Excerpt from the series

Why, you might be wondering, is it so important to keep Shakespeare practical? What do I mean by practical? Why is this the way to discover how to speak the text and understand it?

Plays themselves are not simply literary events—they demand interpreters in the deepest sense of the word, and the language of Shakespeare requires, therefore, not a vocal demonstration of writing techniques but an imaginative response to that writing. The key word here is imagination. The task of the voice coach is to offer relevant choices to the actor so that the actor’s imagination is titillated, excited by the language, which he or she can then share with an audience, playing on that audience’s imagination. Take the word “IF”—it is only composed of two letters when written, but if you say it aloud and listen to what it implies, then your reaction, the way the word plays through you, can change the perception of meaning. “Iffffffff”… you might hear and feel it implying “possibilities,” “choices,” “questioning,” “trying to work something out.” The saying of this word provokes active investigation of thought. What an apt word to launch a play: “If music be the food of love, play on” (Act 1, Scene 1 in Twelfth Night, or What You Will). How this word engages the listener and immediately sets up an involvement is about more than audibility. How we verbalize sounds has a direct link to meaning and understanding. In the words of Touchstone in As You Like It, “Much virtue in if.”

I was working with a company in Vancouver on Macbeth, and at the end of the first week’s rehearsal—after having explored our voices and opening out different pieces of text to hear the possibilities of the rhythm, feeling how the meter affects the thinking and feeling, looking at structure and form—one of the actors admitted he was also a writer of soap operas and that I had completely changed his way of writing. Specifically, in saying a line like, “The multitudinous seas incarnadine / Making the green one red” he heard the complexity of meaning revealed in the use of polysyllabic words becoming monosyllabic, layered upon the words’ individual dictionary definitions. The writer was reminded that merely reproducing the speech of everyday life was nowhere near as powerful and effective as language that is shaped.