“My Instructions May Be Your Guide”

SEVEN STEPS TO SHIPSHAPE SHAKESPEARE

These keys to unlocking the Bard’s secrets are distilled from the basic principles of Shakespearean acting taught to actors daily in the country’s leading drama schools. (And I should know: I teach them there!) They can help lift the veil of obscurity off Shakespeare’s alien-seeming language and reveal the familiar and comprehensible English hidden underneath.

Apply some of the following techniques to the excerpts of Shakespeare in this book, or to any others you fancy, and you’ll find his language starting to feel as comfortable in your mouth and sound as familiar in your ears as the words you speak and hear in regular conversation. You may also find that your appreciation for all poetry, and not just Shakespeare’s, gets an unexpected and altogether happy boost.

Here, then, the Seven Steps to Shipshape Shakespeare.

STEP 1: Know What You’re Saying

It’s extremely easy to regard the strange vocabulary and alien syntax in Shakespeare as either insuperable obstacles or generalities to be approximated rather than understood. After all, the language is four hundred years old, and English in Shakespeare’s day resembled German—the tongue from which it most recently derived—much more than it does today, and shared many byzantine grammatical structures with that still highly complex language. But a great way to get specific with the text, to bring it into your mouth and brain sounding fresh and new four centuries after it was written, is to ensure that you know exactly what you’re saying. A great way to do that is to translate Shakespeare into modern, accessible, colloquial English that makes it effortlessly clear in your own mind. Write a paraphrase. Actors preparing a Shakespearean role sit with dictionaries and scholarly editions and work through their lines word by word to make certain they know what everything means. To save you that time-consuming, brain-boiling work, I have included paraphrases with almost every excerpt of Shakespeare in this book, the exceptions being those passages whose language is simple and clear enough that they’re self-explanatory. You’ll note that my paraphrases have a very colloquial style, a loosey-goosey aspect that lends them a certain energy and flow. This is deliberate. Paraphrases help most when they’re simplest. They needn’t be pedantically precise, such as “To exist, or to negate existence: this is the central inquiry” (Hamlet’s “To be or not to be, that is the question”), nor need they restate the obvious, as in “The day after today, and the day after today, and the day after today” (Macbeth’s “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow”). Instead, they should express each of the basic thoughts in Shakespeare’s text in terms that are immediately comprehensible to a modern ear. To achieve this, they might need to spell out certain concepts that Shakespeare leaves veiled, or even to rearrange things ever so slightly. Thus, for Hamlet: “What I’m wondering is whether I should go on living or not”; for Macbeth: “Time moves along relentlessly, inexorably, slowly.” Sometimes they’ll sound a little goofy, like “Watch out for March fifteenth!” (that’s “Beware the ides of March” from Julius Caesar), and often they’ll render soaring poetry in terms that are eye-rollingly flat, as does “The glory of the divine presence can be seen even in things as ordinary as a dying bird” (that’s Hamlet’s “There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow,” and it really loses something in translation). A good paraphrase will clarify abstruse terms, burn away the fog that can obscure simple thoughts, and reveal arguments in language that’s maximally easy to wrap one’s head around.

STEP 2: Antithesis: The Juxtaposition of Opposites Everywhere in Shakespeare

Americans well know these famous phrases:

Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.

The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.

Anyone speaking the first passage aloud will naturally emphasize the words that oppose each other, as JFK did at his inauguration, because those words convey the very meaning of the thought. Stressing any other words would result in nonsense: “Ask not WHAT your country CAN do FOR you, ask what you can DO for YOUR country.” Ridiculous. The very idea being expressed depends upon—is built upon—the contrast between two opposites: What your country can do for you versus what you can do for your country. Similarly, no English speaker in his right mind would quote Lincoln talking about the difference between “WHAT we say HERE” and “what THEY did HERE.” Preposterous. The only way to make this extraordinary sentence comprehensible is to stress the contrasts between the ideas not remember and never forget, and between what we say and what they did. At Gettysburg, opposition communicates meaning.

Rhetoricians call the juxtaposition of strongly contrasting ideas within a balanced grammatical structure antithesis. Shakespeare is addicted to it:

To be or not to be, that is the question.

Two loves I have, of comfort and despair.

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,

But in ourselves, that we are underlings.

