An actor in one of Shakespeare’s plays, Tom Hiddleston tells Dan Poole and Giles Terera, should be “saying the line . . . not as if one repeating a memorized speech,” but “as if the thought has come fresh to the character in the very moment.” Shakespeare is able, Hiddleston says, to “synthesize humanity into these big fat fantastic stories,” and the important thing for both actors on stage and teachers in the classroom, says Hiddleston, who is being interviewed in Muse of Fire, is to “make these stories about right now.” Such an approach, he says, is “what keeps it fresh. It’s like happening right now.” A “real lesson” he has taken from his own experience, he tells Poole and Terera, comes from his memory of “being declaimed to. I remember being shouted at and I remember not understanding.” Hiddleston continues:
And I remember thinking. . .they’re talking Shakespeare at me and I don’t understand it and then I remember the performances that do stick with me—the ones where you go, oh—they’re just making it—they’re just saying it.
A line of Shakespeare should “sound like people talking,” Hiddleston says. “We don’t want it to sound like people delivering high arch poetry.”
In an earlier conversation with Poole and Terera, Hiddleston recalls a production of The Changeling, in which the actor, Will Keen, played de Flores. He “literally broke. . . all the rules,” Hiddleson says. He—he literally broke all—he seemed to break all the rules, that I’d been taught about Shakespeare.” Hiddleston continues, speaking to Poole and Terera:
I mean, there’s all this clutter in your head about it and he used to just say it. . . .It was like he’d just made it up and that seemed to me to be the—the way to do it—is just to say it. Do you know what I mean? And not to declaim it or to sing it or to speechify it.
Such a delivery, Hiddleston explains, when the lines are spoken “so naturally that the actor seems to be making it up,” is when “the power of Shakespeare’s wisdom and clarity of his insight into the human condition hits me with even more force.”
Jonathan Bate, author of The Genius of Shakespeare, and a biography of Shakespeare, Soul of the Age, suggests similar goals on the FutureLearn website for his course, “Shakespeare and his World.” Like actors on the Shakespeare stage and other teachers of Shakespeare in the classroom, Bates says:
I always find when I teach Shakespeare, however well I think I know each play I always discover something new that I’ve never noticed before. Actors say the same thing—and that’s what keeps Shakespeare so alive. One key to great acting is saying the line as if the thought had come fresh to the character in the very moment (not as if one is repeating a memorized speech). And that’s how I try to teach the plays: with a sense of freshness and wonder, as if coming at them for the first time. . . .
“Shakespeare cannot be a sixteenth-century antique,” Bate says at the conclusion of The Genius of Shakespeare; he is “still our contemporary” (357).
When approaching a Shakespeare text, whether in a school setting or rehearsal space, “the most common demand” is that the work be “relevant,” Simon Palfrey says, in his book, Doing Shakespeare. That means, he explains, “the plays have to speak with immediacy and urgency.” The plays, he says, must “come alive.” They must “work on some more immediately familiar framework,” Paltry says. They must work in ways that are “going to be relevant to us,” ways that are going “to surprise us,” Paltry explains (8). The actor, Indira Darma, describes the rehearsal of a Shakespeare play “with some brilliant Shakespearean actors,” and her choice of words seems familiar: the language, Darma explains in an interview in Muse of Fire, “feels alive, and it feels current, and it just feels like it comes from the real human being—it doesn’t feel like a recitation or anything like that. . . .”
Cicely Berry tells Dan Poole and Giles Terera in a conversation in Muse of Fire that it is important to make Shakespeare’s language “sound real for yourself.” Berry continues, speaking to Poole and Terera:
We’ve just got to go for the truth of it and see how—what—what it speaks for now. That’s the important thing—what it tells us of our feelings now—and our way of looking at things. And there’s something there which is very sort of universal—isn’t there? We can’t explain it—why. . .
The plays, then, must serve, to invoke a phrase used by Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner in Teaching as a Subversive Activity, “some purpose that is related to the life of the learner” (42). In their book, Postman and Weingartner say, “teachers must discover what is relevant to their students, and to themselves.” Postman and Weingartner caution teachers against “initiating studies that hold no interest” to learners. Such teaching, they warn, is “sterile, and ridiculous,” and “very little of significance can happen” as a result” (52, 53). Teachers must be “in pursuit of relevance, Postman and Weingartner tell us, for, “unless an inquiry is perceived as relevant by the learners, no significant learning will take place.” Teachers cannot hope to “help a learner to be disciplined, active, and thoroughly engaged, unless he perceives a problem to be a problem, or what is to-be-learned as worth learning, and unless he plays an active role in determining the process of solution” (52). That is, Indira Darma declares to Dan Poole, “you’re interested in the things that relate to you.” “No one,” Postman and Weingartner tell us, “will learn anything he doesn’t want to know” (52).
