Box-kicking with Bob Jones

Bob Jones, known around ASC Theatre Camp as a favorite lecturer for his wealth of wisdom, discussed the differences between voice and prose at his lecture on Wednesday.

Verse is a form of writing with a metrical rhythm and strict rules (which many writers, including Shakespeare, do not always follow precisely). Because of its beat-like flow, verse is generally much easier for the actor to memorize and also for the audience to remember. In Shakespeare’s day at a live, crowded theater like the Blackfriars Playhouse, some audience members would have trouble hearing all of what the actors were saying. The structure of verse emphasizes the most important words as stressed syllables, so even if only the stressed syllables are heard, the audience member would have a good grasp of what the actor was trying to communicate. For example, Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” line without the unstressed syllables would read “be not be is quest”. Bob pointed out that those words alone are the meat of Hamlet’s entire speech, and essentially of the entire play.

To help the campers understand verse more fully, Bob got them on their feet for a physical exercise. First, he assigned every camper a line from a scene between Claudio and Don Pedro from Much Ado about Nothing. Bob instructed them to use scansion to determine which syllables were stressed and unstressed. “Now gallop your line!” Bob announced. Each camper tapped out the line according to the stressed and unstressed syllables. The campers with more irregular lines tripped a little on the way, but Bob helped everyone produce an accurate gallop by the end. Here are several examples Bob provided of regularities and irregularities in Shakespeare’s verse:

CLAUDIO
˅        /     ˅    /    ˅    /     ˅   /     ˅      /
Give not this rotten orange to your friend

This is an example of a regular verse line. It has ten syllables that alternate stressed and unstressed and it begins on an unstressed syllable.

HAMLET
˅   /   ˅    /   ˅   /    ˅     /   ˅     /     ˅
To be or not to be that is the question
You’ll notice that this line has an extra, unstressed syllable at its end, which is referred to as a “feminine ending”.

BEDFORD
 /        /   ˅      /      ˅     ˅        /       /      /    ˅      / 
Hung be the heavens with black, yield day to night!

Here Shakespeare breaks all the rules of verse, using several “spondees,” or feet where both of the syllables are stressed. This irregularity in verse would catch the audience’s attention. In this case, the excess of stressed syllables make the line sound more powerful and reinforce the line’s meaning – but, you can see how this line would be difficult to gallop.

In contrast to verse, prose sounds much like how people converse today and has no complex stressed and unstressed structure. A King and No King, one of the three plays in Session 2, is written mostly in prose . While looking at an excerpt of text from this play, the campers noted that there are more punctuation marks, caesuras, and meter shifts than there typically are in Shakespeare’s text. Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher wrote A King and No King during a period when the vogue in writing was moving from verse towards prose, and this play contributed to that transition. Here is an excerpt that when read aloud, sounds like every day speech. Bob noted that Shakespeare never ended a sentence after two syllables into a line, as Beaumont and Fletcher have done here with “So long.”

ARBACES
Bessus, go you along too with her. –I will prove
All this that I have said, if I may live
So long. But I am desperately sick,

After his overview of verse and prose, Bob covered the importance of the last word in a line. While the stressed syllables are more important that the unstressed, the last word in a line is the most important out of all of them. Bob brought out three mysterious white boxes and instructed the campers to choose a small section of their own lines to work on. Then he told them to recite their chosen text by walking during the line and turning abruptly on the last word before beginning the next line. When the campers had perfected their sharp turns, Bob added in the boxes. Now the campers gave the boxes a swift kick on the last word, an even more forceful movement than the turn. This exercise made the campers extremely conscious of putting emphasis on the final word. Bob explained that physicalizing this emphasis helps you to get vocal ideas, and can help you to give phrases weight. At the end of the lecture, Bob opened the white boxes to reveal that a Complete Works of Shakespeare had been hiding in each! The campers laughingly bemoaned the fact that they’d been abusing their idol for the last hour.

The campers left Bob’s lecture with more comprehensive understanding of how Shakespeare, Beaumont, and Fletcher use verse and prose and of their purposeful switches between both throughout the plays. One of the most difficult challenges in performing Shakespeare and his contemporaries is deciphering the playwright’s intent that is hidden within the structure and then actually executing the iambic pentameter. Thanks to Bob, the campers are now prepared to attack their plays, galloping and kicking their way through tongue-tripping text.

--Emma  Lo

Midsummer Day Camp: Monday

My exciting Midsummer Day Camp experience began at 10 AM on Monday morning in Hunt Hall West. The campers were in a large circle on a mat, individually delivering lines from Macbeth that the camp directors had prompted. I learned that this is the camp’s way of “auditioning” the campers—by seeing how big of a choice they could make with the recital of a given line. The first prompt I watched was “My lord, his throat is cut, that I did for him,” which is delivered by Murderer 1 at the beginning of the famous ghostly banquet scene. One by one each camper played the line as “evilly” as possible, as requested by Camp Director Adrian. The young actors brought an imaginative assortment of villainous cackles, murderous hand gestures, and—the crème de la crème—evil British accents to the mat. Clearly this camp’s production of Macbeth will not lack enthusiasm and creativity.

            After a few more rounds of this recital game—which also included a melodramatic plea of Lady Macduff’s, a spell cast by one of the witches, and an enraged challenge to battle from the daring Young Siward—the campers had a brief introductory music lesson with Jeanette. They learned the song “We Are Young” by Fun while practicing projection, articulation, and singing without those pesky diphthongs.

            This musical interlude made way to a deliciously morbid lesson with Sarah Enloe, ASC’s Director of Education. The campers made their way downstairs to Hunt Gallery in their smocks, where they learned about the different types of fake blood used for the stage. Many questions must be answered, Sarah explained, before a type of fake blood can be chosen for a specific moment in an ASC production. For instance, how old is the blood? Has it scabbed over, or been freshly spilt? How does the blood move onstage? Most importantly, how thick is it? Does it need to be washable so costumes will not be ruined? And where does the blood come from? All of these questions, she informed the campers, need to be answered through inferences in Shakespeare’s text.

Sarah and the campers then looked at several moments that refer to blood in Macbeth, and determined together what kind of blood would be preferable for each moment. Some references are purely symbolic or rhetorical, such as in Macbeth’s first soliloquy: “But in these Cases/ We still have judgment here, that we but teach/ Bloody Instructions…” (II.7.481-83). Others, however, required the campers to answer Sarah’s important questions in order to determine which fake blood would be best.

            Sarah then split the large group into pairs, and each pair was given a different moment in the text that calls for fake blood onstage. The pair then made the blood—using an assortment of ingredients such as peanut butter, starch, and red food coloring—that fit the excerpt they received. After applying their fake blood to their hands and arms, each pair explained to the rest of the group which moment in the play they were assigned, what kind of blood they chose to make, and whether or not their execution fit their initial ideas. Sarah’s workshop was a creatively engaging experience for the campers. If anyone had come to camp doubting that Shakespeare could be fun, they did not keep those doubts after this bloody mess. 


-Lee Ann Hoover, Education and Dramaturgy Intern