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Abstract
This article examines perceived difficulties in applying Stanislavskian notions of action-playing to Shakespeare’s dramatic verse, and introduces a new interpretative tool: the “Motion in Poetry Metaphor.” The use of this tool creates a coherent framework in which verse rhythm and action-playing may be understood as exhibiting a mutually-reinforcing relationship. This is achieved through the conflation of two Conceptual Metaphors. The first, “verse rhythm is physical movement,” is a conventional metaphor commonly employed to explain the embodied experiences of speaking and listening to metrical verse, and is here explored with reference to Reuven Tsur’s theories of cognitive poetics. The second, “psychological action is physical action,” is at the heart of the Laban-Malmgren System of actor training and fuses Stanislavskian notions of action-playing with Laban’s “movement psychology.” By conflating these metaphors, actors can understand verse rhythm as being, not just active, but “hyperactive;” as embodying the psychophysical sensations of action-playing in a manner that is beyond the capacity of naturalistic prose.
Notes
1. Burns, Character, 227.
2. Culpeper, Language and Characterisation, 6.
3. Ibid., 90.
4. Fuchs, The Death of Character, 10.
5. Barthes, S/Z, 178.
6. Toolan, Narrative, 92.
7. Saint-Denis, “Stanislavski and Shakespeare,” 83.
8. Ibid., 79.
9. Ibid., 84.
10. Callow, Being an Actor, 86.
11. Gaskill, Words Into Action, 56.
12. Ibid.
13. Toporkov, Stanislavski in Rehearsal, 215.
14. Merlin, The Complete Stanislavsky Toolkit, 132.
15. Translations of Stanislavski’s Russian term zadacha have caused no end of confusion amongst English-speaking actors and teachers of acting. It has been variously rendered as “objective”, “task”, “target”, “action”, “activity”, “want”, “intention”, etc. For the purposes of my analysis, I choose to use the terminology introduced into this country, first at the Drama Centre and then at the RADA, by the respected acting teacher Doreen Cannon (herself a first-generation student of Uta Hagen) and which continues to be taught at these schools and elsewhere.
16. Stanislavski, An Actor Prepares, 128.
17. Merlin, The Complete Stanislavsky Toolkit, 114.
18. Ibid.
19. Stanislavski, An Actor Prepares, 128.
20. Harrop, Acting, 43.
21. Merlin, The Complete Stanislavsky Toolkit, 116.
22. Donoghue, The Third Voice, 46.
23. Hall, Shakespeare’s Advice, 10–12.
24. Stanislavski, My Life in Art, 350.
25. Ibid., 558.
26. Ibid.
27. Ibid., 512.
28. Stanislavski, Stanislavski Produces Othello, 78.
29. Benedetti, Stanislavski: A Biography, 312.
30. Stanislavski, Creating a Role, 91–178.
31. Ibid., 118.
32. Some may doubt the wisdom of this approach. One thinks immediately of Dustin Hoffman’s experience of rehearsing The Merchant of Venice: after a long period of trying to make the transition from improvised dialogue, and the characterization developed through that process, to the skilful and sensitive delivery of Shakespeare’s text, Hoffman was forced to admit (to a delighted Peter Hall) that “you can’t improvise this shit.” See Hall, Shakespeare’s Advice, 17.
33. Stanislavski, Creating a Role, 175.
34. In accounts of Stanislavski’s late explorations of verse plays such as Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Moliere’s Tartuffe we are told that, although the first stages of rehearsal were given over entirely to improvisation, once the actors had made the transition into using the lines of the play, considerable attention was given to the detail of the text and to the discipline of verse-speaking. (See Torporkov, Stanislavski in Rehearsal; Benedetti, Stanislavski and the Actor) However, as we are not offered any metrical analysis of the verse or any detailed commentary on how the verse was spoken or what the work on verse-speaking entailed, this news might, for my present purposes, be considered reassuring without being particularly helpful.
35. The only verse referred to in these pages comes not from the pen of Shakespeare but from that of Roderigo, who, as part of Torstov’s richly imagined backstory, we are given to understand has composed a number of verses in praise of Desdemona.
