My problem with Shakespeare…

… is probably the same as everyone else’s: how do you speak it? Do you have to have a deep, resonant voice and plummy vowels? What about all those strange olde words? What is the difference between you and thou? Do you pronounce the -ed at the end of a verb, like buried? What is an image cluster? What about poetic language? It’s so dense, I don’t understand it. Who or what is rhetoric anyway?

My ambition is perhaps greater than my understanding but these Sonnets fascinate me. When I first read them I jumped in and swam around until my voice went hoarse or I went insane with incomprehension. The whole time my feelings reflected back at me from the page. The over riding experience was an A-ha resonance.

I am an actor. I read the Sonnets with an eye to improving pronunciation, rhythm, breathing, pausing and generally musing about the man who wrote them. They are for me a direct link with an actor from the past. These lines live and breathe through me now as they did then through him.

I feel a poem must be read aloud to uncover all its treasures. First it is felt, then it is reflected upon, and only then can meaning be applied fully. Deadly rational intellectual perusal alone is death to the energy of the word as sounds.

Consonants shepherd vowels, opening and checking them. Play with words and you will notice how slippery they are. And how concrete they can seem. Everything is in opposition. The longest word in Shakespeare’s entire canon is a 13 syllable nonsense word and it occurs in his play Love’s Labours Lost:

Honorificabilitudinitatibus.

This word was a favourite word of Sir Francis Bacon who stacked it in pyramid form to use as a puzzling word-cipher-code-cryptogram. Some people strongly favour Sir Francis Bacon as the real Shakespeare and one of their many proofs is this 13 syllable word.

I will wager Will Shakespeare was a word lover with a Brando iconoclasm, (meaning I think he stole freely from those around him). Of course he was no ordinary thief, like Brando he broke the mold and produced magic. The James Dean metaphor goes to Sh. only real contemporary challenger Christopher Marlowe, who died young and beautiful in a tavern in Deptford ! Or not, as you will.