Shakespeare on Toast: Getting a Taste for the Bard
Page 8
Or, in this case, learn a bit of Shakespearian before going to see a play of his, and unlock a treasure chest of life-changing jewels in his work.
I’m getting a little carried away. Everything we’ve looked at so far are the doors and windows to the House of Shakespeare.
The foundation of it all, though, is poetry. Understand how iambic pentameter works, and you can talk to Shakespeare.
I mean it. You can have a conversation with him.
Act 4
Catch the Rhythm
Scene 1
Theatre Way, Wigan
Before we dig into iambic pentameter itself, an important distinction needs to be made. There are two main types of speech in Shakespeare’s plays, and they’re most commonly referred to as poetry and prose.
You speak prose. Prose is just a word for normal, free-flowing speech or text, and although there are rules that govern it, they are neither as obvious nor as formal as the rules that you find in poetry.
It’s important to note that any one word of the English language can be found in either poetry or prose – one writing style doesn’t exclude a particular set of words. To be entirely accurate, perhaps I should say there are some words that are more likely to turn up in one style than another, but that doesn’t really concern us here.
To pick a fictional character purely at random, here’s the Reverend Clement Hedges, from the film Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005), speaking in prose:
HEDGES This was no man. Does a man have teeth the size of axe blades? Or ears like terrible tombstones? By tampering with nature, forcing vegetables to swell far beyond their natural size, we have brought a terrible judgement on ourselves.
And the same speech rewritten as poetry:
HEDGES
This was no man. Does a man have teeth
The size of axe blades? Or ears like terrible tombstones?
By tampering with nature, forcing vegetables to swell
Far beyond their natural size, we have brought
A terrible judgement on ourselves.
The words are all the same, I simply broke the speech up into lines, and that’s the first giveaway with poetry. It’s written in lines and at the beginning of each line the first letter is capitalised (I should say that this may not be true for some modern poetry you might come across, but in Shakespeare, this is how it is).
Now it’s probably fair to say that this now-slightly-poetic extract might not be remembered in hundreds of years’ time, but the techniques I used to make it pretty are the same ones that modern poets use, and they’re similar to the ones Shakespeare used.
Ending lines with Does a man have teeth and we have brought makes the reader question what’s going to come next. It brings an anticipation to the line, if only for a second. It makes it more dramatic. Leaving the punchline by itself on the last line gives a comic pacing to the reading of it.
Breaking some of the standard rules of English grammar (that a new line = a new sentence, for example) to emphasise particular points of a piece of writing, as I’ve done with Hedges’ most learned observation, is essentially what Shakespeare did.
However, what’s particularly important when having a gander at Shakespeare, is how the thoughts of a character sometimes go with the lines of poetry, and sometimes the thoughts break over the lines of poetry.
A full stop usually indicates the end of a thought, traditionally known as a sentence, but the word sentence takes us back down the Literature road: they’re actors’ texts, so we’re going to stay on Theatre Way and call them thoughts. People write in sentences, they speak in thoughts. If I had broken Hedges’ speech up into parcels of sense, or thought, it would have looked more like this:
HEDGES
This was no man.
Does a man have teeth the size of axe blades?
Or ears like terrible tombstones?
By tampering with nature,
Forcing vegetables to swell far beyond their natural size,
We have brought a terrible judgement on ourselves.
The first thought takes up a full line of poetry. So do the second and third thoughts. But the fourth thought overflows into three lines of poetry. The way it overflows brings a slightly different dimension to the dramatic tension of the writing.
If the poem were read out loud, the reader would need to make it clear that while the last three lines are three different lines of poetry, they are still one thought. Other wise, when read aloud, it’ll just sound like prose, and the vast effort the writer has put into writing it as poetry would be wasted.
So it’s become normal practice for the end of a line of poetry to be acknowledged in the voice, somehow – a rising inflection, or a slight pause, perhaps – to indicate that while the line of poetry has ended, the thought has not.
Scene 2
A kitchen, baking verse-cake
Poetry then, as far as we’re concerned, is any text that has been written in lines. Verse is poetry that has been given a particular rhythm. You might hear the two terms used interchangeably. I’ll do my very best not to do that.
Much of Shakespeare’s work is written in verse: he made his actors (and so therefore his characters too) speak a lot of the time in rhythmical poetry; a brilliantly simple device to make his kings sound kingly. This gives birth to a general rule: ordinary people speak in prose, kings and queens speak in verse (though it’s not always this way round: remember earlier in the book where Kent in King Lear, disguised as an ordinary commoner, mocks Cornwall – he doesn’t just use complicated words to go ‘out of his dialect’, he switches into verse, the speech of kings, and back again to prose. We’ll see more of this later.).
