This might be the most difficult lesson. Work with this one a while.

THOUGHT

-This is where we begin to grow a speech. Thoughts come in order, and you have to fully open one thought before you can move onto the next thought.

-To ignore the thought is to simply be reciting words.

-You have to take the energy all the way through  the thought. To drop the energy will lose the thought, and in losing the thought you will lose the audience.

-Thoughts are signposted by punctuation.

• A full stop: a colon, a period, a question mark or an exclamation mark is often the end of a thought.
• Commas mark turns and diversions within the thought- typically not the end of the full thought.
• You cannot run over punctuation. Acknowledge each comma, period, etc.

Thoughts can go on for many, many lines! Some are as short as less than one line, some are over 12 lines long! Typically a speech will have between 3-5 major thoughts within it. If a character has more they are clearly in turmoil… less shows a clear path and idea.

Activity:

-Get a partner and then a speech. Read it.

-Read the speech out loud to each other like a conversation-switch readers whenever the thought changes.

• If they drop the energy start over and have them push against your hand harder and harder until the thought is done to grow the energy throughout. No partner? Push against the wall, increasing in intensity until the thought is complete. Start over at the next thought.

Activity #2: (Outside if possible! Or a place with a lot of room to move around.)

-Select a speech.

-Read it out loud and walk it. Turn each time you feel the thought change direction. Let the changes happen as you feel them.

Example: To be (turn) or not to be (turn) that is the question.

• Challenge: Try to walk the rhythym of the speech. Allow the iambic to dictate your steps.
• In turn, allow the text to dictate your speed. Does the iambic flow quickly or slowly? Does it change with each thought?

-Read it again out loud and on each turn vary something in your vocal quality. Get louder or whisper, do a different voice.  It doesn’t have to fit the text, just get accustomed to changing on each thought.

-Stand still. Breathe. Eyes closed, think through the speech you just did silently to yourself.

Think about your speech for a moment and take a walk around. Loosen up.

-Mark where each thought begins. (Not the developments within the thought)

• In another color mark where the thought begins to shift.

-Talk yourself through the speech, thought by thought in your own words.

-Standing still read the speech one last time to yourself, keeping the discoveries about the thought progression in your vocal quality.

Final thoughts: Learn a text thought by thought rather than line by line.

When you don’t understand a line or a section of a speech go back to the beginning of the speech and unlock it stage by stage, line by line.

The Line

-Don’t flatten the verse into prose. (Tempting because it sounds more modern)

Activity:

-Take a speech

-Observe the first word of each line. Read the first four lines to yourself, only vocalizing the first word.

-Do the same, only vocalizing the last word.

-Look at the collection of last words, and observe what that says about the concerns of the speech.

**This is your scaffolding of how the speech moves.

- Now begin to do building blocks. First word, breathe. First and second. Breathe. First second third, breathe. Etc to the end of the line. Feel the power of the line begin to grow.

- Read the first four lines to yourself. On the last stress of the line make a large clap. (Not a golf clap!)

Final Thoughts: Too often actors commit to half a line and mumble the rest. You need every word and every line.

From Patsy Rodenberg’s Speaking Shakespeare

Sometimes the rhythm of the line will break or change if the character is emotionally distressed. Here are some of the variations in the iambic you need to be aware of:

INVERSION/TROCHEE:

Now is the winter of our discontent (Richard III)

Gallop apace you fiery footed steeds (Romeo & Juliet)

I take the offer then: pay the bond thrice. (The Merchant of Venice) 

-Flip the first foot’s stresses so the first word is stressed.

- Mid line ones show interruption of thoughts.

- Will only happen at the beginning of the line or after punctuation!

-They mark when something important has happened and stresses the more important word.

FEMININE ENDING:

To be or not to be that is the question. (Hamlet)

And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, (The Tempest)

- Shows indecision

-Softens the line

-Ends on an extra unstressed syllable and one half feet.

SHORT LINES:

Love, and be silent. (King Lear)

- Beat out the remaining feet- that is how much silence you need to put after the line. The above example has 2.5 feet of silence after the last word.

SHORT COMBINATION LINES:

LEAR: But goes thy hear with this?

CORDELIA: Ay, good my lord.

HAMLET: Consent to swear.

HORATIO: Propose the oath, my lord.

 - The combination of the lines makes a perfect 5 foot line.

