This tool breaks down each character’s thought process through the placement of Logical and Psychological pauses.
You will need to begin by explaining that punctuation can be broken down into two categories: Major punctuation and Minor Punctuation.
Major Punctuation defines the end of a thought and consists of:
Full Stop.
Exclamation Mark!
Question Mark?
Colon:
All other punctuation is categorised as Minor punctuation.
To aid the identification of punctuation in performance, learners should be provided with highlighter pens and asked to highlight all Major punctuation marks with one colour.
For example
. ! ? = Blue
Start by defining the Psychological Pause as the characters need to take a physiologically motivated break whilst speaking. In Shakespeare’s plays, the psychological pause occurs at the end of a thought and therefore, at the major punctuation.
Ask learners to perform the scene; however, when they reach the Major Punctuation, to say the word ‘Psychological’ as a way of signalling where the psychological pauses need to occur in the performance.
Instruct learners that once they said ‘Psychological’, they should begin the next line with the clear intention of beginning a new thought.
Learners should then be asked to go back to those thought breaks at the major punctuation and give themselves a psychological reason for pausing at that moment.
Following the exploration of Psychological Pauses, it is time to introduce the Logical Pause.
Explain to learners that a Logical Pause is there to help make sense of what is being said. In Shakespeare, the only punctuation mark this occurs at is the semicolon. Ask learners to go through the text and highlight all the semicolons in another colour.
Instruct learners to perform the scene again; this time, say ‘Logical’ every time they reach a semicolon.
Following this performance, it will become clear to learners that Shakespeare’s use of the semicolon is limited. This is an opportunity to open a discussion about where else logical pauses can be placed. As a single thought can traverse multiple verse lines, there will be a need in longer passages of text to add logical pauses before the Major punctuation and the psychological pause.
If Learners had previously identified that their text was in verse, the best place to add these would be at the end of a verse line. Or if necessary, at an occasional comma, though as will become clear in the Punctuating the Thought tool, commas are not a place to frequently pause.
Learners should now be instructed to perform the text saying both ‘Logical’ and ‘Psychological’ where appropriate, including adding Logical Pauses at the end of a verse line if necessary.
To conclude, the tool asks learners to perform the scene one final time, without saying either Logical or Psychological but informed by this work on the scene.
Tray One : The First Encounter