sorry to be pedantic outside of the tags but i love these as exhibits a b and c of why the āshakespeare is meant to be performedā cliche is real; on the page they look wild but actors know how to read the embedded stage directions
two of these examples canāt be shared lines of iambic pentameter (both gertrudeās line and brutusā are already rushed and irregular at eleven syllables, so laertes and cassius both get their full ten beats for two or three words) and one of them doesnāt have to be (macduff and malcolmās lines add up to ten beats indicating that itās shared but no one will call the scansion cops on you if you split it into two and divvy up the extra ten syllables between them, which imo is the more playable option)
remember that verse is symphonic and that those extra syllables are notes in the orchestration of the sceneā they have to go somewhere, either into beats of rest or sound. thereās a lot of ways to score any of these moments but one possibile notation for the first is
MACD: your royal fatherās murdered.
(rest/ rest/ rest/ rest/ rest/)
(rest / rest / rest/ rest/ rest/) ā¦
all that silence affords the director a moment to let a lightning-fast scene (the entire cast pouring onstage in ones and twos, yelling over each other at varying levels of authenticity) come to a screeching halt, and the severity of the situation set in. for the actor itās playable as all hell, and ultimately very human: the kind of raw shock that makes you ask stupid questions. you get the same thing with laertes. tbh iāve always found ādrowned? (rest / rest /) oh. (rest / rest / rest / rest/ rest /) ā¦..where?ā to be utterly goddamn devastating in how realistic it is, bc what else can you say to that? if someone told you with no warning that your sister drowned, what else would come out of your mouth in the moment but something stupid and mundane? oh. ā¦ā¦ā¦.where did it happen?
the other notable similarity in these three moments is the use of un-words: two āoās and a āhaā (they arenāt meant to be pronounced exactly like āOhā or āHaā; traditionally shakespearean un-words are performed as unarticulated sounds, sighs, groans, exhalations etc). un-words leap out to the actor because it is a character rendered speechless. i made a post a few weeks ago about how big of a deal it is when people written by william shakespeare dont have words for what theyāre experiencing/when the pain is so big that even in a metanarrative universe where you are only the words you speak you are forced to admit that something is unspeakable, and every āoā or āhaā or āahā etc is a moment of this horror, this defeat at the hands of your own medium
itās a rich moment for actors because in classical text itās frowned upon to act āoutsideā of the line (to waste vocal qualities on things that arenāt words, ie to take a pause from speaking your richly layered monologue to let out a pained exhale. āact on the lineā says your director, smacking you on the knuckles with a copy of freeing shakespeareās voice), itās diva-y and amateurish to take more syllables than youāre given. but when youāre given the space of ten beats for āha portiaā, who will dare call you a scene hog for stretching that āhaā into five notes of agonized, wordless noise?
in the same way that learās āhowl howl howlā is very much not just the word āhowlā said three times these moments demand full, shattering vulnerability from the actor, a dive into the place in the body where pain lives. maybe laertes and malcolm really do say āoh.ā, quiet and childlike, or maybe that āoā is a stand-in for the all-air sound that shakes out of you when you get punched in the lungs and try to talk through it, or for that deep animal groan you heard that made you think what was that before you realized it was coming out of your own throat
anyway you get what i mean. you wouldnāt look at a blueprint and say you saw the house, you wouldnāt read the sheet music and say you heard the symphony, etc
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