All of Shakespeare’s plays contain some blank verse, or iambic pentameter; most of the plays contain more blank verse than anything else, Giles Block tells us, at the beginning of his book, Speaking the Speech: An Actor’s Guide to Shakespeare. This language is often called “poetry,” Block goes on to remark, and George T. Wright defines “poetry” in his book, Shakespeare’s Metrical Art, in a way that would support this. Poetry, Wright says, is “language composed in verse . . . language of which an essential feature is its appearance in measured units, either as written text or oral performance.” By contrast, Wright explains, paragraphs of prose lack what is “indispensable” in poetry—poetry’s “essential feature,” and that “by which we recognize its nature.” That feature, Wright says, is “the line,” for “it is important to the form of a poem that the line be presented intact” (ix).
Wright’s definition accurately describes Shakespeare’s blank verse; to note the poetry—or “poetics”—of the lines as their primary trait, however, is superficial. To refer to what the characters say in the plays as poetry misses other, more significant characteristics of the iambic pentameter line. When we hear Shakespeare’s characters speak, says Giles Block, “we shouldn’t hear ‘poetry’” (13). A line of blank verse in Shakespeare’s plays, the director, Peter Hall, informs us, in his book, Shakespeare’s Advice to the Players, “represents the speech of everyday life.” Hall, who also co-founded The Royal Shakespeare Company with John Barton, continues: “The iambic lines of Shakespeare” are never far away from the rhythms of ordinary English speech” (15).
John Barton, who has been speaking to a group of actors in a filmed series called Playing Shakespeare, sums up these remarks. “Now, it’s often been pointed out,” he says to the actors, “that this verse form approximates more closely than any other verse form to our natural everyday speech.” Blank verse, he says, is “much closer to the way that we naturally talk.”
Peter Hall discusses this characteristic of Shakespeare’s language, as well. The iambic line, Hall tells us, represents “what Shakespeare actually heard when he wrote the line” (16). When an actor observes the “linear structure” of Shakespeare’s lines, Hall says, his “speech at its best sounds completely natural. The blank verse is made to sound like colloquial speech” (27, 28). In an earlier book, Exposed by the Mask: Form and Language in Drama, Hall says:
It is always a shock to remember that Shakespeare’s verse is his leanest and quickest means of communication. His verse does not represent “poetics.” It is not poetry; for him, it is the equivalent of ordinary speech. (49)
“To Shakespeare,” Hall says in Shakespeare’s Advice to the Players, blank verse “represents the speech of everyday life” (15).
The simple rhythm of Shakespeare’s language is “not so special,” and is “not solely the language of poets,” Giles Block continues (7). George Wright is more specific in Shakespeare’s Metrical Art, “The nature of iambic poetry in English, then, is largely determined by its source in English speech.” Wright states further, “Iambic pentameter has often been called the most speechlike of English meters, and this is undoubtedly true, especially of its blank verse form,” and, later, he adds:
Patterns we find in poetry always derive from patterns we discern or intuit in the world around us. The arrangement of words and phrases in poetic lines reflects our custom of speaking, and of hearing each other speak, in succession of rhythmic units. (2)
The sound of iambic pentameter, then, is “all around us—all the time,” says Giles Block. “It is the way we all speak and write,” he continues (13). “In fact,” John Barton adds, “Shakespeare often uses it as a vehicle for naturalistic speech.”
A spoken phrase in English, Peter Hall goes on to explain, usually has “five beats or so.” Which is why, Hall suggests, “the common utterance of English verse and English dramatic poetry is a five-beat iambic line” (15). In Playing Shakespeare,John Barton contrasts the “five-beat iambic line” of English dramatic verse with two earlier verse lines. The first example is from a play in the “miracle cycle,” which Barton calls “doggerel—not speech,” and notes that the lines “have eight syllables with four strong stresses, which is a bit short to accommodate our normal speech rhythms.” Barton’s second example is from a mid-16th Century play, King Cambises. Barton calls these lines “a rollicking jingle.” The lines, he says, are, “again, not speech.” Barton continues, describing the lines: “There are fourteen syllables then, and seven strong stresses. The lines are obviously much too long for our normal speech rhythms.” And George T. Wright comments, in Shakespeare’s Metrical Art:
Pentameter, then, is the most speechlike of English line-lengths, especially when it appears without rhyme. Long enough to accommodate a good mouthful of English words, long enough too to require most of its lines to break their phrasing somewhere. (5)
So, as it turns out, Block concludes, “our own everyday speech is more patterned and less plain than we think it is” (13). An objective for actors speaking Shakespeare’s lines on stage, then, could well be making them sound “so natural, so present,” as Mark Rylance suggests in his “forward” to Speaking the Speech. “I came to love it most,” Rylance says, “when the person sounded like a person I might meet off the stage in the actual world” (ix).