Now is the winter of our discontent

Made glorious summer by this son of York.

That which hath made them drunk hath made me bold.

I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.

The evil that men do lives after them,

The good is oft interrèd with their bones.

In peace, there’s nothing so becomes a man

As modest stillness and humility,

But when the blast of war blows in our ears,

Then imitate the action of the tiger.*

Antithesis is so widespread in Shakespeare that you can flip open your Complete Works to any page, point your finger to any line, and find within three or four lines of it something that sounds a lot like the excerpts above. Every antithesis requires its speaker to emphasize the juxtaposed ideas. Stress any words other than those directly opposed to each other, and you’ll make a hash of what’s being said.

To help you identify the words you need to lean upon in order to get the most out of Shakespeare’s antitheses, I will list them in my comments where necessary.

STEP 3: The Changing Height of Language: Shakespeare’s Language Swings Back and Forth from Highly Poetical to Very Simple

The best way to understand what a shift from heightened to simple language does is to observe one in action. Consider the first line of Act 1, Scene 4 of Hamlet, spoken by the play’s title character. It’s late on a winter night, and he’s out on the castle ramparts with his friend Horatio and the soldier Marcellus, awaiting the reappearance of his father’s ghost. He says:

The air bites shrewdly. It is very cold.

The second of these two sentences requires no paraphrase. It is very cold is not heightened or elevated, nor for that matter “Shakespearean,” in any way at all. It’s just a simple declarative statement, something any of us might say on any February evening. The first sentence is something else entirely. It imagines the air as a living being of some sort, complete with a mouth and teeth. This biting air is tactical, strategic: it bites in a shrewd manner, that is, cannily, subtly, with an ulterior motive. The adverb shrewdly acquires its meaning from the shrew, a tiny rodent with a long snout that allows it to insinuate itself into even tightly closed places. A literal translation of Hamlet’s first sentence, then, might read, “The air is a shrew biting my skin.” This vividly metaphorical expression of coldness could be rendered in an even simpler paraphrase: “It’s very cold.” Put that paraphrase next to the second sentence, and you’ll find that Hamlet is saying, essentially, “It’s very cold. It’s very cold.”

Why does Hamlet say “It’s cold” twice? The answer is about the changing height of his language. Hamlet, educated at Germany’s Wittenberg University, is comfortable with heightened language and complex thought. Perhaps he says the first sentence to Horatio, also a distinguished WU alumnus (“Knockwurst, Bratwurst, go, Vit, go!”), but says the second, simpler half to the lumpen soldier Marcellus. Perhaps he says the first sentence to Marcellus, who doesn’t get it, forcing Hamlet to clarify with the second sentence. Perhaps Hamlet says the first sentence aloud to everyone, and then turns aside and says the second sentence to himself. Or vice versa.

We can’t know what Shakespeare had in mind when he wrote these words. All we can do is interpret them and use our best efforts to bring them to life in a truthful way. In this sense, there’s never any correct or incorrect way to say the lines. None of the four interpretations I posited above is right, nor is any wrong. They’re just ideas for actor and director to try in rehearsal. The key point about all of them is that they arise from a close reading of the text that reveals that one half of the line is heightened, and the other is not. Anyone trying to communicate its underlying ideas must first recognize the change that happens halfway through it, think about why that change is there, and then say the line in a manner that uses its change of height to make both parts of it sharp, lifelike, and clear.

STEP 4: Verbs: Special Heightening Agents

Verbs are specially charged by definition, because they are words whose syntactical job—to cause action—requires of them a greater energy than that called for from the other parts of speech. Hamlet says that the reason the fear of death is so powerful is that it “puzzles the will” and “makes us rather bear those ills we have / Than fly to others that we know not of.” The italics are mine, of course, and they indicate the verbs (or verb phrases), which happen to be the words that any speaker of English will naturally stress as they try to make Hamlet’s ideas clear. Try to say these phrases sans emphasis on the verbs, and all you’ll have is mush.

One of the most effective ways to bring Shakespeare alive in your mouth or in your mind is to underline the verbs as you work through the text. Their communicative vigor is so copious, potent, and expressive that they will actually haul you right through a speech’s thoughts from start to finish…if you let them. Always, always hit the verbs. And use them in whatever form they appear: participial or gerundial verbs used as adjectives or other parts of speech (“the pangs of disprized love”; “there’s nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so”) carry great energy and are indispensable.

