January 28, 2004
341-2
Shakespeare wrote poetry, dramatic poetry—not just because it was the fashion of the times. He created in dramatic poetry terms because he had to, because what he wanted to communicate demanded poetry as its expression. Think about this. What is poetry? Avoid the quick and facile answer. And don’t let my answer be enough for you either. I write it just to stimulate your own thinking. How deep must human experience go, how passionate must human engagement become, for poetry to be its “realistic”, natural, true expression? Have you ever become so exhilarated that you wanted to burst into song? Have you ever been so deeply struck to your core that you wanted to howl (or even just to moan) at the moon? To dance to the heavens, where ‘dance’ means to move, to spin, to soar, to reach, to extensify, your inner being’s torment or exultation to the universe?
Beethoven was compelled to express such experience in music. Rembrandt’s profound and quiet passion turned to painting. Michelangelo took hammer and chisel and attacked a piece of marble so that he might liberate the magnificent human struggle he sensed trapped within it. And Shakespeare took the rather effete poetry of the Elizabethan court and the banging, booming poetry of Marlowe’s theatre and he wrestled it, kneaded it, worked it, pushed and pulled it, shaped it into a creative poetry of the theatre that still manifests intense human experience with ringing exhilaration today. Shakespeare imagined a Hamlet in such dramatic poetry terms. He gave him language music to express the human struggle with. He created Cleopatra in poetry. And he gave Cleopatra a vocal score whose every twist and turn proceeds from a kinesthetic totality response within her. He dramatized the tragedy of Othello’s jealousy in terms of dramatic poetry. And by the way, he changed the very nature of dramatic poetry with each imagining. Avoid the poetry, turn it to prose, and you eliminate the meaning, the power, the beauty, the depths, of the story. The poetry is the meaning.
How can you be content with passivity, with partial involvement, as you engage with Shakespeare? How can you settle for a collapsed spine and feet only tentatively connecting with the earth? How can you stand your tiny little contemporary voices and shallow safe emotions? Be brave. Meet Shakespeare on his terms, match him. Learn to let him lift you, wrestle you, knead you, work you, push and pull you; let him take you further in your creative capacities than you were before your encounter with him. Prepare to meet the Shakespeare Challenge. If you are prepared, you just may more easily let Shakespeare’s power carry you past tiny frettings and individual huffings and puffings and tensions and emotionalizings.
Warm Up! Prepare you body and your voice for this engagement. You all know what you must do: relax and stretch your muscles. Release tension from neck/shoulder and pelvis/waist. Align your body: feet shoulder width apart, weight on the balls of the feet.
Knees unlocked, ready to respond. A straight spine with the gentle, tension-free curve at the coccyx. Ribcage lifted, head centered on neck. The readiness is all.
Voice: You know what you must do. Breath support with the diaphragm, ribcage expanded. (I won’t take the time here to detail the elements. You know them. I only wish you would work until they are a nonconscious, instant part of your creative selves.)
Prepare that warmed up voice and body to Shakespearean heights. Get rapiers (real or imagined) and fence. Bring your bodies alive to balance and quick-witted response, with clarity and precision, with total engagement in the opposing forces of thrust and parry. Add a vocal component that vocally embodies these qualities. Work singly and in pairs. Do this and do this again. Then do it again. Do this until it is part of who you are, until balance and agility, kinesthetic joy in language (every character who speaks poetry loves language, tastes words, delights in vowels that carry meaning from the depths of the being, cherishes, teases, embodies sound and rhythm—the music of language poetry), become a natural part of your expressive self.
*Gusto, life, vitality are at the heart of Shakespeare’s world. The astonishment of newness, of discovery. (Run to the dock, see a ship come in. Watch an elephant, which you have never seen before, come down the plank—a cage of multi-colored birds—chattering monkeys. A man crowbars open a wooden crate and you smell sweet, pungent spices you’ve never smelt before. Etc etc. You come up with illustrations that touch off your sense of wonder, of astonishment.)
*Jump into the ring and bait the bear. Then sneak into the theatre next door and throw walnuts at the actors, heckle them along with groundlings next to you (what do they smell like? Have they been drinking? When did they wash last?)
*Dance the morris dance until you could fill the world with music and dance and drink.
*Take the man or woman you love and go running into a barn, climb into the hayloft and make riotous raucous love—or just plain muscular, panting sex—until you want to shout out to the heavens in your joy in being human.
*Play a huge practical joke on Malvolio.
*Jump on top of the orchard wall and improvise a love sonnet to your lover on the balcony above you.
*Get your friends together and plan and carry out a vital, stupendous Falstaff Punk’d operation.
