I Love Shakespeare

… is legion and my tongue wanders the gamut of our wonderfully manipulative language. By way of explanation, my parents are Edinburgh Scots, I was born in Rawtenstall, Lancashire, NE In-ger-land and at age 16 we emigrated to Mississauga, Canada. I am living now in Amsterdam, NL.

I use Dutch regularly and fluently so the accent bleed is big and people always ask where I’m from. I also speak French and German to varying degrees. Truly I have an accent of bastard mongrel mix. I speak to be understood, not to be judged on how I spoke it.
‘…in so profound abysm I throw all care of others’ voices…’ Q112.

So do I have a right to speak Shakespeare en plein publique for audiences judicious as ignorant? Yes. Do they have the right to say of it what they will? Yes. Will their opinions differ according to the part of the world I’m in? Yes.

My duty is to the verse as i interpret it. Audiences watch this and criticize or praise it and it is no longer mine. Then i do the same again, performance after performance. Minting it new every time. Actors embody language in character and personality. Then again all the world’s a stage.

What is missing from this accent discussion is the emotional power and influence of rhetoric and language. Language is ultimately physical: breath, diaphragm, vocal folds, real and false; tongue, root to tip; lips; teeth; palates, hard and soft; nasal and chest resonance; timbre; pitch; tone; position and posture; all play their part.

‘…All tongues (the voice of souls) give thee that due,
utt’rng bare truth, even so as foes Commend.
Their outward thus with outward praise is crown’d,
but those same tongues that give thee so thine own,
in other accents do this praise confound
by seeing farther than the eye hath shown…’ Q69.

Healthy emotion is the body and mind’s fuel. Emotion is also a catalyst for physicality. See art history for standards of pieta or rage. Shakespeare aspires to capture these states of emotion and the *truth* these states reveal. He does so in his plays and poems. No personal notes or letters for him, not even ensuring all their continuations in Print. His contested Sonnets are the psycho-machia of Shakespeare scholarship.

Check yourself as you sit in what posture you are sitting and how that makes you feel. Anyone clenching their teeth at my verbosity? There is a cartoon of Peanuts showing Lucy, ‘this is my depressed stance. (When I stand up straight it doesn’t work.’ is the payoff). A good example of how physicality influences emotion and thinking.

How’s your breathing? A subtle holding and release mechanism Shakespeare also understood so well. Anger and other negative emotions deeply influence and are influenced by breathing. Start panting for fifteen seconds and the resulting headrush should inform you of the truth of this.

Btw this rational/emotional/ physical connection is one of the eternal truths that exists in the Works.
‘…fair, kind and true is all my argument…’ Q105.

Feelings are not only caused by outside interactions. They can be quite easily be called up by the imagination. Go back to your last traffic jam or stroke of luck in your mind’s eye for proof. Or the responses we flame one another with show the supremacy of psychology and emotion in language.

Shakespearean actors were undoubtedly very physical and had to ride the phonetic roller coaster of verse as carefully as a surfer riding a ripcurl. Dude! Elizabethan street talk must have been fascinating. This flame is usually kept alive by the criminal element: an unofficial Court as far reaching as her Majesty’s. Crime and punishment are great inspirers of the word. Ask any judge.

The Elizabethan form of english was in the process of being formulated. Accent would have taken you to dialect and on to foreign language. When does a language region stop and start anyway? The main objective would have been persuasion and delight and we all know someone with a voice like honey or tar. Physical charm or repulsion is also fascinating to watch.
‘…my adder’s sense to critic and to flatterer stopped are…’ Q112.

Shakespeare’s words provide a blueprint for the actor to map out the character’s life in their various dramatic representations. What’s behind their thinking and actions lead us to speculate on their personality, which we can never know. We can only speculate about this as we read or as we breathe life into their words and consequently or contiguously feel their thoughts.

Shakespeare and his contemporaries were hyper-aware of this flux and change i.e. the difference between the spoken and written word. Pronunciation treatises and early language dictionaries were in abundance. Therefore they had to be talking of it. Thought and the spoken word always precede Print and the written word. My belief in Shakspere is based on this understanding.
‘…they that level at my abuses reckon up their own…’ Q121.

The rational argument of language is based on abstraction and logic, and language is far more psychological than that. I am that i am yet i know that i know nothing. The rational also contains some lists of fallacious arguments and appeals and other equivocations. Ask any policeman. I would argue almost all of everyday interactive talk consists of this.

The more polished forms of speech that Society (the in-crowd) uses, whether it be Hong Kong or New York or Oxford or Glasgow, are the class aspects of language. How they relate to one another and to the serving staff are indicators. Once again, if not more so, language is used psychologically. Even here you will find the self-made or inherited man of regional roots whose tongue never changed for Society’s ends. Status games are common to mankind despite cultural gulfs.

Irony in language is another eternal truth the works embody. Consider the levels of intercourse, textual and otherwise behind
‘…when my love swears that she is made of truth i do believe her, though i know she lies…’ Q138.

Also another truth is verbal beauty or the art of mellifluity: (a factor good translators of Shakespeare uphold as the greatest virtue)
‘…So that eternal love in love’s fresh case weighs not the dust and injury of age…’ Q108.
is to me nothing if not idealistic on the level of meaning and everything in its truth of the delicacy of the phrase. Like Matthew Arnold’s ‘…meal to moth’s wing…’ it provides a complex image with simple tactile and sensory subtlety.

Surely emotional truth is another eternal truth. Sometimes Shakespeare brings a tear to my eye on the turn of a word that turns an argument. MacDuff’s ‘…All my pretty ones? Did you say all?…’ shows this change between unidentified and identified (or less and more) thought and feeling.

The balance of antithesis and paradox, thought and musing, questioning and answering are all combined in Shakespeare’s language. These factors are responsible for the flexibility of Shakespeare’s language as both internal and external embodiments of these *truths*. Intuition and imagination are paired in language which is often illogical, ungrammatical and unusual. Yet I sense a truth behind it all.
‘…For I have sworn thee fair: more perjur’d eye, to swear against the truth so foul a lie…’ Q152.

So where does this posting lead me except to begin again and establish the truth I find (or think I find) of Shakespeare’s language and its affect and effect on my emotion and psychology and my rational thought.
‘…Hence, thou suborn’d informer, a true soul when most impeach’d, stands least in thy conrol…’ Q125.

The aim of Shakespeare is purely rhetorical: to teach, to persuade and to delight. Yet there is an all-encompassing soul behind this task. I have very few conclusions. He was born in the right place at the right time doing what he was passionate about in the right place. He left us only his words.

… 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.