Speak the speech, I pray you: 5 quick and dirty tips to maximize memorization

I just started my 41st speech this week. No, I'm not done yet, so don't bust out the tankards of mead and cups of sack quite yet. I've doubled up on a few (quadrupled on Hamlet), so I have handful left before I reach my goal of at least one speech from each play. I felt this a good time to begin imparting some wisdom to anyone who might be inclined to try this on their own.


1) Practice every goddamned day. I start on Sunday with a new speech. I find it is best to learn the whole thing all in one go, and then over successive days, I progressively wean myself from checking the text every other line until I get more confident with it. I tried breaking up longer speeches up into eight- or ten-line bites over four days... but very few of them are so long that I feel I must do that to keep my sanity. I did Richard III's monstrosity over several days early on in the project, but did Richard II's behemoth much more quickly. Soon enough, shorties (20 lines or less) became a piece of the proverbial cake. Cram before bed, when your brain is ripe for filing away new things. Practice in your shower. Practice in your car on your way to or from work. No one will judge you there.

2) Say it out loud. Turn your speech into an earworm. Just like a catchy song you hear fifteen times on the radio at work, the speech will follow you around better if you know how your own voice sounds reciting it. Say it without a sound. Mouthing the words without giving them voice helps develop muscle memory. You tend to exaggerate it when you voicelessly recite, but I've found it opens you up to delivering it more clearly and effortlessly when you voice it again. It's like isometric exercise for your tongue.

3) Watch or listen to actors delivering the speeches you choose. I cannot tell you how much more easy it was to memorize speeches that were already done for me. Sir Kenneth Branagh's recitation of Hamlet's fourth soliloquy ("My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!") will never sop rolling around in my brain. Ben Whishaw's Richard II sitting on the sunny shore of his England as his voice fights the breeze will forever inform my delivery of his monologue about the death of kings. I will never not think of Tom Hiddleston soliloquizing as Prince Hal in King Henry IV Part One. They are more than just pretty faces to me ;)

4) Research the character. Research the vocabulary. Never try to recite anything out of context. Find out what is supposed to be motivating the character and keep it at the forefront of your mind. For each speech, I read the corresponding chapter in Marjorie Garber's "Shakespeare After All" just so I'd recall the plot and get more in depth analysis of characters. Look up every unfamiliar word or phrase. It'll all come more naturally if you know what the bloody hell you're actually saying. Memorization is a party trick. Comprehension takes work. We're here for enrichment of our brains, not for boot camp drills.

5) Choose speeches that intrigue you. At first, this is simple. There are so many speeches on the menu. But after a while, you're bound to hit plays that don't enthuse as much as others, or you simply aren't familiar with them at all. If you can't find something that you like, you're not going to spend as much time with it and you'll lose interest. I've read every play and highlighted the bejesus out of my old paperback copy of the Complete Works, so I could always spot a passage that got my attention and analyze it for potential memorization material. If you lack such a personalized resource, I recommend checking http://www.shakespeare-monologues.org for worthy suggestions.


This will take more than 40 weeks. I don't think I'll be satisfied with myself until a year passes. I took a few breaks to give myself a chance to review old speeches and just because real life carries you away sometimes.

I've already chosen my final speech--one that I think will test all my skills and patience. It's Shakespeare's longest soliloquy, and it marks the return of that trusty bastard Richard Gloucester in his salad days during Henry VI Part Three. 71 lines of pure, uncut soliloquizing. I can't wait!

Let's talk of graves, worms, and epitaphs

             Psst: Scrub to 1 h 6 m 45 s for the "Hollow Crown" speech

If ever Hamlet's nugget about how "A thought which quartered hath but one part wisdom/And ever three parts coward" applied to anyone (because I personally don't think it actually describes Hamlet Jr.) it's Richard II. This young monarch, who is a Class-A wanker from the start, is prone to frilly rhetorical speeches throughout this eponymous play. However, may his dollophead status never cloud our appreciation of his insights, for he has as much (or more) tendency as any other king in Shakespeare to wax truthfully about the unique discomforts of sitting upon the throne. 

