performance

I picked up the book How to Speak Shakespeare by Cal Pritner and Louis Colaianni. It should be titled How to Speak Shakespeare for Students because it spends a lot of time covering extreme basics like the difference between verbs and nouns—but I suppose that the best place to start is at the beginning, and making assumptions about an audience’s prior knowledge often reduces the effectiveness of instruction, so I can understand why the basic grammatical review is there.

Often times puns and alliterations that would have passed you by will pop into plain view when you read the plays aloud, so even if you don’t go crazy and buy a book about reading the plays out loud, try it yourself. It will sound silly at first, but the longer you read, the more you start to “get it.” It was reading Twelfth Night aloud that got me hooked on The Bard.

How to Speak Shakespeare briefly addresses the poetic form of the majority of Will’s works: iambic pentameter. It starts you off by having you read the prologue from Romeo and Juliet in the tedious “da DUM, da DUM, da DUM, da DUM, da DUM” pronunciation. Had the book stopped there, I would have chucked it in the proverbial fire. But the reason I like the book, so far, is that it proceeds to explain to you why you should never read Will’s poetry like that. The reason? It’s boring! Predictable patterns aren’t entertaining or exciting. People want to be surprised; shocked; moved. The best way to read Shakespeare is to learn what an “iambic foot” is and then forget it. When you’re reading Shakespeare, forget you’re reading Shakespeare. You can always tell a bad Shakespeare actor when it sounds like they’re reading poetry when they speak.

Here are some things you might to do avoid “bad Shakespeare acting”:

1. Go to Open Source Shakespeare, copy some lines from a play, paste them into a word processor, then remove all the line breaks. Make it all one big paragraph. Then read it. Forget that it’s poetry. Pretend it’s prose.
2. Watch Ken Brannagh’s Much Ado About Nothing and pay attention to how Denzel Washington speaks. Then pay attention to how Keanu Reeves speaks. Denzel sounds like he’s talking to you in your living room. Keanu sounds like he’s reading poetry.
3. Get yourself worked up before you read Shakespeare out loud. If you’re angry or upset you’ll naturally stress the syllables and words you’re supposed to stress.

Have fun!