Shakespeare took blank verse and ran with it. By the end of his career -
in The Winter's Tale, say, or Anthony & Cleopatra - he scarcely wrote
a regular blank verse line, being more fascinated by complicated
counterpoint and jazzy rhythms. But Richard III is an early play - the
first really good one he wrote. He was still intrigued by how easy it is
to fall into the rhythm of "De-dum, de-dum, de-dum, de-dum, de-dum" and
also how fitting it is for whenever the character should sound either
rhetorical-
e.g. Lady Anne:
0, curséd be the hand that made these holes;
Curséd the heart that had the heart to do it;
Curséd the blood that let this blood from hence...
or. Lady Anne again, perfectly ordinary-
I will not be your executioner.
Once we accept that a distinguishing mark of our screenplay is a lot of
words, that we are making a talky talkie, then I don't think the
particular way the words are spread out on the page is an obstacle.
Shakespeare made no attempt to have his plays printed and would only
want his words to be judged by how they sounded not what they looked
like. That's why academic critics get it wrong when they talk about
"verse-speaking," as if somehow it were different from prose-speaking.
It never worries me - in fact I'm delighted - if the audience never realises that the play is written in verse. The only
time when they need to realise it is when the verse rhymes - usually to
mark the conclusion of a long scene-
Shine out fair sun, till I have
bought a glass, That I may see my shadow as I pass.
So I don't think there are any hard and fast rules about speaking
Shakespeare. But I do think that it's worth the actors examining the
verse, to discover how it can help them. Some of the words are old
fashioned - that's why I've cut out all the "thees" and "thous." Some
other words are unusual and some specially invented - but I promise you
that Zeffirelli's Hamlet and Branagh's Much Ado had many more archaisms
than arc in our script.
I hope you'll want you and me to go through it all line by line but here
are a few general notes that I would expect the cast to take into
account, as they indicate that the verse is designed to help and not
hinder:
1. Read the line out loud and over-stress the
"de-dum's" - e.g. Clarence:
No, no, my dream was lengthened aft-er life
De-dum de-dum de-dum de-dum de-dum
That suggests, for instance, that the second
"no" should be spoken with
more stress than the first, giving an impetus to the urgency with which
Clarence goes on to explain what he felt next. An actor inexperienced in
blank verse might (wrongly?) be tempted to think the second
"no" was a
bit of over-writing and throw it away. In other words, Shakespeare's
rhythm can suggest just how he wants the lines to be spoken.
2.. Appreciate that the last word of the line is invariably the most
important for the sense and for the sound and it is a sort of teaser,
leading on to the beginning of the line that follows. That's the energy
of blank verse - it is always moving onwards, often urgently.
It's intriguing how the last words (which will include the final
"dum")
of the lines in a long speech invariably carry the meaning of the whole.
Take Clarence's speech in jail in scene 36:
0, I have passed a miserable night.
I thought that I had broken from the Tower
And was embarked to cross to Burgundy:
And in my company my brother Richard,
Who from my cabin tempted me to walk
Upon the hatches. As we paced along,
I thought that Richard struck me
Into the tumbling billows of the main.
0 Lord, I thought what pain it was to drown!
What dreadful noise of water in my ears!
What ugly sights of death within my eyes!
I thought I saw a thousand fearful wrecks,
A thousand men that fishes gnawed upon,
Wedges of cold, great anchors, heaps of pearl,
Inestimable stones, unvalued jewels
All scattered in the bottom of the sea.
In comparison, the first syllable (an unstressed
"de") is relatively
unimportant.
3. In regular blank verse, each line generally contains one thought, so
that the speeches are made up of a series of logical links. It disturbs
this forward movement if the actor does too many
"naturalistic" pauses
in the middle of the lines. Shakespeare's characters love talking but
not necessarily the sound of their own voices. Speech and thought are
simultaneous. The time for the actors to think what they will say next
is whilst someone else is speaking. During their own speeches, the
natural place to pause (but then only when really necessary for effect)
is usually at the end of the blank verse line - even if the end of a
sentence occurs in the middle of the line. e.g. Clarence again:
And in my company my brother Richard, Who from my cabin tempted me to
walk Upon the hatches. As we paced along . . .
The sense and sentence finish with
"hatches." in the middle of the line.
If Clarence pushes on from there, without more than a breath, with
"As
we paced along," he will capture the character's desperation (a) to tell
the story of his dream while it's still fresh in his memory and (b) to
convey the turbulence with which each succeeding image of the dream
turned it into a nightmare. The arrangement of the verse indicates to
the actor that the speech is not reflective but urgent.
4. There is never a need for the verse to be obvious to the audience. The
'voice beautiful' is a relic not of Shakespeare's style but of Victorian
theatres, which were so huge that actors needed to sing out the lines in
order to be heard at the back of the distant gallery. I would expect our
dialogue to sound swiftly conversational most of the time; as Hamlet
advised the actors at Elsinore:
Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on
the tongue. But if you "mouth" it, as many of your players do, I had as
lief the town-crier spoke my lines.
And that, for now, is all I've got to say.'
The notes which accompany the screenplay are all my own work and any
errors of fact or judgment are all my fault. Whilst I was writing, RL
was still busy on post-production, overseeing the sound, music and final
colour-grading of the film. By a happy chance I delivered this book to
my ever helpful editor Alison Tulett on the same day that
post-production on the film was completed - Friday, 17 November 1995.
