As a professional actor in training, my education here in Acting has been varied and enriched by deeper analysis and practice in the Specialist Skills module. Across multiple classes and several hours a week, greater detailed instruction in tackling monologues, working through Shakespeare and acting for camera has given me an extension to my ‘actor’s toolbox’, which I can use going forward into the industry.
I found our lessons with Dr Dermot Daly in Shakespeare enlightening and engaging. Delving into the nature of the canon of literature and theatre’s position in it contextualised a lot of our current society’s opinions on the work from hundreds of years ago that we still produce regularly today, and looking at the stages of Shakespeare’s career helped me understand better his intentions writing and the specific references he made, whether to politics contemporary to him or his late-career reflections on legacy and mortality.
The Tempest is one of Shakespeare’s last works chronologically (RSC, 2025) and many consider Prospero to be Shakespeare’s self-insert (Coleridge, 1836), dictating the story that serves as a “greatest hits” of his works (badmrbones, 2022). Prospero delivers the epilogue, which goes from pointed to poignant if you believe it to be Shakespeare bidding his audience goodbye: lines such as “I want / Spirits to enforce, art to enchant,” reflect on his career and the final couplet “As you from crimes would pardon’d be, / Let your indulgence set me free” (Shakespeare, 2015) asks the audience to let him retire gracefully out of the public eye. This added context shifts the weight of intention from the actor back into the writer’s hands – all the actor needs to do is deliver them with the required grace and allow Shakespeare himself back into the conversation, one last time. Of course, this is just one interpretation of the text and one way to perform it; each actor or director’s belief in the weight of this sentiment echoing through time can colour the performance differently.
One class that was particularly useful to mounting Shakespeare’s work, especially, for me, comedies, on stage was on blocking. Shakespeare’s zaniest characters, such as Puck from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, need to come across to the audience as big personalities that, in Puck’s case, have an omnipresent quality presiding over the narrative and pulling the strings. Where mentions of physical space crop up in the lines, they should be utilised to their fullest potential: instructions on a writer’s metaphysical map of the stage. Taking Puck’s speech from Act 3 Scene 2 about Titania falling in love with Bottom, he begins with an allusion to her place of rest; “that close and consecrated bower,” (Shakespeare, 2024) which gives the actor a clear location to direct this line too, especially since said “bower” has likely been seen or is physically on stage. He later goes on to note that Bottom “forsook his scene and enter’d in a brake” (left the rehearsal space and hid in a bush), giving another physical location the actor can play off, interact with or enter too.
In addition to this, the speech provides more physical directions should the actor choose to follow them. Puck, in his infinite mischief, can choose to mock, imitate, terrorise or chase Bottom around the space, depending on the actor and director’s choices. As seen in Figure 1, lines specifically talking about Bottom, “The shallowest thick-skin of that barren sort” and “And forth my mimic comes” give the actor justification to do an impression of him, chase his spectre around or invoke his mannerisms to exaggerated effect. Allowing this to lead blocking permits the actor to diversify their acting choices and occupy the whole stage while being led by the text. Putting this theoretical exercise on its feet, I was reminded that it is difficult to be too expressive for stage, so the intensity of my movements could be increased past what felt natural or comfortable to act; the bigger the choices, the easier they would read in an auditorium. With this technique in my repertoire, I can continue to practice making increasingly bolder choices, knowing my impetus comes from the text and is grounded in the reality of the world being created by the words being spoken. I hope to one day make a choice worthy of being told to ‘tone it down’.
An invaluable technique when it comes to comprehension and performance of Shakespeare is a thorough analysis of the text, taking into account all possible meanings – crucially puns and wordplay. This is, of course, crucial to offering your best work with any writer’s composition, but Shakespeare presents a unique set of challenges to the modern actor that necessitates a rigorous interrogation of the book. The archaic language acquaints the reader an immediate obstruction to instantaneous awareness: once conquered, the meaning is then further complicated by Shakespeare’s fondness for puns, wordplay and double meanings. For example, from Act 2, Scene 2 of Romeo and Juliet, Juliet’s “that which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet” (Shakespeare, 2024). Here, imagery equates the object of her affection to a beautiful flower and sets up the argument that she (and Shakespeare, for the rest of the play) is going to make that their family’s feud is getting in the way of their love.
