AYLI Diary: Shakespeare Boot Camp 3

Warmups

We warmed up (with Clark, of course) then sang Happy Birthday to our fearsome AD Cindy.

We worked on the second page of the Lessac consonants — D, T, P, B, G, and K — then applied them to lines from the show.

Welcomes

We welcomed two new cast members, John and Cliff, and regretfully said farewell to two, Katie and Lauren, whose real lives conflicted with our Temporary Autonomous Zone.

Dealing with verse

Then we settled in to learn how to dissect verse. AYLI is mostly in prose, which is not necessarily a plus: the iambic pentameter of Shakespeare’s verse is actually easier to learn. The meter provides a framework that alerts you when you’re off course (the line doesn’t flow; you stumble), and the language is more vibrant, more emotional.

However, at least some of the play is in verse, so we dissected it.

Here’s the text we used (from Oliver’s appearance in Act V):

Rather than be dismayed at this sentence — and there are even longer sentences — start by doing what you learned in 3rd grade: underline the subject once, the verb twice, and circle the direct object:

In this case, we actually have a compound/complex sentence, but we’re grownups so this doesn’t faze us:

So our basic sentence is:

I recovered him, bound up his wound, and he sent me to tell this story and to give this napkin.

There. Now we know what Oliver is trying to say. The idea is that the basic sentence gives us the structure of the line’s arc; we know how an English-speaking human would say it, and so we have a blueprint for our breath and our inflection/emotional delivery.

Next, start making decisions about what to add back in. (Full disclosure: I don’t remember the decisions we made last night in exact order, so I’m going to finesse this. The concept is the same.) Let’s start here:

So now our line is:

I recovered him, bound up his wound, and he sent me hither to tell this story and to give this napkin unto the shepherd-youth.

Still a very basic sentence, one that doesn’t even have any dangly bits yet. Keep going:

Still perfectly doable:

I recovered him, bound up his wound, and he sent me hither to tell this story, that you might excuse his broken promise; and to give this napkin unto the shepherd-youth that he in sport doth call his Rosalind.

What next? Let’s go for the first two parentheticals:

This is not a problem, is it? We already know where our voice is taking us on the main arc of the sentence, so all we have to do is insert these two separate parenthetical phrases. At this point, we are so savvy that we recognize that the first is a general adverb (“when?”), while the second is modifying/attached to “He,” i.e., Orlando. Our voices automatically shift gears into our “by the way” tone — and back.

I recovered him, bound up his wound, and (after some small space), being strong at heart —> he sent me hither to tell this story that you might excuse his broken promise; and to give this napkin unto the shepherd-youth that he in sport doth call his Rosalind.

From here on out it’s tutti all the way (as Professor Peter Schickele always said):

Piece of cake now, isn’t it?

Obviously we are not required to do this with every single line, but if we have one with tangled syntax and endless parentheticals or lists — this method gives us the tools to tackle the line in a way that helps us not only decode the English but also understand how the character is thinking and feeling.

So successful was our lesson that we got out early!

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If you have ten minutes, do yourself a favor and click on the Peter Schickele link above. You won’t regret it.