The hierarchy of speech in Shakespeare, going from a low emotional intensity and a prosaic language, to high emotion and very poetic language, goes like this:
If you’re trying to express something that prose won’t do justice to, then switch to blank verse. If that isn’t forceful enough, moving up to rhyming verse or a sonnet (a fourteen-line rhyming poem) might do it: when Romeo and Juliet first meet and dance together, Shakespeare gives them a sonnet to share, to convey to the audience the height of their emotions and the importance of their first meeting (I’ll look at sonnets in a bit more detail later on in this Act).
But if your emotions can’t be expressed in any other way, then you just gotta sing! Desdemona’s willow song in Act 4, Scene 3 of Othello, and Ophelia’s terribly sad song in Act 4, Scene 5 of Hamlet are beautiful examples.
Verse is why a lot of people think Shakespeare writes in an odd-looking way – why the plays look so different from modern English when you see them on the page – and is probably a large part of the reason why many people take one look and say Shakespeare wrote in a different language.
Here are a couple of examples from Shakespeare, first verse from Hamlet, then prose from Much Ado About Nothing:
HAMLET
To be, or not to be – that is the question;
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing end them.
(Act 3, Scene 1, lines 56–60)
BENEDICK (coming forward) This can be no trick. The conference was sadly borne. They have the truth of this from Hero. They seem to pity the lady; it seems her affections have their full bent. Love me?
(Act 2, Scene 3, lines 215–18)
Sometimes Shakespeare writes in verse, sometimes he writes in prose. As we saw earlier (here) with the Kent/Cornwall extract from King Lear, sometimes he switches from one to the other in the same scene, in the same conversation between two characters, and like a lot of the other innocuous-looking inconsistencies in Shakespeare’s writing, this can either be ignored, or be seen as a good character note.
With the King Lear example, in order to emphasise Kent’s switch from high, flowery language back to his commoner’s tongue, Shakespeare makes him swi
tch back to prose. Using Caius’ voice again, and taking away the beauty of verse, Kent’s reply is twice as powerful.
Shakespeare could have written Benedick’s speech in verse, and it might have looked something like this:
BENEDICK
This can be no trick. The conference was sadly borne.
They have the truth of this from Hero. They seem
To pity the lady; it seems her affections
Have their full bent. Love me?
But Shakespeare didn’t write it in verse. For some reason, for this moment in Benedick’s life, Shakespeare wanted him to speak in prose. Benedick speaks in verse elsewhere in the play, so why not here? Well, there are probably a dozen reasons. Verse would force the actor to deliver the lines more dramatically, and perhaps, as Benedick is alone on stage, he’s more relaxed and so he doesn’t feel the need to heighten the style of his speech.
Whatever the reason, the point is that there is always a reason why one character speaks in prose, another in verse, or the same character switches styles during a scene. (As we’ll see later, modern editors of Shakespeare sometimes change lines which are prose in the Folio to verse.) It’s one of a number of clues that Shakespeare left in his writing for his actors to find, so that they’d speak his words in the exact way he wanted them to, without his ever having to ask them directly.
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Verse or prose?
Carrying on the idea that Shakespeare used verse to make his kings sound kingly, it’s not surprising that the only plays he wrote entirely in verse are about kings:
King Edward III
King John
Richard II
Both sequels to King Henry VI are almost entirely written in verse, and Titus Andronicus, Richard III and Henry VIII also come close to being prose-less.
At the other end of the spectrum, none of his surviving plays is written entirely in prose.
The Merry Wives of Windsor has the greatest amount of prose, at 87 per cent, with Much Ado About Nothing and Twelfth Night next in line – but even 38 per cent of Twelfth Night is verse.
Verse seemed to bake Shakespeare’s (and, it would seem, his audience’s) cake more than prose …
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Scene 3
A cardiac unit
Unless it’s written down, it can be quite hard for us to tell the difference between verse and prose, and an Elizabethan audience might not have been able to notice the difference either, for a couple of very good reasons.
One, as I said earlier, they’d probably never have read the texts beforehand, so they wouldn’t be able to see that what they were listening to was written in poetry – and as I’ve just shown, it’s very easy to spot when written down.
And two, the beauty of iambic pentameter is that it’s the style of poetry that most closely resembles English speech.
I think that’s brilliant. At a time when the English language (as we know it today) was relatively new and exciting, the most popular style of poetry imitated its natural rhythm when spoken out loud. What’s even more exciting is that Shakespeare used this very human-sounding poetry to explore what it is to be human.
Shakespeare’s audience watched actors pretending to be people they weren’t, in situations that they’d probably never get to experience, wearing unusual clothes, often saying quite extraordinary things, but even when they were pretending to be kings, still sounding like you and me.
I said earlier that verse is a type of poetry that has a particular rhythm. Your heartbeat has a particular rhythm, too – a (hopefully!) regular weak-strong, weak-strong pulse. The natural rhythm of the English language is very similar to that – an alternating contrast between strong-sounding syllables and weak-sounding syllables. It should come as no surprise, then, that a lot of poetry written in English has this heartbeat-like rhythm to it. Prose also reflects the rhythm of everyday English speech but, unlike poetry, it doesn’t have regular rhythmical units, and there aren’t structured rules for the number of syllables per line, as we’re about to see.
