You’ve most likely heard a riff on the above title a couple of times earlier than in your life. It’d’ve been from a trainer at drama college, or maybe a veteran actor who seems like they undergo life with a prop cranium up their sleeve, able to soliloquy at a second’s discover. However in case you’re questioning precisely how Shakespeare improves your performing, you’ve come to the appropriate place.
Performing Shakespeare is immensely useful for actors. It builds confidence, promotes vocal and bodily growth and engages the actor with character growth and script evaluation. Performing Shakespeare additionally engages a performer’s understanding of the western canon of literature: opening them to the affect the creator has had on performing arts and standard tradition for the previous 400 years.
On this article, we’ve outlined seven core methods through which performing Shakespeare improves your performing. You’re prone to uncover extra alongside the way in which, however these ought to get you effectively and actually began.
“Performing Shakespeare”
“The play’s the factor.” – Hamlet
Earlier than we start: you may observe that we’ve settled on “performing” Shakespeare, fairly than “learning”, or “studying”, and even “reciting”. There are advantages to all of those choices, and a few we’re going to recommend you do anyway. However “performing” Shakespeare lets you join with the phrases on the web page as they have been meant.
Shakespeare doesn’t belong in an English class, a flowery stage or distilled into cliff notes. It needs to be dropped at life by actors anyplace and all over the place, and loved by them and their audiences alike. Performing Shakespeare is a terrific reminder that the Bard wasn’t about torturing college students and boring theatregoers. He was an entertainer. And one of many highest.
All that being mentioned: performing Shakespeare doesn’t require your very personal Globe theatre, and even an viewers within the first place. You may be doing scene work, training a monologue or reciting a sonnet when you brew your morning espresso. Simply as long as you carry his phrases to life.
#1 Constructing Confidence
“Our doubts are traitors, And make us lose the nice we oft may win.” – Measure for Measure
Shakespeare scares numerous actors—the language, the historical past, the data that the phrases themselves are iconic to the final. Many actors really feel like they’ll’t sort out his work alone or unprompted: they want a cause, or extra coaching, or to higher perceive the textual content guided by a specific trainer or director.
Our recommendation, and our first touted good thing about performing Shakespeare, is to construct confidence by leaping proper in! Show to your self you possibly can tackle the Bard, and also you’ll quickly have your self believing you possibly can deal with something.
Actually, this level isn’t even about performing Shakespeare effectively. It’s simply to interrupt the preconception that Shakespeare is supposed just for drama-school-trained actors and business elites. Give it a go. You’ll shock your self how straightforward it’s whenever you give the phrases a while and thought. And you may additionally uncover a model new ardour.
#2 Your Voice is an Instrument
“I’ll roar that I’ll do any man’s coronary heart good to listen to me.” – A Midsummer Evening’s Dream
Actors with vocal energy are in brief provide lately. A whole lot of it has to do with the recognition of “display performing” and its related programs, which regularly trick impressionable performers into considering you possibly can skip elementary performing instruments like “being articulate” and “not sounding like somewhat flute” since you’ll have a microphone strapped to you.
If you happen to fear your voice sounds somewhat skinny whenever you’re performing, then Shakespeare is the right approach to prepare you up. He routinely used a rhyme construction in his performs generally known as “iambic pentameter” (5 unstressed/burdened syllable parings per line), which lends itself to loud-and-proud recitation. Whereas your dialogue shouldn’t sound sing-song, you possibly can utilise this rhythm to naturally intensify the burdened phrases and syllables within the dialogue—lending energy to your efficiency.
#2.5 Discover Feelings within the Vowels
Shakespeare’s writing additionally used vowels to hold emotion, granting his actors and audiences perception as to how a personality is likely to be feeling. In King Lear, because the eponymous character mourns his daughter Cordelia, he utters the road; “HOWL, HOWL, HOWL, HOWL.” It’s nearly onomatopoetic in the way it conveys the tragedy and anger of a damaged king. You may’t ship the road with out giving it your all, and letting these feelings out.
An actor with a robust vocal presence stands out from their friends. Discover the poetry in Shakespeare’s phrases and revel in performing it. If you do, you’ll study to like your voice because the instrument it’s: of evocation, of persuasion, of energy.
#3 Embodied Appearing
“Like Valour’s minion, carv’ d out his passage,
Until he fac’d the slave;
Which ne’er shook arms, nor bade farewell to him,
Until he unseam’d him from the nave to th’ chops,
And repair’d his head upon our battlements.” – Macbeth
We’ve included this fairly bloody passage from the Scottish Play above for instance a degree about Shakespeare’s minimal stage instructions. He wasn’t large on telling actors the place to face and what to do. The few he did present are extra involved with logistics than creating a way of the bodily world: “enter”, “dies”, “exit pursued by a bear.”
