Foundation Craft

At the Guildhall School of Music and Drama I don't teach my students Shakespeare until their second year. The reason is pragmatic: until the body, breath, support, voice and speech muscles are thoroughly worked and tuned it is extremely hard to realise and release such physical and sensual texts.

First year work on language sensitises the students to structure, rhythm, imagery and poetry. Language must be important to them – a powerful tool. This means they have to explore how they use language and how language affects them. Many of them have to rediscover the potential of language to make concrete and transform inner and outer worlds. Within a year of language-based exercises they begin to understand how powerful and poetic their own language can be. They realise what an armoury they have at their disposal.

In the first year they learn to memorise accurately and effortlessly so that the momentum and precision of great texts is honoured. There is no substitute for learning texts fully and completely. My students learn passages from complex texts every week. They learn mediaeval, Elizabethan, Metaphysical, eighteenth-century and Romantic texts: they touch base with Chaucer, Spencer, Donne, Milton and Pope. The important part of this training is to learn accurately and to practise regularly. I want them to feel the language – the words, thought structures and images – flowing in their bloodstreams, a familiar part of them rather than something baffling, strange or difficult.

This grounding in language is particularly important for Shakespeare. The passionate exchange of ideas and feeling through words has always been the blood and oxygen of English-speaking theatre, a theatre built on heightened poetic text. In this Shakespeare is the master. His plays are highly struct