Rhythm in poetry is known as metre; poetry with a steady, regular rhythm is known as metrical poetry. Here’s a classic example of such a thing:
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
(Sonnet 18, opening line)
When asking questions about a piece of metrical poetry, there are two things you need to find out:
— What kind of rhythm does it have?
— How many beats are there?
Now. The phrase iambic pentameter is a fancy way of answering these questions, and is actually saying a very simple thing: it’s telling you, in a complicated way, the kind of rhythm, and how many beats (or units of rhythm) there should be in the line.
The word meter in pentameter is the same word as metre, and it has the same meaning – it’s talking about a rhythmical line of poetry – but it unhelpfully has a different spelling.
The other half of the word – penta – is Greek and means five, so we know that in this rhythmical line of poetry there will be five things.
When people look at lines of poetry written in metre, they count in units of rhythm. A unit of rhythm is known as a foot – so they count in metrical feet. Usually, a pair of syllables makes up one metrical foot. It follows then that a line of verse that has ten syllables in it, as ours does, has five feet (which, as my mother would say, makes it difficult to buy shoes for):
A line of poetry with ten rhythmically ordered syllables (five metrical feet) is a line of pentameter. A line of poetry with four metrical feet is called tetrameter, three metrical feet trimeter, and so on.
Back to the two questions – we know how many beats there are (five), so what kind of rhythm is it?
We hear a rhythm when we hear a recurring pattern of strong and weak beats, so really we’re asking which are the strongly stressed syllables and which the weak?
There are several possibilities in metrical poetry, but here are the two main types of metrical feet (I’ve used BOLD CAPITALS to make it as clear as possible where the stronger stress is):
An iambic foot. In Greek, an iamb means a weak syllable followed by a strong (de-DUM). A naturally iambic word is com-PARE.
A trochaic foot. The opposite of an iamb, a trochee (pronounced TROH-key) means the syllables go strong-weak (DUM-de). A naturally trochaic word is E-asy. So is TRO-chee, for that matter.
If an iambic foot sounds like de-DUM, then five iambs together would look like this:
Say it out loud. One de-DUM every second, patting your hand on your leg every DUM. It doesn’t really matter how fast you say it, as long as the rhythm is constant:
de-DUM de-DUM de-DUM de-DUM de-DUM
That is a line of iambic pentameter – a line of metre with five iambic feet.
Ten syllables evenly stressed weak-STRONG, or stressed iambically, means that the weak stresses should always be on the odd syllables – the 1st, 3rd, 5th, 7th and 9th – and the strong stresses all on the even syllables – the 2nd, 4th, 6th, 8th and 10th (working out where the stresses are in Shakespeare’s speeches is tremendously important to an actor, as we’ll see later).
Going back to the two questions again, we know the opening line from Sonnet 18 has ten syllables (or five beats) in it, so it’s a line of pentameter. We know that the word compare is pronounced iambically (com-PARE), so we can assume the rest of the line is iambically stressed too:
Note that an iamb doesn’t have to sit over one word, e.g.,
de-DUM
mer’s day
Metrics are driven first and foremost by rhythm, not sense.
When looking at a piece of Shakespeare’s poetry, instead of writing de-DUM over the top of the words, we can just as easily show the weak and strong stresses a different way:
So now, marked up, the rhythm of a line of iambic pentameter looks like this:
And with the line from Sonnet 18:
It’s worth pointing out that if you were to say these lines in normal conversation, rather than in performance, th
e stresses might land differently. You could argue that, in terms of the sense of the line, instead of stressing I you could stress shall, making the question more important than the person who’s asking it, but that would mean stressing words against the rhythm Shakespeare wrote the line in, and, as we’ll see in a moment, you need to have an extremely good reason to go against the metre.
I’ll repeatedly mention how important it is for an actor to follow the metre – in fact there are rules, or guidelines I should say, for performing such a line of poetry that can help the audience more easily get at its meaning, and we’ll come to those guidelines in Act 5.
* * *
Just why was iambic pentameter so popular?
In the 1500s the iambic pentameter form exploded onto the public stage. It was being used both on private stages and in the Court from the 1560s – but it was always thought to be too intellectual a style by the general public.
Shakespeare, and his contemporaries, changed that.
Perhaps the reason why iambic pentameter became so popular for playwrights is that
it’s what is easy to say in one breath;
therefore it sounds as natural as possible;
therefore we hear something that is essentially human in it: the size of our lungs and the underlying pulse of our bodies is what this verse is built on;
and as far as learning goes, a line of iambic pentameter is within an easy memory span;
therefore the steady recurring rhythm makes it easy to memorise the lines – very useful when you’re performing six or seven different plays a week, as Shakespeare’s actors would have been doing …
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* * *
I think therefore iamb …