Thou and You

In your study of Shakespearean text, you will be introduced to his constant artful use of the formal address of thou and you. Their usage goes back to Old and Middle English and was further influenced by the French with the Norman Conquests of 1066, but you, who are an actor and not a linguist, can simply concentrate on the fact that these words of greeting are not necessarily present out of some archaic classical tradition alone. They possess a down-to-earth character agenda, placed there as much to portray attitude and emotional relationship as to hold to social ceremony. Additional iterations of thou and you include thee, thine, thy, thyself, your, yours, and yourself/selves.

Below is a listing of when and how you might see them used in Shakespeare:

You

When upper class are talking to each other

A character talks to someone far from them on the stage

 

Thou

Lower class to each other

Masters to servants

Parents to children

Superiors to inferiors (I suggest your can do the
same thing)

 

Talking to a lover

Talking to God or a god

Talking to a character who is absent

Talking to a character near you on the stage

 

Thou and you and their various forms appear in all of Shakespeare's plays and poems. I have chosen As You Like It to demonstrate what the Bard might be up to.

Let's look at you and your. In Act I, Scene 1, the evil Oliver addresses his younger brother Orlando, whom he has subjugated in poverty. They are of the same social status, being sons of a wealthy landowner. The actors playing these roles can know that the words are an argument; what can also be deduced in the use of you is Oliver and Orlando's attitude toward each other—one keeping the other down, the other finally having gotten to the point where he will not take it anymore. Bold is my own:

OLIVER
Now, sir! what make you here?

ORLANDO
Nothing: I am not taught to make any thing.

OLIVER
What mar you then, sir?

ORLANDO
Marry, sir, I am helping you to mar that which God made, a poor unworthy brother of yours, with idleness.

OLIVER
Marry, sir, be better employed, and be naught awhile.

ORLANDO
Shall I keep your hogs and eat husks with them? What prodigal portion have I spent, that I should come to such penury?

OLIVER
Know you where you are, sir?

ORLANDO
O, sir, very well; here in your orchard.

OLIVER
Know you before whom, sir?

ORLANDO
Ay, better than him I am before knows me. I know you are my eldest brother; and, in the gentle condition of blood, you should so know me. The courtesy of nations allows you my better, in that you are the first-born; but the same tradition takes not away my blood, were there twenty brothers betwixt us: I have as much of my father in me as you; albeit, I confess, your coming before me is nearer to his reverence.

OLIVER
What, boy!

Orlando
Come, come, elder brother, you are too young in this.

OLIVER
Wilt thou lay hands on me, villain?

You and your can also be spoken out of a desire to rebuff, ridicule, or chastise. Rosalind does this to Phebe in Act III, Scene 5, when she uses you and your 25 times in the speech! (The full speech is available to you in the “Practice Speeches” appendix.)

Also notice that the last line of Oliver above includes the address thou. Thou is often used when people of the upper class are addressing the lower class, or those beneath them in some way, such as masters to servants or parents to children. Oliver is not speaking to a child or an actual servant, but he is displaying his disdainful attitude toward his younger brother, considering Orlando beneath him, which I say is also displayed in his use of you and your. Acting verbs such as to “put down” or our contemporary “diss” (as in disrespect) comes to mind. Also, when characters change from thou to you or you to thou this too can indicate a change in the relationship, which in this case is exactly what is happening. You can say that, though the two brothers have been involved in strife for years, this scene represents a “falling out,” in which Oliver has also had enough. In the scene that follows he calls his servant Charles the wrestler to get him to murder Orlando in a wrestling match.

Another example of the use of thou, thy, and thine comes later, when the put-upon Oliver is given his come-uppance by Duke Frederick, as the Duke threatens him in Act III, Scene 1. I continue to use bold:

DUKE FREDERICK

Not see him since? Sir, sir, that cannot be:

But were I not the better part made mercy,

I should not seek an absent argument

Of my revenge, thou present. But look to it:

Find out thy brother, wheresoe'er he is;

Seek him with candle; bring him dead or living

Within this twelvemonth, or turn thou no more

To seek a living in our territory.

Thy lands and all things that thou dost call thine

Worth seizure do we seize into our hands,

Till thou canst quit thee by thy brothers mouth

Of what we think against thee.

OLIVER

O that your highness knew my heart in this!

I never loved my brother in my life.

DUKE FREDERICK

More villain thou. Well, push him out of doors;

And let my officers of such a nature

Make an extent upon his house and lands:

Do this expediently and turn him going.

In a kindlier way Orlando speaks to his longtime elderly servant Adam in Act II, Scene 3:

O good old man, how well in thee appears

The constant service of the antique world,

When service sweat for duty, not for meed!

Thou art not for the fashion of these times,

Where none will sweat but for promotion,

And having that, do choke their service up

Even with the having: it is not so with thee.

But, poor old man, thou prunest a rotten tree,

That cannot so much as a blossom yield

In lieu of all thy pains and husbandry.

But come thy ways; we'll go along together,

And ere we have thy youthful wages spent,

We'll light upon some settled low content.

You also find thou in private sacred moments, such as in prayer or a plea to the gods or God, and in moments between close devoted friends. Below begins Act I, Scene 2 between Celia and Rosalind. The two maidens go back and forth between thou and thee. This shift can also suggest a change in the relationship during the scene (this change might perhaps be what actors of today might call “beats”); Celia is concerned that her life-long childhood friend is down in the dumps over her precarious position at court with Duke Frederick, Celia's father:

CELIA
Herein I see thou lov'st me not with the full weight that I love thee. If my uncle, thy banished father, had banished thy uncle, the Duke my father, so thou hadst been still with me, I could have taught my love to take thy father for mine. So wouldst thou, if the truth of thy love to me were so righteously tempered as mine is to thee.

