Speak the speech: Advice incorporated within the lines…

…Sir Peter Hall’s insistence on a pause, howsoever slight, at the end of an IP verse line is sound.

Silence rather.

It allows the listener’s ear to hear,
their mind to digest the meaning of the utterance;
and the speaker to remain poised,
if it is a run-on line.

Or stop,
and continue fresh at the beginning
of the next line, if it is end-stopped.

The one speaks to the mind, the other the voice.
Both are of major-minor and equal importance,
in terms of balance in Sh’s style of writing.

His words were written to be spoken.
Indeed he infuses his Sonnets with direct speech.
He was/is addressing such persons in verse and rime as:

Time, the fair young man, mistress, other poet, a rose, his Muse,

to name but a few who were once real and imaginary still.

He questions his thought process as it’s evolving,
so making it appear alive and spontaneous,
despite its dead delivery in dried ink.

So back to looking at breathing and phrasing,
in immortal lines some two thousand
more long, sounded and furiously dumb.

It’s the silences and the mind’s churnings that fascinate,
determinedly in the moment, figuratively for all eternity.

His eternal lines promised in his Sonnets,
are at once a monument to time and lovers past,
and a living monument ‘even in the mouths of men’,
courtesy of your senses and wits.

BTW Sonnets are not how to make
your name as an actor.

The play’s the thing.
The characters you best adapt.
The roles they offer.
If you’re lucky.