How to Memorize Long, Complicated Sentences in a Play

You’ve learned the short lines. The quips, the “Good morning!” exits, the one-word answers. Then there’s the speech. One sentence that starts on the top line of the page and doesn’t find its full stop until the bottom, with a dash in the middle and two commas you keep putting in the wrong place.

You can say the start. You can say the end. Somewhere in the middle, every time, the floor goes. You skip a clause, or swap two, or land on the last few words and realize you’ve left out the reason the sentence exists.

The short version: a long sentence isn’t one long string of words. It’s a small main thought with other thoughts hung on it. Find that main thought first, learn what each add-on is doing there, then build the sentence back one clause at a time, out loud, testing yourself from memory instead of rereading. Once you know why every piece is in the sentence, the order stops being a list to memorize and becomes an argument you’re making.

Why the middle is where you lose it

Your short-term memory is small. In an influential review of the research, the psychologist Nelson Cowan argued that adults can hold only about four chunks of information in mind at once. Researchers still argue about the exact number, but no one thinks it’s large.

A long sentence by Wilde or Shaw has far more than four pieces. If you try to hold it as a single run of words, you’ll tend to keep the start and the end and lose the middle. That’s often why the beginning and end feel solid while the middle keeps going missing.

The fix is not to cram the whole thing into your head by force. It’s to turn many pieces into a few big ones. When you understand that three clauses are all one reason, they stop being three things to remember and become one.

Find the spine of the sentence first

Many long sentences in period comedy have a simple main clause buried inside them. Everything else is an add-on: a qualification, an example, a sneer in parentheses. Your first job is to dig out that main clause, the spine, and say it on its own.

Here’s Lady Bracknell, after Jack has explained that he was found as a baby in a handbag at a railway station:

JACK: Yes. The Brighton line.

LADY BRACKNELL: The line is immaterial. Mr. Worthing, I confess I feel somewhat bewildered by what you have just told me. To be born, or at any rate bred, in a hand-bag, whether it had handles or not, seems to me to display a contempt for the ordinary decencies of family life that reminds one of the worst excesses of the French Revolution.

The Importance of Being Earnest, Act 1, from the public-domain Project Gutenberg text.

Strip out the add-ons and the spine of that last sentence is short: To be born in a hand-bag seems to display a contempt for family life. That’s the thought. The rest is Lady Bracknell making it worse:

• “or at any rate bred” widens the charge from where he was born to how he was brought up.
• “whether it had handles or not” waves away the detail Jack was proud of a moment ago.
• “to me” makes it her personal judgment, which in her world settles it.
• “the ordinary decencies of” turns family life into a set of rules he has broken.
• “that reminds one of the worst excesses of the French Revolution” escalates a handbag to a political catastrophe.

Notice that each add-on has a job. Once you can name the job, you know why it’s there, and you have a much better chance of knowing where it goes.

When the point comes last

Some sentences hold the main idea back until the end. Writers on style call this a periodic sentence: everything leads up to one main idea that usually isn’t complete until the final words. These can be harder to learn, because nothing in the first half tells you where you’re going. With a periodic sentence the spine sits at the end, so learn the ending first and build the rest toward it.

Learn the thought before you learn the words

It’s tempting to drill a long sentence like a phone number. The research on how actors actually learn says that’s backwards. In a summary of Helga and Tony Noice’s studies, the Association for Psychological Science reports that actors learn lines by “focusing not on the words of the script, but on those words’ meaning,” breaking a script into logically connected beats.

The same research found that people who studied material by imagining explaining it to someone else remembered it better than people who memorized by rote. The Noices call this “active experiencing”: using your body, mind, and feelings to get the meaning across to another person.

So before you drill, paraphrase on purpose, once. Turn to an imaginary Jack and tell him, in your own words, what you think of being found in a handbag. Then go back to Wilde’s words and notice how much sharper his version is. You’re not learning the paraphrase. You’re learning the shape of the argument that the real words will fill.

The actor and director Dakin Matthews made the same point in a masterclass at USC on Restoration comedy. When you speak your own thoughts, he said, you never stress the wrong word. You only do that with someone else’s words, and it means you haven’t absorbed the thought yet.

Build it back up, one clause at a time

Now that you know the spine and the job of every add-on, rebuild the sentence. Say the spine out loud, from memory. Then add one clause and say the whole thing again from the beginning. Then add the next one.

1. To be born in a hand-bag seems to display a contempt for family life.
2. To be born in a hand-bag seems to me to display a contempt for family life.
3. To be born, or at any rate bred, in a hand-bag seems to me to display a contempt for family life.
4. To be born, or at any rate bred, in a hand-bag, whether it had handles or not, seems to me to display a contempt for family life.
5. ... a contempt for the ordinary decencies of family life.
6. ... a contempt for the ordinary decencies of family life that reminds one of the worst excesses of the French Revolution.

