The YSP Focused Workshops
on The Language of Shakespeare
YSP currently offers seven different brief, focused workshops on the YSP RISARA model for understanding the language of Shakespeare. We will schedule these as they are requested by interested actors, including adults. As soon as several actors have requested the same workshop, we will contact you.
Each Focused Workshop meets four times for about three hours each meeting, then ends in a demonstration performance of about an hour. Each is open to interested participants of any age (including young actors and adults), and each may be profitably re-taken even by those who have already completed it or another Focused Workshop.
If you are interested in studying any of the topics below at some time over the next three months or so, please reply, listing the name or names of those workshops you are considering, or add your name to the sign up sheet at the playhouse (upstairs theater).
#1: HA! HA! KEEP TIME!
Understanding Rhythm and Stress in Shakespeare’s Verse
Shakespeare used verse for about 75% of the lines in his plays. As the great Russian author, Shakespeare translator, and Nobel Prize winner Boris Pasternak once said, “Rhythm is the basis of Shakespeare’s texts.” In a very imperfect analogy, we can think of it like the current of a river. If there were no current — no flow or movement — the water in the river would still be there, and portions of the shore might still be scenic. But it would all stand still. It wouldn’t flow; it wouldn’t go anywhere. As it is, the rhythmic flow of his verse “current” — always moving, filled with shifts and surprises; stately and slow in some places, heart-throbbingly quick and exciting in others — gives movement and direction to his characters, his scenes and situations, his dialogue and speeches. The artistry of Shakespeare’s rhythm lies largely in the way he departs at critical times from what is “normal” and “regular.” It is a large part of what makes his plays so memorably great. To handle Shakespeare well, the actor or intelligent reader must have an understanding and a “feel” for this rhythm. This is our very basic, and very popular, Focused Workshop and perhaps the most fundamental one of all. It is the only one with a second, more advanced version: “That Would Be Scann’d” — for those who have completed this one.
#2: WHEN WE TALK OF HORSES
Understanding, Seeing, and Conveying Shakespeare's Imagery
The Chorus, right at the start of the play of King Henry V, speaks to the spectators, and in doing so issues an unforgettable challenge to audience and actor alike: “Think, when we talk of horses, that you see them…” In a few words, he has defined the fundamental conspiracy between performer and audience member (and remember that the intelligent reader is both!) that helps turn the words of Shakespeare on a page into supreme dramatic and poetic art. It is important to remind ourselves that Shakespeare had none of the visual “advantages” of modern writers or directors of stage plays or screen plays. There was no real scenery on his stage. And he could not “show” us his imagined pictures with artful camera shots or special effects. And yet, four centuries later, we are far more likely to see and remember the images he gave us — from the storm that plagued King Lear to the air-drawn dagger that Macbeth thought he saw — than we are to recall anything in a modern play or movie. This Focused Workshop will help you as actor (or intelligent reader) learn to recognize every image you are speaking or reading, and to see and feel its function and evocative power. As an actor of Shakespeare, you must help your audience to look with its ears. As a reader, you are both actor and audience, and must show the images to yourself! You will learn to define imagery, both objective and figurative, to explore its basic dramatic and poetic functions, and to understand how Shakespeare used it to build character and enhance emotion in his plays.
#3: O, IT CAME O’ER MY EAR!
Understanding the Use of Sound in Shakespeare
Language was heard long before it was seen. In Shakespeare’s time, language was still much more important for how it sounded than for how it looked on a page. Johannes Gutenberg the first Westerner to use moveable type printing, died less than a century before Shakespeare was born. And until just decades before Shakespeare began writing his plays, most books printed in England were still written in Latin — which most of his audience would not have been able to read or understand. So, Shakespeare’s plays were written for the voice and the ear, not the page and the eye. So, the sound of the words his characters spoke was critical. The nature of that sound carried much of the meaning. In order to interpret that meaning — and those characters — really well, the actor/reader must be versed in and conscious of how the sound connects with and enhances Shakespeare’s poetry and drama. In this Focused Workshop we will examine some examples of dominant sounds of the language, and how Shakespeare used them to create his great plays.