ROSALIND
Well, I will forget the condition of my estate to rejoice in yours.

CELIA
You know my father hath no child but I, nor none is like to have; and truly, when he dies, thou shalt be his heir, for what he hath taken away from thy father perforce, I will render thee again in affection. By mine honor I will, and when I break that oath, let me turn monster. Therefore, my sweet Rose, my dear Rose, be merry.

ROSALIND
From henceforth I will, coz, and devise sports. Let me see—what think you of falling in love?

CELIA
Marry, I prithee do, to make sport withal; but love no man in good earnest, nor no further in sport neither than with safety of a pure blush thou mayst in honor come off again.

Act III, Scene 5 has a private little moment between Silvius and Phebe. It can be considered a scene between lovers, though at this point in the play Phebe is actually in love with Ganymede (Rosalind in disguise) and Silvius is drunk with love for Phebe:

PHEBE
Ha, what sayst thou, Silvius?

SILVIUS
Sweet Phebe, pity me.

PHEBE
Why, I am sorry for thee, gentle Silvius.

SILVIUS

Wherever sorrow is, relief would be.

If you do sorrow at my grief in love,

By giving love your sorrow and my grief

Were both extermined.

PHEBE
Thou hast my love. Is not that neighbourly?

SILVIUS
I would have you.

PHEBE

Why, that were covetousness.

Silvius, the time was that I hated thee;

And yet it is not that I bear thee love;

But since that thou canst talk of love so well,

Thy company, which erst was irksome to me,

I will endure, and I'll employ thee too.

But do not look for further recompense

Than thine own gladness that thou art employed …

Know'st thou the youth that spoke to me erewhile?

Phebe has just fallen in love with Ganymede and is quietly pondering that love. She uses Silvius's love for her as a means to get him to deliver a letter to Ganymede. It might even be a valid acting choice that Phebe woos Silvius to accomplish this.

Other iterations of thou include addressing someone who is not in the scene with you or who is otherwise near to you on the stage, and you when one character is speaking to someone far from them on the stage, such as Malcolm in the final scene in Macbeth as he speaks to his victorious countrymen spread about the stage:

We shall not spend a large expense of time

Before we reckon with your several loves,

And make us even with you.

So let me say once more—because by now you know that I can't resist the opportunity to repeat myself—that in Shakespeare's language and in fact all language placed in the mouths of characters by a playwright, even the most reverent ceremonial-seeming words of address are spoken not always out of mere courtesy alone, and even Shakespeare himself from time to time will appear to break his own “rules” for his own dramatic purpose. Especially when a character changes midstream from thou to you or vice versa; you can trust that this means something that will be very useful to you. What you want to do is look at these instances as driven by circumstance and context, depending upon the human need in the heart of the speaker.

The Poetry That Doesn't Rhyme

But in spite of what we just talked about, contrary to popular belief Elizabethans did not necessarily walk around speaking thee and thou to each other. Shakespeare chose the language of his plays first to heighten the experience of theatre for his audience, and second to differentiate his characters from each other, such as the upper class from the lower class. However, it is not as simple as saying, “The lower-class characters always speak in prose and the rich and high-born always speak in verse.” This is only partly true; it is more accurate and helpful to say that in a given scene characters speak the language which best fits their need. Henry V moves back and forth between poetry and prose, one moment wreaking havoc in blank verse with his grand, Saint Crispin's Day speech and the next moment commiserating his lowly beaten-down soldiers around the campfire in everyday prose. Iago speaks both poetry and prose with Rodrigo and then poetry with Othello. Rosalind certainly speaks verse in the court but then prose in the Forest of Arden (where, to escape death from her cruel uncle, she has also disguised herself as a boy). The Merry Wives of Windsor, a play about simple country ladies playing tricks on Sir John Falstaff, is written almost entirely in prose. Look to the situation of the play these characters are dealing with as well as their station in life to find out why they suddenly change back and forth: you might soon realize that they are serving their own ends, and their predicament makes it necessary to move nimbly in their speech, back and forth as the situation demands. For instance, studying Iago's words in Othello might suggest to you that the famous villain is using plain-speaking prose as he conspires with Rodrigo, but then he turns to blank verse for flowery images to convince the doomed young man he still has a chance with Desdemona. With Othello he speaks verse out of (at least feigned) respect from soldier to superior, but also the heightened language is meant to convince the Moor of Desdemona's unfaithfulness in the same way he duped Rodrigo. In As You Like It Rosalind, well-bred and high-born, is capable of speaking verse at court out of respect for both the bad Duke Frederick and love for her friend Celia; then, once disguised as a boy in Arden, she speaks prose—not out of evil but rather out of a desire to convincingly playing her role, speaking the tongue of the local natives to help them believe she is actually a male from those parts. In the same play Silvius, though of the country, speaks verse as he pleads his love for Phebe; Phebe does the same—as she lovingly praises Ganymede (Rosalind in boy's garb). Merry Wives takes place in a country setting with normal, homespun folks; Falstaff is speaking the prose of the “lower” class because his intentions—fornication with married ladies—are low. But when pure young lovers Fenton and Anne Page converse in private, they speak blank verse. These are just a few of the possibilities—character, actor-driven possibilities, mind you—that can be unearthed when delving into the construction of Shakespeare's text to find out what his characters are going through. He has placed into the hands of his actors what their characters think and who they are in part by the arrangement of their words on the printed page.