However, some have theorised that within this line is a veiled slight towards a rival theatre of the Globe’s: the Rose Theatre. The Globe was built near to the Rose on the south bank of the Thames, but on the other side of a main thoroughfare (Adams, 1917), and it has been said that the Rose had a sewage problem, or an issue with sewage washing up on the banks of the much nearer River Thames (Pelligrino, 2021). Ergo, “a rose / by any other name would smell as sweet” (emphasis mine), is a subtle dig at the rival, in my mind added by a chuckling Shakespeare impressed with his own wordplay, which gives the line a sharp edge that could remind Juliet’s actress that she too is fallible of perpetuating the same kinds of feuding that will, in three acts time, end her life.
Some passages are straightforward; some are mysteries to be pulled apart and used to embellish a performance with secret symbolism that reveals a character’s subconscious thoughts or associations. In Figure 2, I have taken apart Launce’s monologue from Act 2, Scene 3 of Two Gentlemen of Verona during an exercise where we swapped speeches with classmates until we had one we were unfamiliar with. After completing the basic task of ensuring I understood the base meaning of what I was saying, I started interrogating the language, and discovered a hidden lexical set within the few character names given in this speech: “Launce”, the family name, is a kind of sand eel, “Proteus”, the nobleman, is an old sea god from Greek mythology and the family dog is named “Crab” (Shakespeare, 2015). Therein is an inherent hierarchy, both in the societal sense, but also in their oceanic counterparts – the ambiguity of the order of the sea creatures varies their standing, asking whether the dog here is stronger or more virtuous than Launce.
Did Shakespeare intend to liken all three characters in the beginning of this speech to sea creatures? We can never be sure. But examining the text in this way opens doorways to potential acting choices: what if Launce’s actor embodies a fish during this speech? What does it mean if Launce believes the dog to be better than him? These ideas seem absurd, but they can invite experimentation and breathe new life into an old piece. Picking Shakespeare apart is a special talent of mine as an almost-English-degree-student, however now applying it to live stagecraft is a new and exciting way to tease out the meaning behind the words not just for me and an examiner, but an audience as well. I hope my idiosyncratic discoveries (intended or not by the writer) provide new angles that can refresh these 400 year old plays for a modern audience.
Another thing we covered in Dr Daly’s class was original pronunciation. Videos of the leading expert on original pronunciation, David Crystal, and his son, Ben Crystal, demonstrating it with famous passages that suddenly sounded different, with rhymes that do not reproduce in Modern English (Crystal), were of huge interest to me. We explored other notable examples of meanings that become clearer in original pronunciation or that disappear entirely in modern speech, one of these being from Act 2, Scene 7 of As You Like It. The line “And so from hour to hour we ripe and ripe” (Shakespeare, 2024), in original pronunciation sounds like “whore to whore” as the ‘H’ sound was often dropped (OpenLearn, 2011): modern audiences miss the sexual joke, as without the homophone the pun disappears. Knowing this has made me reexamine Shakespeare I thought I knew well; as the field is still small, a lot of original pronunciation has not entered the mainstream academic consideration of Shakespeare yet. Therefore, when I research and analyse new Shakespeare, I now review it through the lens of original pronunciation, looking for wordplay or rhymes that are not present when speaking it in my natural accent. This gives me a deeper connection to the work as Shakespeare wrote it to be heard and clues me in to more obscure meanings, jokes and intentions in the work.
In Tyrrell Jones’ class, we focused on monologues as the straight play’s equivalent to the solo number and significant to future audition processes. One class of particular relevance to my process and a pivotal addition to my skillset was exploring thinking on the line with classical repertoire. Using another Shakespeare speech – Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” (Shakespeare, 2024) – we examined thoughts in a monologue: how long they might realistically be, how to show a change of thought and how thinking on the line dynamisises performance to the point where these thoughts are being convincingly had by the character in the moment. Walking the room as we spoke, we were instructed to stop and start at the commencement of a new thought, proving we could hold in us while speaking the progression of the character’s thinking, retaining the lines yet maintaining the spontaneity that the monologue requires, being an unprompted, unplanned stream of consciousness from Hamlet.
Utilising this technique had an unforeseen benefit: committing the lines to memory became a lot easier as splitting the lines into thoughts, as seen in Figure 3, made the sequencing of the entire speech easier to follow. This technique also benefitted the way I move during a monologue, as well as giving me more ways to use the punctuation in the lines as an invitation to pause and let the audience fill gaps where the character is thinking or weighing their options. I am going to bring this directly into Into The Woods, as my song ‘Giants in the Sky’ should be seen as similar to many of Shakespeare’s monologues, since it is a moment in time in which the character has learnt something and is deciding how to integrate that into their worldview and move forward using it to inform their decisions. Since monologues and solo songs are equivalents in different genres, the skills I learnt in this class are transferable to “the Shakespeare of musical theatre” (Ball, 2010).
