4/30/2023 0 Comments Scansion practice shakespeareThe same is true with Shakespeare: You've got to obey the verse, keep the integrity of the lines‹but that has nothing to do with your planning of who the character is." He added, "If you get spooky and dainty with it, it doesn't work."īay Area actor, director, and teacher Julian Lopez-Morillas, though, spoke of the importance of the poetry. When he writes three dots, you've got to pause. Albee is very specific about the words, the punctuation. You should work the same way you do with an Edward Albee play. He said that when actors first read Shakespeare, "it's about spondees, meters, trochees, which is of no help. When Tyrone Guthrie came to Stratford, Ontario, in the 1950s, he said that American actors are better equipped to play Shakespeare than the English, because they have so much energy, and their speech is closer to what Shakespeare's was." Easton continued, "Shakespeare works wonderfully using American regional accents, particularly if they're sort of extreme and denote class and intelligence level, which is what English accents do." On the other hand, Shakespearean actor Richard Easton, who teaches at the University of San Diego, said, "One doesn't have to fuss with the verse. More attention I think should be paid to that by American actors." It becomes less about the language, the rhythm of the verse, which is undeniable." He elaborated: "You may have an instinct for how you feel about a moment, about what the language is saying, but it's just as crucial to know what the structure of the language is doing. Said James Newcomb, who lives in Encinitas and has acted with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Shakespeare Santa Cruz, and Idaho Shakespeare Festival, "We come from American psychological realism. Others, however, think Americans are too intimidated by the poetry of the language, and that they should stop worrying about it and get on with the usual tasks of the trade: character-building, objective-playing, etc. Some of the pros believe that American actors need to work harder on the structural intricacies of the text. But as I discussed this with various Shakespearean actors and teachers, a schism became apparent. I started out by wondering if there are certain bugaboos or fallacies inherent in the acting of Shakespeare that traditionally tend to trip up Americans. Is it possible American actors have taken that advice a little too literally? Or, conversely, have they not taken it seriously enough? Syntactically based scansion is also more accurate, and able to identify a wider range of rhythms (including free verse and triple rhythms) in contexts where traditional scansion fails."Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue," Hamlet advised the Players. Syntactically derived stress assignments are much closer to native-speaker assessments of stress and so produce more natural scansions. From this research, it is clear that referencing syntax improves the accuracy of scansion. This identifies the skill level of each application. A third experiment enters the applications in an online poetry contest against humans, allowing them to be measured against a critic’s actual criteria. This is used to estimate how far each application approximates human assumptions when it does not match expert scansion. The second experiment uses a survey of non-experts to determine the acceptability of the applications’ scansions and of expert scansion. The first experiment assessed the applications against expert scansions of a large corpus to determine which one identifies rhythm the best. In each of three experiments, three applications are tested: one does not use syntax (Scandroid), one uses it for stress assignments only (Revised Scandroid), and one, which I have developed, uses it to determine both stress and scansion (Phonological Scansion). The research seeks to evaluate the impact of syntax on scansion generally and computer scansion in particular. However, no current computer scansion program references it, and most recent research has overlooked it (Hayes, 2005). One improvement is proposed by recent linguistic research: according to Hayes and Kaun (1996), syntax is an essential component in both stress and scansion assignment. The best, including Scandroid (Hartman, 2005), only scan as well as the undergraduates they are designed to help, because they depend on unreliable procedures to identify the stress in syllables and the rhythm in lines. In the last decade a large number of computer programs have been developed to identify scansion in English poetry – that is, the intended rhythm of stressed and unstressed syllables in each line.
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