“Remember me!” At midnight, on the battlements of Elsinore, his father’s restless
spirit transfixes Hamlet with that command. “Remember thee!” Hamlet reflects: “Ay,
thou poor ghost, while memory holds a seat/ In this distracted globe.” Summoned to
vengeance, the Prince of Denmark decides that in order to fulfil his mission, he
must clear out his memory-banks. He should erase all the knowledge installed by an
elite Renaissance education: “I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records,/All the saws
of books, all forms, all pressures past,/That youth and observation copied there.”
The duty of revenge means unlearning all that Hamlet knows by heart - a big deal,
around 1600. I the second act, memorisation again becomes a plot-pivot. Hamlet writes
a speech for the First Player which, he hopes, will terrify stepfather Claudius into
admitting guilt. “You could, for a need,/study a speech of some dozen or sixteen
lines, which/I would set down and insert in’t, could you not?” A cinch. In the London
theatre Shakespeare knew, star performers had to commit bulky parts to memory within
days. Richard Burbage, for whom he probably wrote Hamlet, was a legend for his repertoire
of supersized roles.
Next week, 415 years on, Benedict Cumberbatch will become the latest actor to scale
the peak of Hamlet when he begins his sold-out run at the Barbican Theatre in London.
Every Hamlet has to learn, and repeat night after night, around 1,480 lines. The
count will vary a little according to the edition used. Compared with this epic stretch,
Shakespeare’s other tragic leads look almost lightweight: Othello with 890, King
Lear 750, Macbeth a slimline 710. If Hamlet stands at the pinnacle of the actor’s
art for its emotional and intellectual range, it also activates and exercises the
hippocampus - the area in the brain that converts short-term into long-term memory
- as few other roles will.
For civilians, the feats of large-scale memorisation that actors and musicians routinely
accomplish remain a mystery and a marvel. In another art form, this Sunday the Aurora
Orchestra and its principal conductor, Nicholas Collon will perform Beethoven’s sixth
symphony, the Pastoral, entirely from memory at the BBC Proms. This concert follows
the acclaim that greeted a similar gig at last year’s Proms, which saw the Aurora
play Mozart’s 40th symphony without scores. Collon writes that the event “ranked
as one of our most intense and rewarding musical experiences. In every way it deepened
and enriched our relationship with this extraordinary piece of music, forcing us
to internalises nuances that can be easily glossed over when reading from the page.”
We don’t take this heroic level of recall and retrieval on trust in the theatre and
the concert-hall alone. The humble hotel-lounge pianist will often know hundreds
of pieces by heart, as will the folk singer. The questions”How do they do it? And
“Could everyone do the same?” sound painfully jejune. Yet they fascinate lay people.
The actor Michael Pennington was a distinguished Hamlet for the RSC in the 1980s,
celebrated for his intelligence and clarity. Since then he has not only practised
his art but dissected it in a series of incisive books. “It is the question that
everyone asks at a party,” Pennington says about the everyday miracle of learning
and retaining lines. “It defines the job; it’s the bare necessity. But it’s still
the thing that amazes other people.”
Learning by heart continues to thrive in many cultures. Islamic custom cherishes
the achievement of the “Hafiz” - the guardian - who can recite from memory every
verse of the Koran. Scholars suggest that Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey crystallised
in their written form about 750BC, out of an already ancient school of oral transmission.
In Serbia, as late as the 1930s, the Homeric investigator Milman Parry came across
folk bards who could recall, and embroider, traditional stories thousands of lines
long.
In the West, however, what was dismissively labelled as “rote leaning” began to fade
from public education early in the 20th century. For all his back-to-basics rhetoric,
Michael Gove’s reforms to the GCSE syllabus did not reinstate mass recitation in
the classroom, though they do insist that pupils should know well “no fewer than
15 poems”. Meanwhile, the Poetry by Heart competition begun in 2012 by former Poet
Laureate Andrew Motion this year encouraged pupils from 313 schools to rekindle the
ancient art - not as an empty ritual, but as a creative means, argues Motion, of
“finding pleasure and confidence in a part of the curriculum where such things can
be in short supply”. The 2015 national winner was Emily Dunsan of Graveney School
in Tooting, who performed poems by Elizabeth Bishop, John Keats and Siegfried Sassoon.
So actors and musicians use - admittedly, at an extraordinary pitch - a near-universal
facility that just happens to have fallen out of favour. And the more you hear any
text, the easier it becomes to ingest for good. Michael Pennington reports that,
when he first studied Hamlet as a professional actor, long years of exposure to the
play meant that the part posed no special problems. “By that time, I’d heard it played
over and over again, in my mouth and other people’s mouths. I hardly had to learn
it at all.” In contrast to the abstractions and complexities of, say, King Lear or
Macbeth, he also found that the punch and snap of Hamlet’s own speech helped to make
the role stick. “Although it’s very long, the language is surprisingly simple to
learn - it’s very practical, down-to-earth language. What could be simpler than “To
be or not to be”?”
Do actors and musicians command a special treasury of recall-and- retrieval secrets
- darks arts invisible to the awestruck spectators? Almost certainly not. When the
leading Shakespeare scholar Professor Peter Holland researched memory and forgetting
on the stage, he wrote that: ”What I found most remarkable is the virtual silence
in the books on acting on how to remember the lines”. By and large, that’s still
the case. Handbooks on technique will briefly round up useful tips but then move
on to website management or the benefits of yoga.
For most performers, the mantra remains what Pennington calls “Repetition, repetition,
repetition”. Yet that discipline can take a myriad of minds.one size of memorisation
by no means fits all. Pennington says that “I always learn late at night. Some people
prefer the morning, when you’re fresh… Everyone has their own system, especially
when they come across passages that are particularly tricky for them.” He recommends
acrostics and mnemonics that associate troublesome passages with a memorable story:
an approach rooted in Renaissance “art of memory” that flourished in Shakespeare’s
day.