Through acting, we become other people. One way to achieve this that we explored with Keeley Forsyth is stepping into the world of a character and inventing their memories to build their inner world and give them a unique past full of experiences. A definite advantage of this also is that you are drawing on memories, experiences and traumas that are not your own, and therefore risk less entanglement with your character and your own feelings, which can be critical in shows that explore heavy topics and themes. Observing my classmates, I watched them build rich memories awash with details: in one example, a classmate vividly painted and investigated a memory of saving her infant brother from drowning, describing their dress, where their mother was, the weather, their surroundings, how it felt. Drawing out the details, she placed the fear she had for her brother in her body, locating it in her stomach and drawing on that in the scene when they ran it a second time.
This technique of exploring a character’s past experiences and widening our view into their world far beyond the lens of the script comes from the work of director and actor Mike Leigh, who, instead of writing screenplays, works with his actors over months building the lives of his characters and improvising their actions and reactions until the script writes itself (Veltman, 2009). An intense technique, Leigh’s methodology ensures – should the actor have done their work right – a fully-fleshed out world containing characters that could be indistinguishable from real people making realised and sensical decisions. His actors seem to love it, and I can see its many merits having watched the process in action and having seen the scene before and after its intervention with only one actor. He searches specifically for a kind of actor who is between “the emotional, feeling actor who […] creates a performance from some apparently deeper or more instinctual place” and the kind of actor that is “wholly literary and cerebral”, looking to work with people who are able to “think deeply about their characters” but also be reactive and “organic” as them within the bounds of a scene. With regards to my own process, I have found creating memories to be a fascinating tool to get within a character’s thought process, learning why they react the way they do. It can personalise and familiarise you with ‘your version’ of a character so deeply, when the text on the page is immutable. I have begun work on my third year show character Jack (Into The Woods), examining aspects of his childhood through this method, and I am enthused by the prospect of delving further as rehearsals begin.
Throughout the first term of this year, I advanced my knowledge and skills in Acting through the Specialist Skills module, focusing on strengthening areas of interest and those I knew were likely to be useful in my graduate season and through my early years in the industry. This term has increased my confidence in Shakespeare especially and other classical repertoire, as I feel more natural in performing it now knowing I understand not only the language but the conventions of the time, the context and how it would have been originally heard, performed and received. I also feel I have been taught some excellent techniques for building the inner world of a character and cannot wait to put these into practice as we delve into rehearsals and beyond.
FIGURE 1
FIGURE 2
FIGURE 3
Bibliography
Shakespeare, W. (2015) The Tempest. Edited by Edward Blount & Isaac Jaggard. London: Penguin Classics.
The Royal Shakespeare Company (2025) Timeline of Shakespeare’s plays. Available online: https://www.rsc.org.uk/shakespeares-plays/histories-timeline/timeline [Accessed 22/01/2026]
Coleridge, S.T. (1836) Notes on The Tempest. Literary Remains, Volume II.
badmrbones (2022) Comment on Excerpt from Shakespeare’s Tempest [poem]. Available online: https://www.reddit.com/r/Poetry/comments/svxtwj/excerpt_from_shakespeares_tempest_poem/ [Accessed 22/01/2026]
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Shakespeare, W. (2015) Two Gentlemen of Verona. London: Penguin Classics.
OpenLearn from The Open University (2011) Shakespeare: Original pronunciation (The Open University) [Video]. Available online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPlpphT7n9s [Accessed 22/01/2026]
Crystal, D. Original pronunciation – home. Available online: https://www.originalpronunciation.com/GBR/Home [Accessed 22/01/2026]
Shakespeare, W. (2024) As You Like It. London: Penguin Classics.
Shakespeare, W. (2024) Hamlet. London: Penguin Classics.
Ball, M. (2010) Is Stephen Sondheim the Shakespeare of musical theatre? The Guardian. Available online: https://www.theguardian.com/stage/theatreblog/2010/mar/29/stephen-sondheim-musical-theatre [Accessed 22/01/2026]
Veltman, C. (2009) An interview with Mike Leigh. The Believer. Issue 61. Available online: https://www.thebeliever.net/an-interview-with-mike-leigh/ [Accessed 22/01/2026]