I will flag useful verbs, verb forms, and verb phrases throughout this book.

STEP 5: Scansion and Meter: The Time Signature Behind the Lines

The majority of Shakespeare’s work, and the majority of the excerpts quoted in this book, is written in verse. As distinct from its antithesis, prose (of which there’s plenty in Shakespeare, some of which we’ll see as well), verse is language that’s composed in individual lines that conform to a given rhythm. That rhythm is created by the individual syllables in the words of the line, some of which receive stress and some of which don’t. The art and science of counting the stressed and unstressed syllables in a line and then affixing to them a label that helps readers navigate the poem is called scansion, and it serves to identify the poem’s meter, or time signature.

The most important meter for anyone working on Shakespeare is the famous iambic pentameter. That’s a fancy label for a verse line whose count (meter) is five (penta, as in pentagon) so-called feet, or sets of syllables, which are iambs. An iamb is a foot comprising two syllables, the first of which is unstressed and the second stressed. It sounds like this: dee-DUM. New York is iambic: new YORK. So are Detroit (de-TROIT) and hello (hel-LO) and goodbye (good-BYE) and shalom (sha-LOM). Standard scansion notation marks the first syllable with a caret and the second with an accent mark: ň ń.

Put five iambs next to one another, and they look, and sound, like this:

ňń     ňń     ňń     ňń     ňń

dee-DUM dee-DUM dee-DUM dee-DUM dee-DUM

Any verse that conforms to that ten-syllable, fivefold, unstressed-STRESSED pattern is labeled iambic pentameter or its non-technical synonym, blank verse.

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears

(friends ROM-ans COUNT-ry-MEN lend ME your EARS)

Now is the winter of our discontent

(now IS the WIN-ter OF our DIS-con-TENT)

There is a tide in the affairs of men

(there IS a TIDE in THE af-FAIRS of MEN)

To be or not to be, that is the question

(to BE or NOT to BE that IS the QUES-[tion])

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow

(to-MOR-row AND to-MOR-row AND to-MOR-[row])

All Shakespeare, and all iambic pentameter.

Trained Shakespearean actors bang through the stressed and unstressed syllables in their scripts like so many Tito Puentes drumming away at a very literate set of timbales:

the FAULT dear BRU-tus IS not IN our STARS

ba-BANG ba-BOOM ba-BING ba-BLAM ba-BUMP

but IN our-SELVES that WE are UN-der-LINGS

dee-DUM dee-DUM dee-DUM dee-DUM dee-DUM

This percussive analysis reveals all sorts of fascinating things about the rhythm of Shakespeare’s lines:

It can tell you that a certain word you thought was unimportant actually falls in a position where the scansion gives it stress. “In” in the two lines above is an interesting case. Most of us would ignore that little word, but Cassius deliberately stresses it both times he uses it. Bang out the meter on your tabletop, and you’ll hear that interesting detail.

It can tell you that a certain word is pronounced differently in Shakespeare than we’re used to hearing it. That special pronunciation might require you to emphasize a given syllable in a surprising way, as in this antithesis-crammed line from Much Ado About Nothing: “Thou pure impiety and impious purity!” Impious, the opposite of pious, which we pronounce im-PYE-us, is pronounced IM-pyus in this line as it is every time it’s used in Shakespeare, and here purity is pronounced with two syllables, not three: PURE-tee. Thou PURE im-PYE-uh-TEE and IM-pyus PURE-tee. Without hammering through the scansion, we’d never say the words correctly.

It can point to inflections in prefixes or suffixes to words, like that famous stressed -ed at the ends of words that’s such a prominent part of Shakespeare’s characteristic sound. Octavius Caesar opens Act 5 of Julius Caesar with this Bardism, Shakespeare on the Occasion of Good News:

Now, Antony, our hopes are answered.

If you pronounce answered with two syllables, as a modern English speaker instinctively would, the line will only have nine syllables, not the ten that iambic pentameter demands. Only by stressing the -ed ending will the meter be complete, and only then will Shakespeare’s hopes be answerèd.

Throughout this book I will mark inflected -ed endings with an accent grave (-èd), and I will point out other places where the scansion demands an unusual pronunciation.