However because the story informed by the Bleeding Captain illustrates, Shakespeare’s performs recommend daring and thrilling actions of their phrases, of their telling. For that reason, performing Shakespeare is usually a really bodily train—a terrific problem for any actor honing their chops.
How are you going to take pages of dialogue and make it come to life beneath the neck? What sorts of shapes and conditions are you able to conjure? Is there a approach that physicality can’t solely help the textual content, however actively add to and enrich it?
#4 Creating Character
“I’m decided to show a villain and hate the idle pleasure of lately.” – Richard III
Shakespeare wasn’t only a good wordsmith, he was an skilled storyteller. And if you would like an evidence of that with out finishing an undergrad diploma, we will boil it right down to this: Shakespeare understood character. He understood the way to craft them, the way to pit them towards one another, and the way to give them needs and wishes that carried them by way of, let’s be trustworthy, a lot of textual content.
When performing Shakespeare, you’ve got a singular alternative to discover and realise characters. Many of those are identified to audiences, which suggests you possibly can contribute to their famed personas … or subvert expectations totally.
Contemplating character can even assist you keep away from a cardinal sin of Shakespearean performing, which isn’t to think about the goal of your character: their very cause for being within the play within the first place. Too many actors suppose that in case you converse the phrases, that’s sufficient to hold the play. Bulls**t.
Shakespeare gave his characters objectives to attempt for and obstacles to beat. He gave them flaws and ambitions and quirks, like every good author value their rattling. Why wouldn’t you do all you may to find these wonderful particulars? Talking of:
#5 Script Evaluation
“Phrases, phrases, phrases.” – Hamlet
Performing Shakespeare will make you a grasp of script evaluation. As a result of with out this quintessential performing instrument, you’ll be misplaced in a sea of thees, forsooths and hey-nonny-nonny.
If you wish to discover ways to perceive and converse Shakespeare’s phrases, you’ll want to begin by making a glossary of all of the phrases and phrases you don’t perceive. And this requires you to be very trustworthy and open: no guessing or approximating. You may’t go “I assume he’s a Greek God of one thing…” Know the God in query, and why Shakespeare picked them out specifically.
Script evaluation can even assist you with character targets and actions—the techniques with which they navigate by way of the scene. It’ll additionally offer you a leg-up on the rhythm/poetry within the textual content, which accommodates multitudes of hidden meanings to be unlocked.
#6 Exploring the Canon
“Some are born nice, some obtain greatness, and a few have greatness thrust upon them.” – Twelfth Evening
The extra you already know and perceive Shakespeare, the extra you’ll have the ability to observe his affect all through the Western Canon. Shakespeare’s roots run deep by way of standard tradition; figuring out which Shakespeare play was tailored as The Lion King might help you determine his influences elsewhere, and maybe offer you further perception as to the deeper that means of a textual content.
We stress this as a result of the very best actors are well-read, well-rounded people with data of their craft and its historical past. Realizing your Shakespeare gained’t simply make you extra fascinating at events, it’ll offer you a leg-up when talking with administrators and writers—whose chief type of communication are the numerous influences from which they draw inspiration.
#7 De-Mystifying Shakespeare
“It’s Shakespeare, proper, it’s like algebra on stage.” – I Hate Hamlet
Each time you carry out Shakespeare on stage, on digital camera, in your automotive or to your bathe organiser, you de-mystify his phrases. This may not seem to be one thing that improves your individual course of as an actor. However de-mystifying Shakespeare will get you feeling comfy along with his writing. That permits you to do extra and reap the advantages of all the things we’ve already listed.
Let’s return to the idea of confidence. Performing Shakespeare helps you construct the arrogance in figuring out that you just can. And why? Since you ought to: you should work with the very best phrases obtainable and sort out a number of the most enjoyable dramatic challenges ever put to actors!
Bear in mind this when performing Shakespeare for the primary time—as a result of that is an important piece of recommendation there’s. Deal with it like some other play, some other character, some other gig. Overlook 4 centuries of veneration: benefit from the tales and phrases of a author who actually understood actors, and what made for a cracking night time of drama.
Have enjoyable. We assure you it’s there available.
Conclusion
“Take pains, be excellent. Adieu!” – A Midsummer Evening’s Dream
So there you’ve got it: our scorching tackle the advantages of the Bard for actors. One final thing we’ll point out is that your Shakespeare journey needn’t occur alone. Even in case you’re leaping in at what may really feel like a later level in your life. Chat to a buddy, take a category, choose a monologue and go to city!
Proper right here on StageMilk now we have a whole lot of pages of monologue breakdowns, synopses, language guides and different sources that can assist you in your Shakespeare journey.
So get cracking, get impressed. Good luck!
