Music and Meaning in the Tempest

When Prospero puts on his magic robes to address the spirits of the island, at the start of Act 5 of The Tempest, he is not - contrary to popular opinion - making much sense.

This is deliberate.

For the real meaning of this speech lies not in the words themselves but in the music of the language.

Consider the first few lines:

Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes and groves,
And ye that on the sands with printless foot
Do chase the ebbing Neptune and do fly him
When he comes back; you demi-puppets that
By moonshine do the green sour ringlets make,
Whereof the ewe not bites, and you whose pastime
Is to make midnight mushrooms, that rejoice
To hear the solemn curfew; by whose aid,
Weak masters though ye be...

Little sense here unless you want to spend some time – longer than any audience in a theatre has – breaking down the structure into phrases and then trying to link the phrases back together again in a syntactical infusion which reveals a modicum of meaning under a microscope.

But I am playing.

As Shakespeare is in this speech.

Forget the meaning and listen to the sound.  Listen, particularly, to the rise and fall and changes of pace.

Notice the extremely long opening note running through the words from ‘Ye elves ‘(line 1) to ‘ye be‘ (line 9).  No breath.  No end of a sentence.  No break.  Just one long note.

Then it changes.

We move fluidly from ‘Ye’ to ‘I’.

And the energy rises noticeably.

Now the language expresses power and achievement.  Still no concrete meaning, but an impression of something omnipotent doing powerful things:

... I have bedimm'd
The noontide sun, call'd forth the mutinous winds,
And 'twixt the green sea and the azured vault
Set roaring war: to the dread rattling thunder
Have I given fire and rifted Jove's stout oak
With his own bolt; the strong-based promontory
Have I made shake and by the spurs pluck'd up
The pine and cedar: graves at my command
Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let 'em forth
By my so potent art.

The meaning here lies not in prosaic logic, but in the artistic images evoked by the sounds.

The abrupt intrusion of the word ‘graves’ – caused in part, paradoxically, by the appearance of a regular iambic rhythm in a highly irregular rhythmic structure – injects strident new energy.

Omnipotence.  Destructive power.  A force greater than nature.

And the music has risen from quiet elves of brooks and streams, through a crescendo of violence and raw power, to a climactic declaration of ‘Potent Art’.  A climax signalled by the assonance of ‘By my’ and ‘So Po', which majestically slows the beat and creates natural emphasis and focus on the word 'Art'.

It continues...

But this rough magic
I here abjure

And, as he does so, the power wanes.  Triggered by the suggestion of a logical argument contained in the word ‘but’.

Now the tempo slows.  The music lowers in pitch and volume.  And now the music in the language needs heavenly music to accompany it and even the very act of calling for this heavenly music is magically incoherent and yet completely comprehensible:

... and, when I have required
Some heavenly music, which even now I do,
To work mine end upon their senses that
This airy charm is for,

See how there is no end in sight to the sentence; no logic in the verb tenses; no definition of subject and object; no clarity of meaning.  And yet we know something is ending.  And we know this is about ‘senses’ and something ‘airy’ and magical.

And then we are hit with reality; a functioning, physical reality:

I'll break my staff,
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,
And deeper than did ever plummet sound
I'll drown my book.

These final lines make sense.  They are relatively logical and syntactically simple.  They seem to end with a full stop.

But more important than any of that, they complete the music of the whole speech.

For they carry a natural downward inflection.  The lower notes of the spectrum.  The bass sounds which you feel in your bones even more than you hear them in your ear.

And the final line is only a half-line.

It does not end with a full stop.

It ends with half a line of silence.

In one monologue – at the focal point of the whole play – Shakespeare provides Prospero with a speech which stretches language to the limit.  It communicates through image, rhythm and sound, rather than through logical meaning.  And yet it all leads to a single logical statement which establishes the impending end of Prospero’s reign; the end of Shakespeare’s Art.

On an island full of magic and music, built on a structure which mirrors the advent and passing of a storm, this speech is the epitome of The Tempest.