“Shakespeare had this unbelievable genius,” Cicely Berry explains in a conversation with Dan Poole and Giles Terera; he was “able to write down how people spoke . . . and he had this genius of being able to put it down.” Much of what Shakespeare wrote, Berry says, “is in iambic pentameter—take iambic pentameter to start with,” she tells Poole and Terera:
Iambic pentameter—it is—it is the rhythm of which we speak, actually. We do speak in that rhythm normally, I think. He just happened to hear that sound as people spoke. He was able—I say this genius to hear how people—the timing of people’s thoughts and how they spoke—and that timing is still with us today.
At the beginning of Speaking the Speech: An Actor’s Guide to Shakespeare, Giles Block suggests that calling the language “poetry,” designates it as “a more artificial way of speaking and more removed from life” (13). Rather, Block suggests, Shakespeare’s language “must sound natural, and every moment should sound new” (8). Referring to Shakespeare’s language as poetry, then, discourages introducing the plays in ways that “recognize the existence of the real world,” and discourages presenting them to students in “an environment that allows the world to enter,” to use the words of Frank Miceli, in his essay, “Education and Reality” (179, 180).
Postman and Weingartner rely heavily on what Miceli describes as a “reality curriculum,” as what must occur in a classroom where “significant learning” can take place. The program that he describes, Miceli says, “was designed to assist high school students in studying aspects of life they wished to know about” (171). In their discussions in such a classroom, students, Miceli says, “brought to bear what they had read, what they had seen, and what they had felt” (179).
What Miceli describes is a curriculum concerned with students’ “perceptions of the world, and their attempts to communicate with that world” (178). That curriculum is in opposition to one that is “concerned with the structure of the comfortable past.” Miceli describes a curriculum “concerned with the here and now, the difficult present” (180). Postman and Weingartner make this contrast more graphic: while “their teachers are teaching ‘subjects’ that mostly don’t exist anymore,” they say, students must “find new roles for themselves as social, political, and religious organisms” (14). Miceli contends that, in fact, “more teachers should prepare themselves for confrontations with students who, rightfully, want a program that is part of our new world and has a vital place in it for them.” He states, further:
The student must be central to any curriculum development. . . . central in that our curricula begin with what he feels, cares about, fears, and yearns for. . . . If we can say that all human discovery, regardless of discipline, starts with an answerable question, then we ought to look at the curriculum as a series of questions from students that the school helps them to explore. . . . Any curriculum, after all, ought to recognize the existence of the real world. (180)
“Education and Reality,” Postman and Weingartner say, presents “some of the processes and concepts” they have talked about in Teaching as a Subversive Activity. The activities described by Frank Miceli, for example, are based on the belief that the students should feel they are learning something. Miceli’s article, along with an article by Terry Borton, “What Turns Kids On?” they say, provides an “illustration of the new education,” and describes the development of a curriculum “similar in many respects” to the curriculum described in Teaching as a Subversive Activity.
Terry Borton notes in “What Turns Kids On?” that “education requires an attention to the student’s personal concerns.” The curriculum that Borton and his colleagues develop, he says, was based on previous research that distinguished “between the progressive clichés about student interests” and their “concerns, the basic psychological and sociological drives of students” (72). Thus, Borton says:
We wanted to build a curriculum which would explore the students’ own sense of the disparity between what they thought about in school, and what they were concerned about in their own lives, and the way they acted. . . . We believed it was a concern common to all our students and one that we could build a curriculum to meet. (73)
Such a curriculum, Borton says, “suggests the vision of a new function and meaning for schools—schools that face the questions all men have experienced.” The goal of such schools, Borton concludes, is to develop students’ “understanding of others and of themselves” (80).
In his book, Shakespeare and Text, John Jowett articulates, to an astonishing degree, what might be Shakespeare’s relevance to us. Even after four centuries, Jowett writes, Shakespeare “retains a reputation for speaking to us, here and now, movingly, deeply, and sometimes challengingly about matters that concern us.” (6)
Fiona Banks makes a similar claim in her book, Creative Shakespeare: The Globe Education Guide to Practical Shakespeare. “Shakespeare’s plays,” Banks says, “are full of amazing, stimulating and challenging stories that captivate the imagination.” The plays, she says, “contain stories worth ‘hearing.’” They are “universal stories,” and Banks explains:
The characters that people them are complex and diverse. Their dilemmas are of their time but simultaneously modern. The stories are timeless and enable students to gain perspective, a sense of themselves and of the universality of the human condition. (10)
Tom Hiddleston, finally, makes this assessment of Shakespeare’s relevance to theatre audiences and students in school, even after four hundred years: “Shakespeare,” Hiddleston says in a conversation in Muse of Fire, “is the most compassionate, the most intelligent, the most psychologically forensic, the most emotionally truthful writer that has ever lived.” And, he continues:
His depiction of the whole of human life is so rich and so deep, and so detailed, and has universal access to every soul of every age that he speaks to us and his writing shows us who we are.
