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Performing Shakespeare: Voice Training and the Feminist

Actor

Sarah Werner

New Theatre Quarterly / Volume 12 / Issue 47 / August 1996, pp 249 - 258

DOI: 10.1017/S0266464X00010241, Published online: 15 January 2009

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0266464X00010241

How to cite this article:

Sarah Werner (1996). Performing Shakespeare: Voice Training and the Feminist Actor. New Theatre
Quarterly, 12, pp 249-258 doi:10.1017/S0266464X00010241

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 Sarah Werner

Performing Shakespeare:
Voice Training and the Feminist Actor
Although voice work presents itself as a neutral set of tools that can help actors in
performing a text, an analysis of the cultural biases behind voice training reveals that
both the underlying ideology and the methods of reading and acting it produces limit the
possibilities for feminist performances of Shakespeare. By naturalizing the language and
rhythms of the text, by focusing attention on the characters' need for the words as
opposed to the dramatist's need for those words, and by emphasizing the necessity of
being 'true to Shakespeare', voice training denies actors ways of questioning the politics
of the playscripts. Sarah Werner has just received her PhD in English from the University
of Pennsylvania for her dissertation entitled 'Acting Shakespeare's Women: Toward a
Feminist Methodology'. She has presented papers at a number of conferences, including
the Shakespeare Association of America and the International Conference on Medieval
Studies, and is currently a lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania.

ALTHOUGH it is not fair to suggest that
there is a single acting methodology for the
performance of Shakespeare in Britain,
Cicely Berry's approach to reading and
speaking Shakespearean plays has strongly
influenced how those plays are performed
in Britain today. As a voice teacher at the
Central School of Speech and Drama, and
as Voice Director of the Royal Shakespeare
Company for more than twenty years, she
has come into contact with and shaped
many of today's top Shakespearean actors.
Her published work, along with that of
Patsy Rodenburg, who trained at Central
and is now head of the Voice Departments
at the Royal National Theatre and Guildhall
School of Music and Drama, and Kristin
Linklater, who has brought voice work to
the United States, have spread voice work
into rehearsal spaces and classrooms across
Britain and North America.1
The books which have emerged from
their experience reach out to anyone with
an interest in either performing or reading
Shakespeare (an audience that in their eyes
includes potentially all of us), and present
themselves as neutral tools that will help us
to reveal Shakespeare effectively. But these
books are not simply neutral tools, as the
ways in which actors are taught to approach
and understand Shakespeare directly affect
how they are able to perform his plays: the
tools they are given to work with determine
what they can build.
For academics and theatre practitioners
interested in reinvestigating the relationship
between Shakespearean text and perform-
ance, an examination of these tools is neces-
sary for understanding the production of
Shakespeare today. For feminists and others
who want to challenge the politics of
Shakespeare, this examination is crucial to
imagining new ways of approaching and
realizing his plays. With these goals in
mind, this project interrogates the relation-
ship between actor training and the poten-
tial for feminist performance, looking both
at the voice training texts and at an actor's
account of her role in Measure for Measure,
revealing that both the ideology behind the
training and the methods of reading and
acting which voice training produces limit
the possibilities for feminist performances of
Shakespeare.2
Voice work is something of a catch-all
phrase for the type of actor training that
began with Cicely Berry's work with Peter
Brook in the 1960s and 1970s. Sharing Peter
Brook's belief in the importance of the
'empty space' that allows Shakespeare to

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 speak for himself, Berry sought to clear
away the blockages that cripple our voices.3
As Brook's foreword to Voice and the Actor
says, Berry's work 'is not how to do but how
to permit: how, in fact, to set the voice free'
(p. 1). Kristin Linklater also urged us to
freedom, as is evident from the title of her
own book, Freeing the Natural Voice, which
shortly followed Berry's.
This emphasis on freeing the self is
related to the belief that through voice work
one can access a deeper, more primitive, and
more innocent self that is healthier both
for personal life and for life as an actor.
Although the focus is on a psychological as
opposed to a historically based primitivism,
an unmistakable result of this drive towards
the innocent and primitive version of the
self is a naturalization of the good old days,
those mythical days in the past when we
were more in touch with our emotions and
closer to the very origins of language. This
longing for innocent, carefree days of yes-
teryear (and especially for Shakespearean
England) is a pervasive and little examined
nostalgia - there is no problematizing of the
past, no mention of what perhaps was
wrong with life in the old days. Instead,
from its inception, voice work taught the
actor to trust Shakespeare, who came from
those better days, and to focus on private,
transcendent emotions.
If voice work in the 1960s and 1970s wanted
to free us so that we could access those
earlier happier days, voice work of the 1980s
and 1990s focuses on a sense of physical
well-being. Berry's desire to make language
organic grounds voice work in the body in a
way that Rodenburg makes explicit:
Words that respond to need flow through us,
practically becoming part of our circulatory
system, touching every part of us. (NW, p. 3)
Linklater's naturalization of voice work goes
so far as to use the rhetoric of bodily illness
to describe improper vocal habits: "Three
language viruses have emerged during the
twentieth century that can infect Shake-
speare's meaning if not treated firmly with
the antidote of consciousness' (FSV, p. 130).
While voice work in the 1990s still has the
same primary goals - making the actor an
'empty space' where the (now organic) lan-
guage can be released through the (freed)
voice, allowing the actor to access a deeper,
more articulate, and healthier self - the
focus on 'organic' language works further
to naturalize this deeper and less civilized
self, and so to encourage the actor to trust
Shakespeare, our link to that healthy past.
This continuing desire for access to a
healthier sense of ourselves makes the ideo-
logy of voice work particularly problematic
for the feminist actor. As Richard Paul
Knowles argues about these texts,

