Editor's Note
By Jim O'Quinn
This issue's annual Approaches to Theatre Training package is devoted to the rigors and rewards of vocal training for the actor. But as you read, keep an eye out for another thematic thread that runs through the special section and spills into the back of the book—the language of Shakespeare. How should it be spoken? How is its meaning best conveyed? Is it time (as linguist John McWhorter boldly proposes) to translate the Bard's glorious 16th-century effusion of words into contemporary English?
If that strikes you as heresy, take a deep breath (as Kristin Linklater and Catherine Fitzmaurice recommend, for starters) and follow the Shakespeare trail from Cicely Berry's eloquent riff on the first scene of Hamlet, to Patsy Rodenburg's valorization of intellectual awareness in speaking classical text, to playwright Diana Son's testimonial about "the play that changed my life" (Hamlet again), and finally to McWhorter's carefully reasoned opinion piece. "English since Shakespeare's time has changed not only in terms of a few exotic vocabulary items," McWhorter posits, "but in the very meaning of thousands of basic words and in scores of fundamental sentence structures." How to clear away this linguistic fog? Translate Shakespeare "into modern English readily comprehensible to the modern spectator." Might he have a point there?
There's a certain irony in juxtaposing McWhorter's not-so-modest proposal with the fertile ideas of the five distinguished voice trainers featured in these pages, since in many of the regimens these teachers have developed, the literal text being delivered by the actor is tangential, almost an afterthought. Consider the exercise Linklater conducts with a crew of actors and academics on the Aegean isle of Santorini, designed, in her words, "to de-wire the brain in order to let the emotion through." Rather than delivering lines, the speakers replaced the words with a breathed-out "fff"—a content-free exhalation that, even without language, stirred the performers to new levels of expressiveness. As one participant put it, "The breath intervenes before you conceptualize, before you see the image."
Breathing, relaxation, simultaneous tasking, presence—these are among the many concerns of the eminent teachers whose own voices ring out clearly and individually in this special training issue. Their ideas are essential groundwork for actors honing their craft—and for all of us who revere great acting as well.
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