You’ve probably heard a riff on the above title once or twice before in your life. It might’ve been from a teacher at drama school, or perhaps a veteran actor who sounds like they go through life with a prop skull up their sleeve, ready to soliloquy at a moment’s notice. But if you’re wondering exactly how Shakespeare improves your acting, you’ve come to the right place.
Performing Shakespeare is immensely beneficial for actors. It builds confidence, promotes vocal and physical development and engages the actor with character development and script analysis. Performing Shakespeare also engages a performer’s understanding of the western canon of literature: opening them to the influence the author has had on performing arts and popular culture for the past 400 years.
In this article, we’ve outlined seven core ways in which performing Shakespeare improves your acting. You’re likely to discover more along the way, but these should get you well and truly started.
“Performing Shakespeare”
“The play’s the thing.” – Hamlet
Before we begin: you might note that we’ve settled on “performing” Shakespeare, rather than “studying”, or “reading”, or even “reciting”. There are benefits to all of these options, and some we’re going to suggest you do anyway. But “performing” Shakespeare helps you to connect with the words on the page as they were intended.
Shakespeare doesn’t belong in an English class, a fancy stage or distilled into cliff notes. It should be brought to life by actors anywhere and everywhere, and enjoyed by them and their audiences alike. Performing Shakespeare is a terrific reminder that the Bard wasn’t about torturing students and boring theatregoers. He was an entertainer. And one of the very best.
All that being said: performing Shakespeare doesn’t require your very own Globe theatre, or even an audience in the first place. You could be doing scene work, practicing a monologue or reciting a sonnet while you brew your morning coffee. Just so long as you bring his words to life.
#1 Building Confidence
“Our doubts are traitors, And make us lose the good we oft might win.” – Measure for Measure
Shakespeare scares a lot of actors—the language, the history, the knowledge that the words themselves are iconic to the last. Many actors feel like they can’t tackle his work alone or unprompted: they need a reason, or more training, or to better understand the text guided by a particular teacher or director.
Our advice, and our first touted benefit of performing Shakespeare, is to build confidence by jumping right in! Prove to yourself you can take on the Bard, and you’ll soon have yourself believing you can handle anything.
Honestly, this point isn’t even about performing Shakespeare well. It’s just to break the preconception that Shakespeare is meant only for drama-school-trained actors and industry elites. Give it a go. You’ll surprise yourself how easy it is when you give the words some time and thought. And you might also discover a brand new passion.
#2 Your Voice is an Instrument
“I will roar that I will do any man’s heart good to hear me.” – A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Actors with vocal strength are in short supply these days. A lot of it has to do with the popularity of “screen acting” and its associated courses, which often trick impressionable performers into thinking you can skip fundamental acting tools like “being articulate” and “not sounding like a little flute” because you’ll have a microphone strapped to you.
If you worry your voice sounds a little thin when you’re performing, then Shakespeare is the perfect way to train you up. He routinely used a rhyme structure in his plays known as “iambic pentameter” (five unstressed/stressed syllable parings per line), which lends itself to loud-and-proud recitation. While your dialogue shouldn’t sound sing-song, you can utilise this rhythm to naturally accentuate the stressed words and syllables in the dialogue—lending power to your performance.
#2.5 Find Emotions in the Vowels
Shakespeare’s writing also used vowels to carry emotion, granting his actors and audiences insight as to how a character might be feeling. In King Lear, as the eponymous character mourns his daughter Cordelia, he utters the line; “HOWL, HOWL, HOWL, HOWL.” It’s almost onomatopoetic in how it conveys the tragedy and anger of a broken king. You can’t deliver the line without giving it your all, and letting those emotions out.
An actor with a strong vocal presence stands out from their peers. Find the poetry in Shakespeare’s words and enjoy performing it. When you do, you’ll learn to love your voice as the instrument it is: of evocation, of persuasion, of power.
#3 Embodied Acting
“Like Valour’s minion, carv’ d out his passage,
Till he fac’d the slave;
Which ne’er shook hands, nor bade farewell to him,
Till he unseam’d him from the nave to th’ chops,
And fix’d his head upon our battlements.” – Macbeth
We’ve included this rather bloody passage from the Scottish Play above to illustrate a point about Shakespeare’s minimal stage directions. He wasn’t big on telling actors where to stand and what to do. The few he did provide are more concerned with logistics than creating a sense of the physical world: “enter”, “dies”, “exit pursued by a bear.”
