Rhythm and Meaning in Shakespeare: A Guide for Readers and Actors by Peter Groves (review)

In his informative new text, Peter Groves strives to restore ‘richness and precision’ to performing and reading Shakespeare’s texts, saying ‘if we trust Shakespeare as an artist, it is always worth at least exploring the performance suggested by the metre, because that is most likely to embody his rhythmical intentions’ (p. xix). There is evident need for his book when you consider that little of Groves’s teaching is replicated elsewhere. For example, Scott Kaiser states in Mastering Shakespeare: An Acting Class in Seven Scenes (Allworth Press, 2003), that one aim is to give American actors clues to the secret which English actors seem to know from birth – that of mastering Shakespeare. Yet he does not cover in detail the metre embedded in Shakespearean text. Indeed, Kaiser suggests breaking the text down specifically to suit modern listening skills which cuts up the metre. In contrast, Groves stresses in his book areas where both British and non-British actors and readers may err in their metrical and performative delivery of Shakespeare’s texts.

The performance of early modern drama has latterly become the subject of much academic research. Such publications as Performing Early Modern Drama Today (eds Pascale Aebishcher and Kathryn Prince, Cambridge University Press, 2012) include performance listings in acknowledgment of this fact. However, much research has focused on exploration of space and stage design, the material culture of costuming, props, and lighting, without exploring the technical aspects of the actual writing itself. For an ‘original practices’ season at Blackfriars Playhouse in Virginia, players were given, as a resource, Making Shakespeare, an excellent tome by Tiffany Stern (Routledge, 2004). Stern notes that early modern texts rely on language but there is little on how that language should be transmitted to the audience. Stern advocates reading a part in terms of passions with actors breaking their speeches down into individual passions, matching pronunciation with weighty telling gestures. Other texts such as Erika T. Lin’s Shakespeare and the Materiality of Performance (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), concentrate on cultural attitudes and practices that were mediated through performance, but the complex subject of staging and performing the text is rarely dissected.

Groves focuses his concern on how Shakespeare ‘organises the rhythms of speech in verse, and uses them to create and reinforce meanings in the theatre (and in the mind of the reader)’ (p. xiv). By necessity the book is quite a technical volume. Chapter 1 covers the music of English speech or prosody; Chapter 2 demonstrates normal ways in which the performance material is patterned in verse, pointing out variations which, with regulation, contribute to the patterning; Chapter 3 focuses on breaks and pauses which provide powerful effects in the delivery process; while the fourth and the fifth chapters investigate off-beats and demonstrate the way in which performance can be cued; the sixth chapter deals with other kinds of spoken verse in the plays; while the seventh makes a foray into metrical analysis.

In such a dense work the accompanying sound files prove very instructive. Readers are directed to a link on Monash University Publishing’s website in a user-friendly manner in order to experience aurally the lessons being expounded in the text. As the sound files would prove crucial to the self-learner one hopes that there is an adequate system for future-proofing the accessibility of the listening experience. One minor issue is audio example eleven which does not correlate to the text but rather appears to relate to audio example twenty-one. The sound files are clear and distinct and are executed in melodious and natural tones. The wonderful appendices are worth a special mention for the richness they bring to the volume. They range from topics such as ‘Pronouncing Shakespeare’s Names’ to ‘A List of Symbols used in Scansion’. In the first appendix, Groves...