Maybe you have been told by your acting teacher from time to time that you get too precious with the pause. Actors love to pause. Those brief moments give us exquisite space to demonstrate to the audience just how brilliant, how talented, how limitless is our depth of feeling as a performer. If you are like me you might have been guilty of doing what every actor just starting out seems to do: you pause before you reply, no doubt in an attempt to give yourself time within those milliseconds to feel it before you answer the cue line. Maybe—and please don't think that I am jumping on you, because I have done the same thing myself—in the very back of your mind you do this not only so that you can feel it, but in order that the audience can see you feel it, as well! Deadly! Your director will hasten to admonish you never to do this, of course. They will rightly say that the time spent by the audience waiting for your reply will only slow down the play, so they instruct you to do all of your reacting as you are speaking. Throughout your career you will no doubt hear this age-old acting tip again and again, even if spoken to others: act on the line.

Shakespeare probably never said it that way but he would have been right in league with your director. More than likely English actors spoke far more rapidly than we do today. Although your normal inclination in studying the poetic meter of Shakespeare's speeches is to try to find clues on what might be working in the mind of a character in a certain moment—and that is the best reason for studying his verse—when you break down the poetry it can also help you with one of the actor's most pressing obligations—picking up your cues. In speaking blank verse—that is, a stanza of poetry that does not rhyme—you will best make sense of it if you adhere to a very simple principle—follow the punctuation. Even if in the throes of “feeling it,” an actor still needs to be careful of and to avoid pausing—stopping, breaking—in the middle of a line that is not otherwise broken by a period, comma, colon, semi-colon, or caesura. You are not playing Stanley Kowalski. (In case you don't know Tennessee Williams's famous character from A Streetcar Named Desire, I should mention that in theatrical lore he has forever been linked with an actor's predilection for mumbling realism on the stage.) Unnecessarily breaking up text makes it harder to make sense of the line you are speaking. This is true even in contemporary plays. In keeping strict adherence to the punctuation you will make the most amazing of all Shakespearean discoveries; this is what directors and acting teachers—and perhaps even the prompters in Shakespeare's time—mean when they exclaim, “Just say it!”

Now I am not saying that the actor, even when speaking Shakespearean verse, can never pause, even in the middle of a line. We are not setting down hard and fast rules here. What I am saying is that before you rightly make the acting choice that will help to bring your character to life, it is most helpful to begin with the fundamental meaning of the line—and that will always begin with the punctuation the writer intended in the first place (in the Bard's case this means what we have best been able to put together after 400 years). Just as you master arithmetic before you tackle algebra, try first to discover the best meaning of a playwright's line, and then the vocal heights to which you soar are rightfully up to you. (This by the way is true of contemporary plays, as well.) You can then pause when the urge strikes you—as long as you don't slow down the show!

The technical term for this form of Shakespearean poetry I have just described is iambic pentameter. This is the form of language you will most often see when working on Shakespeare.

But don't let such a mathematical-sounding phrase daunt you; actually iambic pentameter is very simple in its meaning. Meter is the way poetic verse is constructed to be better understood. This meter is broken down into various forms, depending upon the desire of the poet, and in this case it is a pattern of consistently recurring unstressed and stressed syllables. When you highlight the unstressed and stressed syllable into a single component this is called a “foot.” This single foot is also called an iamb, a “foot” of poetic meter composed of two syllables, one unstressed and one stressed. Such as, “To be.” Next add the word penta. Penta means “five.” Add meter to the end of that and when you put these together you get iambic pentameter, or a foot of unstressed/stressed syllables that happens five times in a line of blank verse poetry, which creates what is called a “regular” line that “scans” (calculates) into a ten-syllable line divided between five (iambic) feet. Are you dizzy yet? Don't be. The word scansion is another fancy word for studying the breakdown of poetic verse in just this way. The word scan comes from the Latin scandere, which loosely means “to ascend.” This is actually quite instructive. In studying poetic meter you are, in effect, ascending toward the meaning of the line of poetry. I like thinking of it this way, because to me it suggests action and it suggests movement, doing something. As an actor you aren't studying the arrangement of iambs on a page for some great academic thesis; you're trying to find out what is driving a character's need to speak.

These are the basics of blank verse and it is in this form that you will find the majority of Elizabethan plays and sonnets, not just Shakespeare. This will be the principal form you should devote your initial study of his verse upon. There are many other forms of poetic meter which will really make your head spin, such as trochees—when the syllable is stressed, then unstressed; anapests—two soft stresses then hard stress; dactyls—one stressed then two unstressed; and amphibrach—unstressed, stressed, unstressed. But let's hold our horses and make sure we are clear on the most common Shakespearean verse you will most likely work with first!

So; on to doing. A “regular” line only means that the line of iambic pentameter seems to flow more or less easily and logically from your tongue as long as you speak it aloud adhering to the punctuation. (In addition to helping you make better sense of what you are saying, this recognition makes it clear just how much faster and fleet of tongue Elizabethan actors were, much more so than some of our fellow mumbling, Method-influenced actors of today.) Eventually you will be able to tap out the rhythm of iambic pentameter the way you would slap your thigh with your hand or tap your toe to beat the rhythm of musical syncopation—poetry is music—and you will further find that this particular rhythm, this unstressed/stressed beat, tends to replicate the beat of the pumping of the human heart. See below the arrangement of two syllables, in five segments (feet). If you speak it out loud you might say it like this:

da dum / da dum / da dum / da dum / da dum.

There. You have just spoken a regular iambic line.

Is it possible, in looking at the example above as well as speaking it aloud (even though I have used italics to indicate the stressed syllable), that you get a sense of a heart beating? Thuh-thump, thuh-thump, thuh-thump, etc.?

