Pages and Stages

Abstract

InShakespearean Verse Speaking Abigail Rokison secures solid footing in the perennially liminal field of drama studies, and parlays information between two camps of Shakespearean practitioners – actors and their trainers on one side, playtext editors on the other – about how, textually speaking, the other side sees things. Assuming her book reaches the diverse readership it aims to reach, it appears that both sides will be in for a shock. For instance, scholars will learn that elite trained performers of Shakespeare in Britain have, for generations now, been informed of all sorts of ‘rules’ concerning how to handle the texts vocally, based on their instructors' convictions as to the correspondences between textual features and specific patterns of utterance. These instructors, mostly directors and voice coaches (their names will be familiar), work from the premise that the job of any production of a Shakespearean play is to represent Shakespeare's text faithfully, and that any Shakespearean text comprises not just words and sentences but the punctuation and white space around them: punctuation and white space being signs of the passage of time, wherein transpire the thoughts and actions that link each word or phrase to the words or phrases that follow. To observe these passages of time and justify them in the staging therefore becomes as important to representing the play-as-written as correctly speaking the words. This much agreed, among the instructors Rokison describes there follows an enormous debate concerning what length and manner of time is indicated by each instance of white space, and how, precisely, performers should conduct themselves within that interval.