Acting in a play with hightened language, such as a Shakespeare play, presents an additional set of challanges than does a play where the dialogue is written with contemporary English. If I do a play by Tennessee Williams, or David Mamet, or Neil Simon, it is usually fairly apparant what the words mean. This isn't always the case when I do Shakespeare.
Yet it is essential that I understand what every single word means in the play. One of the common comments that you hear about lesser productions of Shakespeare is that the actors didn't really have a grasp of what they were saying. As an actor, it's not enough for me to just have the gist of the line. I need to know how to use every single word of the line and with lines as thick and as rich as Shakespeare's, that takes some work.
So, as I memorize, I am also uncovering meaning. There is no point to memorizing a line if I don't know what it means. Throughout this process, I am utilizing six different sources.
First I have three copies of the play. None of which are my actual script (which I haven't received yet.)
It may seem bizarre that I am utilizing different copies of the play but there is good reason for it. While Shakespeare was alive, some but not all of his plays were published. Sometimes they were published multiple times and different editions could have different lines to them. Seven years after his death, two of his colleagues went around and collected as many of Shakespeare's scripts as they could find. Some they had to piece together using old prompt books, manuscripts, etc. In the end, they came up with 36 of Shakespeare's scripts and they had these published in one large edition. This was called the first folio (folio had to do with the size of paper being used.) The scripts as they existed in the first folio weren't always identical to the earlier published versions.
So, by 1623, there were already multiple variations of some of Shakespeare's plays.
How different could they be? Well... look at what is perhaps Shakespeare's single most famous line of text....
In the folio we have: To be, or not to be, that is the question:
But in the first edition of Hamlet, that line actually read: To be, or not to be, aye there's the point,
Aye there's the point????
So you can see that at some point in time, people have been deciding which version of things should become the accepted version.
In addition, over time, publishers have taken Shakespeare's scripts and made them user-friendy. They tweak the spelling of some of the words to make them more readable today. For example, the word that we know today as "suit" may have been spelled "suite" in the folio. Editors will also play around with the punctuation so that they are easier to read by today's sensibilities.
Some theatre people argue that if we look at the earliest copies of Shakespeare's plays, like we may find in the folio, we can find acting clues. Some schools of Shakespeare training say that the punctuation in the folio unlocks the way to say the lines. Others look at what words happen to be capitalized think that these words deserve extra stress when performed. There are all sort of ideas about things like this. I don't buy that there are any strict rules when it comes to things like this. Any Shakespeare scholar will tell you that many people set the type for the folio when it was printed and they each seemed to have their own style. So, what we may think is Shakespeare's punctuation might actually be a style choice from one of the compositors of the book.
With all that said, I do think there is value to having the folio copy of a script. Perhaps there are clues, and it is worth looking at the different punctuations and spellings to see what they might unlock. So, I have been working out of a folio copy of Othello.
Then, I have a new edition of Othello. For 400 years, this script as been tweaked every so slightly, this way and that. It is good to have a new edition to see what the culmination of scholarship has produced. I like the Arden editions of Shakespeare. The Arden has good, extensive footnotes about aspects of the play.
So with these two sources, I can uncover meaning by looking at an early copy of the text and a modern edition of the text but what happens when I come to a word that I have no idea what it means?
There are two great sources for that:
1) The Oxford English Dictionary - Back in the 1800's this guy decided that he was going to make a dictionary. In this dictionary he was not only going to define every way that a word had been used, he was also going to find where in liturature that word first appeared! I mean, that is unreal! So, if I don't know what a word means, I can look it up in this book and see all of the different ways that a word has been used. It's pretty fascinating. Often I find that a word I thought I knew the meaning of, had a completely different meaning in Shakespeare's time.
2) Shakespeare Lexicon - Some other guy decided he was going to make a list of every word that Shakespeare used and what that word meant every time it what used. This body of work is known as the Shakespeare Lexicon and comes in two volumes. So if I look up the word "suit" for example, it will list every single place in every single play that Shakespeare used the word "suit" and what it means each time he used the word. Crazy.
So I have both of those sources by my side. Well, that is a lie, I use the Oxford English Dictionary online. But I do have the Lexicon.
So, I've got the Folio version of Othello, The Arden edition of Othello, The Shakespeare Lexicon, and The Oxford English Dictionary. I also have an app on my phone that has all of the Shakespeare plays on it. So, if I am bored and I have my phone, BAM... bust out some Othello on the i-phone and I am off! I was using that two nights ago. It's very convenient.
Finally, I have a copy of the No Fear Shakespeare edition of Othello. This line of Shakespeare editions are interesting. They have the original text on one page, and on the adjacent page they have a modern paraphrasing of the text. On the one hand it is horrible... sometimes the paraphrasing is either really bad or really wrong. However, there are times where it helps to see how someone else puts a particularly challenging stretch of text into their own words. I look at this as a last resort... but it is handy to have around.
If I don't know exactly what I am saying... how in the world can I expect the audience, who only gets to hear what I say once... to know what I am saying? It is not enough to know what the paragraph kind of means. It is not enough to know what each sentence kind of means. I need to know exactly what each word means and how they are all working together to form these complex thoughts. If I don't know what each word means... there is no point to memorizing the line.
So, in order to do all this, I draw from a variety of resources, in order to make, hopefully, informed decisions about meaning. When it comes down to it, the most important thing is that the audience gets it, so I say use many of the resources that are at your disposal in order to achieve better success.
Happy Memorial Day.
Hatch
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