Earlier I used the word “regular,” in speaking about an iambic Shakespearean line. You might ask: what does this “regular” have to do with acting Shakespeare?

Again I repeat: when you have an unfettered line of iambic pentameter you can most likely speak the line easily, directly, and simply—as long as you don't stop in the middle of an uninterrupted line. If you are able to speak to your peers without intermittent stops and false starts you are clearer and you make better sense, and it might be deduced that the thoughts driving your words are reasonably clear to you. You might even believe that you are in either a state of well-being or that you at least possess clarity in what you are trying to say. In other words, you understand what you are saying and why, and this normal, human delivery of speech is most likely going to flow in a beat-of-the-human-heart rhythm as the words fall effortlessly from your lips.

Then the light bulb pops on.

A regular line of blank verse is probably spoken by a character who is in touch with what they want and are able to communicate it. They are probably not confused or distracted—though this does not mean that they are not in turmoil or otherwise unhappy; a regular iambic line is also spoken by a character in distress; it may simply be they are not so emotionally broken up about it that their words are broken up in the meter as well. Shakespeare uses regular lines when his characters are hysterical, as well. Once you have arrived at this you will have hit upon the best use of the technique of scansion!

In playing Shakespearean speeches you will still be able to just “get up and do it,” but isn't it helpful to have this handy-dandy tool for you to resort to in the event that you might have questions about what a line seems to be saying, and therefore need a little more help? (Especially after you have already gone to the trouble of reading the text notes at the bottom of the page!)

Though there are other poetic techniques Shakespeare employs to break up a regular line when his characters are going through something that is making them hard to understand—such as trochaic pentameter—there is also a lunch-pail, working-actor reason for the meter that beats like the pumping of the human heart: number one, for the most part we human beings tend to speak this unstressed/stressed pattern of speech in our everyday lives, and two—for performers who have a job to do—such poetic rhythm can be memorized quickly. I have already said that as a member of the Lord Chamberlain's Men you might have been handed your part today for a performance this afternoon. In constructing his plays in this fashion Shakespeare, an actor himself, is giving his fellow tragedians a helping hand because he knew they had to pick up quickly on multiple parts and plays during the course of a week. Whew!

The Joys of Iambic Pentameter

There are many possibilities in Shakespeare's orchestration of blank verse. It can also indicate stage direction and action. You will find lines that may appear “irregular” at first; that is, they do not follow the standard ten syllables spread over five feet of iambic pentameter. But when you look closer at the text—as long it has not been “corrected” by some editors; go for the Pelican or Folger if not the First Folio to be safe—you will see that it is still actually meant to be spoken as iambic pentameter because the words were intended to be shared with another character in the next speech!

Rhymed Verse and Couplets: A Poet and Do Know It

Shakespeare has his characters speak rhyme verse for several reasons. It can be for songs (such as those sung by Feste in Twelfth Night, or Ariel in The Tempest); for Choruses, Prologues and Epilogues (Romeo and Juliet, Henry V, A Midsummer Night's Dream, etc.); plays-within-plays (Hamlet and Dream); and to depict the supernatural fairy world (Macbeth, Tempest, and Dream). With rhyme, in addition to cap a scene or suggest that something is going to happen, I say that Shakespeare's characters are also speaking out of their greatest need. Below are examples of how he does this.

Richard II: Bolingbroke (the future King Henry IV) speaks rhyme only after he has attained the crown.

Twelfth Night: the grieving Olivia speaks in prose—until she becomes infatuated with Cesario (the woman-disguised-as-man Viola) and she suddenly turns to rhyme!

Romeo and Juliet: in Act III, Scene 1, in the aftermath of the confused brawl that led to Mercutio and Tybalt's death, Benvolio begins first with blank verse to confess how it happened and ends with a rhyme, followed by Lady Capulet's plea for Romeo's death. The Prince ends the scene with a long all-rhyming speech as he banishes Romeo from Verona.

Measure for Measure: in Act III, Scene 2, Duke Vincentio (disguised as a monk) encounters Elbow and Pompey and they play a scene totally in prose. When the others exit, the Duke speaks a long monologue entirely in rhyme, as he tells the audience of the perils of false faith, such as, in part:

Shame to him whose cruel striking

Kills for faults of his own liking!

Twice treble shame on Angelo,

To weed my vice and let his grow!

O, what may man within him hide,

Though angel on the outward side!

Rhymed couplets are two consecutive lines of verse that end with the last word in each line rhyming. The word couplet comes from the French couple, which means “a little pair.” This is fitting.

In studying Hamlet you are introduced to this early, in Act I, Scene 2, when in describing his outward appearance the Prince of Denmark says (bold mine):

But I have that within which passeth show;

These but the trappings and the suits of woe.

At the end of that scene, shocked upon hearing Horatio's rumor of having seen the Ghost of Hamlet's father on the battlements, Hamlet ends his short speech with:

Till then sit still, my soul: foul deeds will rise,

Though all the earth o'erwhelm them, to men's eyes.

Couplets can even appear a line before the end of the speech, such as when Hamlet closes Act I, Scene 4 with:

So, gentlemen,

With all my love I do commend me to you:

And what so poor a man as Hamlet is

May do, to express his love and friending to you,

God willing, shall not lack. Let us go in together;

And still your fingers on your lips, I pray.

The time is out of joint: O cursed spite,

That ever I was born to set it right!

Nay, come, let's go together.

