Memory | PlayFighting

Sleep For A Memory Boost

Some memorization strategies are so easy, you could do them in your sleep. What strategy is that? Sleeping: you need to sleep to get the most out of your study. To memorize your lines in Shakespeare, don’t stay up late. A lot of recent research is pointing to the fact that memories are encoded in […]

Trouble Remembering Act 2 & 3?

In our search for the best ways to memorize lines, there are certain principles that are well proven, and others that are unreliable. Today, we look at two memorization ideas that have been shown to work for everybody… so much that it’s almost common sense. Psych Research Memory research has long known about two major […]

Sounds Prompt Sounds: Listen and Repeat Your Lines

“Oh, wait… I know this line. I can see it on the page… uh, the top of page 40. Argh, I can’t remember… How does it start?” I’ve heard so many actors say that sort of thing in rehearsal, and I can tell you exactly why it happens: memorizing from the page. In performance, you’ll […]

Why the “Palace Method” doesn’t work for Shakespeare

Proponents of the Palace Method of memorization say that it’s great for not only lists, but also for speeches. If your speech is a list of points to talk about, then that’s true. But if you have to deliver Shakespeare’s words in exactly the order he wrote them, it’s less than useless: it will harm […]