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Breaking Down the Bard: Unlocking Shakespeare’s Language
By Lorraine Thompson
Lorraine Thompson currently is the head of the Drama Department at Athens Academy in Athens, Georgia. Her bachelor’s degree in Education is from Auburn University of Montgomery, and her Masters in Fine Arts in Theatre is from the University of Georgia. She enjoys spending her summer months working as an actress.
Practical steps to help students decode, understand,
and successfully perform the works of William Shakespeare
I love the works and words and Shakespeare and I want my students to feel the same way. Approaching the Bard through acting rather than as literature has proven to be highly effective in accomplishing this goal. Take this quote from one of my acting students:
“As a freshman I hated reading Shakespeare for my English class but through studying it in acting class, I have truly begun to understand the beauty of the language and context. I am now eager to start reading Hamlet next week in my senior English class because learning to understand Shakespeare from an actor’s standpoint has made it so much more appealing to me.”
To hear that she now finds Shakespeare’s works “appealing” is a big relief to me. It is because of my love of the Bard that I offer a course in Acting Shakespeare for my advanced acting students. In this class, students select and ultimately perform a scene or monologue from the works of William Shakespeare. Initially, this task often seems daunting to the students. For most, the only experience they have with Shakespeare has come from reading it in English class. The memories of this experience are typically not positive or pleasant and perhaps leave students feeling that he is impossible to understand and his work is irrelevant. I try to show them otherwise in acting class. To meet this challenge, I have come up with three easy steps to helping my students decode the Bard:
- Work with a Lexicon,
- Paraphrase, and
- Re-format.
Work with a Lexicon
I think we would all agree that when communicating through an artistic text, it always helps to understand what we are saying. It just makes sense. If you are singing a song in Italian, you translate it first. You want to read a text, but it is only written in Chinese? It has to be translated first. Common sense, right? With this said, it is surprising to me how many people read and perform Shakespeare with not a clue as to the meaning of the words they are reading or speaking!
Thus, the first step in my acting class is to make sure that my students know what they are saying when they are speaking. We do this by using a Shakespeare Lexicon. According to Merriam Webster, a lexicon is “a book containing an alphabetical arrangement of the words in a language and their definitions.” In this case the “language” is Shakespeare. There are several good Shakespeare Lexicons out there. Here are a few we use:
Website:
http://shakespeareswords.com
http://www.bardweb.net
Hard Copy Book:
Shakespeare Lexicon and Quotation Dictionary
Volumes 1 & 2
By Alexander Schmidt
Dover Press
The lexicon process is simple. Have your students look up in the lexicon the meaning of every word in the piece. Even the words that seem obvious should be looked up. When working with Shakespeare’s English, words we use today can have a completely different meaning than they did in the day of ruff collars and farthingales. An example of this can be found in a line of the Nurse in Act 1 Scene 3 of “Romeo and Juliet.” “I’ll lay fourteen of my teeth, And yet, to my teen be it spoken, I have but four.” When I first read this, I assumed that the “teen” she was referencing was Juliet. I interpreted this line to mean: she spoke to Juliet about only having four teeth. Boy, was I wrong! Upon looking up the word “teen” in a Shakespeare lexicon, I discovered it is defined as “grief, trouble, or suffering” (makes a lot of sense for the origin of the word “teenager”!). The real meaning of the line is basically: much to her dismay, she only has four teeth. The lexicon work is an important first step to unlocking language and should not be skipped or skimped.
Paraphrase
Now that students understand what it is they are saying word for word, the next step is to find the language’s rhythm and intent. To do this, the scene or monologue is paraphrased. By putting the text in their own words, the students consider how they would inflect the thought. What gets the emphasis? Where do they speed up or slow down? How do they color the lines with their vocal variety? This step of the process helps the student to make clearer/stronger choices when it comes to line delivery. This also assists with establishing a personal connection with the material giving the performance another layer. As one of my students so deftly summarized, “I now understand what Shakespeare does with language, how he interweaves the sounds and meanings of words to evoke emotions.”
Re-format
At this point, the text is understood and choices have been made for line delivery and intent. It is now time to memorize. One of the challenges in learning lines in classical works is the way the script is written. When a student reads Shakespeare, the lines are primarily written in verse. The line length is dictated by counts, not punctuation. This is visually deceiving to our modern sensibilities. Thus, step three of the decoding process is to re-format or re-write the lines as they would be written in a contemporary script today. Now the text is written in a way that can be easily read and memorized.
I realize that this method may seem sacrilegious to some. Many feel that Shakespeare is scared and should not be tampered with. Many feel that the traditional ways of working with the Bard are the best. If this is your feeling, this method is not for you. However, if you are a theatre educator that is looking for an alternative way of having students explore this master writer, understand his words, and have a better experience overall.... I encourage you to give this a try.
I think one of my acting students summed it up when he said, “As soon as I heard we were going to learn Shakespeare, I immediately thought it was going to be boring. However, my view completely changed as soon as we started working with the text. I learned just how many of the phrases we use today come from him and how to understand what is being said. For someone who hated to think about Shakespeare, I appreciate him now.”

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111 Shakespeare Monologues
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Clues to Acting Shakespeare
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Romeo and Winifred
This hilarious spoof turns Shakespeare upside down and shakes things up with a stage full of zany modern‑day characters.