Here’s a word not quite unique to Shakespeare, but you won’t find it in use too often.

cogitation (n.) IPA Pronunciation:
thought, contemplation

CASSIUS
Then, Brutus, I have much mistook your passion;
By means whereof this breast of mine hath buried
Thoughts of great value, worthy cogitations.
- Julius Caesar (I.ii)

This word takes some cogitation at first, but it does sort of sound like what it is right? The wheels in your head are turning – cogitation. Perfectly logical, right? If nothing else it will make you sound smarter when you use it.

Were you ever told to “think before you speak”? If so that was probably good advice if you’re prone to say silly things in everyday conversation. But onstage that doesn’t work so well with classical text. Words of the poets from Sophocles to Shakespeare are not natural speech where people are careful about what they say. This poetic language is directly connected to the character’s thoughts, actions, and emotions.

When looking at scansion, looking up words, and making sense of the text, those are times to do a lot of thinking. But if you get onstage and are thinking about all that and more you’re bound to give a very disconnected performance or reading of the text.

Have you ever listened to performances of Shakespeare where the actor tries to give a “natural” delivery of the language full of “ums”, “uhs”, pauses and mumbles? It doesn’t work! It’s not Mamet. Shakespeare’s speech is not and was never meant to be natural. People didn’t even talk like that in the 16th century.

The words are the character’s thoughts. When Hamlet says,

O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!
Is it not monstrous that this player here,
But in a fiction, in a dream of passion,
Could force his soul so to his own conceit…
(II.ii)

Do you think he’s planned out what he’s going to say? No! he’s telling the audience what’s in his heart at that very second in time. Everything in Shakespeare is “in the moment” and 100% here and now.

In that respect, there is no subtext in Shakespeare! People will say what they mean every time. Wait, some characters lie don’t they? Yes! But when a character is lying, we have been told they are lying or we will find out soon after that they were lying. But the point is that there’s not as much grey area hovering beneath the words.

The language will always be connected to the character objective in that scene and show how they feel. There’s no need to think about how to show what the character feels, the words speak for themselves. Be true to the text, let the words come out. If you’ve done your thinking about it beforehand and you know the words down pat, the rest will happen on its own if you let it.

New to the Bard Blog….

The Shakespeare Blog Carnival

A blog carnival is a central place where blog posts from different blogs are shared. For example, The Carnival of Education.

There are a lot of great Shakespeare blogs out there and I thought that it would be a good idea to create a carnival for Shakespeare. There’s at least one made for everything else already.

Submissions can be made my anybody just by filling out this form. The carnival is hosted here, meaning that I’ll write a post including all the submitted posts that I deem worthy of being shared… which will probably be most, if not all submissions. I’d like to eventually have other blogs take turns hosting it in order to reach the largest audience.

So if you have some favorite posts, please submit them. Feel free to ask any questions you have and I’ll answer. This is a win-win for everyone and a great way to share information between readers and writers of different blogs.

A few days ago on one of my posts the following comment was added:

i’m studying shakespeare at school it’s very very boring but then all school is

I hope the comment’s author doesn’t mind me using it. But that sentence got me thinking back to my high school days where the previous statement was all too true. I got to thinking, how one teach or learn about Shakespeare in a setting with very little motivation to do so?

It’s far from a simple answer, but I had an idea. The first solution I thought of is to reply: “Don’t study Shakespeare in school.” Beep, beep, back the truck up. You may think I’m crazy but bear with my oddly structured flow of ideas. I consider myself a scholarly person, and an eternal student (I’m sure I’ll always be going back to school in some form every now and then throughout my life) but a motto I’ve had since high school is “Don’t let school get in the way of your education.”

I know, I’m only sounding crazier as I go. There is some merit to this statement; it’s not an excuse of a motto to justify ditching class and going to the beach. The fact of the matter is that many students don’t find that they are motivated to learn in school and in the classroom setting. They’re not all lazy or bad kids. They just don’t find the environment very inviting and engaging. Aha, I’m starting to make some sense now to you I hope…

Students: School might not be you’re best friend, but I’m sure there’s plenty that you want to learn about. When you get home from a grueling day, do your homework, grab some snacks. Then, get online or find a book in a library about something that interests you and learn! There’s some great info online about everything. So if Shakespeare is boring you in class try to find a different source of information online, in a book, or on video before you give up on it or shun it entirely. There are plenty of things out there that will help you learn if the classroom isn’t you’re cup of tea.

Teachers: Accept that the classroom isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. Change up the learning environment to allow for various types of activities and see what students go for. Long lectures on Shakespeare usually aren’t a good starting point. For homework, instead of worksheets how about some research? But something the student chooses (within guidelines you set) and is interested in. You can’t cover everything students should know in a classroom so why try? Instead of telling them what they should know, how about motivating them to learn! Shakespeare (and everything else) isn’t as boring when a student looks it up on their own accord. They’ll remember it better too.

So some say that “school is all boring,” but it doesn’t have to be. Remember not to let “school get in the way of education” and suddenly learning isn’t so bad. School should not be neglected of course, it needs to get done, but it is not the alpha and the omega. There’s a wealth of information to be learned out there and it’s up to you to make the most of it.

In the news today I found an article that began, “A JEWISH school tumbled down national league tables after pupils refused to answer questions on Shakespeare because they believed he was antisemitic.” A lengthier article on the same subject also sheds more light.

