ABSTRACT
One of the major obstacles encountered by the student or inexperienced reader in studying the work of Shakespeare is the form in which it is principally composed - blank verse. Accustomed, through television, to a kind of dramatic language which appears to reflect contemporary speech, the twentieth-century reader finds it difficult to adjust to an art form which appears to have more in common with 'poetry' than with the art of the theatre. But, in fact, the distance between Renaissance and twentieth-century drama is not as great, in this respect, as at first appears. For all its seeming realism, the dialogue of a contemporary play does not reflect everyday speech - it creates an illusion of actuality by drawing upon the audience's assumptions about the kind of speech patterns the individuals concerned might be expected to employ. Stage cockneys, for example, use rhyming slang, civil servants favour long sentences and polysyllabic words, while academics deal in abstract ideas. When the dialogue assigned to such characters is analysed, however, it quickly becomes apparent how remote their language is from day-to-day usage. There are few of those long companionable silences that make up such a high proportion of human intercourse; people rarely repeat themselves or leave their sentences unfinished; while 'um', 'er', 'y'know', 'as I say', 'I mean', etc. are used much more sparingly than in daily conversation. Moreover, the implications of a scene rarely depend solely upon what the characters say. The atmosphere or emotional tempo is dictated by background music - a convention to which the twentieth-century spectator is so wholly accustomed he is generally unaware, while the drama is in progress, of its role in determining his responses. The excitement of a car chase between cops and robbers, for example, is not created by the sparse 'Look out!', 'There he goes', 'Turn right!' which go to make up the dialogue, but by the pounding rhythm and mounting pace of the music, which the viewer accepts as unquestioningly as if his own life were conducted to unseen orchestral accompaniment. Lighting, too, plays a significant part in determining the impact of the words that are
spoken. A single spotlight can suggest the isolation of the speaker from the rest of a group, while a deepening gloom can dictate the atmosphere of an entire scene, or lend a sense of foreboding to an otherwise banal exchange. In short, what the twentieth-century audience is conditioned to regard as naturalistic is often at a considerable remove from the unlit, unaccompanied, inarticulate actuality of human communication. It is the product of an agreed set of assumptions, or dramatic conventions, that are so familiar to the contemporary spectator that he or she is no longer aware that the playwright is operating within them.
