The Pub

Prologues and Prayers

Alyssa Keysor

O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend
The brightest heaven of invention,
A kingdom for a stage, princes to act
And monarchs to behold the swelling scene

“When the day of Pentecost arrived, they were all together in one place. And suddenly there came from heaven a sound like a mighty rushing wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. And divided tongues as of fire appeared to them and rested on each one of them.”

– Acts 2:1-3

I grew up with no formal liturgy but with plenty of religious routine. Every week at my Southern Baptist church, we sang several hymns and contemporary praise songs, read three or four verses of Scripture, listened to a sermon, passed the offering plate, and rushed to get a table at the nearest Tex-Mex restaurant. Except occasionally for the singing, the congregation kept quiet, very much an audience. Delivering the word of the Lord was up to the pastor.

For the rest of the week, the responsibility fell on each of us to have our own quiet times. But no matter how determined I was to be quiet and concentrate, my attention flitted from one thing to another. I wished for a sign, a tongue of fire, to descend, dramatic, and demand my attention.

For the past three years, I have been a member of Church of the Resurrection. There, I am expected not only to hear the word but also to speak it along with the rest of the congregation. The effect has been that, in speaking these words with other people week after week, it is easier for me to train my mind on them when I am quiet and alone. The Creed, the Collect for Purity, and the Confession are settled into my tongue’s muscle memory well enough that I can rely on them.

Every Thursday in Acting Shakespeare, no matter what else we need to accomplish, we begin by working on the prologue to Henry V. We have parsed out the phrases with a lexicon. We have marked caesuras and compared scansions. We have passed it to one another one line at a time. We have stood in the center of the football field and shouted to the stands, defying the wind and trains, and we have whispered it, cooed it, as a nursery rhyme to a sleeping baby.

Most often, we have galloped in laps, gasping the text with whatever breath we can muster. We started at something near a rhythmic run, eventually slowed into a trot, then into a walk. By the time our bodies grew still, we were able to speak the text to the rhythm of our own hearts.

After so much work on my feet, it is hard for me to walk even from one class to another without chanting, “O, for a Muse of fire …”

* * *

The more familiar a text is, the easier it is for most people to gloss over, no matter how beautiful or important it is. When it comes to holding our culture’s attention, Shakespeare and the Bible suffer the same injustice. They are that which we know of through their influence on our language, our literature, even our movies and televisions. Most people know just enough of Shakespeare and the Bible to think of them as cliché and tune them out. It takes a very good actor to make an audience actually hear Shakespeare’s text, just as it takes a very good preacher to make a congregation hear the word of the Lord.

Cicely Berry, the vocal trainer for the Royal Shakespeare Company, uses the term “post-articulate” to refer to today’s English-speaking culture. The English language can be eloquent, but our everyday speech has grown lazy and lukewarm. “Therefore,” she says to the Shakespearian actor, “we must always be after the reaching out through words, and not a dulled, inward-looking speaking of dialogue. We have to honour a greater need, and that is to make what we say remarkable to the hearer.”[1] Because of this responsibility, we care for the text we have to deliver.

Perhaps the same could be said to a Christian: It is not enough only to hide God’s word in our hearts, though we must also care for it in that way. We keep it on our lips until it is on our hearts.

The difference between Shakespeare and the Bible is that Berry admonishes the actor to reach out through words. As Christians, we are called to let the Word reach out through us.

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But pardon, and gentles all,
The flat unraised spirits that have dared
On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth
So great an object

“… Do not worry about how you will defend yourselves or what you will say, for the Holy Spirit will teach you at that time what you should say.” – Luke 12:11-12

Someone in Shakespeare class once asked why we couldn’t simply speak the text. Why do we have to do all of this hunting about in lexicons? Why do we have to gallop? Why, for that matter, is it even important that the words mean something to us personally? If Shakespeare is so wonderful, why can’t we just rely on the text to do its own work?

Just rely on the text? Berry would be appalled at such a question. “This is a platitude which has no meaning when you are on stage performing to several hundred people; and in any case it is misleading, for words have to be filled with your own experience or they will be flat and lack commitment and so be uninteresting.”[2]

No matter how well I understand the words, though, after enough rehearsal, I grow overwhelmed. There is motivation and intention to think about, how I feel about my scene partner, if I have any secrets, where the beats lay, how to handle my props, how to show the appropriate emotion, and a dozen other small, practical things like remembering to breathe. When I get overwhelmed, the rhythm is the first thing to go. The lines get sloppy, and one line no longer clearly leads into the next.

Berry warned this would happen, and our professor is prepared for it. Every time he notices the class slipping, no matter how well we know the speeches, we return to galloping.

