Session 4, Nov 6
/In attendance:
Dale
Meranda
Marissa
David
We looked over Act II and explored ways to tackle the sometimes-difficult text.
For starters, we had a short lesson on Elizabethan grammar:
thee/thou
English used to have formal/informal versions of the second person pronoun, as many languages still do. The general (but not invariable) rule was that you was used for superiors or people you didn’t know well, while thee/thou was for subordinates or intimates. There are many examples in Shakespeare where one character will insult another one by thou-ing him.
Also, thy = your and thine = yours: Is that is thy dog? Is that dog thine?
(Note: the modern use of thou in church services is not, as most people think, high-falutin’; rather, we are addressing God as an intimate.)
verb endings
English used to have verb endings like most other languages, but when the Normans conquered England in 1066 and the ruling class spoke French, the common folk jettisoned most of them as unnecessary. Other than irregular verbs, the only endings we have these days are the s’s on third person verbs: I lie/you lie/he lies.
-est, 2nd person: thou liest (but you lie, usually)
-eth, 3rd person: he maketh me to lie down; note that anyone who tacks on -eth to any verb to sound fancy doesn’t know what they’re doing. (Anyone who tacks on -eth to a noun is A Idiot.)
In AYLI, it’s mostly the local yokels who still speak with thee and the verb endings.
We looked at untangling syntax (like in Session 1). Look at this line:
As sure I think did never man love so.
Using our 4th-grade subject/verb strategy, we extract:
Man did never love so.
Reinsert the interjection:
Man did never love so, I think.
Semi-translate the As:
(Since) man did never love so, I think.
Find a place for the adverb:
(Since), surely, man did never love so, I think.
or
(Since) man surely did never love so, I think.
or
(Since) man did never love so, I surely think.
Now that you’ve determined the meaning, re-approach the line:
As sure I think did never man love so.
The meaning being clear, your can start your work as an actor figuring out how to present the line.
That’s a lot of work for one tiny line, but sometimes it is necessary.
I presented my rule of thumb for actors struggling with Shakespeare: slow down. Most beginners make the mistake of assuming that because the language is more dense than what our audiences are used to, they need to rattle along as fast as they can in order not to bore the audience.
The opposite is true: because our audiences have to listen harder, slow down to give them a chance to hear what you’re saying. Of course there are going to be passages that don’t make sense to them, but if you’ve done the work of an actor, the sense will come through if you give the lines time to carry the weight of your character’s emotions/goals.
Always remember: Shakespeare’s words are your friends and your support, not your enemy.
We had a good time looking over Silvius’s first set of speeches about love (from which our problematic line comes). We began exploring how to make them funny, and that’s where the great lesson about “doing Shakespeare” comes in: your job is not to say the words, it’s to make your character’s words come alive.
Just like any other role.
We looked at ways to plan for the musical arc of longer lines/speeches; how to set up the repetitive structures of some of the speeches; the patterns we can consciously apply to sentences, and how to disrupt those patterns for comic effect.
We examined some of the themes that begin developing in Act II:
the rapaciousness of the court vs. the generosity of the forest [Gifting as a principle; the forest gang’s gentle treatment of Jaques; the willingness to share limited resources (Corin and the forest gang)]
gender/identity [a boy actor (Billy) —playing—> Rosalind —disguised as—> Ganymede —pretending to be—> “Rosalind” <—being wooed by— Orlando]
the nature of love, particularly the old trope of lovers being debilitated by their emotions; the “cruelty” of the adored one’s refusal to reciprocate
We talked about Jaques perhaps being somewhere on the autism/Asperger spectrum: the odd fixation on one emotional state (“I can suck melancholy out of a song as a weasel sucks eggs”); the over-detailed attempts at humor or analysis (“I met a fool!” and most famously “All the world’s a stage”); the obvious eye-rolling on the part of the other characters who nonetheless tolerate his idiosyncrasies with some affection.
There was a lot more that escapes my memory. If any of it was important, please put that in the comments!
Next session: Wed, Nov 13, 7:30–9:00
ASSIGNMENTS:
Read through Act III. In most of Shakespeare, III.2 is long and pivotal. Pay attention.
David: present ideas for using the huge white canopies as set pieces.
