Richard DiPrima
Published: 2010
Total Pages: 854
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Author s Note: This book is intended to help the actor or intelligent reader master the forms of Shakespeare s language. Anyone who acts Shakespeare s plays well must have a confident feel for the language of his plays. Anyone who reads his plays well must be a Shakespearean actor deep inside his or her mind! It has been my honor, as founder and director of The Young Shakespeare Players, to direct thousands of actors in full-length Shakespeare roles. My experience with these players -- from age 7 to 80, with most between 13 and 18 -- has helped tell me what the serious Shakespeare actor or reader must grasp. Our young actors always quickly understood that they needed to start to make Shakespeare s language their own. They always especially emphasized the resonance of his words, and their precise and evocative beauty. I find inadequacies in published works on understanding and using Shakespeare s language. Some are overly simplified, or even wrong-headed. Some are excellent, but simply do not go far enough. They tend, for example, to take an element of Shakespeare s writing craft (say, his use of verse rhythm or antitheses), explain its meaning briefly, give a few examples, and move quickly on. Often, the actor/reader leaves with too little experience to apply this knowledge the next time the element crops up. We need, instead, a way for the serious actor or reader to immerse in the key elements of Shakespeare s text, so that each becomes familiar and instantly recognizable. And so, we developed the RISARA model, which is the basis of this book. The RISARA model RISARA is an acronym for six major ways in which Shakespeare shaped and varied the language of his plays: R - Rhythm and stress. Shakespeare wrote most of the lines in his plays in verse -- language formed into expected rhythm patterns and line lengths. Then he regularly broke the rules of his own verse form. The R in RISARA leads the actor/reader to ask: Does the rhythm vary from the regular pattern or normal line length? If so, why? Can this variation help us more clearly understand the meaning? I - Imagery. Shakespeare's movie cameras and special effects were he words, spoken by the actors; and his screens were the ears and minds of the audience. What pictures do Shakespeare s words evoke? How does the imagery help define the emotions and characterizations in his plays? S - Sound. In Shakespeare s time, language was more important for how it sounded than for how it looked on a page. Does the sound of Shakespeare s words add to the feeling of the passage being read? How does the actor/reader use it to enhance the meaning? A - Antitheses. Shakespeare used no figure of speech to greater effect than antithesis -- the formal contrast set up to sharpen and guide the thinking of character and audience alike. In any passage, does Shakespeare emphasize his meaning by comparing antithetical words or ideas? Do such comparisons need special emphasis to bring out the meaning? R - Repetition. Schoolchildren in Shakespeare s time were thoroughly trained in rhetoric and formal figures of repetition. Shakespeare often used these to strengthen a passage by repeating certain sounds, or words, or whole phrases. We need to ask: How did he use repetition in this passage? How does the repetition enhance the mood or character or image? A - Architecture. Shakespeare built a kind of architecture into his words in other ways -- from changes of direction in speeches, to phrasing of individual verse lines, to shifts between prose and verse, and much more. How do these architectural elements add to the meaning or feelings of the scene, or speech, or passage? What can the actor/reader do to emphasize these architectural features?"