Create/discover opposites:
*Lying together, breathing, panting together after love-making, you and your lover look out the hayloft window and watch a funeral procession go by, the priest’s incense censer swinging slowly as smoke puffs into the air. A Latin chant. A woman in black, dabbing her eyes with a kerchief, weeping. Etc.
*The soldier/you tramps through the mud of the battlefield, swinging your broadsword, hacking at the enemy who howls as he hurls himself at you. Across the field comes a courtier a feathered cap bobbing in the air, picking his way daintily through the corpses, a perfumed kerchief to his nose.
ETC.
*Be impatient with your willingness to let me do all the imagining. Come up with ten more illustrations. Goal: to bring your totality alive to the stimuli of Shakespeare’s world to turn you into an imaginary, life-loving, wonder-seeking, sensory-exciting Elizabethan.
After you have turned yourself into a Shakespearean, an imaginary Elizabethan, attack the magnificent work of creating individual Shakespeares. Touch off in yourself the joy of creating.
Through life-study, through metaphor, through imagination (See the notes I’m writing to the sophomores.) you turn yourself into a Cleopatra: Be the serpent of the Nile—in action. Coil around a marble pillar, undulate up the tapestried stairs to the fountain of sugar-sweet water, dip your tongue in. Let the powerful, muscular coils pulse against each other. Then, stand, put a gold headdress on. Let the rays of the sun stream out from the headdress and reach the river Nile, reach to Antony’s Rome. Lift your arm and grasp the power of the sun, hurl it at the slave who is slinking away from your chaise. Let your voice follow. ETC. until the metaphors take you over, until you are fully, totally, responding. And note: not just until you can manufacture the external likenesses. No, do it and do it again and again until you have absorbed the behavior and the very metaphor takes over, transforms you. (What metaphor can help you embody Cleo’s ‘infinite variety’?)
You respond to Hamlet’s world of Denmark—not just Elsinore. What has ‘the beauteous majesty of Denmark’ done in today’s USA that violates the integrity of the Hamlet in you? Surely you needn’t look far into the activities of the USA in today’s world to find images, experiences, that assault your soul, that wrench your very pride in being an American in the world. Let a re-experienced image play through you, beneath the words: ‘O such an act that blurs the blush and grace of modesty, calls virtue hypocrite….’ Stand in the upper hall of your apartment building and listen to that Bush voice (perhaps coming from a tv in an apartment on the floor below) say ‘Bring ‘Em On’. Did you listen to the state of the Union speech? Hear those words, see the smug arrogant smile tug at the corners of his mouth. (Actually, for me Cheney is a better physical image for Claudius—even the Cheney voice is oilier too.) Do whatever works for you to touch off the Hamlet in YOU. Let the hall grow darker, the walls higher. Turn the electric light sconces into candles, torches. The wall paper becomes tapestries, the stairs stone. Listen for the sound of his voice until your right hand unconsciously reaches for the rapier at your side. A candle sputters. You listen. Gertrude laughs from deep in her throat. You are drawn down another stair. Your hand tightens on the hilt of the rapier….
Where will you go in your own experience to discover and relive, recreate, the depth of anguished betrayal that rips through Hamlet’s heart and soul at his mother’s relationship with Claudius? (And note: that relationship exists in terms of vivid, detailed, lived images, experiences, sensory assaults. Test yourself: what fragments of sensory experience, intensely reexperienced, do you relive when you ‘think of’ a significant, major relationship in your life?) As I said in class, reading the vivid descriptions of atrocities committed in Viet Nam and only recently declassified—learn to find creative stimuli everywhere--touch off in me the deep horror that motivates Hamlet, carries him through the play. (And which, by the way, if you try to do the ‘scenes’ with Gertrude and Ophelia only as isolated ‘scenes’ and not connected to this greater horror in the political world around you, you won’t succeed. The tragedy is deep and broad in reach. It is the tragedy of Denmark. What in today’s America activates it in you?) The fact that the Viet Nam interviews have been kept from public view and the realization that no one was ever investigated further or prosecuted for the crimes described, sends the Hamlet/me into a frenzy that I can channel directly into Hamlet seeing Claudius making public policy pronouncements from the throne, Polonius nodding and saying ‘Uh huh’. And Gertrude? And Ophelia?
I have been describing work you do on your own. Work you do before you plunge into a scene with a partner. This is the joyous creative imaginative work of the artist actor. Why do you avoid it? Find a way to attack the issue with gusto, with Elizabethan vigor and joy at leaping into the unknown. Work, struggle, fail, curse, go to work again, discover, sing for joy, go back to work. Become Shakespearean actors.