""You can't act Shakespeare until you can speak him." Those words inform every page of Speaking Shakespeare. Patsy Rodenburg tackles one of the most difficult jobs an actor can take on: speaking Shakespeare on the stage both as his words were meant to be spoken as well as in an understandable and dramatic way that projects the reality of the character. Patsy calls this book "a simple manual to start the journey into the heart of Shakespeare." This is just what she gives readers in a book that was developed as she worked with her students at London's Guildhall School of Music and Drama. As she worked with the people in her classes, she encouraged them to consider the way in which Shakespeare's text is written and how it is spoken to inform every aspect of the creation of a character onstage. She begins with the "givens" of speaking verse. She then moves on to the rehearsal of leading Shakespeare roles from Hamlet, King Lear, Richard III, Macbeth, and others. With the same sensitivity to an actor's development that she displayed in The Actor Speaks, Patsy uses ideas of dramatic resonance, breathing, placement, and the actor's preparation to show how one can bring these characters fully to life. Like The Actor Speaks, this will be a book every working actor will need to have. Speaking Shakespeare is a passionate book about how one properly plays the characters of the most well-known playwright in the English language and that passion is encompassed in another rule she passes on to her students and readers: "To release the full power of Shakespeare's work, you have to commit through the body, breath and word."" --