Ave Maria University 

Character and Figures of Speech:

 “The critical debate about early-modern

 acting styles," Yu Jin Ko rightly observes, 

“still largely centers on, but remains 

divided about, the question of whether 

the acting leaned more less towards on 

of the two poles labeled long ago as 

‘naturalism’ and ‘formalism,’ though 

related if not entirely interchangeable 

binary oppositions between ‘inwardness’ 

and ‘rhetorical character,’ ‘representation’ 

and ‘presentation,’ or ‘identification’ and ‘alienation’ come into 

play as well.”[1] Though we acknowledge such divides, we find them 

overstated.  For the classically trained actor need not appear 

statuesque or overly formal; to the contrary, Cicero recommends that 

a speaker must experience what he or she wishes his audience to 

experience, a feeling conveyed to others must be emoted first 

in a speaker.[2]  Such feeling, what Stanislavsky found essential 

to naturalism, Cicero supposed to exist already in the language.[3]  

Our actors, then, may discover the characters they play not only 

in the self but also in the words they perform.  Each actor blends 

his or her own unique voice and body with the language of the 

role that he or she plays.  So we welcome contemporary 

techniques that help actors make the language "their own" but 

emphasize mastery of Shakespeare's  language above all, what it 

reveals in terms of thought and feeling.  In the links on figures of 

speech, explore how repetition incites passion, or how figures of

syntactical arrangement show actors how to perform 

arguments, or even how figures may convey dynamic changes 

of mind or feeling, revealing a character’s conscious and swift 

movements of alteration.[4]  

Rehearsal or Study?

Tiffany Stern argues that “study” rather than “rehearsal” is a 

better term to describe how a Shakespearean actor would prepare.  

Study refers to “private learning” and to “learning with a teacher” 

and would be the means of suiting word to gesture.[5] In this way, 

the actor followed “the classical rhetorical tradition,” which 

included “action,” or gesture and facial expression, and 

“pronunciation,” or cadence and figures of speech.[6]  To reflect 

an early modern actor’s preparation, we complete a “part text 

analysis" for each role.  Actors work with “sides,” that is, with 

just the part of the text that includes their lines:  They paraphrase 

Shakespeare’s words into contemporary English, scan lines if they 

are in verse, mark breaths or pauses, note figures of speech, and 

create an emotional map, identifying changes of feeling.  After 

such analysis, actors rehearse with a director or a voice coach, 

experimenting with their findings, in an attempt to learn more 

about the characters they play.  Though we rehearse like a 

modern company in ensemble as well, we ask all our actors “to 

study,” especially before they begin memorization or blocking. 

Talking to Audiences

With proscenium theatre productions, an imaginary boundary 

exists between audience and actor, a so-called "fourth wall" which 

is supposed to be at the front of the stage.  An audience sees 

through that fourth wall and into the action of the play.  Such 

convention maintains theatrical “realism,” keeping actors bound 

within the mimetic world of the story.  In modern theatre, to 

break the "fourth wall" means deconstructing the boundaries of 

illusion, creating moments of “meta-theatre” for characters to 

comment upon the play as a play or to make anachronistic 

reference or to engage audiences in other ways outside of the 

drama. 

                 Shakespeare’s scaffold, however, afforded other 

possibilities.  Instead of deconstructing the fiction, speaking to 

audiences could enhance it.  As Robert Weimann speculates, the 

stage’s locus distances an actor from an audience, facilitating the 

play’s “mimetic representation,” but when an actor moves to the 

platea, or approaches audiences, he may engage spectators in a 

“non-representational” setting, providing an area for actor-

audience contact.[7]  You can find our Orlando moving between 

the locus and platea and back again in the video below:

Even so, Weimann makes an important clarification about locus 

and platea:  “What is involved, though, is not the confrontation of 

the world and time of the play with that of the audience, or any 

serious opposition between representational and non-

representational standards of acting, but the most intense 

interplay of both” (80-81).  Indeed, our actors often speak directly 

to audiences so that we may invite them into the play's 

illusory world, thereby creating a heightened experience of 

audience participation in the play's fiction.  Most often, actor-

audience contact occurs in soliloquy but we find other moments of 

interaction for communal imaginative exercise.  Thus, when 

Orlando in As You Like hangs his verses in the forest of Arden, his 

spectators help him by "playing" his trees and holding his poems:  

An audience member, then, may not only visit Arden but also 

become part of it.  In practices such as these, we follow the spirit 

of Shakespeare’s original productions, which creates “the most 

intense interplay” between “the world and time of the play” and 

“that of the audience.” To learn more about how Shakespeare 

employed performance space in his own Blackfriars theatre, see 

Clare Von Rueden's essay.  To see Beatrice from our production

of Much Ado taking lines to the house, watch the video below.

NOTES

[1] Yu Jin Ko, Mutability and Division on 

Shakespeare’s Stage (Newark:  University 

of Delaware Press, 2004), 42-3.

[2] See Cicero, De Oratore, trans. E. W. 

Sutton and H. Rack­ham (Cambridge, Mass.: 

Harvard University Press), II.xliv.189.   On 

how classical rhetoric was received in 

Renaissance England, see Quentin Skinner, 

Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of 

Thomas Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge 

University Press, 1996),19–211; Peter 

Mack’s “Rhetoric in the Grammar School,” 

in Elizabethan Rhetoric (Cambridge: 

Cambridge University Press, 2002); and 

Brian Vickers’ Classical Rhetoric in English 

Poetry (Carbondale:  Southern Illinois 

University Press, 1989).  On Shakespeare’s 

use of classical rhetoric, see Miriam 

Joseph’s Shakespeare’s Use of the Arts of 

Language (New York: Hafner Publishing, 

1966) and Heinrich R. Plett, “Poeta Orator:  

Shakespeare as Orator Poet” in Rhetoric 

and Renaissance Culture (Berlin:  Walter 

de Gruyter, 2005).     

[3] Cicero, De Oratore, II.xlvi.191-192, 

writes:  ipsa enim natura orationis eius, 

quae suscipitur ad aliorum animos 

permovendos, oratorem ipsum magis etiam 

quam quemquam eorum, qui audiunt, 

permovet.

[4] On figures, see Renaissance Figures of 

Speech, ed. Sylvia Adamson, Gavin 

Alexander, Katrin Ettenhuber (Cambridge: 

Cambridge University Press, 2007).

[5] Tiffany Stern, Rehearsal from 

Shakespeare to Sheridan (Oxford:  

Clarendon Press, 2000), 64.

[6] Ibid., 72.

[7] Robert Weimann, Shakespeare and the 

Popular Tradition in the Theater:  Studies 

in the Social Dimension of Dramatic Form 

and Function, ed. Robert Schwartz 

(Baltimore:  The Johns Hopkins University 

Press, 1978).  Hereafter cited internally by 

page.