Freeing Ourselves through Voice? what 'freedom' will do for actors is to restore a
'natural', 'childlike' access to 'self, a psycho-
This emphasis on freeing ourselves through logical 'depth' that puts them in touch with
our voices has carried over to the most something that is at once their true (individual)
recent voice work. Twenty years later, selves, our common (universal) humanity, and
Linklater is interested in Freeing Shake- Shakespeare. (p. 97)
speare's Voice, and Patsy Rodenburg claims This emphasis on individuals and common
that 'voice, speech, and text work can liber- humanity distances the actor from any type
ate and transform both our use of language of political action or sense of history, and
and our sense of ourselves' (NW, p. xv). naturalizes the social order found in Shake-
Berry is still interested in liberation and in speare: in these texts, 'Shakespeare, human
reaching the inner truth, although her em- nature, truth, and the human condition are
phasis has shifted: for her, voice work by implication unchangeable', observes
Knowles (p. 100). Although Rodenburg does
is about getting inside the words we use, respon- couch her work in political language, she
ding to them in as free a way as possible, and then
presenting that response to an audience. . . . It is ultimately backs away from political action:
about making the language organic. (AT, p. 11) 'despite the rhetoric of liberation and em-

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 powerment, The Right to Speak ultimately
places responsibility for repression squarely
within the realm of the psychological'
(Knowles, p. 104).
Linklater, on the other hand, never hides
her investment in voice work as a source of
personal liberation and revelation, repeat-
edly situating voice work and Shakespeare
as therapy for both the individual and the
community.5 For the feminist actor, this
emphasis on psychological healing and the
prioritization of therapy over political action
limits her ability to call attention to the
politics in the text. This type of therapeutic
catharsis built into voice work will con-
tinually get in the way of a resistance to
gender stereotypes that might be found in
the playscript. Language that is organic and
natural is not language that challenges
societal structures.
Entering the Play through Feeling
Even if an actor would want to reject the
implicit ideology of voice training, or at least
to separate the psychologizing therapy of
voice work from the potentially more pro-
ductive voice exercises and text work, s/he
would find that this ideology pervades even
the more practical aspects of voice training.
The point, after all, of making language or-
ganic is to help actors find their characters.
Indeed, voice work teaches that language
and character are intimately linked: the
single most important facet of voice work is
its belief that the actor 'must touch the char-
acter through the language' (AT, p. 15). The
key to Shakespeare, in fact, is reading his
words out loud: 'Often, when spoken, a
Shakespeare text has clear immediacy and
instant identification' (NW, p. 170). Shake-
speare is so clear when spoken aloud
because his characters need to speak, and it
is in speaking that they come alive: their
thoughts 'are discovered at the moment of
speaking' (AT, p. 105); 'they live where they
find their images' (AT, p. 114); and they
'speak in order to release their thoughts and
feelings' (NW, p. 174).
This belief in the life and presence of the
characters is common to most theatre based
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on Stanislavsky's system: an actor must not
just present the character, but strive to
become that character. The problem with
Shakespeare (as actors and their teachers
explain it) is that actors often feel intimi-
dated by his language, and concentrate so
hard on just saying the words that they
cannot inhabit them.
Voice work seeks to make the actor feel
more relaxed about Shakespearean language
by naturalizing its rhythms and texture,
convincing the actor that there is not a
separation between the spoken words and
the inner life of a character. These voice
teachers emphasize working from your
heart and gut (often literally, in the case of
breathing exercises) instead of from your
head: Rodenburg tells actors that these vocal
cues will help them find their characters 'in
ways that are more immediate than intellec-
tual means' (NW, p. 97) - an anti-intellectual
bias that is repeated by all these voice
coaches and that discourages the actor from
thinking about the play instead of just
feeling it.6
Perhaps the most crucial element in un-
derstanding a character is the speed and
rhythm of a character's speech, which, voice
training tells us, not only identifies the
character's emotional state, but is intrinsic to
it. The beat of the iambic pentameter 'is or-
ganic to the thought' (AT, p. 53) and to our
own bodies, and responds 'like our inner
biology' to emotional pressures (NW, p. 137).
Thus, 'when the rhythm breaks within the
text it does so because the character, to a
large or small degree, is at odds with his
[sic] natural rhythm' (AT, p. 53).
This is where the goal of making lan-
guage organic stops being abstract and
becomes linked to the very ability of an
actor to find the character: as you read a
text, 'you begin to breathe at the same points
as the writer, your heart beats with his or
her rhythm, you imaginatively move with
the writer across time and space' (NW, p.
96). Rodenburg reveals why it is so im-
portant for the actor to make the language
organic - it is our physical interaction with
the text and its author that allows us to enter
the world of the play.
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 Berry takes this entrance into the play to
its extreme. Because breath is 'the physical
life of the thought' and 'how we breathe is
how we think' (AT, p. 26), the physical act of
breathing differently can make us think
differently, and if we breathe like the char-
acter (following 'his natural rhythm') we
will think like the character, and finally
become the character: 'we have made the
thought our own physically through the
breath' (AT, p. 26).
Even for an actor who is not looking to
access a deeper earlier self, these prescrip-
tions (breathing = thinking = feeling) invite
the assumption that Shakespeare's charac-
ters are universal, that their feelings are
ahistorical and readily accessible to twen-
tieth-century actors: the emotions that the
rhythms produce in us now are the same
emotions that they produced then. And
many theatre practitioners do speak of
Shakespeare in these terms. When Roden-
burg explains the importance of 'connecting
to a text', she describes how at that moment
there is 'an invisible, harmonious thread
stretching between writer and speaker' and
'time instantly collapses and the word lives
again in a timeless zone' (NW, p. 96). Speak-
ing specifically of Shakespeare, she claims:
It is generally agreed that Shakespeare's plays
and sonnets explore with enormous compassion
and variety all the great dilemmas facing human
beings in conflict. Nothing about the human
psyche and human action seemed to escape his
