William Shakespeare

Playwrights

Sep 14

Treat language as action: an argument, a seduction, a joke, an attempt to keep someone alive.

William Shakespeare (1564–1616) wrote plays as a working actor and member of a London theatre company. The surviving record connects his life with Stratford-upon-Avon and London. You can use the Folger’s account to separate documented facts from stories that later gathered around the name.

Major works

You can begin with Much Ado About Nothing for intersecting love stories, Hamlet for a revenge story full of questions, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream for lovers moving through a changed theatrical world. Folger provides a separate introduction and text for each play. Let those differences guide your preparation instead of choosing one grand “Shakespeare voice.”

Applications for actors

When you read a speech, trace the thought through its turns. Where do you ask a question, correct yourself, offer an image or arrive at a conclusion? Give the language somewhere to go: toward a listener, an imagined person, an obstacle or an audience. You can study the verse alongside that action rather than treating its pattern as a ready-made melody.

For your reading and rehearsal, consider these interpretations alongside the complete play.

How a thought becomes a theatrical event

What changes when your character begins to speak in verse? You have a shaped line, but the thought may continue beyond its end. A question may interrupt an argument; a short reply may complete a rhythmic unit begun by somebody else. You can hear those possibilities by distinguishing punctuation, line endings and changes of intention. None of them needs to become a mechanical instruction to pause. Their value lies in what they let you discover about a mind working under pressure.

In Hamlet, you encounter thinking that changes direction as it proceeds. You can follow an image into an argument and then hear the speaker challenge the argument. A soliloquy, a speech spoken when the character is alone or addressing an audience beyond the other characters, gives you a particular relationship to the people listening. You need to decide what the speech is doing now. Merely displaying what you have already concluded can flatten the very activity the language makes available.

The comedies ask for equal precision. In Much Ado About Nothing, you can compare the verbal contest between Beatrice and Benedick with the damaging circulation of information around Hero and Claudio. Who hears a claim, who believes it and who gets to answer can reorganize the action. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, you move among lovers, rulers, fairies and a group preparing a performance. Each world gives you different rules of attention and authority. A change of theatrical scale still needs an intelligible human purpose.

What the body and voice contribute

How do you make unfamiliar language available to a listener? You need the physical capacity to carry a complete thought and the imaginative specificity to make its images matter. An image of weather, illness, hunting or money has a practical world behind it. Research that world, then ask why this speaker reaches for it at this instant. The image can persuade, threaten, conceal or discover something. Your articulation serves its arrival in another person's imagination.

You can also follow how Shakespeare distributes knowledge. The audience may know who is disguised while your character does not. You may suspect a deception without possessing proof. Those differences make listening consequential. Prepare what you know at each entrance, and let the next event alter it. The reward of studying this writing is the range it demands from you: intimate persuasion, public address, rapid comic exchange and large changes of feeling can all belong to the same dramatic world.

Working with the text

Bring these questions to your complete edition of the play.

Choose a short exchange from your complete edition. Speak it once to change your partner’s mind, keeping every word. On the next pass, notice one contrast in the language and make both sides specific in your imagination. Let the partner’s answer change the urgency of your next thought. Compare the attempts before deciding what to keep.

Interpreting the work

When you use an edition, keep its scene and line references in your notes. A film, a translation, an adaptation and the play’s printed text may make different choices. You can learn from each while being precise about which version you are rehearsing.