Shakespeare's Wordcraft (Limelight)

Despite implications to the reverse, this fine book was written by my colleague, Scott Kaiser, not Kaiser Scott. Scott Kaiser is the longtime voice, speech, and text coach at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland Oregon. His long experience there has well prepared him to make this solid contribution to the literature. In nine very thorough chapters, Scott analyses Shakespeare's compositional proclivities, and turns in a very user-friendly account of his rhetorical flourishes. This, by itself, gives the actor a little seat at the back of the Bard's brain, from where he or she can watch the wheels and levers in operation. When it comes to speaking the words, an actor, so privileged, will be much friendlier with the language, and relish its inventiveness to a far greater extent than the actor who has not read this book. Once you have read Scott's excellent primer, you will be ready for the much heftier  Shakespeare's Use of the Arts of Language  by Sister Miriam Joseph, the all-time classic, in my view. For the actor on a shopping spree, and wanting a dialect instruction manual alongside this book, my own book,  Accents and Dialects for Stage and Screen (includes 12 CDs)  contains a good number of Shakespeare monologues used to illustrate dialects (Lady Macbeth in Scottish, Joan of Arc in French, Don Adriano di Armado in Spanish, etc.)

How can a Shakespeare expert make such a dull presentation of such a magical talent? Three major problems (i) the author's rather brief exposition of each technique presented (word order, omissions etc) is purely technical and conveys nothing of the artistic genius Shakespeare brought to bear. (ii) Each of these brief expositions is followed by scores of examples, apparently selected without discrimination. Some of them are wordcraft at its very finest. Many others had me thinking "That's how I'd have expressed that point - nothing magical in that example." (iii) As if to show how lacking in intelligence the author expects his readers to be, he includes parenthesised statements of how the phrase would read without implementation of the technique discussed. Thus, the first quote under the heading 'Omitted "And"' comes from Richard II. "So weeping, smiling, greet I thee, my earth" Just in case the dumb reader has not got the point, the author adds (Rewritten So weeping AND smiling). I wonder if the author has spent so much time researching Shakespeare that he has lost sight of why Shakespeare is so worth researching. A delightful Beechamism springs to mind from another art form "A musicologist is someone who can read music but not hear it." The author appears to be the Shakespearean equivalent of Beecham's musicologist.

This book takes you through different rhetorical devices used by Shakespeare and with each device there are more than enough examples to fully grasp the concept and to start seeing patterns. Oftentimes the rhetoric of Shakespeare is explained with a big long technical term that no one can remember, with a very complicated definition; then you're only given one or two examples and expected to have learnt it... not in this book! Kaiser makes Shakespeare much more tangible- especially for actors who are looking to study the brilliant way Shakespeare crafts his words.

An excellent analysis of the many types and figures of speech deployed by Shakespeare in his works. The prologue by the author is worth the price of the book as he explains the many patterns, and also the lack of understanding, of rhetoric in today's use of English. Kaiser's explains the different forms of rhetoric with examples from Shakespeare and from contemporary writers such as Wm. Safire, MLK, Jr., and others.After studying this book I began to see the rhythmic patterns in my favorite works like the King James Bible and Science & Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy. It helped me understand why I liked these works so much. If you want to know how rhetoric is constructed then I recommend this book.

I could spend hours and hours with this book. I started reading this with a bit of anxiety over working with Shakespearean text. This book instilled in me a new understanding of the text and enthusiasm for the work. Shakespeare has never been clearer to me. Scott Kaiser has masterful knowledge of both Shakespeare and rhetoric.

Outstanding! Mr. Kaiser has command over the Shakespearean canon and possesses the cunning organization skills of a General orchestrating a winning battle. Want to go from rookie to expert in a jiff, breathe in the contents of this book...until they’re as second nature on stage as they are in regular life.

This book was clear, enaging and helped me understand how to break down heightened texts better than any other book I've read. I've been in actor training for ten years and have a whole new wealth of tools for playing Shakespeare with better skill now.

The long and short of this book is a demonstration of how Shakespeare invented new words. All of these techniques are from Rhetoric, but the author did not want to be tied down/bogged down in making this too scholarly. A simple listing in the back of the book could have easily connected the person that wanted to know more to the rhetorical elements themselves.