- The actors need to reahearse these to come right after each other with no hesitation. (The continuation of the perfect line shows that there is no pause between the short lines.)

- This means you not only have to scan (mark the stresses) on your lines but the lines before and after yours- AND while acting be paying attention (remember the listening activities?!).

Caesura:

It wearies me; //you say it wearies you (Merchant of Venice)

- This is a full pause in the line, marked by a //

- Not every line has them, be aware of where there could be a full silence. Don’t be afraid of silence on stage!!

ELISION:

In’t, as’t, hea’en, o,  lock’d, accomplish’d

- In Shakespeare’s time the “ed” at the end of the word was frequently pronounced. (Now we would mark it as “pronounce-ed”- but that is not the case in Shakespeare’s text!) If there is an apostrophe then you can use the modern pronounciation because it is shortened.

- “As it” becomes “as’t”… “It were” becomes “twere”… it’s a contraction of words we no longer contract.

- The letter “v” also frequently dissapeares to make words like “heaven” a one syllable word “he’an”.

Activity:

-Take a monologue and a pencil and scan the first two lines

  ** Proof it by reading it out loud using the stresses. Does it work?

 ** Make necessary corrections.

** If you think something is “wrong” figure out if it can work both ways.

-Have someone else scan a speech and try to read it with their scanscion marks.

Final Thoughts: You can spend hours examining iambic and line length. Each time there is an irregularity, the content will be highlighted and sense and intention made clearer. This is not easy, and often takes much, much practice for it to come naturally. Keep working at it!!

Iambic:  (From Patsy Rodenberg’s Speaking Shakespeare)

What is it?

• The heartbeat of the words. Finding this will help you discover the pace of the text.

Practice: de DUM de DUM de DUM de DUM de DUM. (Emphasize the capatalized words)

-Walk it and say it out loud.

-Now start to put extra emphasis on the last DUM. Clap on the last DUM.

Read out loud and emphazise the iambic meter:

When I do count the clock that tells the time.

But soft, what light through yonder window breaks  (<– note that words can be split between the syllables)

The quality of mercy is not strain’d

Activity:

-Create a couplet (2 lines) in iambic pentameter. (Double points if you can make the lines rhyme!)

-Learn how to mark it to indicate stressed syllables. Over the words, put a flat line  over unstressed syllables and a upright dash over stressed. Perfect iambic pentameter looks like this: – / – / – / – /- /

-Count the total syllables. Note if it is an even 10 or if there are more or less.

-Don’t force the line to fit into the iambic, you will know when it breaks.

-Each set of one unstressed and one stressed syllable is called a “foot”. There are typically 5 feet in a verse line.

Thus far we have worked with perfect iambic. However, it is the breaks that indicate trouble, and give each line more specificity.

Education series is from Patsy Rodenberg’s Speaking Shakespeare.

Alliteration, Assonance & Onomatopoeia

-Alliteration: Grouping of consonants together

-Assonance: Grouping of vowels together

-Onomatopoeia: Words that sound and feel as they mean, expressing by sound what they represent.

Play with these words in your mouth; see if the way it feels to say it is the same as what it means:

- Uneven — jagged

-Take – Give

-Hiss

-Bawdy

-Mewling

-Whining

-Punch

Final thoughts: Think about why a specific word is used in the text. Shakespeare does not choose his words arbitrarily.

Listening:

-Perhaps the hardest thing to learn while doing Shakespeare is to learn to fully listen to what is happening around you while you are performing. To practice this skill try the following things:

• Listen to yourself breathe.
• Then notice how many other noises you are able to hear. Start listening to what is closest to you and move away. Stretch your ears are far as possible.
• Listen to the music of someone else’s speech patten. Do they end sentances with an upward inflection? Downward? Does it stay the same or change?
• Listen to the words people choose to emphasize in their speech.
• The challenge: listen to a viewpoint that is not your own. Don’t think of your rebuttal, why you disagree or anything about yourself. Simply listen to it. Analyze how they are speaking rather than what they are saying.

Word Construction

-You must be able to speak clearly in order to be understood, and also to find the resonance within the words.

Compare: O, my offence is rank, it smells to heaven (Hamlet)

To: What studied torments, tyrant, hast for me? (A Winter’s Tale)

-Compare the use of vowels and the hard Ts and Ds. What does this tell you about the emotion of the speaker? (Read out loud. Make sure you can hear the difference in the words!)

