Can the words of a brooding medieval prince have anything to do with running your brewery’s website today? Well, you can certainly stretch a lot of things to make them seem useful. A line like,

There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.

could be taken, for instance, to mean that you can push your off-flavor beer because people will come around if you can convince them the flavors are good. In fact, quoting Shakespeare would be a useful way to open folks’ minds to change in that way. But I’m not talking, here, about big-picture philosophical things (despite myself); I’m talking about practical advice for the communications person sitting down to write a webpage or a newsletter.

Writing as Performance

Hamlet’s famous advice to the players is still a reference point for actors today, but writers—from brewers playing at marketers to experienced copywriters—can learn from it, too. Writing for your website or newsletter or whatever is, after all, a kind of performance.

For this post, let’s just look at the beginning of the speech, which I quote at length both because I’m a literature guy who values context and because the extended speech is interesting in its own right. This speech happens toward the middle of the play, when Hamlet hasn’t been able to commit to taking his father’s ghost’s advice and killing his uncle, so he devises a plan to entrap his uncle by producing a play that recreates the supposed murder.

The play doesn’t actually require Hamlet to say these things, so there’s some reason to think this is Shakespeare’s actual advice:

Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to
you, trippingly on the tongue: but if you mouth it,
as many of your players do, I had as lief* the	soon
town-crier spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air
too much with your hand, thus, but use all gently;
for in the very torrent, tempest, and, as I may say,
the whirlwind of passion, you must acquire and beget
a temperance that may give it smoothness. O, it
offends me to the soul to hear a robustious
periwig-pated* fellow tear a passion to tatters, to	i.e., done-up in period costume
very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings,* who	i.e., those standing in front
for the most part are capable of nothing but
inexplicable dumbshows and noise: I would have such
a fellow whipped for o’erdoing Termagant*; it	with Herod, broad villain roles
out-herods Herod: pray you, avoid it.

Hamlet makes two related points, here. The first concerns speaking with exaggerated articulation. The image is of an actor’s mouth making ridiculous contortions, perhaps like a town-crier, on the belief that he will be heard and understood better. The second concerns doing the same with your hands and body.

The Principle: Don’t Overdo It

Our principle, then, is to not overdo it. Don’t make absurd and exaggerated gestures on the belief that your audience wants you to dance around like a monkey. Give them more credit, and show more respect for their time.

Most breweries aren’t in danger of exaggerated formality or trying to impress people with their learning. Rather, they’re more likely to shoot for a casual and familiar style that says, “Hey, we’re just regular guys, even cool guys, making beer.”

Beware Good Advice

You might take “trippingly on the tongue” as a cue to write “like you speak.” As with a lot of good advice, it’s only good up to a point.

In the first place, most people who try to write like they speak end up writing more like they think, that is, in a stream-of-consciousness style that meanders all over and maybe eventually gets back to the business at hand.

While you may wander along rabbit-trails or parenthetical comments while you speak, you usually keep your goal in view and get back to it sooner than later at risk of losing your audience.

In the second place, Shakespeare himself certainly did not write like he spoke. Nor did most playwrights of his day. This is where Hamlet’s advice comes from in the first place. One might think that, in order for an audience to understand something so sophisticated as even this advice, you’d have to exaggerate and pantomime everything you were saying.

However, if you’ve ever been to a good production of Shakespeare, then you know that fluid, dynamic delivery of the lines with simple and sensible actions goes a long way to helping you understand what’s going on.

Choose the Right Model

Really what I’ve been talking about here is the matter of voice, which many marketing managers struggle to find. And I’m suggesting that “voice” is not the same as “speech.” That means you have to be thoughtful about how you present yourself online.

A good way to do that is to choose the right model. In copywriting, Hemingway, not Shakespeare, is the more typical model. You want to err on the side of simplicity and clarity rather than sophistication.

But here’s what I glean from “trippingly on the tongue”: Read your copy out loud. Feel how easy it is to read it fluidly and with expression. Hear how well it stays on topic or veers off track. If you can’t read it well yourself, your audience will likely have trouble, too. If you lose yourself, you’re likely to lose your audience.

Tastes will differ, of course, but it’s very easy, if not to out-herod Herod, to out-wallace David Foster Wallace. DFW was brilliant and verbose, but most of us aren’t him and are more likely to just be verbose.

So, take it from Hamlet and just don’t overdo it.

Image Public Domain via Wikimedia.