Shakespeare Monologue Coaching for Beginners

No matter where you are on your Shakespeare journey, you can help someone else along on theirs.

Whether it’s as a teacher or director, coaching other actors is an invaluable skill that will not only help your comrades but make you more self-aware in your own artistic practice.

We traditionally think of coaching and teaching as skills to learn later in your career, but honing these skills early will help you develop your own craft even as you learn to help others develop theirs.

Rather than a traditional Shakespeare monologue workshop where a single teacher coaches all the participants, in this workshop Mac will share some techniques and ideas for how to be a kind and helpful coach, and then participants will take turns coaching each other through short Shakespeare monologues.

Participants will learn how to put each other’s needs first and how to — kindly, patiently — disrupt unproductive Shakespeare habits, and give other artists permission to be more of themselves in classes, auditions, and rehearsal rooms.

Participants should come with a short Shakespeare speech memorized, ideally no more than 20 verse lines or 150 words of prose.

Mac MacDaniel is one of the founders of Elsewhere Shakespeare, a punk band masquerading as a theatre company. He is an autodidact educator and actor who specializes in historical staging practices and rhetoric. He has taught Shakespeare and facilitated productions up and down the east coast and in Europe. He has written about Shakespeare for PBS and his book The Play's The Thing: A Beginner's Guide to Seeing and Enjoying Shakespeare is carried by theatre companies across the US.

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