The Argument

"My Dear, Hamlet is not a guy like you."

I have fought with myself for a long time about the logistics of doing Shakespeare.  For a long time I thought that as long as you could decipher olde english you'd know what you were really saying, and thus be able to just speak with clarity and intention.  It took me a long time to come to appreciate that the classical language is not simply olde english but poetry; poetry that requires much more than simply knowing what you're saying.  The language is heightened and the actor must honor that, but how?  I've seen actors on both ends of the style spectrum fail to move audiences because of the disconnect that Peter Brook describes in the quote below.  People either A.) try play their characters as if they were not in a classical play but a naturalistic film scene or B.) send it up in epic, bombastic and mannered "style."  Check out his thoughts.

From The Empty Space:  

Imperial gestures and royal values are fast disappearing from everyday life, so each new generation finds the grand manner more and more hollow, more and more meaningless.  This leads the young actor to an angry and impatient search for what he calls truth.  He wants to play his verse more realistically, to get it to sound like honest-to-God real speech, but he finds that the formality of the writing is so rigid that it resists this treatment.  He is forced to an uneasy compromise that is neither refreshing, like ordinary talk, nor defiantly histrionic, like what we call ham. . . If you ask an actor to play in a "romantic style" he will valiantly have a go, thinking he knows what you mean.  What actually can he draw on?  Hunch, imagination and a scrapbook of theatrical memories, all of which will give him a vague "romanticness" that he will mix up with a disguised imitation of whatever older actor he happens to admire.  If he digs into his own experiences the result may not marry with the text; if he just plays what he thinks is the text, it will be imitative and conventional.  Either way the result is a compromise: at most times unconvincing.

So this is the dilemma and I don't know what the answer is.