Smooth and Rough Verse

Note: This thread is continued from "What's My Motivation?" Read that entry first, or this won't make any sense (and even then, it's iffy).

Most Shakespearean practitioners believe that the Bard encoded instructions for blocking directly into his verse. Some take this to extremes: Patrick Tucker, of the Original Shakespeare Company, believes the best way to perform Shakespeare is virtually unrehearsed, with the actors never having spent time together before opening night. They just step onto the stage and let the lines lead them. I’m not that much of a zealous; and besides, that quasi-improv approach demands highly trained (and suicidally confident) actors, whereas some of my cast may never even have acted before. They’re willing to try the trapeze, but they still need the net.

But I think some very general distinctions about verse could help me to help them to block the scenes as we go. The biggest distinction is between smooth verse and rough verse. As you probably know, Shakespeare’s verse is iambic pentameter:

De-dum de-dum de-dum de-dum de-dum.
O lady, lady, shame would have it hid.

Iambic pentameter, or blank verse, is repetitive, sometimes almost hypnotic—and very easy to memorize. By the time he wrote Lear, however, Shakespeare was experimenting with variations on the blank verse pattern. He would sometimes shift beats around, put a stress where you don’t expect it—make the smooth flow of blank verse into a rough, bumpy ride. For instance:

Dum dum de-de-de dum de-de dum dum...
Thou, Nature, art my goddess; to thy law...

Some rules still apply, of course. Usually, there are five stressed beats per line; but they’re in an unexpected order, and so the line throws emphasis on the words which break the pattern. Once in a while, he’d even throw in a line with more than five stresses, to make extra sure you get the point:

Dum de-de dum-de-dum! Dum dum dum dum!
Rumble thy bellyful! Spit fire, spout rain!

The result is, smooth verse and rough verse sound very different, albeit in subtle, sometimes subconscious ways. They can be used to determine the temperament of the speaker (usually, smooth = calm, rough = agitated). And I think, in my case, they can also be used to help with blocking.

In my evolving model, Step One involves determining the intention of the speaker, in physical terms which apply to balance and status:

Are they advancing/trying to gain power?
Are they retreating/relinquishing power?
Are they circling/trying to support another’s power?

Once they have an intention, Step Two would involve studying the scansion of the verse: is it rough or smooth? The answer may help to determine whether the actor is literally moving on their lines, or whether they are moving through their lines—that is, standing still on the stage, but using the rhythm of the lines to accomplish their intention. Remember balance: sometimes it’s not safe to move, because the stage is destabilized. So instead you (metaphorically) lift a foot up, gingerly feel your way forward, and try to assess the current state of affairs.

If the verse is smooth, it’s safe to move.
If the verse is rough, stand and feel your way along.

I tried this out on a passage from the play, to see if it bore any fruit. The passage is from 1.4, when Goneril is chiding Lear for letting his Knights abuse her hospitality (I’ve altered this speech from its original form, but I tried it on the original too, and got the same results):

Not only, Sir, this, your all-licenced Fool,
But other of your insolent retinue
Do hourly Carp and Quarrel, breaking forth
From rank, and (not to be endured) riots, Sir.
I’d thought by making this well known to you,
T’have found a safe redress, but now suspect
That you protect this course, and put it on
By your approval; which if you did, the fault
Would not escape our notice, nor our judgment.

Goneril’s intention is clear, here: she’s making a bid for status, and should therefore be advancing, trying to claim the fulcrum for herself.

Now look at the verse. The first four lines are quite irregular. If you tried to speak them in a sing-song de-dum de-dum rhythm, then only line 3 would even remotely work. However, lines 5 through 7 seem more regular (although line 7 clumps its stresses together in the middle of the line, with “this course”). Then lines 8 and 9 become irregular again, with the final line seemingly containing an extra beat, as in:

De-dum de-dum de-dum, dum dum dum-de
Would not escape our notice, nor our judgment.

(All this scansion work is highly subjective, of course. But that’s why we’re artists, not scientists.)

So, the speech goes irregular, regular, irregular. So what? So, imagine that Goneril has just come on stage to find Lear goofing around with his Fool yet again. It’s the last straw; something must be done. She opens her mouth to chastise her father, for what is probably the first time in her life. She’s uncertain. She’s testing the waters. As she speaks, she gains confidence—and she starts to advance on him. Power is shifting. But that provokes a reaction from him—something physical, something intimidating—and she has to stop moving. Notice the verse becomes rough again when she starts talking about Lear’s “fault” and her own “judgment”—these are legal terms which cast her as judge, and him as criminal (a deliberate reversal of the power dynamic).

So, it sort of works. That’s just one small example, of course, and it will only get more complicated from there. Plus, there’s another big issue: 25 per cent of the play is not in verse at all, but in prose.

Hmm...reading over what I've just written, I realize it sounds awfully muddy and subjective. I’m going to have to seek out some more examples, and see if my “method” holds up.