Activity

-Take a monologue. Read the first two lines (at least) twice, making sure to pronounce your vowels correctly and hit the consonants.  Simply read clearly. Don’t act the lines- emotion will come through the word construction. Find someone to give you feedback.

- On the first time through have the listening partner listen to make sure the speaker is hitting the consonants correctly and hard. Make needed corrections.

- On the second read through discuss what emotions are shown by the word construction.

Conclusion: You must be a clear speaker to find the emotion in the words themselves (beyond the meaning of the words) and to woo the audience into listening to you.

Activities and coursework from Patsy Rodenberg’s Speaking Shakespeare.

Basic tenets:

-To understand any play text fully you have to speak it.

- To release the full power you have to commit through the body, breath and word.

-  You have the trust the words and know what those words mean.

-  To access the power of the play you have to know how the play is constructed.

-You can’t act Shakespeare until you can speak him.

There are no short cuts in this work. You have to work with the text of Shakespeare with both voice and body until it becomes intrinsic and instinctive in your brain.

Trust the clarity of the words (no maybes in Shakespeare’s text!) and take the risk of engaging with the text.  The characters in Shakespeare speak their passions and fully commit to every action.

Centering

-With feet at shoulder width apart, flop over like a rag doll, shake the tensions out, and slowly straighten up… vertebrae by vertebrae.

-  Place your hands on your stomach or sides and take three slow, deep breaths ensuring that your hands move each time.

- Without moving your head begin to notice everything around you, from the others in the room to the light quality to the ambient sounds. Remain aware of these through the rest of the class.

-Breathe and let your arms open wide and raise up. Feel energy going out your fingertips.

-As you relax feel the parts of you that want to withdraw with tension.  Work on keeping them open.

Breath Support & Voice

- Breathe in and release on an aaaah for 10 seconds.

• This is an exercise to continue to do until you can release for a full 10 seconds, or more. Work will increase your capacity.

-Do it again on an aaaah sound as far as you can, but stop before you are pushing.

• Try three in a row. Do you feel tense?

- Find a spot on the wall. In contemporary speech we tend to drop away at the end of a statement rather than grow. In Shakespeare we need to grow.  Place both hands against the wall and on an aaa vowel push against the wall growing the volume of the aaaah for 10 seconds.

• Stop increasing volume when you feel you are pushing. With practice you will increase your capacity for volume.

- As you learn speeches make sure you continue to breathe both supported and easy throughout. You will often need to learn how to breathe the piece before you can speak it.

You are now in a state of readiness to attack Shakespeare.

We are going to start a regular set of posts here to help with working with the text of All’s Well That Ends Well (and Shakespeare in general).

Please feel free to ask questions on the posts if you have them and we will respond as soon as possible to them! You may not be the only person with the question, so please post anything that comes to mind as you read this.

To start with:

All’s Well That Ends Well is often defined as a Chekovian Comedy. What is a Chekovian comedy? Cambridge defines this as:

‘First of all I’d get my patients in a laughing mood – and only then would I begin to treat them.’ Chekhov’s words sum up the motivation for his comedy: laughter as medicine, and a vital prerequisite for any treatment of his fellow human beings. Implicit is the sense that laughter – and comedy – are restorative, and that the objectivity and detachment which laughter may produce could inoculate us against such human diseases as pomposity, hypocrisy, selfcentredness, laziness, or – the worst of all – wasting life. It is Doctor Chekhov who wrote those words, and beneath them lies a serious but non-judgemental sense that laughter is curative and healthy. Chekhov’s comedy is therefore not only a stylistic feature in his works, but is also a vital part of his philosophy. It is the point where content and form meet, the one usually inseparable from the other. And this, in turn, relates to the subject matter of his works – not the artificial and complex, though enjoyable, plot lines of farces by Labiche or Feydeau, or their third-rate imitators, but the daily lives of ordinary people.  (Gottlieb, Vera. “Chekhov’s comedy.” The Cambridge Companion to Chekhov. Eds. Vera Gottlieb and Paul Allain. Cambridge University Press, 2000. Cambridge Collections Online. Cambridge University Press. 09 November 2010 DOI:10.1017/CCOL0521581176.018)

Here’s another article: http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/tv_and_radio/article6805327.ece

So, after reading that, what do you think? A dark comedy? A laughing tragedy? How would you compare them? How does the comedy in All’s Well work?