Good morning, everyone, I hope you’re all well-rested and ready to take on another day! This is Kyle again, coming to you from Tyson, the rehearsal space in the Blackfriars basement, where Sarah Enloe is running our first Wake-Up Workshop. 

The workshop started off with a demonstration of meter using the most famous line in all of Shakespeare: “To be, or not to be, that is the question.” Eleven people in the workshop were recruited to represent one syllable in the line, with every other person standing to represent the stresses in the line, with the eleventh person representing the line’s feminine ending (“She is single, but she is un-stressed!”). This exercise demonstrated the parts of speech that may or may not usually be stressed, the differences between Q1 and the Folio, and the infinite variety of acting choices that paying attention to meter provides us with. 

The next exercise used another famous line: “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.” As with the Hamlet example, this line from Macbeth was used to demonstrate how the sense of the line can reside in the stressed and unstressed syllables. 

Sarah then introduced attendees to a game well-known among the education staff: Iamb. Attendees stood in a circle, and performed actions assigned to parts of meter: iambs, trochees, caesuras, feminine endings, verse to prose, etc. 

After a rousing round of the game, attendees moved on to working with some text from The Taming of the Shrew, exploring how punctuation works in meter.

And with that, we’re out of time, be sure to grab some coffee, tea, or pastry in the Cutaia Lounge upstairs before we dive right into the next sessions!