Although I have worked with many different directors of Shakespeare in many different productions, and I pride myself on being a supportive colleague and adaptable coach, it would be disingenuous of me to claim that I do not have certain personal aesthetic preferences when it comes to verse speaking.
Primarily, I believe that poetry should serve the drama, not the other way around.
Here’s an example of something I don’t particularly care to listen to:
De-dum de-dum de-dum de (keep in time);
De-dum de-dum de-dum de (here's a rhyme).
When iambic pentameter, line endings, and punctuation are fetishized as something we “do” to the text, they can end up colonizing the actor’s breath and imagination and their usefulness as analytical tools ceases. When rhythm, figures of sound, and other prosodic elements become more important to “unlocking meaning” than the actual denotations and connotations of the words themselves, or the rhetorical thrust of a complete thought, then we have fallen into the poetry trap.
The poetry trap is one way actors avoid doing the unglamorous analytical work of knowing what they’re saying and connecting that to a playable action. This trap is similar to the backstory trap. (Often, actors prefer to spend time inventing complex emotional backstories for their characters as an escape from the harder and more useful work of investigating what’s actually on the page and transforming that into objective). The poetry trap is one way actors replace vulnerability and bravery with cleverness. From the practical standpoint of rehearsing a play so that an audience can follow it, it’s simply faffing about.
Meter is not something you have to do to the text after the fact. It’s a creative constraint under which the thing was written. Scansion can be an important diagnostic tool when something is off kilter, but putting your focus on showing your homework–marking five slavish stresses per line and making sure the audience hears them too– rather than on understanding the rhetoric of the thing–and the visceral, human need behind each argument–is a sure way to fragment your thoughts and lose the name of action. “Doing” scansion can also lead to five operatives per line–which in nearly every case is simply too many operatives. (If every word is important, then none of them are.)
We don’t go to the theatre to hear meter, punctuation, and figures of sound. We go to experience story through acting. With a playwright like Shakespeare, poetry is baked into the dramatic writing. Certainly we can enrich our playing if we know what’s there, but we can also trust it to take care of itself. This is what I mean when I say “trust the text.” The audience will hear the poetry if you simply say the words, but they will only care if you mean what you say. Focus on action. Focus on your scene partner. Trust that we’ll get the rhyme and meter without your extra help. Overstressing the prosody is like explaining your joke. Poetry is subtextual, or perhaps supratextual. Without a primary focus on the text itself–the meaning and intention of the words–the “poetry” comes off, essentially, as nonsense…
...a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.