But as the story told by the Bleeding Captain illustrates, Shakespeare’s plays suggest bold and exciting movements in their words, in their telling. For this reason, performing Shakespeare is often a very physical exercise—a terrific challenge for any actor honing their chops.
How can you take pages of dialogue and make it come to life below the neck? What kinds of shapes and situations can you conjure? Is there a way that physicality can not only support the text, but actively add to and enrich it?
#4 Creating Character
“I am determined to prove a villain and hate the idle pleasure of these days.” – Richard III
Shakespeare wasn’t just a brilliant wordsmith, he was an expert storyteller. And if you want an explanation of that without completing an undergrad degree, we can boil it down to this: Shakespeare understood character. He understood how to craft them, how to pit them against each other, and how to give them wants and needs that carried them through, let’s be honest, a lot of text.
When performing Shakespeare, you have a unique opportunity to explore and realise characters. Many of these are known to audiences, which means you can contribute to their famed personas … or subvert expectations entirely.
Considering character will also help you avoid a cardinal sin of Shakespearean acting, which is not to consider the objective of your character: their very reason for being in the play in the first place. Too many actors think that if you speak the words, that’s enough to carry the play. Bulls**t.
Shakespeare gave his characters goals to strive for and obstacles to overcome. He gave them flaws and ambitions and quirks, like any good writer worth their damn. Why wouldn’t you do all you could to discover these glorious details? Speaking of:
#5 Script Analysis
“Words, words, words.” – Hamlet
Performing Shakespeare will make you a master of script analysis. Because without this quintessential acting tool, you’ll be lost in a sea of thees, forsooths and hey-nonny-nonny.
If you want to learn how to understand and speak Shakespeare’s words, you’ll need to start by making a glossary of all the terms and phrases you don’t understand. And this requires you to be very honest and open: no guessing or approximating. You can’t go “I assume he’s a Greek God of something…” Know the God in question, and why Shakespeare picked them out in particular.
Script analysis will also help you with character objectives and actions—the tactics with which they navigate through the scene. It’ll also give you a leg-up on the rhythm/poetry in the text, which contains multitudes of hidden meanings to be unlocked.
#6 Exploring the Canon
“Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.” – Twelfth Night
The more you know and understand Shakespeare, the more you’ll be able to track his influence throughout the Western Canon. Shakespeare’s roots run deep through popular culture; knowing which Shakespeare play was adapted as The Lion King can help you identify his influences elsewhere, and perhaps give you additional insight as to the deeper meaning of a text.
We stress this because the best actors are well-read, well-rounded individuals with knowledge of their craft and its history. Knowing your Shakespeare won’t just make you more interesting at parties, it’ll give you a leg-up when speaking with directors and writers—whose chief form of communication are the many influences from which they draw inspiration.
#7 De-Mystifying Shakespeare
“It’s Shakespeare, right, it’s like algebra on stage.” – I Hate Hamlet
Every time you perform Shakespeare on stage, on camera, in your car or to your shower organiser, you de-mystify his words. This might not seem like something that improves your own process as an actor. But de-mystifying Shakespeare gets you feeling comfortable with his writing. That allows you to do more and reap the benefits of everything we’ve already listed.
Let’s return to the concept of confidence. Performing Shakespeare helps you build the confidence in knowing that you can. And why? Because you should: you deserve to work with the best words available and tackle some of the most exciting dramatic challenges ever put to actors!
Remember this when performing Shakespeare for the first time—because this is the most important piece of advice there is. Treat it like any other play, any other character, any other gig. Forget four centuries of veneration: enjoy the stories and words of a writer who really understood actors, and what made for a cracking night of drama.
Have fun. We guarantee you it’s there to be had.
Conclusion
“Take pains, be perfect. Adieu!” – A Midsummer Night’s Dream
So there you have it: our hot take on the benefits of the Bard for actors. One last thing we’ll mention is that your Shakespeare journey need not happen alone. Even if you’re jumping in at what might feel like a later point in your life. Chat to a buddy, take a class, pick a monologue and go to town!
Right here on StageMilk we have hundreds of pages of monologue breakdowns, synopses, language guides and other resources to help you on your Shakespeare journey.
So get cracking, get inspired. Good luck!