Read the articles, form your own opinions first. Were these students right to stand up for what they believe in this case? Or are they making a mountain out of a molehill? Do you think it’s a big deal? Some don’t even believe that Jews are presented negatively in the form of Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, but that’s another story. Let’s make the same deduction that the students did for the moment.

I think if you believe something, the best thing you can do is stand up for it and accept whatever comes your way because of it. In this case, they didn’t get good scores on their standarized test.

Then again… what was the point? So Shakespeare may have been Anti-Semitic. I’m sure 90-something percent of England was at the time as well so shouldn’t they avoid all accounts of British history from that era? Shakespeare wasn’t too kind to blacks either, so how do we deal with that in this case?

I respect those students for voicing their opinion (and rebelling against a portion of standardized testing… I’m not a fan of those) but I don’t think avoiding Shakespeare – or any other author, historian, and artist, for that matter – because of their beliefs is really a good idea. Shakespeare may have been a writer “for all time,” but his ideas in many cases were a product of his time, and what he wrote appealed to his audience. I think that if we accept it as a product of its time there’s less chance of finding it offensive and more chance of moving on with our lives.

You can’t look askance from this word. You’ll come across it sooner or later!

askance (adv., v.) IPA Pronunciation:
(v.) to turn aside, to divert
(adv.) sideways, surreptitiously OR with disdain, maliciously, scornfully

PETRUCHIO
Thou canst not frown, thou canst not look askance,
Nor bite the lip, as angry wenches will,
- The Taming of the Shrew (II.i)

The word is used in the works only as an adverb as far as I can tell, except for in The Rape of Lucrece, though you probably won’t read that. But you should!

Lose text now! Ask me how!

When performing Shakespeare today theatres around the world will cut words, lines, and scenes out of the show. The Shakespeare Blog raises quite a few questions about the effects of editing down one of the Bard’s plays.

Cutting one of the plays is a difficult task. Length of the show obviously needs to be considered. But duration, contrary to popular belief, isn’t the only thing in question. The director (possibly in conjunction with a dramaturge or other) has to decide how much to cut, what information needs to stay in, what can be done without, and other considerations. If length was the only issue the actors could just go faster, which isn’t a bad idea. Lots of productions are too slow… but I digress. I’ll rant about that at a later time.

Speeding up won’t solve everything. Even at a faster pace the script may still be too much for the show the director has in mind. The cuts that are made really have to do a lot with what the director’s concept of the show is. If a director wants to make Julius Caesar more focused on the main conflict, he or she can cut out the various extra politicians who in their opinion “slow down the story.” Or if the director decides to show the King’s ship crashing on the island in The Tempest from a different point of view, the entire first scene can easily be cut.

What’s great about using works in the public domain is that their are no copyright laws on it so you can hack it and change it as much as you want. A director can easily whittle away text so that the script fits their concept of the show. Their are some lines that are often taken out just because they’re more or less unintelligible. If a modern audience won’t get it why should they listen to it?

Some aren’t so happy about cutting Shakespeare’s plays left and right. They may claim that the work is “genius, and should remain unaltered!” And maybe perhaps say “You wouldn’t cut anything out of Einstein’s work, why Shakespeare’s?” Well most people aren’t going to pay to see Einstein’s work onstage for 2 hours.

If the reason to cut is because a producer knows that an audience won’t sit through a 3 hour production, or because the director needs to let go of a few speeches to fit the setting they decided on, or they want to change the ending, so be it. The fact is that it’s art. Live art. Think of it as Jazz music. Old tunes are picked up, things taken out, things put in, other things changed. It’s art: you don’t have to like it.

When I’m sitting through a production and I recognize that certain parts are cut, I ask myself: does it work? If I find justification for leaving it out — it didn’t fit in the concept, the portrayal of the character, it was an obscure reference, confusing text, or didn’t move the plot forward — then it worked. If I find myself questioning the director’s choice and it takes me out of the action and into my head it probably didn’t work so well. The best is when I don’t notice anything missing at all because I’m so engrossed in a great show. That always works for me.

While browsing the net, I came across a post on the Shakespeare Blog that had a piece that related to my recent post about translated Shakespeare editions.

The author, a teacher, mentions that she doesn’t use translations at all. That giving one to them is telling students that

…they cannot possibly understand Shakespeare without having it “translated” for them. [. . .] Second, you’re confirming in their minds that Shakespeare really didn’t write in English…

Some say they don’t know how to read old English. I’m sure they mean “English that is old.” Looking to linguistics and a history of our language, Old English was way before Shakespeare. Middle English was also before Shakespeare. During the Elizabethan era the people wrote and spoke Early Modern English. The language has continued to evolve, but is not so different from Shakespeare’s day to today as it was to Old English – which is almost completely unrecognizable as English.

Shakespeare’s language is a puzzle. A scavenger hunt. The fun is in solving it! When I work on a piece of Shakespeare on of my favorite parts is the text analysis and making sense of it. Looking up the words, making sense of the text, researching the history, mythology, characters, looking at the First Folio for the original punctuation and other clues on how to speak the text… and more. It’s fun! It is really like putting a literary puzzle together and that’s just the first step in creating a performance.

Try putting together the puzzle sometime. I have a feeling that you will enjoy yourself. And if you end up doing this work for a performance the experience will be much more fulfilling because of all the work you did. You’re audience will understand and appreciate you much more too!