Such couplets as these are called “capping” couplets, because they are meant to “cap” or end a scene with a particular force or flourish. This rhyming flourish is not to be taken as merely a witty turn of phrase—although you know that it can be at least that—it should be a foreshadowing, a warning if you will, of things to come, either of foreboding or of joy. Today we would call it an “exit line,” and as with all exit lines it must be spoken so clearly that every single person in the audience will know beyond a shadow of a doubt that something big is coming! Below are a few more capping couplets that end a scene:

O time! thou must untangle this, not I;

It is too hard a knot for me to untie!

(Viola, Twelfth Night, Act II, Scene 2)

I'll tell him yet of Angelo's request,

And fit his mind to death, for his soul's rest.

(Isabella, Measure for Measure, Act II, Scene 4)

A gentle riddance. Draw the curtains, go.

Let all of his complexion choose me so.

(Portia, The Merchant of Venice, Act II, Scene 7)

Also, when rhymed couplets appear in a scene between two characters, play them as if you are picking up on and attempting to complete the other person's thought. Below is an example of Hermia and Helena from A Midsummer Night's Dream (Act I, Scene 1). As the scene begins they are not actually sharing couplets but like the earlier example from Macbeth it does illustrate how characters in need of one another share lines back and forth, on top of each other's utterance, as they fight to help each other, and later Hermia does venture into rhyme to seek a greater proclamation of her love and devotion to Lysander.

 

HERMIA

My good Lysander!

I swear to thee, by Cupid's strongest bow,

By his best arrow with the golden head,

By the simplicity of Venus' doves,

By that which knitteth souls and prospers loves,

And by that fire which burn'd the Carthage queen,

When the false Troyan under sail was seen,

By all the vows that ever men have broke,

In number more than ever women spoke,

In that same place thou hast appointed me,

To-morrow truly will I meet with thee.

LYSANDER

Keep promise, love. Look, here comes Helena.

Enter HELENA

HERMIA

God speed fair Helena! whither away?

HELENA

Call you me fair? that fair again unsay.

Demetrius loves your fair: O happy fair!

Your eyes are lode-stars; and your tongue's sweet air

More tuneable than lark to shepherd's ear,

When wheat is green, when hawthorn buds appear.

Sickness is catching: O, were favour so,

Yours would I catch, fair Hermia, ere I go;

My ear should catch your voice, my eye your eye,

My tongue should catch your tongue's sweet melody.

Were the world mine, Demetrius being bated,

The rest I'd give to be to you translated.

O, teach me how you look, and with what art

You sway the motion of Demetrius' heart.

HERMIA

I frown upon him, yet he loves me still.

HELENA

O that your frowns would teach my smiles such skill!

HERMIA

I give him curses, yet he gives me love.

HELENA

O that my prayers could such affection move!

HERMIA

The more I hate, the more he follows me.

HELENA

The more I love, the more he hateth me.

HERMIA

His folly, Helena, is no fault of mine.

HELENA

None, but your beauty: would that fault were mine!

HERMIA

Take comfort: he no more shall see my face;

Lysander and myself will fly this place.

Before the time I did Lysander see,

Seem'd Athens as a paradise to me:

O, then, what graces in my love do dwell,

That he hath turn'd a heaven unto a hell!

LYSANDER

Helen, to you our minds we will unfold:

To-morrow night, when Phebe doth behold

Her silver visage in the watery glass,

Decking with liquid pearl the bladed grass,

A time that lovers' flights doth still conceal,

Through Athens' gates have we devised to steal.

HERMIA

And in the wood, where often you and I

Upon faint primrose-beds were wont to lie,

Emptying our bosoms of their counsel sweet,

There my Lysander and myself shall meet;

And thence from Athens turn away our eyes,

To seek new friends and stranger companies.

Farewell, sweet playfellow: pray thou for us;

And good luck grant thee thy Demetrius!

Keep word, Lysander: we must starve our sight

From lovers' food till morrow deep midnight.

These two women are in turmoil, admittedly for different reasons, and the need to communicate their turmoil is evident in this scene which reads and plays very quickly. The rhyme scheme helps to drive the scene, keeping it moving, because Lysander and Hermia are about to fly from Athens. Helena, just coming upon the two of them, is flying too—after Demetrius, all of which is made clear after she has learned her friends' secret. Beautiful and clever rhyme, yes. But the point for these two actresses is to pick up your cues because you are fighting to be comforted by your friend! This will also help you avoid getting sing-songy, causing the words to sound like you are telling a dirty limerick.

You don't need to have mastered poetic meter and rhyme to play this scene. Even if you just picked up the script and had to immediately start acting it, you could do it—as long as you allow the inherent pace and accelerating rhythm of shared couplets to take hold of you. The rhyming last word, when you listen and when you follow the scene, will propel you forward. That's all you need to know! At once the scene is playing, really playing, and the audience is watching two people in sync with one another fighting to find an answer to a problem by sharing intentional rhyme at the end of every sentence. The only caution, however, would be to avoid hammering the rhyme too hard. If you find that you are doing this, first remember that rhyme wants to be said as if the character knows they are speaking it and choose to do so, and second go back to the text and if necessary write it out in prose—remember Exercise 7 instructions to help with understanding blank verse?—to keep you on point with the movement of the speech.

Now to people in love: you won't be surprised to find rhyme constantly in love scenes, when wooers are so crazy about each other they can't help finishing each other's sentences. For actors in rehearsal, it is not too great a stretch to play such moments as each lover adding to and topping the previous rhyme tossed to them by their beloved! I return to Romeo and Juliet, this time to their balcony scene in Act II, Scene 2, as Juliet quickly dashes into the house to see the Nurse:

 

JULIET

A thousand times good night!

Exit, above.

