I Love Shakespeare

Every actor knows this line. Alongside sonnets 18, ‘Shall I…’ and 116, ‘Let me not…’ and thanks to Sting, 130, ‘My mistress’ eyes…’

Lust is its subject and that’s why every actor knows it. Is chastity a virtue for actors? is it known? The casting couch exists all the way down to Community theatre and all the way back up to actors hiding their sexual identity in Hollywood. Speculation and rumour and of course those sleeping with the particular individual can give us the spectrum involved from truth to lies. If only we can bribe them into speaking. Naturally this phenomenon is not new in the Theatre world.

Q138:1-4.
‘When my love swears that she is made of truth
I do believe her though I know she lies,
That she might think me some untutored youth
Unlearned in the world’s false subtleties.’

There is an anecdote written by John Manningham, a Law student in Middle Temple in 1602, about R. Burbage and W. Sh. vying for the attention of a lusty citizen (who apparently didn’t care who she slept with). Sh. actually snuck in there before Richard B., which just goes to show that 2 married Elizabethan men of the Theatre were perhaps as unfaithful as their mistresses.

as Q129 finishes:
‘All this the world well knows, yet none knows well,
To shun the heaven, that leads men to this hell.’

is it R.I.P., R.P.? (Received Pronunciation) Are we finally freed from its stranglehold on the lips and throats of actors since the Terry’s? All too often RP creates an effeminate Sh, esthetically pleasing and soothing to the English ear; where Class rhymes with arse, har-har.
The lilt and melody of my mother reading ‘Oor Wullie’ and ‘The Broons’ with me, coloured my early linguistic years. The Scots accent sounds to me the most natural and alive because of it. She also taught me, ‘oh ye cannae shove your granny off a bus.’

But RP won’t die easily, at least not until we stop honouring it as the ONLY way to speak Sh. well, or the accents of Rome for that matter. Witness the Branagh films and BBC series since ‘I Claudius’.
Thin-lipped mumble-mumble and soul-searching, monochromatic seriousness typifies the worst of it. Maybe they just ‘painted Sh. grapes’ with the patina of respectability. Maybe they didn’t really get it.

Sh’s language isn’t easy and unlike a foreign tongue there is no pronunciation guide. except his own oft-repeated words in Hamlet: ‘Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue…’

Sh’s own Warwickshire accent, plus the variations and modulations he found on his life’s path, would have been nothing like RP. The most obvious difference being the sounding of /r/ in words like hard etc.

But as theatre-lore would have it, he gave it to Burbage who passed the role to William Davenant and Thomas Betterton, and like chinese whispers, we end up at the Terry’s and on to Gielgud and Olivier.

‘Mellifluous and hony-tongued’ is how Francis Meres described Sh. writing style, which synonyms and principles one assumes governed his speaking voice too. Sh. lived and breathed as we do now, though as I live and breathe, he didn’t tell us much about his personal life.

Between 36-41 Plays are contended as his: this is his Stage earnings job. He penned, produced and acted in them, presumably for a wage in the beginning, and later as a sharer in the profits of the Globe and Blackfriars. This is the world of Commercial Elizabethan Theatre and Everyman.

His 2 Narrative poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, plus Q1609 Sonnets must have earned him another income, his Writing-for-a-Patron job. If Sh. didn’t know his erotic potboiler narratives had re-print value and he didn’t arrange a deal with the printer. Then he is not his sheep-shearing, tod-selling, interest-charging papa’s son.

Now Shakespeare was a Writer of Plays, which had a whole other set of values than his Poems. The Poems had a whole other audience in mind when the writing was done. That Sh. put pen to paper he tells us himself.

‘which this (time’s pencil or my pupil pen) neither in inward worth nor outward fair can make you live yourself in eyes of men,’ Q15:10-12.

Two major conceits are constantly developed throughout Sh’s written work. The one of Immortality through Verse vs. Time and the other as being an Actor in a Play vs. Time.

‘Your monument shall be my gentle verse,
which eyes not yet created shall oer-read,
and tongues to be, your being shall rehearse,
when all the breathers of this world are dead,
you still shall live (such virtue hath my pen)
where breath most breathes, even in the mouths of men.’
Q81:9-14.

Judging by the Festivals worldwide, Sh still has a Global appeal. So, vive les accents mondiale! OP is also on the rise. Witness the full-fledged productions at the reconstructed Globe in the 2005 season. So how did Sh sound?

there’s an essay by Andrew Gurr in the blogroll/links, dealing with the classical predecessors. But the scholar of the moment in speaking OP has to be David Crystal. His book ‘Pronouncing Shakespeare’ deals with the essential How can we know?

The other question is: Do we care? Well I do, and that’s enough for me.

For they in thee a thousand errors note,
But t’is my heart that loves what they despise,
Who in despite of view is pleased to dote.’

Despite being despised, my heart loves they who despise me. Is this guy a saint or what? Note the 3 repeated /th/ sounds in line 2, and only the first two alike so he can zibilantly slide into his errorz. 142 syllables long this sonnet, believe me I’ve counted them, but check lines 5 and 7 for the extra two.

Q143.

Lo! As a careful housewife runs to catch,
One of her feathered creatures broke away,
Sets down her babe and makes all swift dispatch,
In pursuit of the thing she would have stay.

Whilst her neglected child holds her in chase,
Cries to catch her whose busy care is bent,
To follow that which flies before her face,
Not prizing her poor infants discontent.

So runnst thou after that which flies from thee,
Whilst I, thy babe, chase thee afar behind,
But if thou catch thy hope, turn back to me,
And play the mothers part, Kiss me, be kind.

So will I pray that thou mayst have thy Will,
If thou turn back, and my loud crying still.

This sonnet is an extended vignette on the Grand Guignol of ordinary life. Life is busy; a bird in one hand, an infant in the other, when an event happens that takes your focus away from other cares : you spring into action, leaving your perhaps more important cares behind. Hopefully you return when its over. Til then Ill scream willfully.

Choice is an amazing motor but do we actually have any? Contrariwise, no-choice is also an amazing motivator. Freedom of choice is what makes us human. Or do we feel/think/live the illusion of freedom of choice?

We are all subject to pressures: Motor-physical, emotional, psychological, familial, societal, philosophical, religional. Are any of you perfect in any or all of these areas? These pressures pre-ordain a pathway from cradle to grave, depending on which part of the planet you were born.

This sonnet shows us an image of an industrious working woman; whose world suddenly gets busy with a squawking hen and a wailing child. And it doesnt let up in volume either. It carries on crying till the last line.

Now thats what I call a piece of art for the future. Sh. does the ˜immortality through verse” theme thing so realistically, you often realize (i.e. make real) the prediction, as you speak the words. (See Q81). It happens constantly in the sonnets.

With this LOUD sonnet, Sh. may not have written another ˜Shall I” but he does guarantee his sounds will resonate through time. That was his choice.