I will also point out where it’s best to disregard what the scansion suggests when it leads to a reading that’s overly pedantic, technical-sounding, weird, and alienating. Would any English-speaker’s instincts produce this reading?

friends ROM-ans COUNT-ry-MEN lend ME your EARS

Unlikely. Although technically correct, this is instinctively wrong. It sounds bizarre, herky-jerky, shouty. Let the scansion go, and you’ll find that the line will probably come out more like this:

FRIENDS, ROM-ans, COUNT-ry-men, LEND ME your EARS

Spoken according to natural instinct, the line turns out to be iambic pentameter in name only. Its natural rhythm is far more nuanced and interesting. Shakespeare regards iambic pentameter as more of a guide than a prescription; a map, not a destination. He’s like a jazz musician, establishing a baseline rhythm, then improvising around it, syncopating it into something much more loose and free. Actors are trained to understand this, and to recognize that for every line of verse, there’s the scansion that the meter suggests and the scansion that natural instinct suggests; that is, there’s the metric stress and the natural stress. The best actors know that scansion can provide important, often surprising, information about the words in the lines, but that this information is only useful insofar as it helps clarify what the line is trying to say. Think of scansion and meter as tools that refine your instincts, but don’t replace them.

STEP 6: Phrasing with the Verse Line: Cover the Speech with a Piece of Paper and Read It One Line at a Time

Take a look at how this Bardism, Shakespeare on the Evil Maniac in a Horror Movie, is arranged:

’Tis now the very witching time of night,

When churchyards yawn and hell itself breathes out

Contagion to this world. Now could I drink hot blood,

And do such bitter business as the day

Would quake to look on. Soft! Now to my mother. 5

—HAMLET, Hamlet, 3.3-358-362

In other words, “It’s now dead midnight, when graves gape open and hell breathes disease into the world. Now I could guzzle hot blood, and do the kind of terrible things that daylight itself would shudder to behold.—Take it easy!—Now I’ll visit my mom.”

Notice what happens at the end of each line in the excerpt. Lines 1 and 3 are marked with commas, and line 5 ends with a period. That punctuation falls where it does because the thoughts expressed in lines 1, 3, and 5 all end at the ends of the lines. That is, there is a change or development in the direction of Hamlet’s thinking between night and when, and between blood and and, and the commas denote the end of one phase of that thinking and the beginning of the next. And Hamlet completes a thought about his mom with mother, so the period marks that stop. Lines 1, 3, and 5 are therefore called end-stopped lines, because the ideas on them stop where the verse line ends.

Lines 2 and 4, however, have no punctuation at all. They don’t need any, because the thoughts they express continue unbroken from the end of one line onto the start of the next. Line 2 is about how hell itself breathes out contagion, but that thought is too long to fit on one line of iambic pentameter, so Shakespeare spreads it over two lines, dividing it between out and contagion. Similarly, line 4 is concerned with business the day would quake to look on. Again, this unbroken thought, too long for line 4 to contain, spills onto line 5. Lines 2 and 4 are not end-stopped; the thoughts they express don’t stop at the ends of the lines. Their thoughts run onto the next line, and so we call them run-on lines.*

How should one phrase this language? Lines 1, 3, and 5 take care of themselves. The fact that they’re end-stopped will automatically make any Hamlet break his phrasing at the ends of the lines, precisely where the commas and period indicate a break, breath, or slight suspension of momentum. Lines 2 and 4 are trickier. Should you phrase them according to the punctuation? That would sound like this:

When churchyards yawn and hell itself breathes out contagion to this world.

And do such bitter business as the day would quake to look on.

These readings are clear enough, but they transform poetic verse carefully composed in iambic pentameter into a kind of modern prose devoid of any kind of rhythmic signature. Bitter business indeed.

Suppose instead we separate the lines again and think of their ends as moments of thought. What if we imagine Hamlet thinking in the moment and choosing words to express his thoughts, asking himself exactly what it is that hell itself breathes into the world, and just what the day would do when it sees the bitter business he’s going to conduct? Watch what happens to the odd endings of lines 2 and 4 if we force Hamlet to ask himself those questions:

When churchyards yawn and hell itself breathes out…(what?)…

Contagion to this world.

And do such bitter business as the day…(what?)…

Would quake to look on.