ROMEO

A thousand times the worse, to want thy light.

Love goes toward love, as schoolboys from their books,

But love from love, toward school with heavy looks.

You are also treated to rhyme again later when she rushes back:

JULIET

Sweet, so would I:

Yet I should kill thee with much cherishing.

Good night, good night! parting is such sweet sorrow,

That I shall say good night till it be morrow.

Exit above.

ROMEO

Sleep dwell upon thine eyes, peace in thy breast!

Would I were sleep and peace, so sweet to rest!

Hence will I to my ghostly father's cell,

His help to crave, and my dear hap to tell.

You witness this in a different way when Romeo goes to his confessor Friar Laurence to tell him of his new-found love. This scene drives just as much—or at least it should—propelled by just as much need, but it is between two men, a young man and an older man who is his mentor. Romeo is ecstatically divulging his glorious secret; Friar Laurence is blown away by the news and immediately fights to get the young man to calm down and talk sense:

 

FRIAR LAURENCE

… What early tongue so sweet saluteth me?

Young son, it argues a distemper'd head

So soon to bid good morrow to thy bed:

Care keeps his watch in every old man's eye,

And where care lodges, sleep will never lie;

But where unbruised youth with unstuff'd brain

Doth couch his limbs, there golden sleep doth reign:

Therefore thy earliness doth me assure

Thou art up-roused by some distemperature;

Or if not so, then here I hit it right,

Our Romeo hath not been in bed to-night.

ROMEO

That last is true; the sweeter rest was mine.

FRIAR LAURENCE

God pardon sin! wast thou with Rosaline?

ROMEO

With Rosaline, my ghostly father? no;

I have forgot that name, and that name's woe.

FRIAR LAURENCE

That's my good son: but where hast thou been, then?

ROMEO

I'll tell thee, ere thou ask it me again.

I have been feasting with mine enemy,

Where on a sudden one hath wounded me,

That's by me wounded: both our remedies

Within thy help and holy physic lies:

I bear no hatred, blessed man, for, lo,

My intercession likewise steads my foe.

FRIAR LAURENCE

Be plain, good son, and homely in thy drift;

Riddling confession finds but riddling shrift.

ROMEO

Then plainly know my heart's dear love is set

On the fair daughter of rich Capulet:

As mine on hers, so hers is set on mine;

And all combined, save what thou must combine

By holy marriage: when and where and how

We met, we woo'd and made exchange of vow,

I'll tell thee as we pass; but this I pray,

That thou consent to marry us to-day.

FRIAR LAURENCE

Holy Saint Francis, what a change is here!

Is Rosaline, whom thou didst love so dear,

So soon forsaken? young men's love then lies

Not truly in their hearts, but in their eyes.

Jesu Maria, what a deal of brine

Hath wash'd thy sallow cheeks for Rosaline!

How much salt water thrown away in waste,

To season love, that of it doth not taste!

The sun not yet thy sighs from heaven clears,

Thy old groans ring yet in my ancient ears;

Lo, here upon thy cheek the stain doth sit

Of an old tear that is not wash'd off yet:

If e'er thou wast thyself and these woes thine,

Thou and these woes were all for Rosaline:

And art thou changed? pronounce this sentence then,

Women may fall, when there's no strength in men.

ROMEO

Thou chid'st me oft for loving Rosaline.

FRIAR LAURENCE

For doting, not for loving, pupil mine.

ROMEO

And bad'st me bury love.

FRIAR LAURENCE

Not in a grave,

To lay one in, another out to have.

ROMEO

I pray thee, chide not; she whom I love now

Doth grace for grace and love for love allow;

The other did not so.

FRIAR LAURENCE

O, she knew well

Thy love did read by rote and could not spell.

But come, young waverer, come, go with me,

In one respect I'll thy assistant be;

For this alliance may so happy prove,

To turn your households' rancour to pure love.

ROMEO

O, let us hence; I stand on sudden haste.

FRIAR LAURENCE

Wisely and slow; they stumble that run fast.

Exeunt.

You will also find couplets binding people together out of hatred or strife, as in Othello. First, in Act I, Scene 3, when the Duke of Venice tries to calm Brabantio:

… And, noble signior,

If virtue no delighted beauty lack,

Your son-in-law is far more fair than black.

The Duke exits after completing this line. Before he himself exits, Brabantio cannot resist one last warning—and prophesy—to the Moor:

Look to her, Moor, if thou hast eyes to see:

She has deceived her father, and may thee.

It can be both to let the audience know the present scene is ending but “hang on, something big is going to happen!” and it can be between two people in tremendous need of each other—thrown together by love or hate—who cannot resist completing or carrying on each other's sentences. In addition, historically, couplets were employed for other reasons, such as to help off-stage actors to hear their entrance cue for the following scene, an unabashed prompting for the audience to applaud, or Shakespeare's stage direction to an actor that they must perform a false exit and then return to speak another thought.

As you work on a scene or monologue with rhyme spoken by a character—and I assure you that I am not the first one to dream this up—know that your character is doing so on purpose to get something. Got it? 'Nuff said.

Sonnets

A sonnet is a 14-line poem that expresses a single thought. It is written in iambic pentameter, and the 14 lines are divided up into three four-line sections called quatrains. Quatrains are four lines of verse that make up a stanza. The three quatrains are labeled first, second, and third quatrain. The final two lines of the sonnet are in the form of a rhyme couplet. The idea of the poem is expressed in this order:

First quatrain: expresses the overall theme of the poem.

Second quatrain: the theme is explained in greater detail.

Third quatrain: expresses some conflict in the heart of the writer, often begun with the word “but.” To impress your friends you can let them know that this conflict is also called peripeteia.