interest or understanding. When we speak
Shakespeare's words today they sound as fresh
and meaningful as the day they were written.
(NW, p. 167)
Character: Universal or Specific?
John Barton uses much the same language:
'Shakespeare is timeless in the sense that he
anatomizes and understands what is in men
and women in any age, and what he has to
say is always true and real' (p. 190). This
belief in Shakespeare's timeless humanity
has important implications for actors: accor-
ding to Barton, it is 'the heart of what the
actor must always go for' (p. 184)7
There are obvious ideological impli-
cations to this way of seeing Shakespeare.
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The timelessness and truth Barton sees in
Shakespeare certainly does not bode well for
any sort of politically resistant reading of
the plays. And while it might be possible to
understand and portray Shakespeare's male
characters as universal, there are many more
hindrances to approaching the female char-
acters in this way. In many ways, the con-
ditions of English women's lives have
changed significantly since the Renaissance.
Property and inheritance laws have opened
up possibilities for women's economic
independence that did not exist in the
Renaissance; divorce laws and educational
opportunities have also fundamentally al-
tered women's experiences.
But there are also less obvious fallacies
that the search for timeless humanity can
lead actors to make. If actors feel that they
must achieve a 'sense of inner understan-
ding' (AT, p. 141), they will try to explain
characters' actions and emotions in terms
that they are familiar with. And it is not only
that women's material and political status
has changed in the last four centuries, but
that these material conditions are part of a
cultural system vastly different from the one
that structured and defined women's lives
in Shakespeare's time.
As Catherine Belsey has convincingly
argued, women's confused and fluctuating
legal status in the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries resulted in their unstable subject
positions - both as legal subjects and as
persons with distinct subjectivities. "The
subject of liberal humanism claims to be the
unified, autonomous author of his or her
own choices (moral, electoral, and con-
sumer), and the source and origin of speech'
(Belsey, p. 149). But Renaissance women
were not allowed to speak for themselves, to
voice their own choices - 'they both were
and were not subjects' (Belsey, p. 150).
According to Belsey, what constitutes a
subject, and how a subject understands who
s/he is, were not the same in the Renais-
sance as they are now. If Belsey is right in
her assessment of female speech and subjec-
tivity in the Renaissance, voice training's
insistence on reading Shakespeare's female
characters as authors of their words is a fun-
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 damental misunderstanding of the relation- thinks' (AT, p. 104). The words exist because
ship between speaker and speech - a the character needs them, and the character,
misunderstanding that can prevent actors not the playwright, is the author of the text.
from identifying and exploring the gender But Lorraine Helms's argument that Shake-
politics of a playscript. speare used a range of poetic, rhetorical, and
narrative strategies in order to create an illu-
sion of female presence points specifically to
Characterization and Representation
the need for considering authorial strategies.
If one problem with voice training is its Where a voice teacher might be inclined to
disregard for historical difference, another is see evidence of a character's thought process
that it assumes that the characters are real in the syntax or rhyme pattern of a soli-
people, and not functions of a play. An ex- loquy, Helms would be likely to point to the
treme version of this is Linklater's jarring ways in which the choice of words reflected
reference to how King Lear was raised as a Shakespeare's need to maintain the female
child - 'Had King Lear been told as a child, persona of the boy actor.
"When you've calmed down, we'll talk When we look closely at how voice-
about why you're angry", he could never trained actors approach Shakespeare, we
have given his famous "Blow, winds" find that the emphasis on a character's lan-
speech' (FSV, p. 32). But all are guilty of the guage and emotions often prevents consi-
same line of reasoning when they insist that deration of the dramaturgical effects of a
the characters 'speak in order to release their scene, and hinders a feminist performance.
thoughts and feelings' (NW, p. 174). Insis- Juliet Stevenson is an actor who believes in
tently reading the play's language as revela- Berry's method: 'With Shakespeare, you
tions of a character's emotions and thought begin with the words, and you build from
processes ignores the fact that these are there. Your choices are made from the lan-
fictional characters created by the dramatist. guage' (Rutter, p. xvii). Having played
The type of reading that voice training Isabella in Adrian Noble's 1983 RSC produc-
encourages ignores the representational and tion of Measure for Measure, in Carol Rutter's
dramaturgical strategies of the text, finding Clamorous Voices Stevenson takes us through
meaning to reside in the character's motives, her approach to the scene where Isabella has
and not in the playwright's. When Roden- her first interview with Angelo (II, ii). Her
burg suggests that actors should work with reading bears obvious traces of Berry's
Othello's soliloquy before killing Desde- influence, although she has turned Berry's
mona ('It is the cause, it is the cause, my mystifications of the link between voice and
soul') in order to learn the impact that vowel text into a more practical, technical resource.
sounds have in a text, she describes the
Stevenson thus notes that although in her
language as intimately connected with his
first scene (I, iv), Isabella 'isn't particularly
state of mind:
articulate', she is 'released into language
by the confrontation with Angelo' (Rutter,
The tortured journey of his soul as he moves on- p. 43). When Isabella asks Angelo to spare
stage to kill Desdemona is patterned in that very Claudio's life, the rhythm of the speech tells
conflict of sound. ... In order to kill Desdemona, Stevenson a great deal about her: 'I have a
Othello has to harden himself in the quick vowel
sequence (as in It is) and not indulge in the brother is condemn'd to die. / I do beseech
longer vowels (as in cause and soul). (NW, p. 128)you, let it be his fault, / And not my brother'
(II, ii, 34-6). Stevenson's reading of these
Rodenburg's argument about the sounds of three lines suggests her mode of examination:
words revealing a character's emotions and
thought processes is similar to Berry's: the What she's doing is separating the fault from the
man who commits that fault and asking that the
'tactile nature of the sounds, how they feel fault die and the man live. It's a philosophical
on the tongue when you are forming them', quibble - and she knows it, and the way she says
is 'directly related to how the character it exposes all her diffidence. It's as though she's

