Skip to main content

Are Shakespeareans Better?

 



Is a Shakespearean actor better than another actor? We do tend to elevate Shakespearean actors, put them on a pedestal. When Patrick Stewart was cast as jean Luc Picard on Star Trek The Next generation the announcement was always prefaced: “ . . . Shakespearean actor, Patrick Stewart . . . “ You often hear of certain actors referred to that way and we are supposed to be impressed. But should we be? Is being a Shakespearean actor make you a better actor that anybody else?

Shakespeare was a great writer. He wrote wonderful lines of dialogue. Maybe actors just sound better, smarter, cleverer when his word come out of their mouths. Perhaps, but isn’t there a technique to Shakespearean acting? Don’t you have to know about iambic pentameter and all that? You don’t just spew the words forth and expect to sound brilliant. True, it is a little different when acting in a Shakespearean play. Actors have to recognize a rhythm to the speech. There are some tips and tricks to be learned, but overall, it is still acting. The fundamentals of acting apply to Shakespearean acting.

Consider the following very partial list of characters played by actors who had early Shakespearean roles:

Gandalf (Ian McKlellan)

Captain Picard (Patrick Stewart)

Professor Snape (Alan Rickman)

Darth Vader (James Earl Jones)

Ash in Alien (Ian Holm)

Captain Von Trapp (Christopher Plummer)

Special Agent Cooper (Kyle MacLaghlin)

The Queen (Helen Mirren)

Dr. Who (William Hartnell, Patrick Troughton, Tom Baker, Paul McGann, David Tennant, Jodie Whittaker)

Ghandi (Ben Kingsley)

M (Judi Dench)

Loki (Tom Hiddleston)

Looking at this diverse list, some people would say, “see, so a Shakespearean actor can do anything.” I would say, no. A good Shakespearean actor can do anything. A mediocre Shakespearean actor is a mediocre actor in whatever part s/he plays. 

I am a fan of Shakespeare and I love when I get the opportunity to put on a Shakespearean role, but that does not make me special. I am only as good (or bad) a Shakespeare actor as I am an actor. Acting is acting. Playing a part is playing a part.

I have seen actors making mistakes doing Shakespeare. It may well be because they are not a very strong actor to begin with. But it may also be due to lack of preparation. It is important to learn what all those words you are saying actually mean. Ignoring the natural cadence and rhythm of the speech can be a mistake too. You don’t want to be a slave to the rhythm, but you do need to recognize it is there. A good actor will put in the work. Mediocre actors tend to get weeded out of Shakespeare plays because they don’t put in the necessary work, so in that sense you could say the Shakespearean actor tends to be better. It is like natural selection, survival of the fittest, or in this case, survival of those willing to do the preparation (that's not to say that an actor who has never played Shakespeare can't be a great actor).  

So perhaps a Shakespearean actor tends to be a better actor by choice. In any event, watching a good Shakespearean actor inhabiting a juicy part is a thing of beauty.

Star Liner

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Second Wind

  You have heard about athletes getting their second wind? It is not that they feel better, that they are warmed up and ready to run more easily. It is not psychological (at least, not all psychological). No. There is an actual physiological truth to a second wind. It all has to do with respiration. When I say respiration, I am not talking about breathing. Respiration is a biochemical process that happens at the cellular level. It is how the cell gets energy. There are lots of chemical processes that are constantly going on in each cell, and those processes require energy. Without a constant feed of energy, the cell will die. The more demands there are on a cell, the more energy it needs. For example, every one of your muscle cells need more energy when you are running.   In fact, you won’t be able to run if the cells don’t have sufficient energy for it. The energy currency of the cell is a molecule called ATP. You may have heard that sugar is how our bodies get energy, wh...
1 comment
Read more

Roy Batty Figures it out

  This is written with the assumption that the reader has seen the film Blade Runner . If you haven’t, you may not get much out of it. In one of the last scenes in Blade Runner , the killer android Roy Batty, who holds Deckard’s life in his hands, has a remarkable speech: “I've seen things... seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments... will be lost in time like tears in the rain. Time to die.” I am told that the speech that was written was not working very well, and Rutger Hauer was told to just improvise something. Wow. He nailed it. At this point in the film Roy Batty has been the villain throughout. We have been rooting for Deckard (Harrison Ford) to take him out, but it is not going well, and it seems like Batty is about to kill him. At the last second, Roy Batty pulls Deckard up, to keep him from falling to his death. Then he delivers this...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Outsider

  I am reading The Outsider by Stephen King. The first 150 pages or so I found disturbing. Not for the reason you might think. It is not scary, not creepy in a traditional horror way, but disturbing in a tragic way. The first hundred to 150 pages is tragedy on top of tragedy. The most disturbing thing to me (it is disturbing to me anytime I encounter it in any story) is a false accusation. A man is falsely accused and may well be convicted of a horrific crime. That kind of thing disturbs my soul. It makes the whole world seem wrong. I have always been disturbed by stories with that kind of thing. And why not? It happens in real life too. That makes it all the more horrific. In the Jim Crow South, all you had to do was make an accusation against a black man to set the lynch mob in action. No need to bother with a trial. But even if there was a trial, the outcome was a foregone conclusion, innocent or not. We see Vladimir Putin inventing charges against people and they get locked up...
1 comment
Read more