First read through and understand the language

When receiving our parts and getting our scripts the first step is to do a read through. Having known the play before and have a good understand of the flow of the narrative I thought that I would use this opportunity to look into the words and the type of language that I would be saying in the show. 

The first thing that came to me from the read through was how late on in the play, I become Faustus, this made me think about how much the character would have done in his life until the point I come on.  This gave me an idea of how many years had gone past and how Faustus is now having fun with his life and what he does.

The second thing that I picked up on, was how different the type of language was, compared to modern speach it found it hard at first to get along with how the speach works and how it can be interpreted into conversation. A good technique that I have found That helps with understanding of the text is to translate the lines into modern language when learning them, this gives more context to the lines and also I felt helped me learn my lines.

The main types of language in the play are: prose, which is the basic language that involves the character just communicating with each other, for example my scenes with the horse couser, I would be speaking the dialogue to the character on stage and the audeince would just be listening to what we are saying to follow along with the scene. The second would be: verse. Verse is very common throughout the play of Dr Faustus, and came up a lot in my scenes, particuarly in the cross overs between my interactions with other characters. During these types of speeches, their is usually a set rhythm that you should follow and their are set breaks in the speech, whereas the prose sections can be broke up into different sections to add dramatics and tension. When performing I found it easier to bring meaning through the prose speeches, as I would choose whether to direct some lines out to the audeince or add in a pause. On the other hand when learning my lines and rehearsing I found it easier to learn the speeches in verse, as I would learn them as they are written and break them up into easy to manage sections.