Each pass is a small test. You’re pulling the sentence out of memory rather than reading it, and you’re always starting from the top, so the joins between clauses get practiced as often as the clauses themselves. If one pass falls apart, go back to the last version that held and say it twice more before adding anything.

Do this out loud, at full volume, the way you’ll say it in the room. A sentence you’ve only muttered isn’t the same sentence when you need the breath to get through it.

Mark the few words that carry it

Matthews’ advice for Restoration text was to stress the fewest words possible to make your point and to stop “when the syntax stops.” That’s good advice for memory too. If every word in a long sentence weighs the same, nothing stands out to hang the rest on. A handful of operative words, the ones that carry the thought, become signposts you can find even when you’re nervous.

Here’s Higgins, in the first act of Pygmalion, telling off the flower girl:

THE NOTE TAKER: A woman who utters such depressing and disgusting sounds has no right to be anywhere—no right to live. Remember that you are a human being with a soul and the divine gift of articulate speech: that your native language is the language of Shakespear and Milton and The Bible; and don’t sit there crooning like a bilious pigeon.

Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion (1913), Act 1, from the public-domain Project Gutenberg text. Shaw spelled it “Shakespear”.

Try underlining only these: disgusting, anywhere, live, soul, speech, Shakespear, pigeon. Say just those seven words in order, then the whole speech. The underlined words are the route. The rest is road between them.

Look at the build in the first sentence, too. “Anywhere” goes to “live”: the second phrase repeats the first and pushes it further. Shaw and Wilde lean on patterns like this. Matthews told his students that repetition in Restoration speeches is a technique of argument, a point you state and then develop, and the same is true here. When you see a pattern, you’ve found a piece of structure you don’t have to memorize separately.

Breathe where the thought turns

Matthews also told his class that Restoration plays need more breath because the sentences are longer. The same logic applies to Wilde and Shaw. If you run out of air in the middle, you’ll grab a breath wherever you happen to be, and that random gap is exactly where the next clause tends to fall out.

So plan your breaths with the grammar. In the Higgins speech, the colon after “articulate speech” and the semicolon after “The Bible” are both places where the thought turns. A quick top-up of air there keeps the whole sentence alive without breaking it in two. Mark those points in pencil, and practice them as part of the line, not as an afterthought. Our guide to breath control for long speeches goes further.

Then check it word for word

With Wilde and Shaw, close enough isn’t. The theatre department at CSU Bakersfield warns actors that the temptation to paraphrase is especially strong in a difficult or complex speech, and that the actor should resist it and honor the words the playwright chose.

In comedy the reason is practical. Wilde’s jokes depend on word order. “To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.” Move “carelessness” off the end and the laugh goes with it. In a long sentence, the payoff often comes at the end, so the order of everything before it matters.

In Offbook, you upload the script and pick your role, and realistic voices read the other characters and wait for you. You can hide your lines while everyone else’s stay visible, or swap your lines for first-letter cues, so you can see the shape of a sentence without reading it. The video below shows how.

Start with the first letters of each word showing, which keeps you honest about the clauses you tend to swap, then hide your lines entirely once the sentence holds. Strict line detection holds you close to the script. For a quick start, our free first-letter tool turns any speech into cues with no account, and our guide on how to stop paraphrasing lines covers word-perfect drift.

If you go blank in the middle

It will happen once or twice in rehearsal. When it does, don’t go back to the start of the speech and try to run at it again. Go back to the spine. If you know the main thought and you know where the sentence ends, you can usually find the missing clause by asking what job is left undone.

For Lady Bracknell, that question sounds like this: have I said how bad it is yet? If not, the French Revolution is still coming. It’s a better rescue than memory by momentum, because it works from what the sentence means.

After a blank, rebuild that one sentence from the spine again before you move on. Patch the hole while it’s fresh, and the next run will usually go straight through it.

Questions actors ask

How do you memorize a really long sentence in a play?

Find the main clause and say it on its own. Work out what each extra clause adds. Then rebuild the sentence one clause at a time, saying the whole thing from the start each time, from memory rather than from the page.

Why do I always forget the middle of a long line?

Because short-term memory holds only a few chunks at once, so a long string of words keeps its start and end and drops the middle. Group the middle clauses by what they do, and plan a breath where the thought turns, so the middle has structure of its own.

Is it okay to paraphrase Wilde or Shaw in rehearsal?

Once, on purpose, to understand the argument. After that, learn the exact words. The jokes and the rhythm depend on word order, and a paraphrase you repeat can stick.

How long does it take to learn a speech like this?

It varies with the speech and with you. Whatever the schedule, start each session by testing yourself from memory before you look at the page, and rebuild from the spine any sentence that didn’t hold.