Jack Armstrong graphs the structures of Shakespeare’s plays like rising and falling notes
“A well-told story can be graphed like a piece of music,” says Jack Armstrong (SF83). In a junior-year preceptorial at St. John’s, Armstrong first encountered Heinrich Schenker’s musical analysis. Since then, he has been graphing the story structures of Shakespeare’s plays like a work of music—a useful skill for his job at Philadelphia Shakespeare Theatre. Armstrong’s official title is vice president of the board of directors, but he is also charter of plots, a title all his own. “Schenker was the first person who codified music theory,” says Armstrong, inventing a system of notation to show “how the composer creates and releases tension in each of the lines to form a symbolic whole.” Armstrong sees story structure the same way.
Armstrong’s plot chart for Shakespeare’s comedy Twelfth Night, for instance, unfurls in a riot of color and a wealth of information. Columns for each scene run across the top; below, color-coded bars for each actor show who is present in the scene and with whom. Every scene that advances one of these plots is faithfully noted, and their progress can be tracked across the acts, like rising and falling notes, until they reach their resolutions. It’s both a beautiful representation of data and a handy primer for anyone working with the play—actor, director, or student.
Long before the actors take the stage, Armstrong goes through the script line by line, asking three questions of each: What is this person saying? Why does the character say this—what is he or she trying to accomplish? Why is this in the play? He then writes up an annotated script and generates his Schenkerian plot charts. It’s a monumental task, but the result, he says, is that “the actors get to know the story so well that five minutes into it you forget you’re listening to archaic language. Sometimes it’s like you’re listening to improv comedy.”
For Armstrong, the struggle to bring Shakespeare to all is vitally important work. Drama, literature, writing, history: these are “the science of being human,” he says passionately. “Through stories we learn to be human. They’re how we expand our vocabulary of possible human behavior, and the bigger our vocabulary is, the better our chances of making a good decision.”
→ Read the full article on Jack Armstrong by Anna Perelberg (SF02) in the current issue of The College...
→ View Jack Armstrong's plot chart of Shakespeare's Hamlet...
→ Learn more about music in the Program...