You’ve in all probability heard a riff on the above title a couple of times earlier than in your life. It’d’ve been from a instructor at drama college, or maybe a veteran actor who feels like they undergo life with a prop cranium up their sleeve, able to soliloquy at a second’s discover. However if you happen to’re questioning precisely how Shakespeare improves your performing, you’ve come to the suitable place.
Performing Shakespeare is immensely helpful 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 wherein performing Shakespeare improves your performing. You’re more likely to uncover extra alongside the way in which, however these ought to get you nicely 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, slightly than “finding out”, 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 must be delivered to life by actors wherever 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 perfect.
All that being stated: performing Shakespeare doesn’t require your very personal Globe theatre, and even an viewers within the first place. You can be doing scene work, training a monologue or reciting a sonnet whilst you brew your morning espresso. Simply as long as you deliver his phrases to life.
#1 Constructing Confidence
“Our doubts are traitors, And make us lose the great we oft may win.” – Measure for Measure
Shakespeare scares loads of 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 deal with his work alone or unprompted: they want a motive, or extra coaching, or to higher perceive the textual content guided by a selected instructor 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 may tackle the Bard, and also you’ll quickly have your self believing you may deal with something.
Truthfully, this level isn’t even about performing Shakespeare nicely. 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 simple 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 Night time’s Dream
Actors with vocal power are briefly provide lately. Numerous it has to do with the recognition of “display performing” and its related programs, which frequently trick impressionable performers into pondering you may skip basic performing instruments like “being articulate” and “not sounding like a little bit flute” since you’ll have a microphone strapped to you.
When you fear your voice sounds a little bit skinny whenever you’re performing, then Shakespeare is the proper solution to practice you up. He routinely used a rhyme construction in his performs often known as “iambic pentameter” (5 unstressed/pressured syllable parings per line), which lends itself to loud-and-proud recitation. Whereas your dialogue shouldn’t sound sing-song, you may utilise this rhythm to naturally intensify the pressured 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 may 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 be taught 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 slightly bloody passage from the Scottish Play above for example 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 advised 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 commonly 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 under the neck? What sorts of shapes and conditions are you able to conjure? Is there a approach that physicality cannot 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 sensible wordsmith, he was an professional storyteller. And if you need a proof of that with out finishing an undergrad diploma, we will boil it all the way down to this: Shakespeare understood character. He understood learn how to craft them, learn how to pit them in opposition to one another, and learn how to give them desires and desires that carried them by means of, let’s be sincere, a lot of textual content.
When performing Shakespeare, you could have a novel alternative to discover and realise characters. Many of those are identified to audiences, which implies you may contribute to their famed personas … or subvert expectations fully.
Contemplating character can even enable you to keep away from a cardinal sin of Shakespearean performing, which isn’t to contemplate the target of your character: their very motive for being within the play within the first place. Too many actors assume that if you happen to communicate the phrases, that’s sufficient to hold the play. Bulls**t.
Shakespeare gave his characters targets to try for and obstacles to beat. He gave them flaws and ambitions and quirks, like every good author price their rattling. Why wouldn’t you do all you might to find these superb 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 learn to perceive and communicate 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 sincere 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 particularly.
Script evaluation can even enable you to with character goals and actions—the techniques with which they navigate by means of the scene. It’ll additionally provide you with a leg-up on the rhythm/poetry within the textual content, which incorporates 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 Night time
The extra you recognize and perceive Shakespeare, the extra you’ll be capable to observe his affect all through the Western Canon. Shakespeare’s roots run deep by means of standard tradition; realizing which Shakespeare play was tailored as The Lion King will help you determine his influences elsewhere, and maybe provide you with further perception as to the deeper that means of a textual content.
We stress this as a result of the perfect 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 provide you with a leg-up when talking with administrators and writers—whose chief type of communication are the various 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 won’t seem to be one thing that improves your individual course of as an actor. However de-mystifying Shakespeare will get you feeling comfy together with his writing. That permits you to do extra and reap the advantages of every part we’ve already listed.
Let’s return to the idea of confidence. Performing Shakespeare helps you construct the arrogance in realizing that you just can. And why? Since you ought to: you need to work with the perfect phrases out there and deal with 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 every other play, every other character, every 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 good. Adieu!” – A Midsummer Night time’s Dream
So there you could have it: our scorching tackle the advantages of the Bard for actors. One very last thing we’ll point out is that your Shakespeare journey needn’t occur alone. Even if you happen to’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 we’ve got a whole lot of pages of monologue breakdowns, synopses, language guides and different assets that will help you in your Shakespeare journey.
So get cracking, get impressed. Good luck!
