the theater as fast as you could.)
Step 2
Consider Shakespeare your friend. He didn't get to be the most popular playwright of his time by writing just for the elite. He wrote his plays for illiterate peasants as well as royalty. In other words, he made them accessible and enjoyable for the masses. He was also an actor, so he knew how to write for other actors and make them look good.
|
Step 3
Learn the background. Take some to learn a little about theater of Shakespeare's day and about the history of the play you're working on. This will help you understand things that would have been familiar to his audience but might be foreign to you. Fortunately, many published editions of his plays (Arden, Oxford, and Folger Library, for example) contain introductory essays on these topics.
Step 4
Read the play. You cannot invest your performance with the depth that Shakespeare deserves if you only learn your lines and cues. You must read the entire play to understand the world in which your character lives and your character's significance in it.
Step 5
Know what the words mean. The good news is, the vast majority of words in Shakespeare's plays mean the same thing now as they did when he wrote them. But some words have gone out of use and others may have meant something very different. The editions named in Step 3 include notes explaining the meanings of difficult words. The No Fear and Side-by-Side editions place Shakespeare's original text and a modern translation on facing pages.
Step 6
Look for wordplay everywhere. Shakespeare loved double meanings, especially when they had something to do with sex. Censors were strict and had a great deal of authority, so Shakespeare used puns and other kinds of wordplay to get around them. As a rule, if it sounds naughty, it probably is. If it doesn't sound naughty, it might be anyway.
|
Step 7
Uncover the timeless truths. Shakespeare's world was vastly different than ours in surface details, but you need to find the unchanging essence of humanity that connects the characters to you - and through you, to the audience. The details of life in renaissance Verona matter less to an actress' performance in the role of Juliet than understanding the passion of loving someone so much you will choose shame, poverty, or even death over life apart from them.
Step 8
Learn your lines. This is a fundamental part of an actor's job, of course, but compared to the work of contemporary playwrights, it's much harder if not impossible to improvise your way through Shakespeare due to differences in vocabulary and sentence structure, the frequent use of regular meter (rhythm) and rhyme, and the familiarity of many of the lines to theatergoers.
Step 9
Analyze the text as you would any other play. Decide on your character's overarching goal, her relationship to others in the play, the intention of each line, and the emotional beats in every speech.
Step 10
Use your own voice. Actors in Shakespeare's theater company never performed "Hamlet" with Danish accents, nor did they speak like modern-day Londoners. In fact, no one really knows what they sounded like, but we can be certain they spoke in a way that was understood by their audience and did not distract from the subject of the plays. So using your own accent or that of the region in which you're performing is much more authentic than faking a foreign accent would be.
There are a few exceptions where Shakespeare intended a character to speak in a particular dialect, usually for comic effect, but these should be obvious from the way the dialogue is written and other characters' reactions to it: for example, Captains Fluellen, MacMorris, and Jamy in Henry V.
In most cases, the only adaptation you will probably need to make is to enunciate even more carefully than you normally do on stage so your audience clearly hears every word.
|
Step 11
Leave the poetry (mostly) to the poet.
Much but not all of Shakespeare's work is written in verse. Most of it doesn't rhyme, but is distinguished from prose by having a regular meter, or rhythm. The most common form, iambic pentameter, is based on a 10-syllable line with five stressed syllables. You can tell the verse from the prose in most editions because it is set with a ragged right edge instead of a straight margin.
Now that you know what it is, forget about it. If you overemphasize the stressed syllables and pause at the end of each line it will have a sing-song quality that will distract the audience from the meaning of the words. Part of Shakespeare's gift was knowing when to stretch and vary the form. Sentences run past the end of one metrical line and stop halfway through the next. Some lines contain more or less than the prescribed number of syllables.
Shakespeare did the hard work of creating dialogue with the power and formality of verse and the natural ebb and flow of prose. So make it sound like conversation, not like Dr. Seuss.
Step 12
Look for the playwright's stage directions. Most editions of Shakespeare's plays contain stage directions in brackets [like this]. These were not written by Shakespeare but have been added by editors. Shakespeare gave few directions other than when a character enters, exits, or dies, and sometimes not that much. But Shakespeare often implied stage direction through dialogue. When Berowne says to Rosaline "By this white glove - how white the hand, God knows," Shakespeare meant for Berowne to be holding her hand.
Step 13
Emphasize the important words. For some reason, many beginning actors
seem to want to stress auxiliary words like "hath" and "dost", maybe
because they think it sounds more Shakespearean. Emphasize nouns and
verbs, just like in everyday speech.
|
Step 14
Give your audience a hand. They probably haven't studied your lines as much as you have, so help them out by putting extra punch in the punchlines. Sometimes you may need body language to let the audience when it's okay to laugh and when it's appropriate to cry.
Step 15
Make it your own. At its heart, "Shakespearean acting" is acting. Inhabit the role like you would any other, invest it with the same emotional truth, and your performance will connect with the audience in a way that transcends barriers of time and culture.
|
|
|
|
