For this weeks blog post I found an article for the New York Times of Charles Isherwood interviewing a man about his thoughts on Shakespeare. The article, “Too Much Shakespeare? Be Not Cowed,” was mostly boring chatter on the numerous Shakespeare plays coming to New York City this season and why there happen to be so many, however one section about the language really stood out. The interviewer is defending Shakespeare and talking about the complexity of iambic pentameter and what the rhyming does to the meaning of the language. He says, “yes, there’s an occasional rhyming couplet, but most of the poetry in Shakespeare doesn’t sound anything like a nursery rhyme. It’s just a matter of finding a strict form – it’s called iambic pentameter – to channel thought and feeling, and all successful art must find a useful marriage between form and content” (page 2). I have never heard iambic pentameter described in this way, and it makes me develop a new appreciation for the form, and I will think about it more as we work on the Hamlet script. Isherwood also says, “truly gifted actors have a way of making Shakespeare’s verse sound like thoughts sprung immediately from the minds of the characters to their mouths. And when they do, you can follow their thoughts as clearly as if they were your own” (page 2). I really liked this statement because I thought it held a lot of truth. Shakespeare, because of the language structure, can often sound very robotic and unnatural when actors struggle to say their lines. The actor must learn to say the line as if they were thinking it on the spot, not as if they memorized the lines previously.
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