The Best Way To Speak ShakespeareIt will make you catch your breath.

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I recounted one wine-soaked dinner I had with Hall in which he pounded the table and lamented that the art of verse-speaking had been lost because only a few directors and actors observed the pause.

What Hall didn't quite do, and what Edelstein did for me, was explain why the pause matters. I had initially taken a strictly literary view of it: that the pause turned each line into an aesthetic unit, a one-line sonnet of sorts, comparable to Pope's jewel box rhyming couplets, where glittering reflections of reflections required the closure of a pause to flicker off each other.

But Barry Edelstein showed me an entirely different way of looking at the pause. I audited one of his verse-speaking classes, and suddenly the scales fell from my eyes.

Pay attention because this will change your life. What Edelstein suggested is that the pause at the end of the line Hall was insisting on was not a static stop. Even Hall now calls it a "slight sense break," rather than a pause. Edelstein says it's less like a break than a springboard; that in reading or speaking Shakespeare one should read a line and, when one comes to its end, take a brief moment as if one were thinking up the next line. In that evanescent moment, Edelstein believes, the actor "finds" the next line, and the "springboard" of inventing it gives the words a renewed energy.

It sounds like a slight, subtle adjustment, but it changes everything—take my word for it. Or don't take my word for it. Here's Edelstein in Thinking Shakespeare: He's adamant in saying the end of the line is not a pause, because calling it that makes it seem like a static wall one stops at. Instead, he writes, "[T]he line ending is an opportunity for thought."

And to make it all less abstract, he provides an ingenious way of dramatizing what he means: "The Paper Trick," Which I am reproducing here because I want you to get down whatever edition of whatever Shakespearean play or poem you wish now and give it a try, and then you'll always be in my debt:

Get a blank sheet of paper and cover the entire speech except for the first line. Read that line and when you get to its end move the paper down just enough to expose the next line. Read that then the one beneath, again repeating this process until you've reached the end of the speech. ... Many actors find this exercise revolutionizes their approach to Shakespeare.

Yes! Ordinary readers, too. It changes the way you read to yourself and the way you read out loud.

He then takes several Shakespeare passages and how they should be read, using the end of the line to hesitate for a moment of thought, an action that propels one with new energy and intensity into the next line.

Consider this famous speech from Thinking Shakespeare and how Edelstein annotates what the actress should go through in speaking it:

The quality of mercy is not strained.
breath—(what is it?)
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
catch-breath—(where?)
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest:
breath—(what do you mean?)
It blesseth him that gives, and him that takes.
breath—(what else?)
Tis mightiest in the mightiest. It becomes
catch-breath—(what?)
The throned monarch better than his crown.
big breath—okay and?)

Believe me, it's a revelation. It doesn't preclude the use of modernist Method sense memory acting but tends to seek the emotional memory of the character himself rather than the actor. Here's one of my favorite examples of how it changes everything: the prologue of one of Shakespeare's greatest works, Henry V, which begins (with my Edelsteinian annotations):

O for a muse of fire that would ascend
[where?]
The brightest heaven of invention
[including what?]
A kingdom for a stage princes to act;
[and what about the rest of the people in the theater the audience?]
And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!

It is a method, a way of thinking through what Shakespeare was thinking, which allows one to gaze more deeply into the "bright heaven of invention" that Shakespeare has bequeathed us. It makes you wonder whether Shakespeare didn't compose this way, which is the really exciting notion. One gets to feel the birth of his thoughts in 10-syllable bursts.

Anyway, it was exciting to me that the Public Theater had brought in someone as smart as Edelstein for a new Shakespeare initiative. Meanwhile, there's this summer's promising Twelfth Night, directed by Daniel Sullivan. At a book party for Edelstein's new book, Bardisms, on Shakespearean quotes for all occasions, I ran into one of New York City's great homegrown Shakespearean actors, Michael Stuhlbarg, whom I'd seen in a number of Central Park productions. He talked about how he'd done a Twelfth Night in which he played one of Shakespeare's great comic roles, Andrew Aguecheek, the gulled suitor in the play who participates in gulling the censorious steward Malvolio. And how, when it goes well, the complicated scene, featuring Malvolio and a fake letter, can sometimes "just take off and fly."

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Ron Rosenbaum is the author of The Shakespeare Wars and Explaining Hitler.

Photograph of Anne Hathaway by Bryan Bedder/Getty Images.

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