The Stuart and Norma Leslie Churchill Fellowship to further my Shakespeare studies in order to become a distinguished Shakespearean performance teacher

My Churchill Fellowship was to further my Shakespeare knowledge with particular emphasis on the mechanics of the verse and the techniques needed to bring clarity to his texts.

Our language over the last few decades seems to be shrinking in direct correlation to the prevalent use of spellcheckers, email and texting. We are spending less time hearing each other speak, yet it is verbal communication that helps enable us to maintain and expand our vocabulary.

Shakespeare had an uncanny and unparalleled ability to render how inner states of experience could be conveyed and when he could not find the words to express a nuanced thought he simply conjured new words.

The enduring force of Shakespeare’s ideas is directly linked to the expressive function of his Verse. Understanding how to best use this verse as an actor is imperative to unlocking Shakespeare’s titanic ideas for the audience. If an actor fails to master the mechanics of the metre the clarity is lost and the audience is robbed of the ability to understand the rich and complex insights into his own human nature.

My Fellowship allowed me to interrogate the technicalities of Shakespeare’s verse with the very people who understand it most in terms of speaking it live - Patsy Rodenburg has been head of voice at the Guildhall School of acting for the past few decades and is the go-to expert for all companies performing Shakespeare today. Mr Michael Attenborough OBE, once the artistic director of The Royal Shakespeare Company, shared with me all that he knows about the Bard. Greg Doran, the current artistic director of The Royal Shakespeare Company, invited me inside the hallowed rehearsal rooms to participate in his rigorous Shakespeare gymnasium sessions.

I saw a dozen Shakespeare productions where actors elucidated the ideas of Shakespeare. If his words are not heard more widely they will be relegated to the halls of academia and accessible to an elite few. I will make manifest all that I have learnt during my Churchill Fellowship as an actor of Shakespeare’s works by devising a one-woman tour-able show that will see me perform up to 50 of Shakespeare’s soliloquies and create a podcast series that allows the listener to hear his words.

I will focus my teaching of Shakespeare’s verse on young aspiring actors, giving them solid foundations to build upon as the Shakespearean voices of the future.

Keywords: Shakespeare, Blank verse, Poetic devices, Verse techniques, acting Shakespeare.