As a child studying at The American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York City, I took voice lessons from Mr. John Lemley. With his gentle guidance, I learned that the key to interpreting a poem was not unlike the key to interpreting good theatre: it was there in the rhythm of the piece. The following provides some advice for using Shakespeare’s sonnets as a way of introducing young actors to the pacing of his language – while also practicing their skills in enunciation and projection.
In the first few sessions of the program, after introducing students to a few of Shakespeare’s works in story form and working through the theatre games, gather the children and hand out copies of Shakespeare’s sonnet 8 – “Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day?”
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm’d,
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature’s changing course, untrimm’d;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives like to thee.
Listen here:
Suggested Activities
- Break down the sonnet line by line, discussing its meaning with the children. Ask them to offer their interpretation of the work – what does it mean to them? With its rich metaphors and symbolic imagery – and at the same time the clarity of its romantic message – the sonnet is especially effective in introducing young people to the depth of Shakespeare’s language.
- Now, have the children read the poem aloud – line by line. Don’t take any element of the sonnet for granted! Punctuation (“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”; the pauses signalled by the semicolons and commas) and alliteration (the repetition of letters at the beginning of words) – not to mention the ABAB/CDCD… rhyming structure – all work together to create the singular lyricism of Shakespeare’s sonnet.
- The learning outcome here is the students’ awareness that each word has its value. In reciting a poem, we put emphasis on certain words and phrases, stressing them so that their meaning – and the overall meaning of the poem – is clearly understood by the audience. Both as students and performers, the children will learn that the rhythm of the poem tells us how to say the lines.
- You can apply this close-reading method of interpretation and performance to virtually any of Shakespeare’s works. Indeed, think about how a nuanced, line-by-line engagement with Hamlet’s “To Be or Not To Be” or Puck’s epilogue from A Midsummer Night’s Dream would enrich not only the student’s knowledge of Shakespeare, but their understanding of the nuances of the English language!