Couplet: concludes the sonnet by summing up its overall theme.

Shakespeare wrote 154 sonnets, perhaps between 1592 and 1598. Most of them (126) are written to a young man; the remaining 28 (127–154) are written to an ominous, unknown woman referred to as the “dark lady.” Without Shakespeare's permission the sonnets were published in quarto form in 1609, along with his longer poem The Passionate Pilgrim. Because so many of them were devoted to a young man it has been theorized that Shakespeare was gay and he wrote them to proclaim his love for, perhaps, William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke (one of the people to whom the inaugural First Folio edition was dedicated as “most noble and incomparable brethren”), though we do not know this for a certainty. In this same whispered theory we must also mention Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton, a valued patron to whom Shakespeare dedicated Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. To be fair, however, it must be pointed out that in Elizabethan times men often expressed their great friendship for one another in terms of “love.”

We have touched on how Shakespeare uses his verse to help his actors play fright and urgency through sharing lines, how he helps them let the audience know that something big is going to happen soon through the capping couplet, and how he inserts rhyme willy-nilly into scenes to make his characters raise the stakes, whether out of distress or joy. But in Romeo and Juliet, his greatest love story, he goes a step farther in Act I, Scene 5, providing the two teenagers a scene in which they not only share lines to show their growing instant love, he also builds the driving chemistry between them by making their first meeting—a back-and-forth conversation you might call playful sparring—into a sonnet:

 

ROMEO

If I profane with my unworthiest hand

This holy shrine, the gentle fine is this:

My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand

To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.

JULIET

Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,

Which mannerly devotion shows in this;

For saints have hands that pilgrims' hands do touch,

And palm to palm is holy palmers' kiss.

ROMEO

Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too?

JULIET

Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer.

ROMEO

O, then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do;

They pray, grant thou, lest faith turn to despair.

JULIET

Saints do not move, though grant for prayers' sake.

ROMEO

Then move not, while my prayer's effect I take.

You don't need to be some great acting teacher to see that here you have two young folks that are instantly in love, and they are rejoicing in wordplay with each other for the first time. It is the kind of fun that can only lead—which it of course does—to their first kiss! Young actors, that's all you have to do to play this scene! These two kids dig each other, and are having the time of their young lives building up to a kiss they both know is coming! Girls, if you know what it's like to feel that a guy is cute, you can play this scene; boys, if you remember what came to your mind when you saw a lady across the room you thought was hot, you can play this scene—it is as simple as that! Acting Shakespeare might be outrageous but it is not rocket science!

Prose: How We Talk

This is the second form of language you will most often see in Shakespeare. You will know it because it is simply laid out like the pages of a book; left to right printing with no obvious pattern of stress or non-stress, and the letters are not capitalized on the left-hand side. Shakespeare most often used prose for his characters of the lower class—servants, laborers, etc.—but he did not limit it to them. Both upper- and lower-class characters speak prose from time to time. It all has to do with expressing the desires of their heart. As I have previously mentioned, Shakespeare has King Henry V speak prose with great dexterity to his soldiers in the campfire scenes, but in Henry IV, Part 1 Prince Hal goes back and forth between courtly iambic pentameter and country prose with Falstaff. Conversely, as we have shown, lower class such as Silvius and Phebe speak poetry in their “love” scene in As You Like It. Think of iambic pentameter as heightened language for specific effect and weighty need. Consider prose in these two ways:

1. to portray common, simple folk;

2.to allow the character, whatever their station in life, to speak their mind with greater plainness, such as private scenes in which they are plotting evil or fun.

Prose is spoken when the character does not have the “soft phrase of peace,” either from being uneducated or underprivileged and therefore forced by circumstance to not mince words. You also find it spoken by cynical, plain-speaking wits offering commentary on the world around them (Jaques and Touchstone, both in As You Like It). In addition, Shakespeare employs prose in exposition, letters, and proclamations, speeches spoken out of madness whether pretended or real (think of Hamlet and Lady Macbeth), and for low comedy scenes (think the rude mechanicals in A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Comedy of Errors).

Here is a moving example of plain speaking, from Henry V, in which Mistress Quickly (in this play referred to as “Hostess”) speaks of the death of Sir John Falstaff:

Nay, sure, he's not in hell: he's in Arthur's bosom, if ever man went to Arthur's bosom. A' made a finer end and went away an it had been any christom child; a' parted even just between twelve and one, even at the turning o' the tide: for after I saw him fumble with the sheets and play with flowers and smile upon his fingers' ends, I knew there was but one way; for his nose was as sharp as a pen, and a' babbled of green fields. “How now, sir John!” quoth I. “What, man! be o' good cheer.” So a' cried out “God, God, God!” three or four times. Now I, to comfort him, bid him a' should not think of God; I hoped there was no need to trouble himself with any such thoughts yet. So a' bade me lay more clothes on his feet: I put my hand into the bed and felt them, and they were as cold as any stone; then I felt to his knees, and they were as cold as any stone, and so upward and upward, and all was as cold as any stone.

