So, I’m in the first blocking rehearsal for Hamlet. We’re doing what’s called “feeding lines” where an ASM or other actor stands behind you and quietly says your line to you before you say it out loud (this enables you to look at and respond more naturally to your environment and unencumberedly act on impulses). I have all of four lines in this particular scene so I’m just taking in words and repeating them, looking for relationships to manifest.
When I get the time I pull out my script and look at the lines I have. I’m speaking to the king about my son who is standing just behind me:
He hath, my lord, wrung from me my slow leave
By laborsome petition, and at last
Upon his will I sealed my hard consent.
I do beseech you give him leave to go.
I take a pencil and mark the iambic beats. I find every word follows a straight weak/strong pattern except for “wrung” and that screws up the regular rhythm for the remainder of the line.
This tells me I was pretty much beat down verbally by my son until I gave in. The regularity of all else leads me to think I keep a quite formal and proper reserve for the king but, as is a Dad’s way, I put a small guilt trip on my son for how far he was willing to go to get his way. (I’m good at that, as well)
Finding this pattern also helped immensely in getting the lines memorized. Even though it’s a very short passage, it’s a challenge for me to get Shakespeare’s lines down quickly. I pretty much had this by the end of that run through (don’t contradict me, Rocky).
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1 comment:
This is great. The fact that the sense of the line seems to rest with "wrung," and that it jumps out of the metric scheme a little bit, makes all the difference. Also look at how long it takes him to actually get around to saying "I sealed my hard consent." Three quarters of the sentence is devoted to explaining how badly he didn't want to do it.
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