Galloping is basic, but it is not remedial. It reminds our heads that our bodies know this rhythm. It is the rhythm of walking; it is the rhythm of a heartbeat. I now find it comforting to gallop, saying with as much breath as I can muster, “O, for a Muse of fire that would ascend / The brightest heaven of invention. …”

Then we are sent back into our scene work, breathing in the rhythm of the text.

* * *

Berry believes that work on Shakespeare is the best way to understand the possibilities of text on the stage and in our lives. One reason for this is, unlike many modern plays, the “connection between the physical and verbal life of [Shakespeare’s] characters is totally apparent and palpable.” The actor must treat the words of Shakespeare as “a release of the inner life” of the character. [3]

Shakespeare’s characters say what they mean and mean what they say. I wish the same were true of me. Sometimes I can’t find the words to articulate what I feel, or sometimes I find myself talking aimlessly without meaning anything particular. The same seems to be true of others; so little is said in most daily conversations. I have to watch myself in church to make sure I am paying attention to the words spoken because they are not like everyday words. Every word of the liturgy is specifically chosen to teach and reinforce truth about God. Their order is intentional; the right words come at the right time.

Still, my attention is liable to wander until the rector asks us to stand and leads us in proclaiming together, “I believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, / Maker of heaven and earth…”  I wonder what would happen if I started galloping.

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Suppose within the girdle of these walls
Are now confined two mighty monarchies,
Whose high upreared and abutting fronts
The perilous narrow ocean parts asunder

“This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me.” – Mark 7:6

Not everything I read or recite reflects my thoughts or feelings. At church, for instance, I have to fight every week against saying anything I don’t feel. Is it worse to speak something I am not sure I can honestly believe at that moment, or is it worse to miss an opportunity to speak what I know to be good and true? Should the Confession be an overflow of my inner penitence, or should I trust it to prompt repentance within me?

* * *

Berry identifies two basic categories into which bad acting, especially bad Shakespearean acting, can fall: The actor can find himself ahead of the text, or he can find himself behind the text.

An actor who is far ahead of the text is merely reciting. He knows the text backward, forward, and inside out, so much so that he in no way needs to feel or think about what he is saying. He may be showing off or acting bored; either way, he wants you to be impressed with how much he knows. The worst British actors tend to be ahead of the text, speaking downstage center, directly to the audience.

An actor who is far behind the text may not have the text fully memorized, or she may be so immersed in half-understood method acting that she will not say anything that does not match her feeling. As a result, she may speak quietly, as though to herself, while she searches for the feeling to supply the energy to speak out. This, our professor tells us, is a much larger problem in America: We tend to speak as though it is unimportant whether anyone else understands our words.

All semester, my Shakespeare class has worked on what it means to be on the text, to allow the words to be a release of the character’s inner life that is accessible to the hearer. Not rushing ahead, showing off and tuning out, or falling behind, losing the rhythm as we wait for sincere motivation.

Personally, I have been working on being directly on the text in church. I know it is important to say the prayers and creeds, to read aloud the Psalms, no matter how I feel. If I wait for my feelings to come along, I will be so far behind the text that I will never catch up. But neither do I want to fall into showing the people around me on Sunday mornings how well I know the liturgy, so well that I don’t need to look at the bulletin. I want to learn to trust the truth of what we know about God and his promises, to rest on it and ride on it, to let it transform my thoughts and feelings until saying the liturgy and speaking Scripture becomes an inevitable outpouring of my inner life.

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Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts;
Into a thousand parts divide on man,
And make imaginary puissance;

“Let us, therefore, make every effort to enter that rest…. For the word of God is living and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart.” – Hebrews 12:11-12

Reciting the Nicene Creed and a few collects does not make me a good Christian. Neither does memorizing the prologue to Henry V and a few clumps of soliloquies make me a good actor. But I have to start somewhere.

When I cannot muster the emotional energy to meditate in any devotional way on what Scripture I am reading, I find myself turning to the first verse of Haggai for the sounds of the names and the symmetry of the sentences. “…The word of the Lord came by the hand of Haggai the prophet to Zerubbabel the son of Shealtiel, governor of Judah…” If what I’m reading for is application to my life, the only application I see is that I need to marry someone named Shealtiel if I am ever to properly name my hypothetical future son Zerubbabel.

Some Sundays, many Sundays, I cannot manage to concentrate on the meanings of each individual phrase in the Creed or the prayers. Even those Sundays, I still relish the Collect for Purity: “Almighty God, to whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid, cleanse the thoughts of our hearts…” It is not enough only to read it or hear it, I have to say it along with the congregation, have to taste the parallel structure for myself.

I have wondered before if I ought to say such things if I am not concentrated on them, if I am saying them for the feel of the syllables in my mouth. It is particularly Protestant of me, I suppose, even to wonder if it is moral and ethical to read aloud prayers when I do not feel prayerful. I should hear and speak what is true no matter how I feel. That is part of what it means to be creedal.

