Transcription
[Music] hello so welcome to our lecture on uh verse uh heightened speech and um and a look at some examples mainly drawn from shakespeare just to demystify a little bit of the the the issues or things you might come across that seem problematic about performing shakespeare and then also to kind of give you some clues in order to look at the page and um and find those uh clues as to how to how shakespeare helps the actor uh perform and uh and make choices from this from the script there's a lot of stage directions or um kind of ways that shakespeare lets us know how to say certain lines or it gives us the rhythm of lines in order to uh to communicate and make the story more clear.
first i i just want to say that there just like i've said before there is no right and wrong there is less and more sophisticated so this is to help you again make choices based on the information that you have and those choices are made just by you if you're preparing alone or with a director a teacher if you're collaborating with others and um it's a it's a just a reminder that um there is always gonna be a next time that you perform this that uh you can make that other choice then and um really just look for a way to play with the language.
all playwrights not just shakespeare use rhythm in their writing and i'm not just talking about verse i'm talking about modern playwrights and all the way dating back to the first plays that were ever written um they uh were spoken they um uh draw upon the rhythm of language in performance and that's just important to understand that the especially for verse the rhythm of blank verse in case this case iambic pentameter was written down because it was observed as the way english speakers spoke not because some poet wanted to codify or put a rhythmic beat for the language to fit into the language already moves this way and so this was an observation and playwrights would write in this way because they observed that's how the language moved.
the the real thing that shakespeare uh came along and and made uh happen was that he took um the the way the english language moved on its own and started to break the rules on purpose in order to for dramatic effect and that's what we're gonna really talk about um so think about um you know everything that you see on the page is done on purpose all the rhythm so it's you know the specificity of a monet brush stroke or a bach cord and a corral everything is done expressly and in this case in order to tell a story in order to communicate uh not just um the general plot but also the character's point of view what the character was feeling um how they were how fast they were thinking and the rate of thought and that is very important as you approach this work.
the like anything balance is probably the most important thing to remember here uh if you get too overworked in oh this rhythm here and this um line is gonna and you get so specific you should get specific but if you get bogged down in that and forget to employ all of the acting emotional quality and vulnerability then it will only be one thing or only the emotional and without the structure so really the structure is there in order to feed all of the other stuff into it and um this approach of balance should really be used as you begin to and continue for your career to to work with this kind of language um and you will discover more every time you work.
finally this work has to be done by speaking out loud you can certainly look at a page and academically try to analyze uh all the stuff and and you can see it on the page but it really really jumps out and stands out uh if you get the language out into the world and so you know when i'm directing i read a play when i say i read a play i read the whole thing out loud i read it out a lot a few times so i can understand the rhythm and of the characters how they're talking to each other their point of view and and um and listening or or speaking whether you do this alone or with a friend or a group of friends is tremendously helpful and in fact invaluable to understanding what you want to say and how you want to say it and and how it is on the page and how to make it work for an audience so let us turn the page now to looking at blank verse or ambig pentameter.
okay iambic pentameter we'll break down the word and uh just to discover the meanings we have a measure of something which is the meter yeah the penta means five just like quad means four or octa means eight um so we have pentameter pentameter so there is a measure of five what are we measuring ims so i-a-a-i-a-m-b uh so we have iambic pentameter an im is a foot of poetry where the stresses fall unstressed and then stressed so there are two uh little beats in the foot and they sound like this so an i am is an unstressed followed by a stressed beat and when you have five of them it goes um yes there are other measures of of uh iambic uh poetry there is also poetry that does not sit in this way there's poetry that sits up a different stress and there are names for all of it i'm not going to talk about it here because we're just going to concern ourselves with this iambic pentameter for the moment.
the other way to refer to that is verse or blank verse we will talk in class i will refer to this mainly as a verse i don't usually say oh go into the iambic pentameter because verse is the all-encompassing uh word that means the structure of with that metered uh writing on the page and we will examine the way it is used particularly the way poets use the meter and then broke the rules as i said shakespeare was the first one to come along and change things and use really really use the rule breaking as a way of writing so while um the verse helps things become more precise it helps the actor memorize because there's a certain number of beats in the line um it also can denote or indicate status prose which is just looks like a paragraph on the page can be used to say oh these are more lower thinking people like the rustics in mid-summer and the versus reserve for the nobles that's not always the case where it indicates structure i'm sorry status but it does happen.
the um the switch between pros and verse can also indicate a light bulb going on and a heightened level of thinking such as a um we'll look at in 12th night there's a scene between olivia and um viola where viola uses verse to kind of um show her intellect uh and then there's a play like much ado about nothing which is written almost entirely in prose and that's to indicate that that play is not to be taken light not to be taken seriously there are some serious events and those events end up being inverse um but the uh the overall feeling of the play is less stressful therefore the choices made to write in prose um the way i guess the the best way to try to first unlock uh the verse is to just read it as you would speak it and not worry about where the beats fall and then to look exactly where the beats should fall so we have kind of two meters we have the iambic pentameter and then we have the sense meter we can call it which is just speaking things how they make sense um we have a good um i have a good example from julius caesar which we'll be looking at there's friends romans countrymen lend me your ears breaks a lot of rules and then the following line is i come to see i come to bury caesar not to praise him i come to bear he caesar not to praise him the word stress kind of falls as a natural native english speaker would uh would say it um the line before friends romans countrymen lend me your ears the stress uh the natural speaking stress goes against the where you would mark the beats in an iambic pentameter or on i am and so it's to let the audience know to uh or whoever's listening no this is a different moment a different way to catch the ear and it's mark anthony who says this and he does say it in order to catch the audience's attention and then he settles into uh the rhythm so it's a great way to look at um the way characters are trying to affect others with their speech.
there is also a great example of rule breaking in henry v where they're about to run into battle um and it's once more unto the breach dear friends once more now if i use the iambic pentameter strictly i hear once more unto the breached your friends once more so i should read it like that to say oh wow that doesn't really feel like english and then read it as it makes sense once more unto the breach dear friends once more i find all of a sudden there are seven stressed syllables in the line instead of uh instead of five and i hear king harry going into battle breaking all the rules with his heartbeat going we hear the the the energy the activity inside um emotionally and it's a clue to say i'm breaking rules go ahead and use not just not just notice that there uh the the sense stress falls on unstressed syllables but that you can almost double stress it because it's on an offbeat and it will sound really exciting um so this is a that's a very very quick uh introduction or explanation rather um to verse we'll be talking more about it in class and answering questions and but it is up to all of you to go into your text and take a look um i provided pre-scanned texts so you can go and read them out loud and say oh wow that that's just how i would say it or no i would say this in a different way than what the the bold words are on the page and therefore there's something going on that i need to pay attention to you can get together with some friends to do this uh if you are not a native english speaker and don't have a sense of natural how words naturally fall in the english language it's a very good idea to either work with a friend who does or go listen to an audio book of a native speaker doing this go listen to a find a performance of it please do any tools you can use to to find that variation those difference will really really help you bring the text alive.