First and foremost, you want to know what you are saying. Every word, every phrase and every punctuation point has to make sense to you. Once you have done that, a good idea is to identify your speech measures. A speech measure is basically wherever there is a period or comma. For example:
Julia from The Two Gentlemen of Verona:
O Hateful Hands! / To tear such loving words /
Injurious wasps, / to feed on such sweet honey /
and kill the bees that yield it with your stings! /
each / indicates a speech measure. You don't necessarily want to take a pause between each and every speech measure, and in fact you should not, but if you must take a breath or a pause, do it in between speech measures. Make sure that your speech measures make sense! The last thing you want is to make it choppy!
The next thing you need to find are the operative words.
I don't know that I quite agree with forni-kate. What I've always learned is that speaking in meter is not the best thing as it can get you sort of stuck in a monotonous speech pattern. Instead, use the meter as clues into what your operative words are. With iambic pentameter, an operative word will always be a word that naturally gets a stress anyway. For example.
Two Gents:
O HATEful HANDS / to TEAR such LOVing WORDS. /
Any one of the words or syllables in caps will be an operatve word. Notice that none of the small words are appropriate anyway! Isn't Shakespeare great!
An operative word is the word that essentially is the "juciest" word in the sentence. Standing alone, it best describes the entire speech measure. This is the word that gets the stress above the others. Your best bet is to pick on operative word per measure. For Juliet, I would recomend only one operative word per line. More than that adds a great deal of intensity that is not really apropriate for her. What makes Juliet unique is that above most of Shakespeare's other women, she is very poetic and uses a great deal of imagery to describe her feelings. Certainly for "to be or not to be" it would be more appropriate to go with more operative words, but for Juliet, you don't want her to be hitting too many of her words too hard. For example"
Two Gentlemen of Verona
O
Hateful hands / to tear such
loving words! /
Injurious wasps / to
feed on such sweet honey /
And
kill the bees that yield it with your stings. /
The bolded words are the words that one would stress. Naturally, acting Shakespeare is not all about just shouting the operative words. A good exercise is to treat the text like music. Just focus on enjoying the sound of your voice. Practice with different intonations, different volumes, different pitches. Love the words! Love yourself speaking the words! That will show through so much and will make the text very clear.
Good luck! You can PM me if you have any questions.
"This is what I trained to do, and this is what I love about theater. What I love about being an actress is being able to really look into myself and understand another human being. And out my own self, to shape and form and fashion a real human being--and to present that in such a way that people see something of themselves or their own understanding in that human being."
--Phylicia Rashad