Enjoying the words, though, even trying to mean them, is not enough. It may whet my appetite, but it cannot be enough. It is not enough for me to read on my own or even to speak aloud with a group. James’ letter to the Twelve Tribes warns me not merely to listen to the Word and so deceive myself.

Director Joan Littlewood says that if there is to be any purpose to our study and performance of Shakespeare’s plays, “a production of his work must not be regarded as a historical reconstruction, but as an instrument still sharp enough to provoke thought, to extend man’s awareness of his problems, and to strengthen his belief in his kind.”[4]

If Shakespeare’s plays have that power, how much more so the Word of the Lord? I have to struggle to get my mouth to cooperate with Shakespeare’s lines. How, then, do I fit into my mouth a Word that is living?

* * *

Because iambic pentameter is both so close to and so far from our regular speech, my class must work on it specifically so that it becomes second nature. At the semester’s beginning, we galloped laps around the room, chanting, “I think, therefore, iamb, iamb, iamb.” (I’m sure Descartes doesn’t mind.)

We work every week on the prologue to Henry V. We have done so much work that it is easy for us to speak it automatically. If we fall into that, our professor sends us to the lexicon to look up deeper contexts for the words. If only we knew what “puissance” meant, perhaps we could allow the text to have some power over us.

Understanding, though, is more than knowledge of the words and rhythm. Hans-Georg Gadamer says, “understanding always involves something like applying the text to be understood to the present situation.”[5] We have to know not only what the words mean for Shakespeare but also what they mean for us. To properly understand, we must interpret and apply, and all at once.

That is, once I have left Shakespeare class, if I have understood what I have learned, my acting should have changed. Once I have left church, my life should look different, or I am deceiving myself.

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For 'tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings,
Carry them here and there; jumping o'er times,
Turning the accomplishment of many years
Into an hour-glass. …

“Is there a thing of which it is said,

‘See, this is new’?

It has been already

in the ages before us.”

– Ecclesiastes 1:10

Besides being familiar and influential, The Bible and Shakespeare have the disadvantage of being old. To some people, even educated people, anything that old is archaic.

Ron Bieganski, the artistic director of Free Street Theater in Chicago, does not teach Shakespeare to his acting students. His students are young, alive, and multi-racial; Shakespeare is old, dead, and white. Shakespeare can have nothing to say to the actors at Free Street.

Berry would disagree. She writes that, by learning Shakespeare, an actor’s work, even on modern texts, will improve. A good actor is capable of working with good text no matter when it was written.

True, it is hard to get deader or whiter than Shakespeare. But it is hardly democratic to ignore a person’s opinion just because they happen to belong to a particular age or ethnic bracket. G. K. Chesterton would extend that definition: “All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death.”[6]

To those who would say, “The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did,” T. S. Eliot replies, “Precisely, and they are that which we know.”[7]

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… For the which supply,

Admit me, Chorus, to this history

Who prologue-like your humble patience pray,
Gently to hear, kindly to judge, our play.

“My lips will pour forth praise,
for you teach me your statutes.
My tongue will sing of your word,
for all your commandments are right.
Let your hand be ready to help me,
for I have chosen your precepts.”

– Psalm 119:171-3

Whether or not I comprehend their full meaning, I want to root myself in true and powerful texts.

Whether I can entirely account for the history of those texts, articulate exactly how I know that Shakespeare wrote his own plays or that the Bible is in truth the living Word of the Lord, I believe those words can transform.

Whether I am in an empty rehearsal studio or a full sanctuary, words affect the space around me – even when they are spoken by me, a flat, unraised spirit that has dared to bring forth so great an object.

Whether I am shouting or whispering, whining or rejoicing, insulting or preaching, chatting or pleading, I must know that the words I speak, whether original to me or borrowed from a muse of fire that ascends the brightest heaven of invention, have weight.

Whether my life is at a stroll, a trot, or a full gallop, I will be able to stay in rhythm with the words I know to be true. After all, I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life. He has spoken through the prophets.

In the beginning was the Word, and nothing was the same after that. Thanks be to God.

Alyssa Keysor is a senior English writing major from Greenville, TX. She is learning to play the Theremin, the original electronic instrument, most famous for being the sound of an alien landing.

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[1] Berry, Cicely. The Actor and the Text (Applause Acting Series). (New York: Applause Books, 2000), 10.

[2] Ibid, 14.

[3] Ibid, 9.

[4] Nadine Holdsworth, “Joan Littlewood,” in Fifty Key Theatre Directors, ed. Shomit Mitter and Maria Shevtsova. (New York: Routledge, 2005), 79.

[5] Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method. (London: Continuum, 1975), 307-8.

[6] G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy. (London: John Lane, 1908), 38.

[7] T.S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in The Waste Land: A Norton Critical Edition, ed. Michael North. (London: Norton, 2001), 116.