Shakespeare's Advice to the Players

by Peter Hall

Shakespeare’s text is packed with clues that help the reader to hear and the performer to act any speech. He also tells the actor when to go fast and when to go slow and when to accent a particular word. This book sets out to make going to Shakespeare performances or acting in them a richer experience, and it should have a wide appeal to both actors and audiences. It also celebrates Sir Peter Hall’s fifty years as a director of Shakespeare; from his early days at Cambridge, through founding the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford on Avon in the early ’60s, and later to his fifteen years as the director of the Royal National Theatre of Great Britain. Throughout these years, Peter Hall worked with the greatest Shakespearean actors of our generation including Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud, Edith Evans, Ralph Richardson, Peggy Ashcroft, Charles Laughton and in later years Judi Dench, Anthony Hopkins, Ian Holm, David Warner, and many others. Through this great line flows a tradition of speaking and understanding Shakespeare that remains as relevant and important today. And it is Hall’s experience of working and learning with these and many other actors over the years that underpins the core of this book. Sir Peter Hall is one of the major figures in theatre today. To date he has directed over two hundred productions, including the world premiere in English of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot , and the premieres of most of Harold Pinter’s plays. His diary and autobiography are published by Oberon Books.

Genres: Shakespeare, Theatre, Nonfiction

176 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2003

About the author

Sir Peter Reginald Frederick Hall CBE was an English theatre and film director. Hall founded the Royal Shakespeare Company (1960–68) and directed the National Theatre (1973–88), and was prominent in defending public subsidy of the arts in Britain.

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name.

Reviews

[Keith · Rating 4 out of 5]

When you pick up a book, you’re never quite sure where it will take you. That’s certainly the case when I purchased Shakespeare’s Advice to the Players. I don’t recall where I got it or my motivation for getting it, but I ended up learning more about poetry than acting.

The crux of Hall’s acting theory — and, I would say, verse theory — is this: “Form comes first and if it is observed, it helps provoke the feeling.” (p. 13)

Hall notes the unfashionableness of this statement. Today, form is considered pedantic, mechanical, untrustworthy and artificial. Acting (and verse) today values the appearance of spontaneity, passion, directness.

Method acting, in which you draw on past emotions to nuance your performance, wants to be free from text, from words, from anything but the emotional connection with the character. Form is an obstacle to overcome – it’s something to get around – rather than a tool on which to build.

But Hall notes that “there is no art without form. Form disciplines the inspiration and makes it expressive. Form contains the emotion and ensures that it is credible and not indulgent.” (p. 22)

He continues: “The paradox of art is that the rules of form must always be challenged in order to achieve spontaneity. Yet they must not be completely destroyed. There is a balance between the discipline and freedom which the great creative genius or the astonishing performer can achieve.” (p. 22)

Hall provides the traditional view of the line, the syllable, rhyme, rhythm and rhetoric in a way that many contemporary readers – myself included – typically do not see it: as rhythmic speech. And this is significantly different than poetry written to be read.

This is an eye-opening book, and one I’ll re-read throughout my life. I recommend for anyone interested in Shakespearean acting – or writing poetry.

[Alistair Welch · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a chance find in an impressively stocked Oxfam (perhaps an English academic was downsizing) but Hall’s little book is a fascinating treatise on a much neglected aspect of engaging with Shakespeare, namely scansion. Taking as his title and theme Hamlet’s advice to the players (‘speak the speech… trippingly on the tongue), Hall - from a director’s perspective - addresses how metre, rhythm and stress are not only the structure of much of Shakespeare’s dramatic craft but also underpin (or foreground) meaning. I think people avoid thinking about scansion as a result of its unhelpful association with intimidatingly Greek technical language (iambs, trochees, pentameter and the like). It’s a shame as a sensitivity to rhythmic patterns and, more importantly, when those patterns break can illuminate meaning and character both on the page and in performance. Sometimes Hall’s advice to actors assumes proficiency that could be further demonstrated through examples (‘always pay attention to scansion’ ‘make elisions where appropriate’), and he is utterly dismissive of any approach to speaking Shakespeare that doesn’t respect the preeminence of the 5-beat line. The second half of the book is a series of worked examples with an actor audience in mind, but it’s Hall’s iambic manifesto of the opening section that is most of interest.

[Thani]

Books that practically change the way you do things in your life seem elusive. This book is one of those that I can point to and say, I played Shakespeare one way before I read this book, and another way after I read this book.

Of all my encounters with analysis of Shakespeare and direction on how to play Shakespeare, none have felt as practical, insightful, and clear as this book by Peter Hall. He both reignited and fired up my passion to PLAY Shakespeare, and I feel hooked on studying Shakespeare's verse in a way I never have.

I am grateful for this book, and may spend some time dreaming about what a privilege it would be to act under Peter Hall's direction.

[Andrew Cockcroft-Charles · Rating 5 out of 5]

How I wish this great tradition could continue. Hall truly did become a man of the theatre and was great in his battles. It is a shame that the actor is, in today's epoch, fundamentally opposed to following rules of tradition. He has become, once again, an egoist, returning our great craft to the depravity of society. We rose to knighthoods and cultural bishops, and yet we return to sycophants and vagabonds...

[Mordred Jones · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most informative and eye-opening books on acting I have ever read. Essential for anyone wishing to study and/or perform Shakespeare.
Lots of useful information, presented in an easy to follow way and with industry gathered experience.
Personal stories within are helpful plus stop the book from feeling like a textbook.
Highly recommend!

[Donna Jo Atwood · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was too long--it would have been better as an magazine article at half the length. Something about brevity and the soul of wit (and I realize the book wasn't supposed to be witty--trust me, it wasn't).
Still, the book did show me another way of looking at reading Shakespeare's plays, at looking at the language and the structure of the dialogue. Thank you for that, Mr. Hall.

Task 5.7

[Karen (A Simple Cup of Tea) · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is definitely not a scholar's book to help you examine Shakespeare's plays. If you are however an actor wanting to take an in depth view at Shakespeare's texts it is an invaluable reference.

The first part of the book tells us about the clues Shakespeare put into his text (pentameter, deviations from the normal rhythm, etc.) and how this helps us as actors. The second part of the book takes those clues to the practice with analyses of some of Shakespeare's most important speeches.

[Zachary Waltz · Rating 1 out of 5]

Essentially, his thesis is that, while the actor can have certain freedoms within the iambic pentameter, the line of verse is sacred and must be preserved at all costs. The excessive pauses in the line are fatal. Like Henry Hazlitt's famous Economics in One Lesson, one could title Peter Hall's work Shakespeare’s Advice in One Lesson. For, like the former, the latter states his thesis and then reasserts it in innumerable applications.

[Jess · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was half of a really great book, in that it has some very interesting general observations about how to read the line structure of Shakespeare's plays in order to find insight into how to speak/act the part, but then it kept repeating the same observations over and over again in the latter half of the book, which is devoted to breaking down specific passages.