Acting School Monthly Newsletter - Issue #016 - May 18th, 2010

Help Acting Shakespeare

Here's the news from Acting School Stop, your one stop on the road to an acting career!

In this issue... It's all about Shakespeare acting! Get some acting tips to prepare your first Shakespeare audition or just fresh ideas on how to perform your Shakespeare monologues, plus discover our new Shakespeare acting lessons online.

1) Article of the Month - Acting Tips for your Shakespeare Monologues

1) Understand your Monologue

The first thing you need to do with a new Shakespeare monologue is be absolutely sure you understand every word in it. As much as you can, try to read a lot of Shakespeare plays. Some of the language in Shakespeare is outdated and therefore hard to understand, but the more you read Shakespeare, the more you'll understand it, as a lot of the same words come back over and over in his plays.

If you have trouble with Shakespeare's language, get a Folger's edition of the play you're working on where hard to understand words are explained opposite each page. Even if you understand Shakespeare pretty well, it's a good idea to go through your monologue once and translate it line by line into modern English to really get the meaning to resonate with you. If something feels archaic, try to come up with a modern equivalent that you respond to.

2) Do your Acting Work

The next step involves doing the same work you would do if you were working on any part, be it a monologue or a scene, Shakespeare or Mamet. Read the play your Shakespeare monologue is from a few times and study the given circumstances. Explore relationships, characterization and objectives by asking yourself a lot of questions. Here are a few examples to get started:

- Who am I? What is my character's background, characteristics, emotional makeup?

- What is going on in the monologue? What are the given circumstances of the play?

- Where am I? Where am I coming from? Where am I going to?

- What do I want? How am I going to get it? What stands in my way?

- What time of day is it? What just happened before the monologue started?

3) Find a reason for speaking

If your Shakespeare monologue is part of the scene, all you need to do is think of your objective to find a reason to start speaking.

But what of all these monologues where the character is just speaking aloud to himself? These can fee unnatural to actors. After all, we don't go around talking to ourselves.

Or do we?

If you think about it, we have inner monologues all the time, especially when something troubles us. Here are a few examples of reasons why we may have inner monologues:

- trying to make sense of feelings we're having but don't understand yet.

- trying to reason with ourselves.

- trying to understand a difficult situation.

- trying to figure out what motivates someone else's behavior toward us.

- trying to come to terms with a horrific event (as in some of Shakespeare's most tragic soliloquies).

If you find a reason for speaking your Shakespeare monologue, you will discover your text line by line in the moment and keep the audience's attention, especially if you think of your characters' sharing their thoughts with the audience when they think out loud.

4) Respect the Verse

Auditioning with a Shakespearean monologue means you will not only have to prove that you are a great actor, you will also need to display the technical proficiency required to perform a play in verse or heightened prose.

Once you've translated your monologue into modern English, go through it again this time making sure you have its rhythm down. If, like the majority of Shakespeare's plays, your Shakespeare monologue is in blank verse, this means respecting the iambic pentameter. How do you do that? Just go through your monologue line by line and make sure you are pronouncing 10 syllables for each verse. If you have an extra syllable, you may have missed an elision somewhere in the verse line (an elision is the omission of an unstressed syllable or vowel). If you are one syllable short, you may need to pronounce the –ed ending of a past tense verb or otherwise lengthen the verse line.

The goal is not to sound unnatural but to really master the verses so that when you depart from the set rhythm of the iambic pentameter, you do so knowingly as an acting choice. The more you study the verse, the more you can free yourself from it, finding your own rhythm. Actually, a great place to look for clues is Shakespeare himself….

5) Look for Clues from Shakespeare

The final step to really dig deeper into your character and performance is again studying Shakespeare's verses. A regular iambic pentameter is composed of a series of unstressed and stressed syllables that follow this rhythm…

Ta DUM/ ta DUM/ ta DUM/ ta DUM/ ta DUM /

Each break in rhythm can be a clue for the actor as to the intentions or emotional state of their character. Go through your Shakespeare monologue again and mark all the breaks in rhythm. Also mark:

- short lines that could indicate a pause

- sentences that run over the verse

- semi colons or full stops in the middle of verses

- etc.

Once you've marked your monologue, ask yourself why Shakespeare wrote the monologue this way. Try everything both ways. For example, if there's a short line that suggests a pause, take a pause. Then do it again this time without the pause. See what each reading tells you about the character.

Acting is all about choices. The more clues you find in Shakespeare's monologues, the more opportunities you have to make choices and get to know your version of the character better. The better you know your character and their intention, the more powerful and unique your performance and audition will be.

2) What's new on Acting-School-Stop.com

And don't forget to check out our Shakespeare Monologue suggestions!

If you need more choices, visit the Shakespeare Monologue website. It offers a complete list of Shakespeare's monologues with PDF files of each monologue, double-spaced for scansion and transcription, ready to print.

3) A word of inspiration

"I don't make much distinction between being a stand-up comic and acting Shakespeare - in fact, unless you're a good comedian, you're never going to be able to play Hamlet properly." - Ian McKellen

"There is some mysterious thing that goes on whereby, in the process of playing Shakespeare continuously, actors are surprised by the way the language actually acts on them." – Kenneth Branagh

"The actor should be able to create the universe in the palm of his hand." - Sir Laurence Olivier

Comments? I'd love to hear from you. Just reply to this newsletter with your feedback and thoughts.

Good luck with your acting career!

Alex Swenson

Acting School Stop.com