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 with whatever mixture of horror, fear, or
trying to rush the sentence past the judge before
he spots its legal flaw - getting in there quick
resignation the actor feels appropriate. This
with a load of monosyllables and a weak ending,
passive Isabella would also have less per-
'brother', which trails off, as the line does, into
formative power: an audience would tend to
silence. I think Isabella knows her argument is
be more focused on Angelo's actions (with
weak. She split her advocacy in two in her open-
either horror or empathy) than on Isabella's
ing statement, so there's no strength here, there's
retreat.8 But an Isabella who talks power
no counterbalance. 'Die' and 'fault' get all the
emphasis, metrically and by their position at the
and plays power will do as much acting as
end of the line; 'brother' has no strength at all.
reacting, and will grab the audience's atten-
He's not strongly placed in the line, poor bloke.
tion. Stevenson's Isabella gives her a wider
(P- 45)
range of choices than an Isabella who is less
Looking at the rhythm and structure of the confident, and allows her a greater scope of
lines, Stevenson finds clues pointing toward performative power, but the implications of
Isabella's thoughts and emotions. This is a such a performance are troubling.
fairly straightforward reading of three
straightforward lines, but Stevenson's exami-
nation of the scene becomes increasingly The Power Imbalance
problematic as it progresses. As the rhythm To read Isabella's plea to Angelo as 'copu-
of the language gets faster, and there are lating across the verse' is to suggest that
fewer gaps in the metre, Stevenson sees the Angelo's advances to her in their next
scene as becoming increasingly erotic: meeting are invited (and perhaps even
welcomed) by Isabella; to read Isabella and
Their language is so erotic. They keep landing in
the middle of each other's thought. He gives her Angelo as 'interdependent' suggests that
something, and she lands on it, he lands on that, they are equals, and that Angelo's request
and she lands on that. It's such an interdepen- for sex is thus not sexual harassment but a
dent development. They're listening so hard to reasonable proposition.9 No matter how
each other. That's partly what's erotic about it: much we wish to ascribe power and agency
they're receiving each other. And each of them
seems, perhaps unconsciously, to be arousing to Isabella, and no matter how much we
and inflaming the other - propelling each other hope that Shakespeare has created a strong
into ever wider and deeper waters. (p. 48-9) female character, the results of reading
Isabella as a powerful and erotic woman
And Stevenson concludes: 'She and Angelo will inevitably make the character seem
have been copulating across the verse ever complicit in her victimization and will
since they first met' (p. 49). Looking at the trouble a feminist actor and viewer.
language for clues to Isabella's character, Part of the dilemma here comes from
Stevenson builds a reading that attributes a how Stevenson has been trained as an actor,
fair amount of power to Isabella. Although from the fact that there is no way for her to
she might have been unsure of herself in the react to or comment on her character with-
beginning, here she and Angelo are 'inter- out incorporating her reaction into how she
dependent', 'receiving each other'. By the becomes that character. Reading the clues
end of the scene, Stevenson is describing in the text in order to reveal a character's
Isabella as 'on the attack': 'She's talking thoughts and emotions does not allow for a
power and she's playing power.... She's on consideration of the dramaturgical struc-
home ground now' (p. 49). tures of the script - actors focus on character
This powerful Isabella is an attractive one motives in performing their roles, not
for a feminist actor. An Isabella on the attack author motives.
makes for a more interesting character to But in any play the lines a character
play as well as for a more engaging one to speaks are ultimately chosen by the drama-
watch. A passive Isabella, who is a victim of tist. While playwrights might be bound by
Angelo's advances, could easily become a notions of psychological consistency, if they
one-note performance in this scene, reacting want the audience to think of the characters

