Playing Shakespeare by John Barton

Author:John Barton [Barton, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-77391-3
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2010-11-09T16:00:00+00:00

Now let’s look at another sonnet which is also a single fourteen-line sentence. It contains a further challenge because it is a terrific exercise in our old friends alliteration and antithesis. With this kind of exercise work it is good to take the text more slowly than one would speak it in performance. The sonnets are verbally packed and it is easy for an actor to take them faster than he can in fact think them. When that happens the language remains something existing on a page rather than something which the speaker has found and made his own. So feel your way.

Barbara Leigh-Hunt: “When I do count the clock that tells the time,

And see the brave day sunk in hideous night;

When I behold the violet past prime,

And sable curls o’er-silver’d all with white;

When lofty trees I see barren of leaves,

Which erst from heat did canopy the herd,

And summer’s green all girded up in sheaves

Borne on the bier with white and bristly beard:

Then of thy beauty do I question make

That thou among the wastes of time must go,

Since sweets and beauties do themselves forsake,

And die as fast as they see others grow;

And nothing ’gainst Time’s scythe can make defence

Save breed to brave him when he takes thee hence.”

Sonnet 12

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