Vocal muscularity and respiratory stamina
April 12, 2012
I've marvelled before, in these blogs, at how Shakespeare's rich writing does so much of the work for us in conveying subtle shades of character and meaning in our telling of his stories.
This morning I bought a volume of Harley Granville-Barker's most lucid and enlightening Prefaces to Shakespeare from the excellent Oxfam bookshop in Sheep Street.
I've just read a passage in there that I'd like to share with you. It's an eloquent example of the kind of preparatory work that we actors must do in our turn to ensure we get maximum value out of the figures, tropes and devices that Shakespeare has gifted to us.
The mere sound of a line can give it the right dramatic drive. He helps us produce dramatic effect simply by the way he has assembled vowels and consonants, rhythms and stresses, cadence and assonance.
So Harley Granville-Barker's lesson for me today used a short passage from Hamlet and went as follows:
'Rebellious hell,
If thou cans't mutine in a matron's bones,
To flaming youth let virtue be as wax,
And melt in her own fire: proclaim no shame
When the compulsive ardour gives the charge,
Since frost itself as actively doth burn,
And reason panders will.'
The sentence is evenly balanced. For a beginning the 'Rebellious hell' with its 'e's and doubled 'l' s is tellingly arresting.
The repeated 'm's ('mutine . . . matron . . . flaming . . . melt') keep the tone of the lines level and clear. 'Proclaim no shame' sustains the clarity, while the initial double consonants and the half-open vowels (following for contrast upon the 'e's and 'I' of 'melt in her own fire') add strength and resonance. 'Compulsive' gives force to the manifest indignation of the fully open 'ardour' and 'charge', and the double consonants of the final phrase demand and ensure perfect articulation, while its sibilants ('frost itself . . . reason panders') hiss contempt.
Gosh. I guess Shakespeare and his actors were so attuned to the lyrical and rhetorical power of contemporary dramatic writing that their respect for all this stuff was ready and instinctive, but I think we modern actors can benefit enormously by the sort of analytical awareness that Granville-Barker is demonstrating.
The passage that he uses comes at the end of a long and passionate speech from Hamlet to his mother.
I thought it interesting to wonder where an actor might choose to take his breaths. It needs an impelling pace and a clarity of argument, for sure, so a minimum number of breaths. There is a clear pause for breath after 'hell' and the next breath should perhaps be at the caesura before 'proclaim', (interestingly, there is actually a full stop there in the Folio). Do you agree that the actor should strive to breathe just that two times in the passage?
So do you wonder with me at the vocal muscularity and respiratory stamina a young actor needs to tackle a speech like the one this passage concludes?
by Nick Day
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