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 as real people (and both of these assump- These opposed readings stem in part
tions are problematic for early modern from the methodological differences bet-
plays), the words they choose for their ween the approaches of Stevenson and
characters are none the less the words that McLuskie. Stevenson's focus on character
the playwrights need in order to move along emotions and McLuskie's on dramaturgical
the plot or to make a point. devices lead them to separate conclusions. If
While Stevenson, trained by Berry, reads this variance reflects the differing tools used
the text to look for clues about Isabella's to read with, both the reading and the tools
character, Kathleen McLuskie reads the text reveal an important ideological difference
looking at its dramaturgical dynamics, 'the between the two: while Stevenson trusts
narrative, poetic, and theatrical strategies Shakespeare, McLuskie does not.
which construct the plays' meanings and
position the audience to understand their
events from a particular point of view' Differing Methods and Expectations
(McLuskie, p. 92) - a shift in focus which Both Stevenson and McLuskie define them-
changes how we understand the action. selves as feminists who are concerned with
Looking at the same scene through which Shakespeare's female characters. But where
we traced Stevenson's steps, McLuskie does Stevenson inevitably comes back to the fact
not see a power balance and interdepen- that you must trust Shakespeare's script and
dence between Isabella and Angelo, but that in his words you can uncover a real,
rather a power imbalance, centered on male strong woman - she is interested 'in re-
authority. Isabella, she argues, is 'defined investigating Shakespeare's women from
theatrically by the men around her for the scratch' (Rutter, p. xviii) - McLuskie is
men in the audience' (p. 96). In her first plea profoundly suspicious of any attempt to
to Angelo, 'she is physically framed by recuperate Shakespeare as a feminist, seeing
Angelo, the object of her demand, and Lucio Shakespeare's scripts as inevitably patriar-
the initiator of her plea' (McLuskie, p. 96). chal, born of a wholly male entertainment
The asides of Lucio and the provost make us industry that reproduces misogynistic stereo-
want Isabella to win, but Lucio's bawdy types: the plays' textual strategies 'limit the
innuendoes - 'Ay, touch him, there's the range of meaning which the text allows and
vein' (II, ii, 71) - also sexualize Isabella for circumscribe the position which a feminist
the audience. The way the scene is set up reader may adopt vis-a-vis the treatment of
thus encourages the audience to share in gender relations and sexual politics within
Angelo's desire for Isabella: the plays' (McLuskie, p. 92).
The differences between the two readers
The passion of the conflict, the sexualizing of the are directly related to their different back-
rhetoric, and the engagement of the onstage grounds, and the different expectations they
spectators create a theatrical excitement which is
necessary to sustain the narrative: it also pro- have of their projects. McLuskie, as cultural
duces the kind of audience involvement which materialist and feminist critic, reads texts in
makes Angelo's response make sense. a way that reveals the political structures
(McLuskie, p. 96) that determine Shakespeare's work; her goal
is ultimately to subvert 'the domination of
While McLuskie's reading does not contra- the patriarchal Bard' (McLuskie, p. 106).
dict Stevenson's understanding of how the Stevenson, like most actors, wants to bring
language of the scene works (they both Shakespeare's scripts to life by becoming her
agree that the scene is set up to be erotic), character - an emphasis, as noted above,
the conclusions they draw from the lan- which is an integral part of voice training
guage differ: the end result, according to texts.
McLuskie, is a circumscription of Isabella's Invested in making the characters seem
agency, and not the movement towards real, actors focus on the ways they can be
power that Stevenson sees. sincere and truthful in their roles: they are

