![]() I repeat a period is a place to breathe and switch between thoughts, not a place to have a lengthy pause. PERIOD: This means you come to a complete stop in your monologue to do a full breath, not a long pause. Here’s what each punctuation mark means to an actor: Despite whatever lackluster productions you might have seen full of dramatic pauses, the actual text moves like wild fire. There’s a reason Shakespeare is called “aerobic acting.” One of the main reasons is the use of breath, or lack thereof. Shakespearean punctuation is more than just ending a sentence. Was the first man that leap’d cried, ‘Hell is empty With hair up-staring,-then like reeds, not hair,. Then all afire with me: the king’s son, Ferdinand, Plunged in the foaming brine and quit the vessel, You can tell something is verse by the capital letter that starts every line break all down the left side. In case you’re unfamiliar with the Bard, scansion is an analysis of verse lines in Shakespeare. ![]() There are three pillars of text work: scansion, punctuation, and paraphrase. Text work is primarily breaking down Shakespeare’s choices and why he makes them. In analyzing Shakespeare, a level of text work is required that provides you with all the information you’ll ever need. How fast you should go, where you should breathe, what words you should emphasize are all within the four-hundred year old lines. The best thing about reading Shakespeare is that all the instructions are in the text for you. The idea of a Shakespearian actor always taking long, self-indulgent pauses is ridiculous because Shakespeare does everything he can to make sure actors are sweaty and out of breath with his use of scansion and punctuation. Scansion also gives the speed at which actors should be speaking to one another. We analyze scansion because it tells an actor the emotional state of the character as well as their formality or relaxation in a given situation. Since his majesty went into the field, I have seen her rise from her bed, throw her night-gown upon her, unlock her closet, take forth paper, fold it, write upon’t, read it, afterwards seal it, and again return to bed yet all this while in a most fast sleep. You can tell something is in prose because it appears without line break capitalization. Lower-class characters generally speak in prose, while upper-class and formal characters tend to speak in verse. If the text doesn’t have the distinct verse style, then it’s written in prose which means scansion rules don’t apply. ![]() A scene that has many shared lines indicates that the pace of it should be rapid fire as the characters almost talk over each other. This indicates that Ariel’s line should come right on the heels of the one before her without a pause. ![]() That’s because the line that comes before her has seven syllables and together they create a perfect 10. In the text above, Ariel’s first line is only three syllables. A line with less than 10 syllables indicates that either a pause is allowed in the script or the character has a shared line with another character. A line with 12 syllables is called an Alexandrine line, a character is overcome by emotions OR they’re delivering information (common in messenger characters), OR they won’t shut up and this a Shakespeare clue that your character is rather annoying (Polonius is a great example). A line with 11 syllables is called a feminine ending, indicating a character is so full of emotions they spill out over the 10 syllable line. Finding the moments that are breaking the rules indicate a direction for the actor. Well, what if you get an imperfect line? That’s the point of scansion.
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