ACTING SHAKESPEARE by BERTRAM JOSEPH

Author:BERTRAM JOSEPH
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-317-64624-2
Publisher: Routledge

Josephine Wilson as Lady Macbeth.

‘Nought’s had, all’s spent, where our desire is got without content.’

Bernard Miles as Macbeth.

‘Who should against his murderer shut the door.’

Bernard Miles as Macbeth.

‘The swift, the slow, the subtle, the housekeeper, the hunter …’

‘My husband lives that Tybalt would have slain …

And Tybalt’s dead that would have slain my husband …

All this is comfort.’

Elizabeth Shepherd as Juliet.

Both orator and actor in Shakespeare’s day expressed sincerely felt emotion in details of voice, countenance and gesture which truthfully imaged it, and which truthfully embodied the lines as literature. The gracefulness of their action fitted the speech, and that in its turn already fitted the person. This was full and significant action. And just as the orator took the actor for his model, so we today can learn from what is preserved of the actor’s art in the treatises on rhetorical delivery. Our task is to act in a manner which suits the Elizabethan text (in which speech is fitted to person), the modern actor and the modern audience. And after the basic principles are clear there is much to be gained from considering the actual details of Elizabethan gesture; but we must never forget that no attempt should be made to impose Elizabethan details on a modern acting style suited to modern plays, which demands from the actor an attitude of mind and emotion quite unsuited to Shakespeare.

The gestures of the hand and arm discussed and illustrated by John Bulwer belong among the parts of an excellent orator which the rhetoricians took over from the actors. The more we become familiar with them, the more doubtful does it become whether they ought to be described specifically as ‘renaissance’ gestures, if by the use of the word ‘renaissance’ it is implied that they are not used or even not known today. One, for instance, is called by Bulwer floccifaccit; he describes it thus: ‘The middle finger strongly compressed by the thumb, and their collision producing a flurting sound, and the hand so cast out, is an action convenient to slight and undervalue, and to express the vanity of things.’1 But as Bernard Miles has observed to the present writer, this is not an obsolete, specifically ‘renaissance’ gesture: ‘Victure Mature snapped his fingers at me only five days ago in just the sense of your gesture.’2 Yet during rehearsals for the production of Macbeth at the Mermaid Theatre in St. John’s Wood some years earlier, in 1952, this gesture seemed too esoteric to Geoffrey Taylor, who preferred not to use it, when, as Malcolm, he gave an account of the dignity and impressiveness of Cawdor’s behaviour as he met his death on the scaffold. Here, however, the actor found himself changing his mind after playing the role for some nights; and to our mutual delight he quite spontaneously expressed in the gesture his sense of Cawdor’s quality

As one that had been studied in his death

To throw away the dearest thing he ow’d

As ’twere a careless trifle.

(I, iv, 9–11)

In the same

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