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 precisely not interested in overarching poli-
tical and dramaturgical determinations, nor
are they generally interested in subverting
Shakespeare.10 In voice training, the only
way for an actor to seem truthful and real to
her audience is for her to trust Shakespeare,
with all the political implications that this
carries. The very willingness of cultural
materialists and feminists like McLuskie to
be sceptical of Shakespeare - the scepticism
and curiosity that drives their criticism - is
precisely what is withheld from actors, in
fear that it will defeat their goal of engaging
their audience with a truthful performance
of the play.
The Actress's 'Identity Crisis'
Stevenson's trust in Shakespeare does not
mean that she is not interested in the poli-
tical implications of his plays. If she trusts
Shakespeare, she does not automatically
trust the stage interpretations his characters
have received. The textual choices she
makes that are grounded in Berry's voice
training are grounded as well in a con-
sistently feminist ideology, and the truths
that these two groundings demand some-
times come in conflict. Speaking of the
isolation that many women experience in
the rehearsal room, Stevenson warns against
the type of interpretation such a scenario
can lead to:
Something happens to an actress in a rehearsal
room which never happens to an actor. It's some-
thing of an identity crisis. If you are interested in
how women are portrayed on stage and in re-
investigating Shakespeare's women from scratch,
you feel a responsibility to the women that does
not necessarily go hand in hand with creativity,
because you go into the rehearsal room feeling
slightly defensive of them. You react against the
way tradition and prejudice have stigmatized
them - Cressida the whore, Kate the shrew - and
every time they're judged you feel protective.
Perhaps too protective. So you might end up play-
ing a Cressida who is above reproach and a Kate
who's neurotic, not shrewish. (Rutter, p. xviii)
Being truthful is far from a straightforward
thing here - Stevenson's political and emo-
tional consciousness can prevent her from
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recognizing the 'truth' of her character. In a
case like this, what does it mean to be true to
Shakespeare if doing so means you cannot
be true to yourself?
Theoretically, of course, this sort of divi-
sion would not happen. There is no one true
version of a character, and your understand-
ing of the character's truth should certainly
be able to line up with what you think your
own truth is. After all, Cicely Berry insists
that in a successful portrayal there must be
'a continual blending of our own truth with
the truth of the character' (AT, p. 15). But the
anxiety that Stevenson expresses, one that
many of the actors in Clamorous Voices share,
reveals a truth that cannot easily be blended
with Shakespeare's.
So Stevenson's feminism does not readily
fit into Shakespeare's characters. The res-
ponsibility she feels toward the women in
Shakespeare has less to do with what is in
the text than it does with what is in stage
history and in criticism. Her desire to see
Kate as something other than a shrew is
bound up with the way Kate has been held
up as an example of a shrewish woman
outside of Shakespeare's play, with the way
that 'tradition and prejudice' have used her.
Stevenson's solution to tradition and pre-
judice is to search within Shakespeare's text
for a more positive and complex female
character, as she did with her portrayal of an
erotically powerful Isabella in Measure for
Measure. But the results of that reading and
her recognition of the dangers inherent in
this type of revision - 'You can easily wind
up replacing one kind of distortion with
another' (Rutter, p. xviii) - demonstrate the
inadequacy of this approach for a feminist
actor. Stevenson's struggle with Shake-
speare's female characters is certainly not
due to her own inadequacy as an actor;
rather, the struggle is a result of how she has
been taught to approach Shakespeare. Voice
training's insistence on trusting the language
and making it organic leaves little room for
the feminist actor to question the play-
script's and playwright's politics.
But these problems inherent in voice
training do not necessarily have to invali-
date the process of voice and text work for
IP address: 138.251.14.35
 the feminist actor. The tools that voice
training provides the actor with could, in
different circumstances, enable the actor to
step outside the author's 'truth' and to
counteract tradition and prejudice. If voice
training were to focus less on revealing the
author's truth, and more on examining the
ways in which the author uses particular
forms of language in order to create parti-
cular effects, then an actor could decide
whether to fully inhabit that language, or to
create an alternative to it.
This way of thinking about voice work
depends both on not privileging the play-
wright's authority over that of the actor, and
on seeing the voice and language we pro-
