Shakespearean Verse Speaking: Text and Theatre Practice, and: Shakespeare in Stages: New Theatre Histories (review)

When Hamlet exhorts the players to “‘Speak the speech . . . trippingly on the tongue’” (30), what exactly does he mean? How did early modern actors speak verse, and how should actors speak the same lines now? Are there, as some have claimed, fixed and immovable clues in surviving play texts, or are “rules” in this regard few or none? This is a hugely contested area, not just in the study and the classroom, but everywhere Shakespeare’s plays are rehearsed and performed. Abigail Rokison’s very useful new book comes at the problem from a range of historical and practical perspectives; both scholars and theater practitioners will learn much here.

Rokison is well placed to comment across benches in this way. She trained as an actor, acted professionally for several years, and studied in the lively Kings College / Globe master’s degree program before completing her doctorate. She clearly hopes her book will gain the attention not just of academics but also of theater practitioners. Whether theater professionals have the patience to consume hundred-dollar monographs is a moot point. Price and time aside, the writing throughout is clear and concise; Rokison has worked hard to make her ideas accessible.

The central dilemma Rokison traces is that of applying an acting technique derived from Stanislavsky and Strasberg with its insistence, above all, on emotional truth to texts devised several hundred years earlier, where the actors, however impressive, cannot have been “real” in ways we now take for granted. Actors like Burbage did not need to learn how to speak verse as an “alien” language, since they spoke verse every day of their working lives. How to recapture that knowledge without indulging in the pedantic and audience-off-putting trick of trying to recreate directly the sound of Elizabethan actors at play? In her first chapter, Rokison traces the twentieth-century attempts to return to Elizabethan practice, from the early experiments in staging by William Poel, through the dominance via Cambridge University and the Royal Shakespeare Company of the theories of Peter Hall and John Barton, perpetuated in the DVD of Barton’s 1980s Playing Shakespeare series. Rokison shows how, through the global cultural prestige of these institutions and cultural middlemen, such notions as always marking the end of the verse line, or always linking part lines from one actor to another, have spread. Live tours, DVDs, YouTube, and the new “live” screening of London Shakespeares all contribute to such dissemination.

Yet as Rokison shows, working with the “original” text is highly problematic. Performers use modernized texts, which encode conventions of editing developed since the eighteenth century. We need to closely examine extant Folios and quartos of plays. Here too we can also make use of surviving manuscripts of non-Shakespearean plays and the few remaining “parts” written out for actors. Rokison has a very current grasp of this material and the weight of learning that has been applied to it over the last decade. She shows that playtexts are much more flexible than Barton and Hall have claimed. Vocalizing line endings, enjambment, shared lines, or long Pinteresque pauses on incomplete lines are all options that are available but not always invoked.

The book finishes with a useful experiment on a section of Measure for Measure where the text was marked up with data on punctuation, spelling, and lineation from the Folio. This is fascinating and could easily have been much longer. Perhaps it signals Rokison’s next direction. I look forward to a nuanced text on verse speaking based on this thoroughly historicized study; an accompanying SAA workshop would be deservedly well attended.

The approach in Shakespeare in Stages, edited by Christine Dymkowski and Christie Carson, complements Rokison’s; like her book, this collection is...