Richard is a psychological nightmare. He is the rightful heir to the throne, but it is implied that he was complicit in his own uncle Gloucester's murder. He was ten when he ascended, which, on top of acne and half-descended testicles, must have been stressful. He also has this uncanny Jesus complex, and believes anyone working against him to be "thrice worse than Judas." Perhaps because his father was the famous "Black Prince" Edward, whom he could never live up to, Richard has this nagging self-esteem issue, which he barely covers with a deep belief in the divine right of Kings and the strength of his name alone. He abuses his power and hangs out with a bunch of low-lifes--Bushy, Bagot, and Green, which sounds like some second rate Flogging Molly cover band.

It's when Richard steals and liquidates the newly deceased John of Gaunt's property, gives some to his flunkies, uses the rest to fund an unpopular war in Ireland, and then returns to find that Gaunt's son, Bolingbroke, has amassed a small army of loyal followers willing to fight in Bolingbroke's name that Richard begins to fret. His peeps deliver this information and Richard loses his shit. But at the same moment, he seems to gain this poetic and wise perspective on life as a Royal. This speech alone--the so-called "Hollow Crown" speech--should be proof enough that this somewhat under-garnished play (which is written entirely in verse, BTW) is worth a close reading.

King Richard II, Act III, Sc. II

King Richard: No matter where; of comfort no man speak: 

Let's talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs; 
Make dust our paper and with rainy eyes 
Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth, 
Let's choose executors and talk of wills: 
And yet not so, for what can we bequeath 
Save our deposed bodies to the ground? 
Our lands, our lives and all are Bolingbroke's, 
And nothing can we call our own but death 
And that small model of the barren earth 
Which serves as paste and cover to our bones. 
For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground 
And tell sad stories of the death of kings; 
How some have been deposed; some slain in war, 
Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed; 
Some poison'd by their wives: some sleeping kill'd; 
All murder'd: for within the hollow crown 
That rounds the mortal temples of a king 
Keeps Death his court and there the antic sits, 
Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp, 
Allowing him a breath, a little scene, 
To monarchize, be fear'd and kill with looks, 
Infusing him with self and vain conceit, 
As if this flesh which walls about our life, 
Were brass impregnable, and humour'd thus 
Comes at the last and with a little pin 
Bores through his castle wall, and farewell king! 
Cover your heads and mock not flesh and blood 
With solemn reverence: throw away respect, 
Tradition, form and ceremonious duty, 
For you have but mistook me all this while: 
I live with bread like you, feel want, 
Taste grief, need friends: subjected thus, 
How can you say to me, I am a king?

Lovers and madmen have such seething brains

Bottom and his buddies.

I'm sure I'm not the only one who would love to see Benedict Cumberbatch's Titania and Hugh Laurie's Bottom. And I mean that in exactly the double entendre you're thinking of right now. Too bad my favorite actors aren't always followed around by cameras from the first day they are cast into high school plays. I'd also much rather see what Ben Whishaw would do with Puck than The Tempest's Ariel, but that's another post.

For now, consider Theseus, Duke of Athens, and his dilemma: a bunch of love-sick and drugged-up teenagers from his court get lost in the woods just when the faeries are in the throes of a civil war of the sexes. The kids wake from their stupor and with their fanciful recollection of their "dreams," simply confirm Theseus' worldview that faeries are bullshit. That's the speech I chose--a romantic diatribe about the idiocy of romance. He's such a hipster.


A Midsummer Night's Dream, Act V, Sc. I
Theseus: More strange than true: I never may believe
These antique fables, nor these fairy toys.
Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover and the poet
Are of imagination all compact:
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,
That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt:
The poet's eye, in fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
Such tricks hath strong imagination,
That if it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy;
Or in the night, imagining some fear,
How easy is a bush supposed a bear!