Hamlet could say that hell itself breathes out any of a million things into this world, and that the day would do any of a thousand things when it sees his bitter business. But the exact words he chooses are contagion and quake. The line endings give him opportunities to find specific ideas and express them in specific words.

Run-on lines are very special in Shakespeare, as in all verse. They provide the actor an opportunity to make his mind and his character’s one and the same. They tell the actor to ask “What next?” and then to search for precisely the right word that expresses in every last nuance what it is he’s trying to say. Ask (what?) at the end of every single line, or have a friend shout it out for you, and as you answer the question you’ll begin to write the language for yourself.

’Tis now the very witching time of night, (whaddaya mean?)

When churchyards yawn and hell itself breathes out (what?)

Contagion to this world. Now could I drink hot blood, (what else?)

And do such bitter business as the day (what about it?)

Would quake to look on. Soft! Now to my mother.

A technique I call the “Paper Trick” is an easy and effective way to quickly get you phrasing verse one line at a time. Simply take a blank piece of paper and cover the speech you’re working on, revealing only its very first line. Say that line, and when you reach its end—and only when you reach its end—slide the paper down to reveal the next line—and only the next line. Say that line, slide the paper down again, say the next line, then slide and speak, slide and speak, slide, speak, until you reach the end of the speech. I promise that the speech will become significantly clearer and easier to say on the very first pass through it. With practice, this one-line-at-a-time phrasing will become as instinctual to you as normal speech.

Two caveats. First, beware of regarding the line ending as a pause. It isn’t. It’s a moment of thought, a momentary scan of your mental hard drive, or, as the eminent British Shakespeare director Sir Peter Hall calls it, an “energy point.” It moves you forward onto the next idea, just as a springboard moves you forward from the pool’s edge into the water. The line ending isn’t about stopping, it’s about continuing ahead. Listen to yourself and make sure you’re not sounding like a metronome—ten beats, pause, ten beats, pause, ten beats, pause. Know that if the technique of phrasing with the verse line sounds awkward to your ears or makes you feel uncomfortable, you can ignore it and read the lines as though they were prose. You might disappoint the English professors among your listeners, but the Shakespeare police won’t come and throw you in theater jail.

Second, don’t interpret phrasing with the verse line as a command to ignore punctuation altogether. Especially within lines, the punctuation provides invaluable information about sense, rhythm, phrasing, and even tone. Strike a balance between following it and hewing to the rigorous construction of the verse, and you’re home free.

STEP 7: Monosyllables and Polysyllables: Note the Words with Only One Syllable and the Ones with a Lot of Them

One of Shakespeare’s specialties is to work dazzling rhythmic magic by alternating between passages in which the words have only one syllable and passages comprising words with many syllables.

Monosyllables generally require an actor to slow down and really invest in an idea one word at a time. It’s no coincidence that many of Shakespeare’s most famous phrases are monosyllabic: “Hath not a Jew eyes?” “To be or not to be.” “To thine own self be true.” “Out damned spot, out I say.” “It was Greek to me.” “The ides of March.” Even the not-so-famous phrase we saw above, “Now could I drink hot blood.” In each case, each individual word is important and demands emphasis, and the overall thought demands a deliberate, if not to say stately, pace, which makes it endure in our minds.

Polysyllables, on the other hand, have a sprightliness and speed. In the “hot blood” passage above, the eight words very witching, churchyards, itself, contagion, bitter business, and mother, all polysyllabic, take on a distinctive quality simply because they are sprinkled amidst thirty-six thudding monosyllables. These words demand their own particular pace and feeling.

I’ll point out the places where a series of monosyllables is particularly noteworthy, or where a sudden switch to polysyllables makes a word or idea jaunty, memorable, and fun.

So there you have it: the Seven Steps to Shipshape Shakespeare.

There are many more techniques to discuss—how important words tend to fall in certain places in the lines; how vowels and consonants come together to make a very idiosyncratic Shakespearean music—and I will touch on some of them throughout this book.

But for starters, try these seven. Try a handful; try only one. Each will help demystify some small corner of Shakespeare’s legend. Each will bring Shakespeare’s language closer to you, and you closer to Shakespeare’s language. Through these techniques, Shakespeare will become to you, as he is to me now two decades into my work on him, a friend to whom you can turn on all occasions.