duce as constructed, not purely organic.
While most voice teachers recognize that the
voice is something that we can consciously
affect, they usually use this as a way of
encouraging us to rid ourselves of our bad
vocal habits and to return to our natural
voices. But if our voices are riddled with
bad habits, then perhaps the natural voice is
just another sort of habit. Focusing on the
ways in which we manipulate our voices
and recognizing the ways in which our en-
vironments have shaped our voices would
make voice work a more powerful tool with
which to effect social change.
Jane Boston, a voice teacher at the Central
School of Speech and Drama and a feminist
theatre practitioner, sees the value of voice
work precisely in its ability to effect change.
Unlike Rodenburg or Linklater, who des-
cribe that change as stemming from our
return to a natural healthier state, Boston
sees the power of voice training in its ability
to affect our physical reality: 'We can't go
beyond the bounds of our physical reality,
but yet we can know a hell of a lot about it,
and situate ourselves differently within it -
and therefore affect it.'
In order for voice training to become a
useful tool for feminist performances of
Shakespeare, it must allow actors to form
their own judgements about what is natural
and healthy. Voice training's scrupulous
attention to the language of the playscript
certainly has the potential to help actors to
understand and counteract its politics, while
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the training's attention to how our voices
work has the potential to help actors exploit
the social and political implications that the
sounds we make carry. But until actors can
escape the need to be organic and true, voice
training will continue to place stumbling
blocks in the way of feminist performances.
References
Barton, John, Playing Shakespeare. London: Methuen,
1984.
Belsey, Catherine, The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and
Difference in Renaissance Drama. London; New York:
Methuen, 1985.
Berry, Cicely, Voice and the Actor. New York: Collier
Books, 1973.
Berry, Cicely, The Actor and the Text. New York:
Applause Books, second ed., 1992.
Blair, Rhonda, 'Shakespeare and the Feminist Actor',
Women and Performance, II, No. 2 (1985), p. 18-26.
Boston, Jane, interview with the author, Brighton, 27
February 1995.
Brook, Peter, The Empty Space. New York: Atheneum,
1968.
Goodman, Lizbeth, Contemporary Feminist Theatres: to
Each Her Own. London; New York: Routledge, 1993.
Helms, Lorraine, 'Acts of Resistance: the Feminist
Player', in Dympna Callaghan, Lorraine Helms, and
Jyotsna Singh, The Weyward Sisters: Shakespeare and
Feminist Politics. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994, p. 102-56.
Knowles, Richard Paul, 'Shakespeare, Voice, and
Ideology: Interrogating the Natural Voice', in Shake-
speare, Theory, and Performance, ed. James C. Bulman.
London; New York: Routledge, 1996, p. 92-112.
Linklater, Kristin, Freeing the Natural Voice. New York:
Drama Book Publishers, 1976.
Linklater, Kristin, Freeing Shakespeare's Voice: the Actor's
Guide to Talking the Text. New York: Theatre Com-
munications Group, 1992.
McLuskie, Kathleen, 'The Patriarchal Bard: Feminist
Criticism and Shakespeare: Measure for Measure and
King Lear,' in Political Shakespeare: New Essays in
Cultural Materialism, ed. Jonathan Dollimore and
Alan Sinfield. Ithaca, NY; London: Cornell Univer-
sity Press, 1985, p. 88-100.
Rodenburg, Patsy, The Right to Speak: Working with the
Voice. New York: Routledge, 1992.
Rodenburg, Patsy, The Need for Words: Voice and the
Text. New York: Routledge, 1993.
Rutter, Carol, Clamorous Voices: Shakespeare's Women
Today, ed. Faith Evans. London: Routledge, 1989.
Notes
1. In chronological order, their books, fully cited
above, are: Cicely Berry, Voice and the Actor [in text
abbreviated as VA\; Kristin Linklater, Freeing the
Natural Voice [FNV]; Berry, The Actor and His Text [AT];
Linklater, Freeing Shakespeare's Voice: the Actor's Guide to
Talking the Text [FSV\; Patsy Rodenburg, The Right to
Speak: Working with the Voice [RS]; Rodenburg, The Need
for Words: Voice and the Text [NW]. It might seem unfair
to focus on these teachers' printed work instead of their
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 classroom practices, but these texts have disseminated
their work widely, and as Richard Paul Knowles
argues, 'as texts, these books encode and reinforce
ideological structures and assumptions that are both
deeply embedded in theatrical discourse and too easily
overlooked or mystified when their methods are app-
lied in practice' (p. 93).
2. The categories of 'feminist actor' and 'feminist
performance' are rather difficult to define. As many
feminists have noted, 'feminism' and 'feminist' mean
different things to different people: some who self-
identify as feminists are not considered feminists by
others (Camille Paglia, or Katie Roiphe, for example),
while some who are defined by other people as
feminists do not refer to themselves as such (some older
feminists have observed that many young women
