ABSTRACT

Looking at the wordplay in a Shakespearean scene can give the actors useful information about how to play it, because in the absence of proper rehearsals back in the days when the plays were written, the writer-director had only these means of influencing his actors. At the very least, he had to have a fail-safe way of communicating with the many different boy actors who would be taking over the female roles over the years as their elders' voices broke. These same insights into verbal complexities should also be applied to modern scripts. In each case, the wordplay brings to the actor's attention something specific, and we have marked them by putting them in bold. Scripts for commercial products are notorious for being loaded with assonance and alliteration, let alone metaphor and simile and rude double meanings, why, with these experiences the modern actor is completely equipped to tackle Shakespeare.