Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Writing In Resonance

Writing in Resonance

Shakespearian English is already archaic and does not exactly flow smoothly into our bio processors….We simply don’t speak that way any more, construct sentences in that manner. Taken by themselves we recognize the words but their arrangement and the richness of the prose is difficult at first blush to deal with. However in the day when it was spoken it was understood readily enough not just by the upper class but by the lower as well. As a matter of fact Shakespeare’s English is laced with vulgar innuendo and filthy metaphors that were found amusing to everyone up to a certain point. That point was when the queen said disdainfully, “I am not amused.” Suddenly any humor the prose purported to evaporated.

A couple days ago I gave you Hotspurs soliloquy out of context and I know it had some of my devoted readers scratching their heads. Hold that thought. Concurrently I suggested that monologues should have a resonance and that was why I included the excerpt. That a Stage play gives weight to dialogue that does note exist in a screen play or most anywhere else for that matter, and historically writers of stage plays had their lines valued on the quality of resonance they imparted. As a matter of fact writers who wrote language that was deficient in meter, or rhyme…..resonance often had their works ridiculed. Today this is no longer the case but keep in mind that in he heyday of the English Language it was and it separated the great writers from the wannabies….. It is important to keep this in mind because resonance certainly elevates your writing to a higher level and it can be disguised as prose so that only your subconscious will pick up on it…..and I can assure you your subconscious will, even if you are too unschooled or experienced to note the difference.

So what I am thinking about doing is to tell the students to write a monologue in prose and stack the sentences atop each other. then go back and try and give it some meter, or musicality of some sort. Finally return it to paragraph form as if it were normal prose. It will give your thought monologues a quality that is unique from your novel writing prose….At first the reader is likely to pick up on it….but an actor will pick up on it in a big hurry.

When I had my stage play Andromache read one of the older actors stopped in the middle of a soliiloquy and said ….”Hey this is pretty good stuff.” Imagine how I beamed sitting there next to my wife.

For tomorrow's blog I intend to put Hotspur's soliloquy into modern prose and then do the stacking and then show how Shakesphere did the metering and perhaps how I would update the metering into modern language. Only for illustrative purposes mind you….I am not a pimple on the master’s derriere but it might be a worthwhile exercise to show readers what I am talking about with a bit more specificity.