#4: THE WORD AGAINST THE WORD
Understanding and Using Antithetical Figures in Shakespeare
Of the hundreds of figures of speech that Shakespeare regularly used, none was more important than the rhetorical device known as “antitheses.” These were the formal contrasts he set up to help sharpen and guide the thinking of character and audience alike. In King Richard II, Shakespeare has two different characters speak of setting “the word itself against the word.” The phrase succinctly summarizes this powerful device, which he used again and again in his plays. The famed Royal Shakespeare Company director John Barton once said that if he had only one thing to teach a new actor (or reader) of Shakespeare, it would be how to find and use the antitheses in his writing. Barton said of Shakespeare: “He thought antithetically.” In the course of this Focused Workshop, we will: define antithesis and see why it was so important to Shakespeare; and, learn how to recognize and speak the various kinds of Shakespeare’s antitheses — including those that were direct and straightforward, and those that were implied or even hidden.
#5: THE CAVE WHERE ECHO LIES
Understanding and Using Shakespeare’s Figures of Repetition
The use of rhetorical figures was one of the most important elements of education and expression in Shakespeare’s day. And no rhetorical figures were more valued than those of repetition. Shakespeare used repetition to enormous effect — often strengthening the vividness and emotions of a passage by repeating certain sounds, or words, or whole phrases. Modern people have studied the figures of repetition less formally — but value them just as highly, as memorable twentieth-century speakers from Winston Churchill to Martin Luther King made clear. Shakespeare was a great master of the figures of repetition. And these figures added tremendous force to all of his plays. In this Focused Workshop, we will explore why repetition was so important to so many writers and orators, and especially to Shakespeare; we will examine twenty of the most important forms and figures of repetition that Shakespeare used; and we will learn to use YSP’s specially-created Reverse Dictionary of the Figures of Repetition.
#6: FAIN WOULD I DWELL ON FORM
The Architecture of Shakespeare’s Writing
Shakespeare, like all educated people of his time, was a student of rhetoric. It is not possible to understand and appreciate fully the greatness of his writing without some deep sense of his use of the forms of writing in his plays and poems. In fact, the form of Shakespeare’s writing is very often indistinguishable from its meaning or content — that these are, in fact, one and the same, and that we must feel some mastery of the form to act or read Shakespeare’s language with facility. This Focused Workshop examines some of the other basic features of the architecture of Shakespeare’s writing in addition to those covered in the other RISARA elements. These include subjects such as critical aspects of the form of Shakespeare’s individual verse lines; his end-line punctuation and “enjambment” (that is, lack of punctuation) in his verse; his use of prose versus verse and his changes between the two; his use of “you” and “thou” and his balanced figures and lists; and the architecture of his longer speeches. By the end, we will fully understand that the form of Shakespeare’s writing is not a barrier to understanding the meaning his plays and poem — it is, in fact, a basic part of that meaning!
#7: THAT WOULD BE SCANN’D
An Advanced Workshop on Rhythm, Stress, and Scansion in Shakespeare
There is nothing more basic to understanding the language of Shakespeare than becoming familiar with the rhythm patterns of his verse. That is one reason YSP devotes two separate Focused Workshops to this topic.
Shakespeare wrote the great majority of the lines in his plays in verse — that is, language formed into expected rhythm patterns and specific line lengths. Then he regularly broke the rules of his own verse form. For example, in the passage you are reading, does the rhythm vary from his “regular” rhythm pattern? From “normal” line length? If so, why? And what can you as the actor/reader do to emphasize any special regularities or irregularities in the rhythm, to help make the meaning clearer?
The basic rhythm Focused Workshop is called: "Ha! Ha! Keep Time!" In that one we cover the basics of iambic pentameter and Shakespeare's artistic departures from it. "That Would Be Scann'd" is the advanced rhythm Focused Workshop. In it we briefly review the essentials covered in the first, then spend more time on the "why" of his departures from regular rhythm patterns (what functions do they serve in his plays, and what is the actor to do with them?). We also examine some especially fun "tricky" rhythmic patterns. By the time you are finished, you will feel fully confident in reading and acting the rhythm of Shakespeare's verse!!
NOTE: To participate in this advanced Focused Workshop, you should have completed the basic rhythm workshop, ’Ha! Ha! Keep Time!’ at least once.