Recordings of a single part or of an entire play, committed to MP3 players and listened
to over and over again, also find favour. This record-and-repeat method has a long
pedigree, but Peter Allday’s Line-Learner app brings it into the download age. Older
forms of technology also have their fans. Lenny Henry speaks for many actors when,
in Laura Barnett’s book Advice from the Players, he advises: “Try writing down your
lines, at least 10 times for each scene.” Moving around also helps to fix the words.
It seems that hippocampus likes to have other senses busy while it works. Helga Noice,
professor of psychology at Elmhurst College in Illinois, discovered that the physical
actions that partner words have a crucial effect in sealing the deal for long-term
memory.
All actors agree, however, that the key to mastering lines is not to treat them as
lines, but the ingredients of a character and a story. Grasp the total meaning, and
the words will swiftly follow. For Michael Pennington, “You come to know the character
that much better. It’s like the engineering of a car: you get to see what goes on
under the bonnet. It’s a matter of cosying up to the author - you see how they do
it, and you develop a feeling for the music of the language.”
That “music” will often serve as Super Glue for memory. As anyone who knows the simplest
poem by heart will recognise, we seldom remember via micro-units of sense but through
chunks, phrases and patterns, often hammered into place by metre or by rhyme:”Tyger,
Tyger burning bright,/ In the forests of the night:/ What immortal hand or eye,/
Dare frame they fearful symmetry?…”
Over in the musicians’ rehearsal room, parallel rules apply. At this year’s BBC Proms
lecture, neuroscientist and former rock producer Professor David Levitin - author
of This is Your Brain on Music - outlined the processes of prediction, recognition
and comparison that allow listeners to hear music and performers to reproduce it.
Region of the frontal cortex known as Brodmann 47 helps us to understand musical
patterning. This inner ear for chunks, lines and sequences will ease the path of
singer and soloist. Levitin even suggested that the shape-making capacity of the
brain means that Brodmann 47 may be fundamental to the survival of the species: the
ability to predict what’s going to come next.”
As with those actors who learn via gesture and movement, Levitin reports that “motor
memory” also plays its part. Fingers and arms will recall what they did before, and
how they did it. In a known piece. “It’s the same mechanism that keeps us from falling
off a bicycle.” Meanwhile, all predictive activity in Brodmann 47 sensitises musicians
to the chords, sequences and scales within a given form. That will work for music
that sticks to the harmonic norms. But how much Stockhausen or Boulez can you confidently
learn by heart?
On Sunday, Nicholas Collon and the Aurora players will tackle from memory the 40-odd
minutes of Beethoven’s Pastoral. As the conductor acknowledges when I talk to him
during a break between rehearsals, “This is never going to be a very easy or practical
thing to do. No beating about the bush: it’s a big job.” Singers and soloists, he
notes, will frequently master recitals, concerti and operas that call for a prodigious
exercise of memory. For full-size and entire symphonies, however, the scoreless performance
remains a rare bird.
The Aurora’s triumph with memorised Mozart convinced him of its value. “It was an
experiment, but it was such a joyful process… Everyone was immersed in the music
in a much deeper way. It forces you to learn the structure of the piece right down
to the tiniest details. You actually have to embody every note.” Collon adds that,
“There’s one very obvious benefit: the visual communication between the orchestra
and the audience. There’s no barrier between them - no music stands.” For him, the
expressive quality of a scoreless concert matters far more than the element of high-wire
act without a safety net:”I have tried to get away from thinking about this as a
feat or as a challenge.” Rather “It gets you thinking about the music in a different
way.”
However much we know about the universal endowments of the brain, a sense of mystery
still lingers. With that comes the ancient dread of forgetting. Peter Holland cites
a story about the great 18th-century Shakespearean actor Charles Macklin. One night,
when he was already in his late eighties, after more than half a century of playing
Shylock, Macklin dried on stage. The beloved veteran turned to the audience to apologise,
for “a terror of mind I never in my life felt before. It has totally destroyed my
corporeal as well as my mental facilities.”
Every performer will carry a fragment of that terror - even Cumberbatch, when, with
a mountain in front of him, he first whispers, “A little more than kin, and less
than kind.” Michael Pennington says: “It’s vast. A real nightmare - it’s like falling
at Becher’s Brook.” In fact, audiences will often overlook slips and lapses: “I’ve
heard people deliver five or ten lines of made-up blank verse before they get back
on track. But it’s still what we most fear.”
Age does make a difference. For Pennington’s acclaimed King Lear in New York in 2013,
“I had to take precautions.” Lines that in youth adhere effortlessly have to be chased,
captures and securely locked down. In his recent book about playing Falstaff, Year
of the Fat Knight, Antony Sher recalls how he use to scoff at the naïve playgoer’s
query, “How do you learn all those lines?” Now, “I’ve stopped laughing. It’s an age
thing.” Earlier this year, Michael Gambon revealed that he has given up stage roles
because of creeping memory loss: “It’s a horrible thing to admit, but I can’t do
it. It breaks my heart.”
Such a cri de coeur ought to remind us how much we take for granted. Every night,we
expect art, practice, training, teamwork and trust to fuse seamlessly into a note-perfect
or line-perfect rendition. “I don’t know how it’s done,” muses Michael Pennington.
“It just becomes as natural as breathing.” In the meantime, those of us who never
hold a tune or tread the boards could still do more to keep the hippocampus happy.
Pennington notes that the actor Dame Gwen Ffrangeon-Davies, who lived to the age
of 101, never ceased to commit fresh lines to memory. “She would learn a new piece
of poetry every day until she died. It has to be good for the brain.”
