When we do Shakespeare, it is very easy to identify what is artificial – it’s staring us in the face as soon as we pick up the book. The language is artificial. You can’t get anywhere near a professional performance until you reconcile yourself to that artificiality, embrace it, befriend it, and recognise that these words, and this patterning of words, is where Shakespeare has placed his bets. It’s not the only thing he’s interested in, in fact it’s not the chief thing he’s interested in, but it is his chief tool in expressing his story and his ideas. He has invested in the poetry, so we need to do so too.
Shakespeare’s rhetoric is the exact equivalent to the formal positions of ballet – first position, second position and so on – and we are no more likely to succeed in Shakespeare without studying the rhetoric than we are likely to succeed in ballet without knowing the positions. It is just as important for me to be able to execute an antithesis as it is for the dancer to execute an arabesque. We can’t do Shakespeare via picking our toenails. It needs to be personalised, but we can’t get to where we need to get just with Personalisation. The good news is that learning the discrete skills required for dealing with the artificiality of Shakespeare’s language is about the simplest bit of learning for an actor to do. It just requires study, and a clear teacher. Learning to recognise and use the rhetorical patterns and tricks that Shakespeare uses can greatly empower the diligent student. If we can speak a draft version of the text well, we are more than half-way there. By ‘speak well’, I don’t mean speak like a Pom or speak like ‘an actor’. I’m not talking about accent. Use your own accent. (…) Speaking it well means speaking it with an understanding of the structures within it, the rhetorical tools that have been used to build it, with a sense of the architecture of the lines, and with guts and a sense of fun. Once we can do this, we’re ready to tackle all of the more real-ish elements in the scenes and situations, and our relative command of the language will make these things (paradoxically, wonderfully) more real. Through the artificiality we find the truth- ishness.
In Shakespeare the Aesthetic is strongly asserted, unavoidable, and the surest starting point. It is unmistakably the case that the Dimension of Aesthetic can – in Shakespeare – be the subject of our discrete focus, and the thing that turns us on.
It’s not unusual for a struggling young actor to find their ‘acting legs’ with Shakespeare, once they have learned the Aesthetic demands of the language, because applying those things takes us three-quarters of the way toward good work.
In some ways, Shakespeare is the hardest thing to act, but in this way, you will often hear actors agree, it is the easiest. The student who does better with Shakespeare than with anything else is responding to the supporting structures of form, style and Aesthetic. As I learned in Singapore, each traditional Asian theatre genre is supported and buoyed by a powerful, constant Aesthetic form – a grammar. What supports the Kathikali dancer also supports the Ballet dancer, the blues guitarist and the Shakespearean actor.
All of the above comes from the chapter in Dimensions of Acting dedicated to the Dimension of ‘Aesthetic’ (pages 116, 117). Looking at it now, a couple of years after writing it, I’m inclined to offer some caveats. I’m more inclined to say that the rhetoric in Shakespeare is somewhat like rather than the ‘exact equivalent’ to the formal positions in ballet. The point being that Shakespeare’s rhetorical patterns are much more open to interpretation, and generous to the actor. They don’t just allow for our individuality, they facilitate it. I’m not a dancer, but I suspect this is not so true of ballet, or any other dance ‘settings’. The other important point to make – or self-criticism I would offer here on reflection – is that ‘studying the rhetoric’ is not a necessity in the way I claim in the book. It’s truer to say we need to use or acknowledge the rhetoric when we deliver the text. The use can come organically, without study, for some people, and the acknowledgement can therefore be tacit. But I do think that such people are very rare, and meanwhile, studying the rhetoric is not going to take away such gifts. What remains true, though, is that learning how to ‘do’ the form doesn’t mean our performance becomes the display of that knowledge. A great dancer doesn’t go out and demonstrate ‘the positions’ or ‘the choreography’. We don’t study Shakespeare’s rhetoric in order to show it, but in order to know it.
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