The Peter Hall Cheat Sheet
I was very sad to hear of the death of Sir Peter Hall this morning.
His work influences my own work on Shakespeare every single day.
I first read Peter’s book “Shakespeare’s Advice to the Players” when I was working on Rachel O’Riordan’s production of Twelfth Night at Perth Theatre, and from his book I made this cheat sheet on how to handle verse that I still use today.
I am indebted to Rachel for helping me finally make sense of why verse is useful for actors, and to Sir Peter Hall for his book which laid the foundations for it all, articulating it with clarity and detail.
His book is essential reading, and the cheat sheet below is simply an attempt to distil the key points from each section into a useful aide-memoire for actors.
Thank you Sir Peter Hall for everything you did for the theatre world.
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The Structure of the Line
Try to make every line scan (fit to a regular 10 beat line)
Learn the end of the line
Work out a breathing pattern so that you always have breath in reserve
Breaths whether small or substantial should only be taken at the end of the line
Keep the line whole and play lines rather than words
Scansion
See if anything can be elided in the interests of scansion
Let the five beats dictate the inflection if it sounds natural
The rhythm of the iambics should be lightly stated and as flexible as colloquial speech
Monosyllables
Recognise the monosyllabic lines
Isolate their more slow and measured tempo so that they are comprehensible
Find an emotion that justifies their tempo
The Pause
Define where and how the pause is indicated
Note where Shakespeare has written the pause by omission of iambic accents
Never pause in the middle of a line if the sense continues
A sense-break can occur at the caesura if it can be earned by the slow tempo of the whole line
The actor must always know what his emotional journey is during a pause
A pause can always be taken at the end of a full line if emotionally it can be justified
Rhyme
It is punctuation
It can provoke a laugh
It can confirm a point either by comedy or by a chilling seriousness
It can end a scene
It can add wit and delight
It must be used and enjoyed
Prose
Prose is formal, antithetical and slower than the verse
Meaning needs careful unpicking
The prose loves contradictions and so should the character
Technically, only breathe on the full stop — then it is possible to shape the frequently long sentences
Rhetorical Devices
Conscious inventions by the characters
Aim — to tell the audience their emotional state by illustrations and similarities
Caesura
Break in mid-line marked with full-stop or semi-colon. It follows an end-of-line when the sense runs on, but usually as a qualification or a climax
Consider what emotional change is necessary on the first half of the caesura line in order to earn the time for a full stop or sense break
The sanctity of the line means that sense-break can only happen if the tempo of the line is slow enough
Never pause in mid-line if the sense runs on and only pause in mid-line if the caesura has dictated it
Notice that the half-lines either side of a caesura are often emotionally very rich. This is another reason for taking time
The two halves of the line must make one in temp, dynamic and volume, even though the emotions are usually different
When two characters each have a half-line that makes up one line
