by Eric Goudie

Created on: May 25, 2009

Diction is essentially your choice of words and how you speak or write them. In Shakespearean performance, excellent diction means staying true to the text as it was written, and delivering the lines in a manner that is consistent with the meaning and organization of your character and the rest of the play. Much of the enjoyment an audience gets from great Shakespeare is the result of excellent diction, while much of the confusion and despair that comes from an inability to understand the action of a Shakespearean play comes from actors paying too little attention to the form and structure of what they are saying.

Shakespeare employed three basic forms of versification in his plays. Each uses distinctly different diction and requires distinctly different approaches in performance.

The bulk of Shakespearean lines are written in the format known as Blank Verse. Quite simply this means that the lines do not rhyme. Each line is usually comprised of words that have a combined total of about ten syllables, or five pairs of syllables, each of which is known as an Iambic foot. Since there are five Iambic feet per line the line structure is known as Iambic Pentameter.

In performance the syllables in an iambic foot are usually spoken with the emphasis placed on the second syllable, in what is known as an unstressed-stressed format. This means that a line like "Two Households, both alike in dignity" would be spoken with a slightly stronger emphasis on the syllables House, both, like, dig and ty.

Understanding this structure is the key to a successful delivery. While not all of Shakespeare's blank verse is exactly ten syllables per line or stressed in exactly this way (if it were it would quickly become boring) being able to see the structure of a line and using that structure when speaking it makes the line sound the way Shakespeare intended it. Thus, failing to memorize even one word can throw of your delivery of an entire line, and putting the emphasis on the wrong syllable can make the line sound confusing to even an experienced Shakespearean scholar sitting in the audience.

Maintaining excellent diction in the second of Shakespeare's preferred writing forms is even more important. For working-class characters like the fighting servants at the beginning of Romeo and Juliet or the Mechanicals in A Midsummer Night's Dream Shakespeare chose to distinguish them from the nobility by writing in prose, with no line structure whatsoever.

When performing Shakespearean

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