Double Consonants
When Shakespeare writes a word that ends with the same consonant that begins the next word, as with the Ts in
not | to [be]
or the T and D (we don't differentiate between the voiced consonant, D, and the unvoiced T) in
to be wish'd. | To die
or the two Ps in
To sleep: | perchance to dream:
the result is hard to say. Some of Shakespeare's famous other hard-to-say passages are:
Oh, for a muse of | fire, that would ascend
(you don't want it to sound like, "Oh, for a muse afire"), and
Made glorious | summer by this | sun of York.
Speech teachers have intelligent ways of dealing with the pronunciation problem. Shakespeare wonks embrace it. The prescribed wonk method is to pause, really stop the breath, between the two consonants. You don't want a truck-sized pause, but you want a real one.
"Why?" That's an acting problem. In the case of the first example, we could speculate that Hamlet pauses after "not" and before saying "to be," because the natural reluctance he has to kill himself causes him to hesitate even while speaking the thought:
To be or not | to be.
You would want to stress "not" anyway, because it is the word "not" that contains the antithesis of "To be." A brief pause after it causes it to stand out.
As an actor you must be alert for these double consonants. If you can find a valid acting reason to pause between them, then do so. If you can't find a reason, then ignore the double consonant. The point of verse work is to make you sound like a human being.
AS A GENERAL RULE: any time a line is difficult to say, Shakespeare probably meant it to be difficult for the character to say, and it will be worth your while to figure out why. Shakespeare could write very straightforward sentences when he wanted to:
Well, this is the Forest of Arden.
Look, here comes a pilgrim.
We will proceed no further in this business.
© Deloss Brown 1999