refuse to call themselves feminists even though their
personal and political beliefs match the goals of femi-
nism). It is of course necessary in a project like this to
define my terms, but such a definition can easily
become a paper unto itself. Given the immediate goals
of this paper, I don't feel that it is possible to do this
task justice, so for my purposes here feminist perfor-
mances of Shakespeare are those which refuse to accept
stereotypes of women and which continually question
the playscripts' depiction of gender relationships and
sexual politics in order to effect some sort of change in
today's audience, while feminist actors are those who
are interested in investigating these questions of gen-
der. Although I do not entirely agree with her defini-
tion of feminist theatre, see Lizbeth Goodman for an
example of the sort of definition of terms that needs to
be done when working with feminist theatre.
3. See Knowles for an examination of the relation-
ship between Berry and Brook and a useful historici-
zation of the voice training movement; for an account
of the idea of 'empty space', see Brook.
4. Knowles's arguments about the ideology inherent
in voice work has been instrumental to my own under-
standing of voice training, and much of my thinking
here is indebted to his work. My thanks to him for
allowing me to read his article in manuscript.
5. Linklater's own conservative politics become
quite explicit in Freeing Shakespeare's Voice, where she
claims that 'right-minded people know that the classics
should reveal to the audience a universal message
plumbed from the depths reverberating deep below
national or racial distinctions' (p. 201) - and that it
should be equally clear to those right-minded people
that Shakespeare was really Edward DeVere, the Earl of
Oxford, as the plays' insight into the lives of both the
lower classes and the aristocracy 'would seem more
likely . . . [to have] come from the top down rather than
the bottom up' (p. 213). It is self-evident to Linklater
that Shakespeare is universal for all classes and races
because the aristocracy's values and insights are uni-
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versal, while those of us who are not so 'right-minded'
are close-minded in our special interests.
6. Jane Boston, a voice teacher at the Central School
for Speech and Drama in London, suggests that this
anti-intellectual bias comes from an 'ancient rivalry
between dramatic text as a literary study and dramatic
text as owned by those who will perform it'. 'Circum-
navigating the cerebral', as she sees it, has to do with
empowering the actor, 'a way of saying we know more
than we think we know.'
7. Even a more politically radical director and actor
echoes this sentiment. Rhonda Blair, an American actor
and academic who is a committed feminist, says that
the greatness of Shakespeare's plays 'lies in the clear,
pure insights they give us about what it means to be
human' (p. 26). The complexity of Blair's statement
comes from the fact that she voices it after an account of
the difficulty she had playing the roles of Desdemona
and Isabella, an experience she sums up by saying, 'By
and large, I spent my summer reinforcing patriarchal
culture' (p. 25). In contrast to Barton, Blair does not
believe that what Shakespeare has to say about men
and women is always true, but she does still value what
he has to say about the human condition.
8. There are certainly ways to block a scene so as to
disrupt this pattern of focusing on the action instead of
the reaction. In a 1985 performance of the play directed
by Michael Bogdanov at the Stratford, Ontario, Shake-
speare Festival, Angelo's face was turned away from
the audience while he groped Isabella and mimed an
orgasm, leaving the audience to look at her face and
focus on her reaction. In this case, Isabella's paralysis
had a great amount of performative power. But unless
the director deliberately leads the audience's attention
to the reaction, the centre of attention tends to remain
the active character (in film there is a camera angle
referred to as a 'reaction shot', but no term for the more
common action shot).
9. A number of recent critics and directors have
described this scene in terms of sexual harassment.
According to C. E. McGee's review, a recent production
of the play in Stratford, Ontario, echoed the Anita Hill-
Clarence Thomas hearings. Kathleen McLuskie also
describes the dynamics of the scene as centering upon
male power and harassment.
10. It is also important to recognize that in addition
to methodological differences, institutional differences
play a strong role in the choices McLuskie and Steven-
son make. As an actor who performs in the mainstream
theatre tradition, Stevenson is bound by the conven-
tions and beliefs of that tradition, including the
convention of 'realistic' or 'truthful' acting, and a belief
in the genius of Shakespeare. Academia, on the other
hand, is much more tolerant of work that debunks
Shakespeare; current schools of thought tend to value
scepticism over bardolatry.
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