36. Stanislavski, Creating a Role, 137–40.
37. Ibid., 158–60.
38. Ibid., 138.
39. Ibid., 183–223.
40. Benedetti, Stanislavski and the Actor, 153.
41. Stanislavski, Building a Character, 183.
42. Ibid., 214.
43. Ibid., 239.
44. Ibid., 240.
45. Ibid., 241.
46. Ibid., 238.
47. Moving from a discussion of musical rhythm to one of verse rhythm, Torstov seems to imply that the rhythms of dramatic verse are governed by regularly timed beats and by varying lengths of sound. In English-language prosody, this may be true of some “simple” metres – those familiar to many of us through nursery rhymes and football chants – but not of “complex” metres like iambic pentameter. In fact, it may be argued that one of the reasons for iambic pentameter’s usefulness in capturing the flexible, speech-like rhythms of an individual character’s voice is precisely because it does not work in the way that Torstov describes. For a discussion of complex and simple metres, see Easthope, Poetry as Discourse, 51–77.
48. Merlin, The Complete Stanislavsky Toolkit, 67.
49. Ibid., 63.
50. Ibid., 100.
51. Block, Speaking The Speech, 16.
52. Ibid., 13.
53. Ibid., 16.
54. Ibid., 35.
55. Hall, Shakespeare’s Advice, 30.
56. Linklater, Freeing Shakespeare’s Voice, 54.
57. Berry, The Actor And The Text, 47.
58. Barton, Playing Shakespeare, 8.
59. Ibid., 25.
60. Ibid., 9.
61. I would, however, raise slight concerns of the choice of the word “intention” over “action” or “activity.” Action in Stanislavski’s sense is intentional, but it is quite possible to have an intention without that intention translating into action.
62. Barton is happy to accept, for example, that some speeches have little to do with action or character, and the tendency to associate verse with poetry and emotion rather than actions and activities is still very much in evidence.
63. Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, 5.
64. Ibid., 3.
65. Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh, 7.
66. Ibid., 15.
67. Ibid., 44.
68. Ibid., 47.
69. Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, 256.
70. Ibid., 46.
71. Ibid., 50.
72. Attridge, Moving Words, 31.
73. Beum and Shapiro, The Prosody Handbook, 1.
74. McAuley, Versification, 33.
75. Groves, Rhythm and Meaning, 84.
76. Ibid., 99.
77. Berry, Actor and the Text, 80.
78. Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, 170.
79. I suggest that the metaphor “verse rhythm is physical movement” is an extension of the metaphor “rhythm is movement.” Experiences of rhythm and movement may become conflated at an early stage of childhood development, with experiences of creating rhythm (e.g. shaking rattles or clapping hands) and of being affected by rhythm (e.g. being rocked to sleep or jiggled on someone’s knee) linked to physical movements. Thus, as predicted by Lakoff and Johnson’s theory of neural recruitment, we continue to experience rhythm as movement in later life, even if we are not actually moving or being moved at the time.
80. I am here restricting myself to a discussion of metrical as opposed to free verse.
81. Halle and Keyser, English Stress.
82. Tsur, Poetic Rhythm, 7.
83. Ibid., 8.
84. Ibid., 7.
85. Tsur’s Poetic Rhythm brings together work carried out over several decades and Tsur declares that the creation of the book involved a good deal of “copy and paste” (1). Perhaps for this reason, his use of terminology and the definitions he provides for certain terms are, at times, inconsistent. In the pursuit of clarity and consistency I have developed, and will here employ, some terms of my own.
86. Tsur, Poetic Rhythm, 33.
87. The number of dashes between “w” and “S” vary from the previous representation only to maintain visual alignment with the words and should not be taken as indicating a variation within the Neutral Line pattern.
88. Tsur, Poetic Rhythm, 8.
89. Groves, Rhythm and Meaning, 85.
90. For Tsur, the creative freedom of the performer is restrained only by the basic principles of rhythmical performance and the natural limitations of embodied cognition.
91. Wright, Shakespeare’s Metrical Art, 138.
92. Rather than as two short lines or a line of hexameter.
93. Tsur, Poetic Rhythm, 25.
94. Ibid., 51–2.
95. Berry, Actor and the Text, 60.
96. For a much more detailed discussion of this analytical process, see Askew, “Motion in Poetry,” 183–277.
97. Harding, Words Into Rhythm, 101.
98. Ibid., 93.
99. Mirodan, “The Way of Transformation,” 36.
100. Mirodan, “Acting the Metaphor,” 40.
101. Laban, The Mastery of Movement, 85.
102. Ibid., 77.
103. The convention of using forward slashes in these descriptions is adopted from Laban and is an indication that the order in which the elements are listed is reversible and that the relative prominence of each Motion Factor is variable.
104. Laban and Carpenter, cited in Fettes, A Peopled Labyrinth, 332.
105. Ibid., 331.
106. Laban, The Mastery of Movement, 10.
107. Laban and Carpenter, cited in Fettes, A Peopled Labyrinth, 1–2.
108. Askew, “Motion in Poetry,” 104–11.