PROLOGUE
No profit grows where is no pleasure ta’en;
In brief, sir, study what you most affect.
(The Taming of the Shrew)
By all rights the acting of Shakespeare is very simple: you learn the lines and you get up on your feet and you do it. Arguably this is all he is asking of you. He has provided no long essays explaining the meaning of his great plays, he has not inserted voluminous stage directions or prologues such as you might find with George Bernard Shaw and Eugene O’Neill, and the only possible clues in acting his work that he himself has given you are those spoken by Hamlet in his advice to the players:
Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue: but if you mouth ...
Get Acting Shakespeare is Outrageous! now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
