Benedict Cumberbatch Has 1,480 Lines in Hamlet - So What's the Secret to Actors' Memory Skills? - Features - Theatre & Dance - The Independent

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"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 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. In 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 Hamlethas to learn, and repeat night after night, around 1,480 lines.

Benedict Cumberbatch has 1,480 lines in Hamlet- so what's the secret to actors' memory skills?

Benedict Cumberbatch has to remember 1,480 lines to give his new

'Hamlet'. An orchestra is performing a whole symphony by heart for the

Proms. How do they do it, and why is it so good for their brains –and

ours? Boyd Tonkin elucidates

BOYD TONKIN Friday 31 July 2015

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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 ever 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

internalise 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

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Forget me not: though phrenology located it in the forehead, the seat of

memory is actually the hippocampus, deep inside the brain (Alamy)

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. Islamiccustom 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 around 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

learning" 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 333 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 Dunstan 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

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than 'To be or not to be ...'?"

Do actors and musicians command a special treasury of recall-

and-retrieval secrets – dark arts invisible to 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 actor training on

how to remember the lines". By and large, that's still the case.Handbooks of technique will briefly round up useful tips but

then move on to website management or the benefits of yoga.

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For most performers, the mantra remains what Pennington calls

"Repetition, repetition, repetition". Yet that discipline can take a

myriad of forms. One size of memorisation by no means fits all.

Pennington says that "I always learn late at night. Some peopleprefer 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 the 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 LineLearner 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 Advicefrom 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 the 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 as 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 whatgoes on under the bonnet. It's a matter of cosying up 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 thy fearful

symmetry?..."

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Totall recall: the Aurora Orchestra, led by Nicholas Collon, perform Mozart

from memory in the Royal Albert Hall last year (Sarah Lee)

producer Professor Daniel 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. A 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 that 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

could 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 orchestras 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".


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Michael Gambon in 2013 – his fading memory has forced him to give up

stage roles (Anthony Woods)

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 mental faculties."

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. It's huge. 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 10 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, captured and

securely locked down. In his recent book about playing Falstaff,

Year of the Fat Knight, Antony Sher recalls how he used 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 normal as breathing." In the

meantime, those of us who never hold a tune or tread the boards

could still do more to keep that hippocampus happy. Pennington

notes that the actor Dame Gwen Ffrangcon-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 got to be good for the brain."

'Hamlet', with Benedict Cumberbatch, runs at the Barbican

Theatre 5 August-31 October, with live transmission to cinemasnationwide on 15 October. BBC Prom 22, with the Aurora


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Orchestra and Nicholas Collon, is at the Royal Albert Hall at

3.30pm on Sunday 2 August, with a BBC4 broadcast on Sunday

9 August. Michael Pennington's book 'Let me Play the Lion Too:

How To Be an Actor' is published by Faber & Faber. He will be

appearing in the Kenneth Branagh Theatre Company's

production of Shakespeare's 'The Winter's Tale', which opens at

the Garrick Theatre on 17 October

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Benedict Cumberbatch Has 1,480 Lines in Hamlet - So What's the Secret to Actors' Memory Skills? - Features - Theatre & Dance - The Independent