Transcription
I mentioned, uh, just briefly a few moments ago, um, pausing a lot in your, in your speeches and your thoughts. And so I want to just very quickly talk about breath and where to breathe, uh, because it seems to be always a question when dealing with a verse.
First, always breathe, uh, at any final punctuation. That is to say, a period, a question mark, and an, uh, exclamation point. Um, then you may absolutely take a breath at the end of any verse line. Um, however, you don't need to. And I would say that a breath and a pause are two different things. And quite often, um, I hear more pauses than breaths. Um, I can take a breath very quickly and keep the thought moving, as I did just then. Whereas, I don't need to take a breath and pause and go on in this way, because you start not to hear the sentence, but you just hear a bunch of broken thoughts that sound like their own sentences. And that really, really stops the momentum in Shakespeare and gets in the way of delivering the text. And that's when people in the audience just start to check out because they don't understand what's happening.
So, really, first look for those final punctuations and see how long the thoughts are. And then use the punctuation along the way as a jumping-off point to move the thought forward. Those other pieces of punctuation are commas, semicolons, colons, parentheses, brackets, hyphens, quotations, any, any other punctuation that you see. Use it as an opportunity. I memorize not just my lines, but my words by my punctuation as well. And if that is in your body, you can really, really feel the thought. And the breath that you take gets you ready to deliver this thought, so that you can breathe in the impulse to speak the thought, which is usually what the end of the sentence is. But you, you're ready to connect all the thoughts with breaths along the way. So you can experiment, um, wrapping lines around and not breathing, and all that, or breathing at the end of every line, or, and every punctuation. Um, but I, I believe that, um, if you see or have the approach of breathing in the thoughts, that, um, you will find a, your management of your breath becomes easier. And this is something that we will discuss in class, of course. So do experiment a little bit, especially if you have a big block of text in, "Okay, how am I gonna, how am I gonna breathe? Where do I, where should I breathe?" So it seems the most natural. In no way, if you have 10 lines that all are only have one period at the end, do you have to tank up and take a huge breath and give all those 10 lines? That's ridiculous. We as humans don't speak like that. In fact, the average breath that a human takes is just about enough to handle one line of verse. And so I think that that is a good cue. And so if we take that along with the punctuation, we'll figure it out together.
Okay, an exercise, uh, for, um, discovering your text this way is to literally walk your text. So you start your text, uh, and you start walking as you say the text. And the only time you stop are at a period, exclamation point, or question mark. Uh, you stop at a period. Your two feet stop. On an exclamation point, you jump to stop. And, uh, question mark, you stop on one foot. Then for the other punctuation, you can use a comma to turn 45 degrees. A semicolon turns you 90 degrees. A colon means that you run until you hit final punctuation for the rest of the sentence. Parentheses, I usually duck and come back up when the parentheses are done. A dash or a hyphen, I step to the side as if I'm on a new thought path of thought, and then I step back, jump back in line when the dash, uh, when the second dash happens. Um, those are, that's a pretty good start. Um, quotation marks, I go up and then come back down the quotation. Um, and I know it sounds silly, but when you really start walking your text, you really start to understand how the thoughts are connected, how they work together, how they are in motion, and how they really, really want to move forward.
Um, the other exercises that we've done of moving the words are very, very important. I'll do a little bit more of that with you when you get back for those of you who are not, have not been in class. Um, and that's pretty much it as far as what I want to talk about to you today or with you today. Um, the, uh, summation, I guess, would be to say, whether it's a half-line, a pun, uh, you know, a sound of a word, um, prose and verse switch, everything is moving forward. I think I've said that a few times, but just to make it clear, find an excuse to move forward because, um, the text really flies faster than you, you think it does. And what I mean by that, it doesn't mean it doesn't necessarily need to be spoken faster, but the thoughts happen fast. Um, that is today. This to say, the space that you would take in a modern text, perhaps acting in between the words to have some subtle look or something like this, does not happen so much here. So instead of acting on, acting in between the lines, or acting in between the lines, yeah, we act in, we act on the line. You discover on the line. Therefore, the text is always moving. The heartbeat is always connected. The inner imagination is always finding a way forward. Um, we'll talk about that more in class as well. There's nothing natural about over pausing or, or breathing because you feel like it. So when people say, "Oh, we have to make it naturalistic, the speech," it is naturalistic. The playwrights observed how people were speaking and they said, "Oh, that's right, like that." So just, um, if anybody, you know, comes, "Oh, you know, you speak more naturally," they don't mean more naturally. They actually mean maybe more contemporary with a lot of pauses. But keep in mind, that gets in the way of the thought. And if you can't communicate the thought, no one's going to care what you're talking about.
The final thought I will leave you with as well is that these characters say what they need to say in order to survive. Um, these plays were, you know, um, uh, written to be, to be spoken, but there are no words wasted. Nothing is wasted. And, and so if a character is saying something, they need to say it. Um, the, the, the way, especially the Elizabethans, uh, believed or had a point of view in life is that the body and the mind were connected. They were one. Whereas today, we kind of view things, "Oh yeah, the logical side and what's happening spiritually." It all fell together. Therefore, when the mind is speaking or the mouth is speaking, the soul is speaking. And it's just very important to keep that in mind because the, when a character speaks, their soul is speaking because it needs to survive. And there is a divine aspect to that, um, whether it be, in most cases for them, God and Jesus, because most of the, that world was, uh, in a Christian-based society, um, or if you just want to connect to the gods of the theater. But there has to be that bigger, larger than, than us on earth aspect to the acting and to the words. Um, because that was very real for them. Um, if we, if the impulse to speak is the impulse to live, then if we stop speaking and we stop breathing, we die. So keep that momentum. It's vital to the performance. And attack, attack, figure together. Thank you so much for your time.
What are you still doing here? Waiting around for some clever post-credits scene like a Marvel movie? This is a lecture on verse. "Look, speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue. But if you mouth it, as many of our players do, I had as lief the town-crier spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus, but use all gently. For in the very torrent, tempest, and, as I may say, whirlwind of your passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness. O, it offends me to the soul to hear a robustious periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings, who, for the most part, are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb shows and noise. I would have such a fellow whipped for o'erdoing Termagant. It out-Herods Herod. Pray you, avoid it. Be not too tame, neither, but let your own discretion be your tutor. Suit the action to the word, the word to the action, with this special observance, that you o'erstep not the modesty of nature. For anything so overdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure. Now, this o'erdone, or come tardy off, though it makes the unskillful laugh, cannot but make the judicious grieve; the censure of which one must, in your allowance, o'erweigh a whole theatre of others. O, there be players that I have seen play, and heard others praise, and that highly, not to speak it profanely, neither have the accent of Christians, nor the gate of a Christian, or of a pagan, or of a man, have so strutted and bellowed that I have thought some of nature's journeymen had made men, and not made them well. They imitated humanity so abominably. Let those that play your clowns speak no more than is set down for them; for there be of them that will themselves laugh, to set on some quantity of barren spectators to laugh too, though, in the meantime, some necessary question of the play be then to be considered. That's villainous, and shows a most pitiful ambition in the fool that uses it. Go, make you ready."