Without any trouble at all the actress playing this role can easily inform—and move—the audience, by simply playing the scene and speaking the lines. One of our best examples of this is Dame Judi Dench's reading in Kenneth Branagh's fine film of the play. But you can do it, too, just by memorizing the words, and doing it …

Dag-nabbit! Shakespeare's Made-up Words

As vivid as Shakespeare's words had to be, even he got stuck once and a while searching for the right words to convey what he was trying to say. So you know what he did? He just made up words to help him. How many did he make up? Various figures have been postulated, but what seems to be the most prevalent estimation is that Shakespeare created some 1700 words for this purpose; but don't get nervous, because you will be speaking sounds that can only be explained by scholarly notes at the bottom of the page. These made-up words would have baffled the Elizabethan audience the first time they heard them, too. When speaking these bizarre sounds it is vital that they be played to the very hilt, especially if you don't know what you are saying. How do you think we came up with the likes of our own unique expletives? Such nonsense words come out of you because your desire to communicate is so great that, in the face of the appropriate word eluding you, you knew that you just had to go ahead and speak anyway, you needed to speak anyway! When you accidentally bang your finger or stub your toe or get so frazzled by a sudden life reversal you don't know what to say and yet you know that something must be said out loud to express your displeasure! You wind up shouting, “Fudge!” instead of a certain other word beginning with f, or yelling “S…t!” or even “Dagnabbit!” if you dropped something on your foot. What in the world does “Dag-nabbit” mean? Other than to express the inexpressible when expression is a must!

Shakespeare knew this too. The only difference—other than his genius—is that he had a 400-plus-year head start. Language, as you know, is always evolving—you merely have to take a gander at Webster's Dictionary to see the words and phrases now considered commonplace after being shunned generations ago, many of which (like the uncountable additions to Webster's over the generations) we now have come to know as commonplace. Consider these, from Chapter 3 of The Shakespeare Book of Lists:

advertising, bandit, critic, dickens, epileptic, film, gossip, hush, investment, jig, kissing, luggage, manager, numb, obscene, puke, quarrelsome, rant, shooting star, torture, undress, varied, wild-goose chase, yelping, zany.

Yes, sir, we believe most if not all of the above were concocted by Shakespeare, or at least were part of the common cultural vernacular and it was he who first put them down in print (such as the example “zany” above, which comes from zanni, first appearing in commedia dell'arte). But mostly likely he also made up words that would be unique to the language of his own time (remember your own present-day “dag-nabbit”). Here, along with their meaning, are a few of them, also from The Shakespeare Book of Lists:

addition—title

alarum—call to arms with trumpets

aroint—begone

baffle (which for our purposes has come to mean “to confuse”)—to hang up a person by the heels as a mark of disgrace

balk (remember a baseball pitcher who hesitates at the wrong time?)—to disregard

belike—maybe

bum (still today, spoken mostly by the British)—backside, buttocks

character—handwriting

dispatch—to hurry

enow—enough

fare-thee-well (even today)—goodbye

fustian—wretched

honest—chaste, pure

list—listen

morrow—day

power—army

recreant—coward

stale—harlot

tax—to criticize, to accuse

want—lack

wherefore—why

zounds—by his [Christ's] wounds.

And, yet again from Lists, some that are even more obscure, along the lines of our own colloquial “old fuddy-duddy,” “horn-swaggled,” “bam-boozled,” etc.:

a-birding—hunting small birds

ambuscado—ambush

boiled-brains—hot-headed youths

brabbler—quarreler

canker-blossom—worm in the bud

clapper-claw—to thrash or maul

dewlap—loose skin at the throat

dotard—old fool

fancy-monger—a lovesick man

fardel—burden

geck—fool

gibbet—gallows

hugger-mugger—secrecy

logger-headed—stupid

maltworm—heavy drinker

noddy—simpleton

periwig-pated—bewigged

poop (not what you think)—infect with venereal disease

reechy—grimy

skains-mate—criminal

skimble-skamble—nonsensical

slug-a-bed—sleepyhead

thwack—drive away

welkin—sky

whirligig—a top

These strange and wonderful words share a very common thing: they require your full, open, articulated mouth and lips to properly do justice to them (warm up your lips and tongue!). You must hit consonants with great force, you must allow your mouth to open wide for a vowel—in short you must deliver them as someone who must speak but has no other word to use but this one! You certainly recall (from Exercise 14 in Act Two) the kind of energy and punch exerted when driven to shout, “F…k!” This is how you must deliver all the “Shakespearean” words our twenty-first-century ears are not accustomed to hearing, and especially those words made up in the desperation of human need.

 

 

* * *

 

 

The language of the New Millennium is still evolving, too, just as much as, if not more so than, in Shakespeare's time. Look at these more recent examples of made-up words from Merriam-Webster's Open Dictionary online:

agnostophobia (noun): fear of the unknown

benies (noun): benefits

cutieful (adjective): beautiful and cute

dope (adjective): very good: excellent

gratisfaction (noun): gratitude and satisfaction

malware (noun): a dangerous virus that can destroy your computer's functionality.

popemobile (noun): the special vehicle that transports the Pope in public appearances

wackadoodle (adjective): not quite right: wackier than wacky

Are these words any wilder, more unique to our society and the world in which we live and hope to thrive than the vast array of nouns, verbs, and adjectives penned by William Shakespeare? In addition, they are examples of words created by many people and used in popular culture, not only penned by the Bard of Avon alone. To keep jogging your memory I have included a longer list of his more frequently used words in the Glossary in the back of this book.

Summary

1. Follow Shakespeare's punctuation.

2. The use of thee and thou is about human relationship and need.

3. Blank verse is heightened need but not just about being highborn.

4. Iambic pentameter helps you memorize your words.

5. Shared lines are telling you to pick up the cues.

6. Rhyme verse is speaking out of great need to make a point.

7. Prose is about plain speaking as well as being poor.

8. Both upper- and lower-class characters speak prose.

9. Both upper- and lower-class characters speak verse.

10. Feminine endings are about actively trying to solve a problem.

11. Long descriptive passages help you to build emotion.

12. Characters make up words out of an outrageous need to speak.