Shakespeare on Toast: Getting a Taste for the Bard (13 page)

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 …

Scene 3

A cardiac unit

U
nless 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):

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: