with purpose, knowing nothing.
What is a snail’s fury? All
I think is that if later
I parted the blades above
the tunnel and saw the thin
trail of broken white across
litter, I would never have
imagined the slow passion
to that deliberate progress.
Hawk Roosting
by Ted Hughes
(1930–98)
I sit in the top of the wood, my eyes closed.
Inaction, no falsifying dream
Between my hooked head and hooked feet:
Or in sleep rehearse perfect kills and eat.
The convenience of the high trees!
The air’s buoyancy and the sun’s ray
Are of advantage to me;
And the earth’s face upward for my inspection.
My feet are locked upon the rough bark.
It took the whole of Creation
To produce my foot, my each feather:
Now I hold Creation in my foot
Or fly up, and revolve it all slowly –
I kill where I please because it is all mine.
There is no sophistry in my body:
My manners are tearing off heads –
The allotment of death.
For the one path of my flight is direct
Through the bones of the living.
No arguments assert my right:
The sun is behind me.
Nothing has changed since I began.
My eye has permitted no change.
I am going to keep things like this.
Inessential Things
by Brian Patten
(born 1946)
What do cats remember of days?
They remember the ways in from the cold,
The warmest spot, the place of food.
They remember the places of pain, their enemies,
the irritation of birds, the warm fumes of the soil,
the usefulness of dust.
They remember the creak of a bed, the sound
of their owner’s footsteps,
the taste of fish, the loveliness of cream.
Cats remember what is essential of days.
Letting all other memories go as of no worth
they sleep sounder than we,
whose hearts break remembering so many
inessential things.
Cocoon
by Hollie McNish
(born 1984)
I really love cycling. If I could get a job cycling and doing poetry, that would be ace. Anyhow, wrote this when I got to work …
This is as close as I’ll ever be to a butterfly
rain coat zipped up to my chin
for the half hour bike ride
to work
Hair bunned
at the back
to fit in the hood
helmet clipped tightly
– I am waterproof
Now pace reaches peak
the streets are attacked
Cold frosts the trees
but the sweat coats my back
until one minute left
I let myself go
cycling slow
as I unbutton clothes
jacket unzipped
helmet unclipped
from beneath
hood stripped from my forehead
hairband released
Hair ruffled with hands
to be free in the wind
body to elements
cool down my skin
At that moment
I open
and peel myself free
I feel as close to
a new butterfly
as I’ll ever be
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Upstart Crow‘Speak the speech, I pray you’
As you will know if you have seen Ben Elton’s brilliant television sitcom about William Shakespeare, it was Shakespeare’s contemporary, the playwright Robert Greene, who first called Shakespeare the ‘upstart crow’. Greene was jealous of Shakespeare’s genius. Ben Jonson, another poet-playwright of the era, was more generous. He dubbed Shakespeare ‘the Swan of Avon’ and recognized ‘He was not of an age, but for all time!’
The poet Robert Graves (1895–1985) said: ‘The remarkable thing about Shakespeare is that he is really very good – in spite of all the people who say he is very good.’ The critic William Hazlitt (1778–1830) was on the money, too: ‘If we wish to know the force of human genius we should read Shakespeare. If we wish to see the insignificance of human learning we may study his commentators.’
So much guff has been written about Shakespeare, I am not going to add to it here. I am simply offering you ten great Shakespeare speeches to learn by heart. If you enjoy them, you will be pleased to know there are many more where they came from.
And you will be pleased to know, too, that if you can learn and speak ‘The Owl and the Pussy-cat’, you can learn and speak the poetry of Shakespeare. As ever, ‘trust the author’ is the basic rule.
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. Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus, but use all gently. For in the very torrent, tempest, and as I may say, the whirlwind of your passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness. O, it offends me to the soul to hear a robustious periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings, who for the most part are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb shows and noise … Be not too tame neither, but let your own discretion be your tutor. Suit the action to the word, the word to the action, with this special observance: that you o’erstep not the modesty of nature. For anything so o’erdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.
Hamlet’s Advice to the Players Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 2
There are other rules, of course, and, if you want to dig deeper, I reckon the best two books on the subject are Speaking the Speech by Giles Block, sometime ‘Master of the Word’ at Shakespeare’s Globe in London, and Shakespeare’s Advice to the Players by Sir Peter Hall, the founder of the Royal Shakespeare Company. For both of them, it’s all there on the page. For Peter Hall, ‘the sanctity of the line is paramount’. Hall claimed that any actor could learn to speak Shakespeare in ‘a few weeks’, although greatness might take a little longer: ‘Laurence Olivier took nearly twenty years before he began to ride on the lines like an expert skier.’
In case you don’t have twenty years to spare, here are the Brandreth Rules for Speaking Shakespeare:
Read the speech right through.
Understand it. Translate it into modern English, phrase by phrase, to make sure you know exactly what Shakespeare is saying. Look up any words or references that seem unfamiliar.
Learn it line by line, one line at a time. Understand each sentence or thought sequence, but don’t learn it by sentence, punctuation or thought: learn it line by line. Remember: ‘the sanctity of the line is paramount’.
Find the beat, feel the rhythm. It’s the basic da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM that makes much of Shakespeare surprisingly easy to learn. (Judi Dench was doing it at three, FFS!)
Use your own voice. Just because it’s Shakespeare, you don’t have to put on a specially sonorous actory voice or speak in a strange accent that isn’t your own. Be yourself. Sound as you sound.
Trust the words and tell the story. You don’t need to add any extra ‘feeling’. Shakespeare has done it all for you.
On 27 February 1995, when they were about to make a film together of Shakespeare’s Richard III, the actor Sir Ian McKellen wrote to the director, Richard Loncraine, on the subject of Shakespeare’s blank ve
rse.
I’m glad at last we’re going to do this film.
Three years has been a long, long time to wait.
But now I thought I should sit down and try
to clarify what blank verse means to me;
and thereby reassure your doubting heart.
If, incidentally, you read these lines out loud,
I’m sure you’ll find them tripping off the tongue.
And yet, of course, they’re written in blank verse!
I’ll stop that game and go back to the start. (And that’s another blank verse line, dear heart!) Before Christopher Marlowe (who was born in the same year as Shakespeare – 1564) came down from Cambridge and wrote his first play, the only English drama had been written in rather doggerelly verse and told simple allegorical stories about good and evil, mostly culled from the Bible. Marlowe was also concerned with morality but introduced to the London stage fictional stories about famous people (Tamburlaine the Great and Dr. Faustus for example). He needed a more pliant sort of speech than the old drama. It didn’t occur to him that the prose of everyday speech would be appropriate – after all his characters were often bigger than life and he wanted them to sound especially grand. And so he lighted upon a formal rhythm which linked all the possibilities of poetry with the informality of the audience’s normal speech.
Blank verse means verse that doesn’t rhyme. Its meter is called pentameter because there are five (the Greek ‘penta’) feet to each line. Each foot contains two beats, in the rhythm of the heart – ‘de-dum’ – with the stress on the second beat. And that’s all there is to it. I like the heartbeat point – just as it’s nice that we have ten fingers and the blank verse line has ten beats. I imagine Marlowe counting out the beat with his digits. Not that he’d really have needed to, because (cf. my opening paragraph) the general rhythm of English speech – and modern English – often coincides with the sound of blank verse. Shakespeare took blank verse and ran with it. By the end of his career – in Coriolanus, say, and Antony & 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 …
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 stress the ‘de-dums’ …
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 …
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 (rather like the Irish) and speak simultaneously with thinking. 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 …
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. – Ian McKellen
From Richard III
first performed around
1592–3
Richard, Duke of Gloucester, begins the play with this speech addressed to himself and to the audience. After a lengthy civil war, Richard’s older brother, Edward IV, now sits on the throne as the first Yorkist King of England, but Richard, born deformed, sees himself as sovereign and plans to set his brother the king against his other brother, the Duke of Clarence.
Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this son of York,
And all the clouds that loured upon our house
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.
Now are our brows bound with victorious wreaths,
Our bruisèd arms hung up for monuments,
Our stern alarums changed to merry meetings,
Our dreadful marches to delightful measures.
Grim-visaged war hath smoothed his wrinkled front,
And now, instead of mounting barbèd steeds
To fright the souls of fearful adversaries,
He capers nimbly in a lady’s chamber
To the lascivious pleasing of a lute.
But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks,
Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass;
I, that am rudely stamped, and want love’s majesty
To strut before a wanton ambling nymph;
I, that am curtailed of this fair proportion,
Cheated of feature by dissembling nature,
Deformed, unfinished, sent before my time
Into this breathing world scarce half made up,
And that so lamely and unfashionable
That dogs bark at me as I halt by them –
Why, I in this weak piping time of peace
Have no delight to pass away the time,
Unless to spy my shadow in the sun
And descant on mine own deformity.
And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover,
To entertain these fair well-spoken days,
I am determinèd to prove a villain,
And hate the idle pleasures of these days.
Plots have I laid, inductions dangerous,
By drunken prophecies, libels, and dreams
To set my brother Clarence and the King
In deadly hate the one against the other.
And if King Edward be as true and just
As I am subtle, false, and treacherous,
This day should Clarence closely be mewed up
About a prophecy, which says that ‘G’
Of Edward’s heirs the murderer shall be.
Dive thoughts down to my soul; here
Clarence comes.
From Romeo and Juliet
first performed around
1594–5
Juliet appears at her balcony and Romeo, in the garden below, sees her and is smitten.
But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?
It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.
Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon,
Who is already sick and pale with grief
That thou, her maid, art far more fair than she.
Be not her maid, since she is envious.
Her vestal livery is but sick and green,
And none but fools do wear it; cast it off.
It is my lady, O, it is my love.
O that she knew she were!
She speaks, yet she says nothing. What of that?
Her eye discourses; I will answer it.
I am too bold; ’tis not to me she speaks.
Two of the fairest stars in all the heaven,
Having some business, do entreat her eyes
To twinkle in their spheres till they return.
What if her eyes were there, they in her head?
The brightness of her cheek would shame those stars
As daylight doth a lamp; her eyes in heaven
Would through the airy region stream so bright
That bird
s would sing and think it were not night.
See how she leans her cheek upon her hand.
O, that I were a glove upon that hand,
That I might touch that cheek.
From Richard II
first performed around
1595–6
John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, is dying. Critical of the king, Richard II, he awaits his arrival at Ely House in London, and talks with his brother, the Duke of York, reflecting on the nature of England and the country’s future prospects.
Methinks I am a prophet new inspired
And thus expiring do foretell of him.
His rash, fierce blaze of riot cannot last,
For violent fires soon burn out themselves;
Small showers last long, but sudden storms are short.
He tires betimes that spurs too fast betimes.
With eager feeding food doth choke the feeder.
Light vanity, insatiate cormorant,
Consuming means, soon preys upon itself.
This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall,
Or as a moat defensive to a house
Against the envy of less happier lands;
This blessèd plot, this earth, this realm, this England,
This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings,
Feared by their breed and famous by their birth,
Renownèd for their deeds as far from home
For Christian service and true chivalry
As is the sepulchre in stubborn Jewry,
Of the world’s ransom, blessèd Mary’s son;
This land of such dear souls, this dear, dear land,
Dear for her reputation through the world,
Is now leased out – I die pronouncing it –
Like to a tenement or pelting farm.
England, bound in with the triumphant sea,
Whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege
Dancing by the Light of the Moon Page 10
