Prospero, or how I learned to stop worrying and love the verse (I hope)

I recently read an essay by David Tennant about his work as Touchstone in As You Like It. Excited about the chance to work with the RSC, he showed up expecting to audition for the role of Orlando. Instead, he was asked to read for Touchstone, a role he hadn’t prepared for. In the essay, he discussed some of the difficulties he faced with the character, and frankly admits there are some things he never felt he got right. It’s very heartening to know that other actors struggle like this, particularly ones whom I respect so highly. I think about that every time I get stumped.

I mention this because I’m working through something right now, something I hope will not stump me completely. I’m gearing up right now to play Prospero in The Tempest.  There is a basic rule in dealing with Shakespeare’s verse that when a line of verse can be delivered in iambic pentameter, it should be. The actor is supposed to go through his or her text and see if it can be made to fit the pattern. This is much more of an art than a science. Read a few books on the subject, and you’ll see disagreement on how different lines should be scanned. One thing seems really clear to me, though. In Act I, scene ii, when Prospero begins his long exposition to his daughter, Miranda, about how they came to be stranded on the island, the verse gets extremely difficult to scan. This isn’t unusual in a later play, as Shakespeare’s use of verse really changed over the course of his career. But there are passages that are simply unnecessarily difficult. Here’s a prime example:

Out of the dukedom and confer fair Milan

I start to scan this, and at first I think it looks simple. It starts with a trochee, “OUT of,” and then goes back to iambic; “the DUKEdom AND conFER,” and then lo, and behold. “FAIR MiLAN?” The rest of the line would scan perfectly if it simply said “Milan.” The last foot could be an anapest (unstressed, unstressed, stressed) or a cretic (stressed, unstressed, stressed), but the point remains – the meter is irregular because of the inclusion of a word that doesn’t need to be there. Since the meter is so uneven, it suggests to me that Prospero is pretty agitated. It may seem obvious that he would be upset as he relates how he was deposed as Duke, but I don’t really think it’s that obvious. I could see an argument that since he planned out so many of the details of what is to befall his brother and the others on the ship, that he’s already planned to forgive them, too, but that doesn’t seem to work with the verse in the speech.

Which brings me to another problem. The story Prospero tells Miranda is a long one. I mean, the guy goes on for PAGES about this – a really long time – so long that he keeps asking Miranda if she’s paying attention. It’s going to be a challenge to find levels in the speeches, to pace it all, so that it keeps the audience’s interest.

But here’s the real goocher, the thing that really concerns me – from Julius Caesar on, Shakespeare started to use a LOT of shared lines. Sometimes shared lines are easy to deal with. If the line obviously has ten syllables, it’s pretty easy to deal with them. There’s either a caesura in there, or not, which means the other actor should generally pause, or pick up the line without a pause, respectively. But when the verse is as choppy and uneven as it is in I.ii. of The Tempest, it poses problems. I’m going to have to work with the other actors on how we’re going to scan these lines. But I don’t want to seem like a dick. It’s not my job as an actor to tell the other actors how to say their lines.

When I start working on an early modern English play, the first thing I do is see if my lines are in verse or prose. I make a prompt script for myself. I type all of my lines out into a word document. For the lines that are in verse, I create a table with ten columns, and try to scan the verse into the table, one syllable per cell. This process has been a huge pain in the ass so far, with the verse being so irregular. I’m going to actually try something else for this play, copying all of the text over and then scanning it by hand, drawing the little stress marks out and isolating the feet, so I can really look at the endings that may be three syllables and give them more thought.