‘Rude am I in Meh Speech': Vocality and Victorian Shakespeare

Abstract

In the Royal Shakespeare Company television series Playing Shakespeare, the final episode presents the most important contribution towards an understanding of the speaking of dramatic verse on the late Victorian stage. Entitled ‗Poetry and Hidden Poetry:Three Kinds of Failure', it examines the issue that moderator and Cambridge-educated Shakespearean director John Barton has consistently avoided throughout the previous eleven episodes, the subject of the term ‗poetry' as applied to Shakespearean vocality.Despite his insistence on the structures and rhythms of verse, Barton's anxiety over the visceral impact of words is palpable. Revealingly, the title and the segment dwell on ‗failure', conceding the inability of the contemporary actor to do full justice to Shakespeare's verse. Despite the complete thinking-out of a role, and an understanding of the mechanics of blank verse, he admits that the role never manifests itself with its full power on the stage despite the imagination it conjures from the page: ‗One can't quite put one's finger on what is wrong but there is a kind of textual, emotional and poetic thinningout'.1 He admits that, despite the intellectual realisation of a role, the playing of Shakespeare rarely builds into an overwhelming sensory experience. 2Actor Alan Howard interjects his own perceptions of that mystical moment when the alchemy of an actor's efforts transcends the conception of the role:I think that the other aspect of the actual sounds, the textures and the rhythms, invoke a word which perhaps we don't understand so well today. The word is ‗apprehension' as opposed to ‗comprehension'. Something we sense. I think that ‗apprehension' to the Elizabethans was a very palpable thing. They were sensually highly aware of how rhythms, sound and texture could combine with comprehension to bring about something which goes beyond just the sense. 3 Howard himself apprehends that the ‗sounds' of words -the intricate textures which Hall and Barton subjugate to the structural rhythms of the text -combine with the cognitive realisation of the script to generate sensation alongside intellectual satisfaction, the Aristotelian requirements of catharsis and instruction. Barton admits to difficulty in comprehending this effect:Although the line is quite naturalistic on the surface, it also has a poetic ring, uneasy, haunting and resonant, though it's hard to define it in words. We may not understand but we apprehend it. What word to describe it? It reverberates, it haunts, it rings a bell […] There's a resonance which can't be defined or pinned down. The second piece of evidence for Victorian ponderousness can no longer be supported after the rate of speech has been calculated. 15 If these poets, and the dominant actors of their age, actually speak the verse at an equivalent or faster rate of speech than their theatrical descendants, from where does the perception of protracted vocality emerge? I argue that this curious temporal effect is falsely presented to contemporary ears by the dominance of the vo...