More punctuation
February 27, 2012
I've had a couple readers of this blog express an interest in what I had to say about rhetorical and grammatical punctuation, so I thought I'd offer a bit more on the theme.
I'm pretty sure that we modern actors breathe too often in our delivery of blank verse. Certainly I sometimes find it a struggle to deliver my text with the will and urgency it requires because I'm just not breathing efficiently enough.
Taking breaths too frequently is the simplest way to undermine the veracity our performance because it makes it quite apparent that we don't really mean what we are saying. Terry Hands would remind actors that in real life people always have enough breath for what they want to say. Peter Wood's constant refrain was 'go to the end of the line'. Cis Berry tells us continually that in order to convincingly make our argument we must head for that all important word at the end of a sentence.
A modern editor's interventions may be helpful in conveying the sense of the lines to a reader but, for speaking the lines, paying attention to them as a guide to expression might obscure both sense and verse.
'Now, fair Hippolyta, our nuptial hour…'
is grammatically correct, but surely the line is better spoken running the first three words together before a small caesura after 'Hippolyta'? So how helpful or misleadingly unhelpful is that grammatical comma that a modern editor added after the first word?
by Nick Day
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