Such stuff as dreams are made on

Our memories are rounded in a sleep

Let an astrophysicist teach you a little something about learning Shakespeare. Yes, Neil deGrasse Tyson has helped me on my journey toward good memorization. The above video, which explains what biologists are finding out about the function of sleep in all animals' lives, points out that sleep is more than just rest. Sleep is like the great defragmenter of our brains, rearranging our memories of the day, organizing our jumbled thoughts and helping us access new memories more efficiently.

Just as Neil does in the video, I perform new memory tasks (repeating my speech of the week) right before bed. As I'm drifting off, I read the speech in my mind's eye. The next morning, while driving to work, I make myself repeat the speech at least two times without assistance. I find it works better than practicing in the middle of the day and expecting the same results. The lines I learned tend to get mixed up and lost with all the other events of the day. But when shoehorning some Shakespeare in before bed, the lines are more clear to me the next day.

After weeks and weeks of doing this on my own, I found this recent Talk of the Nation story on sleep and memory. Some subjects were trained in the morning and tested later in the day, and others were trained in the evening and tested the next morning. The study confirms what Neil's colleagues found; we tend to perform better with memory tasks if we are allowed to "sleep on it" before testing our recall.

I like to think of memories as tire tracks in a dirt road. The more the car or bike runs through that exact path, the deeper the grooves become. Also, the more your verbalize, the more than words become facial muscle memory, much as an athlete strives to achieve when drilling with a specified set of movements.

I can't tell you how many repetitions it takes to achieve an expert ease with a speech, but it's probably in the thousands. The first speech I ever deliberately memorized, Hamlet's "To be or not to be," took a few weeks to get down and I have often repeated it to myself over the years. I can do that one upside-down, drunk as a sailor if I have to.

Nowadays, it's a bit more scientific. On the first day, I start with four-line chunks. I usually repeat them until I can say them with my eyes closed (~10 times). By the time I've got all the lines of the speech down, I've probably repeated it all about 20-30 times total. Just before bed, I say it at least two more times. The next morning, two more times. After dinner, five to ten times, plus at least two more before bed, depending on how long it is and how tired I get. Over six days, that's well over 100 repetitions of a full speech in a week.

I often revisit old speeches from weeks before to keep them fresh. The grooves get filled in with rain and mud and I have to keep rolling through them. I've managed to add a handful of newer speeches to the "I can do it in my sleep" list, such as King Henry V's "Unto the breach" and Berowne's "Why? all delights are vain." Richard III's opening soliloquy is almost there as well as "All the world's a stage."

Sometimes, I feel like I'll NEVER get a certain speech as trippingly as that first one, but I've proven myself wrong already. It's a shocking, fantastic feeling, and I highly recommend it.

But if you mouth it: Notes on pronunciation

Forsooth.

I'm frequently entertained by tumblr. Sometimes, the posts surprise me with how insightful and clever they can be, and they always prove that Facebook and Pinterest will always be inferior due to their lack of GIFs. But there's one that shows up every so often regarding British accents. It claimed that Americans never stopped having a "British" accent, and that the current accent we regard as "British" is some over-poshified version of English developed over the centuries and that Shakespeare sounds "better" in an American (read: original British) accent.

Hold your diphthongs, there, glossophile. If American is the closest to Shakespeare's tongue, then why don't many of the rhymes in his sonnets work? Granted, even with a received pronunciation (RP) English accent, not all the rhymes work either, but this just proves there's 400 years of complex sociolinguistic history involved.

I recently came upon this short NPR story about Shakespeare's Accent. It features examples from the British Library's sound recording collection of Shakespeare's most famous scenes, as read by actors and actresses using an accent that is as close to the original as feasibly possible (90-95% accuracy). It results in a phonemic Rorschach test. It will sound familiar to almost any English speaker who hears it. It's not strictly any specific accent you'll ever hear, but if you have a sensitive ear, you'll recognize that it contains flecks of several regional British accents that contributed to what we think of as American (or even Australian) today.

I always challenge myself to guess where British actors come from just by listening to them. Then I check the IMDb and see how close I came. I once guessed that Richard Armitage came from somewhere close to Sheffield (South Yorkshire), because his vocals reminded me of Sean Bean. Richard's from Leicester after all, but I like to think that guessing within a two-county radius isn't bad for a non-native, non-linguistics graduate.

The truth is, Shakespeare sounds mellifluous, full stop. It's challenging to practice recitations in different accents. It serves to color the speech and give it a different emphasis. I'm no actress, but I have friends who are. (We've all had a go at pretending to be foreigners while we visit Disney parks as we were growing up. Orlando is the most anonymous place in Florida, where people come from all over the world, and fakers aren't likely to be given a second glance.)

If you're of the accent-loving clan, I recommend trying it yourself. Recite Hamlet in Scottish, or MacBeth in Irish. Or try Iago as a Southern belle. I dare you not to have fun.