Two Daggers - One Macbeth

There are two ways of playing the dagger scene in Macbeth - Stanislavskian and non-Stanislavskian.

In the Stanislavski version, of course, the actor is absorbed in the world of the play and really only sees the dagger and the space around him.  He literally 'speaks his thoughts aloud' and the audience overhears them from outside the scene.

This is the way this scene has been played in every production I have seen of the play.

But there is an alternative mode of playing the scene.  In this non-Stanislavki version, the actor asks the audience a direct question: 'Is this a dagger I see before me?'  Of course it is not necessary for the actor to be looking directly at the audience as he says this specific set of words, for he can quite naturally speak to the audience while still looking at the dagger.  But at some point he will definitely break his eye contact with the dagger to look out into the audience to see/hear their reaction to his question.  And this is how the scene develops: the actor explores the issue of the dagger's appearance in full sight of the audience and with a clear line of communication between him and them.

Perhaps the skill of the actor and the choices made in terms of focus/eye level - more so than in the Stanislavski version - will determine the tone of this speech, but the effect will be quite different to that other version.  For now the audience is not overhearing from outside; now the audience is INSIDE the scene with the actor.  Now the audience have an immediate presence which - strikingly - makes them complicit in the drama.

When we tested these two modes of playing - in schools - by offering up the soliloquy performed in both styles, we found interesting results.  Firstly, there was a predictable reaction based on which version the (inexperienced) students saw first.  For, whichever order we played them in, the "first seen" was invariably the one judged to be most effective by the students (generally GCSE) - as if they could not adapt to the second once they had seen the effectiveness of the first.  But there was a different response among their more experienced teachers: here the clear favourite was the non-Stanislavskian version.  And the accompanying comments were common:

 

'I have not seen it played like that before'

'It was so much more immediate'

'It was more emotional'

'It was more effective as drama'.

 

 

The trouble is that we have become so used to seeing Stanislavskian acting in our theatres that we appear to have almost forgotten that there really is another form of acting - and one which predates Stanislavski by millennia.  Confronting modern audiences with both forms demonstrated that Stanislavski is definitely not the only way and, quite probably, is not even the best way.

 

But which of these two versions was best for the actor?  I can answer that from personal experience as I was, on many occasions, the actor in question...

 

Firstly, I found that the Stanislavskian version was tremendously technical - for I had to maintain a wholly unnatural thread of emotional angst across a whole speech - but it allowed me to make all the decisions myself.  In other words I was the boss of the speech and could decide where to go next and then fly there (e.g. I often felt the emotion driving me towards smashing my fist on a table at a climactic moment, so I would give in to that urge and enjoy the emotional intensity which followed). 

 

But the non-Stanislavski version was entirely different.  For now I was NOT the boss of the speech; the situation was.  And the situation involved the audience, the dagger, the other people off-stage at the 'feast', and more.  Now I never felt an emotional urge to bang my fist on a table, but I often did still bang my fist on the table!  Why?  Because the action of banging the fist was now an attempt to change the situation; to shake off the madness which was clearly in danger of envelopping me.

 

Two versions, of one speech, in which I would usually bang my fist on a table.  But this action in each version - from its cause to its execution to its aftermath - was wholly distinct.  In the first, it was driven by emotion, shaped by my embrace of that emotion and expressed that emotion; in the other, it was driven by a situation, shaped by my attitude to the situation and it changed the situation... however briefly.

 

And there were other differences too.  But none more unexpected than my discovery of a simple, theatrical, truth: moving round the stage, in the Stanislavski version, as I worked to communicate to the audience my state of emotional angst (and, by their reactions, my work was pretty convincing) seemed somehow unclean; a petty lie.  But moving round the stage exploring the immediate current situation - a situation in which we all knew the audience existed as much as I did - seemed not only pure but a play in which all the roles offered cathartic opportunity.

 

For we were collectively journeying through a shared experience and my contribution as the actor was far more open, generous and imaginative than Stanislavski allowed me to be.