Verse vs. Prose--Playing the Punctuation

I talked earlier about the choices Shakespeare consciously made in determining whether his text should be in verse or prose.  He was one of the first playwrights to embrace the prose form, and Merry Wives of Windsor is essentially a prose comedy with less than 20% of the play in verse form.  But why choose to make this essentially a prose comedy?

He usually makes prose the language form of the commoners or the lower class in his plays, and almost every character in Merry Wives is firmly in the middle class.  In fact, Falstaff is the person of the highest class in the play, but unless he is quoting a poet, he never speaks in verse.  Prose sounds more naturalistic, more common than verse, primarily because it doesn't stick to the strict form of blank verse.  There is also a decided lack of heightened language in the prose sections.

Just like in the verse there are clues on how to play the prose lines embedded in the structure of the prose text.  This is commonly called playing the punctuation.  These same techniques can be used as an additional tool to interpret the verse as well.

The first thing to do when playing the punctuation is that you need to redefine punctuation to mean breath.  When faced with a forty line soliloquy in verse form or a twenty line monolgoue in prose form, an actor will forget that he needs to breathe.  Often.  If you look at any piece of puctuation as a signal to breathe, and the specific type of punctuation as a signal of how much to breathe, then you are beginning to make headway into playing the punctuation.

There are essentially four types of punctuations, and they indicate how much breath you should take.  In descending order from longest to shortest, they are:

1. Period (also question mark or exclamation point) means full-stop and take a full breath.
2. Colon means full-stop and take a full breath.
3. Semi-colon means half-stop and take a quick breath.
4. Comma means half-stop and take a quick breath.

I slid in the word "stop" for a specific reason, which I will get to in a moment.  These prescribed breathing breaks will automatically slow down the actor and give him or her time to figure out what's next in the speech.  A monologue which may have seemed incomprehensible and interminable to the audience suddenly becomes easier to understand and faster.

There are two other types of punctuation Shakespeare uses in his writing:  the dash (--) and the ellipses (...).  They are both essentially telling the actor to stop and indicate that he should take a breath or even two, but they are to be played in very different ways.  The dash is used to indicate a cutting stop, one that suddenly forces a realization or shock.  It's a frenetic and quick moment.  The ellipses is a more contemplative stop...one where the actor ponders deliberately about the next set of words/actions.

Stopping/breathing is important.  Every time a character/actor stops/breathes in the middle of a scene, there should be a small change in direction or momentum of the speech.  Sometimes these stops are a change in the thought pattern to a new idea.  More often, these full stops or half stops either:  they propel a thought further adding more detail and further texture, or they force a related contradiction to the previous thought.  For example at the end of Act II, scene 2, Ford is left alone on stage after first interacting with Falstaff in the disguise of Brooke.  He says:

What a damned Epicurean rascal is this! My heart is ready to crack with impatience. Who says this is improvident jealousy? my wife hath sent to him; the hour is fixed; the match is made. Would any man have thought this? See the hell of having a false woman! My bed shall be abused, my coffers ransacked, my reputation gnawn at; and I shall not only receive this villanous wrong, but stand under the adoption of abominable terms, and by him that does me this wrong.

When playing the punctuation the speech becomes:

What a damned Epicurean rascal is this! (full breath/change direction)  My heart is ready to crack with impatience. (full breath/propel further)  Who says this is improvident jealousy?  (full breath/change direction)  My wife hath sent to him, (short breath/propel further) the hour is fixed, (short breath/propel further) the match is made. (full breath/change direction)  Would any man have thought this? (full breath/propel further)  See the hell of having a false woman! (full breath/change direction)  My bed shall be abused, (short breath/propel further) my coffers ransacked, (short breath/propel further) my reputation gnawn at; (short breath/contradiction) and I shall not only receive this villanous wrong, (short breath/propel further) but stand under the adoption of abominable terms, (short breath/propel further) and by him that does me this wrong.

The speech instantly becomes easier to understand and makes much more sense.  That said it does sound a bit forced and artificial.  The art comes in with the indivdual choices the actor makes in preparing the final delivery of when to play the punctuation and when to ignore it.

These same rules apply to verse dialogue as well, but verse has one other hurdle that prose doesn't have:  the caesura or overrun.  Each line of verse is only ten beats long, and at the end of each line there is either a punctuation mark or not.  If there is a punctuation mark the line is said to be end-stopped.  You would play the punctuation as you would at any other time in a speech.  If there is no punctuation the lines has a caesura or an overrun to the next line.  Dealing with the caesura is the biggest hurdle an actor has when dealing with verse.

Actors hate English classes where classmates have to read poems aloud and put an audible stop at the end of each line as their eyes go back to the start of the next line.  Actors roll their eyes and get frustrated that the commoners don't know how to read things aloud.

Actually the commoners got it right.  Not only is it natural to include a pause of some sort, it actually tells the audience that they are listening to verse.  If Shakespeare had wanted one line to run into the other he would have written the speech in prose form.

Take this example of caesura.  In Act IV, Scene 4 (lines 51-54) the two Fords and the two Pages are planning their final mockery of Falstaff.  Mrs. Page says of the children who will be disguised as fairies:

                            ...Upon a sudden,
As Falstaff, she, and I, are newly met,
Let them from forth a sawpit rush at once
With some diffused song....

If Mrs. Page doesn't play the caesura after line 53 ("at once") the verse rolls right along.  If she does take a moment to pause, then the "With some diffused song" propels her thoughts further and ups the ante of the scene.  It's also more interesting to hear, and "sounds like verse".

Playing the punctuation is at the discretion of the actor and the director, but it certainly can help in interpreting what can at times look to be a ponderous text.