Shakespeare on Toast: Getting a Taste for the Bard (14 page)

It’s worth pointing out that if you were to say these lines in normal conversation, rather than in performance, the 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

I think therefore iamb …

The rhythm that this pairing of syllables makes isn’t too dissimilar from your heartbeat. Put your hand on your heart, now, and feel the rhythm it makes. If you’re sitting still, and you haven’t just been running a marathon, very likely it will be a steady
de
-
DUM
,
de
-
DUM
,
de
-
DUM
about once a second. As we just saw, five of those
de
-
DUM
s is the rhythm of a line of iambic pentameter.

A not particularly poetic example of iambic pentameter in modern, conversational English would be:

In the English language there are words where a syllable is naturally stronger, where the stress falls on one part and it feels odd to put it on the other: try saying
de
-
DUM
and put the stress on the
de
–
DE
-
dum
. It’s not so easy. Putting the stress on the
DUM
, on every second syllable,
should
be easier because it’s mimicking the natural rhythm of English.

Some say that putting the stress on the non-standard part of a word makes you sound like you’re new to the language. In fact, putting the stress on the abnormal part of the word is a very common mistake for someone learning English as a second language: say the word
feather
, and stress the -
er
instead of the
feath
-. It’ll sound odd, maybe a bit like someone from France speaking English for the first time:
feath
-
ER
.

There are some words where you can move the stress around, and it doesn’t matter so much. Some people say
re
-
SEARCH
, others say
RE
-
search. Ad-ver
-
TISE
-
ment
, which sounds like American English, and
ad
-
VER
-
tise-ment
, which sounds like British English.

Scene 4

A maternity ward

D
eciding which word has a strong stress and which has a weak is often very straightforward. The even syllables are strong, the odd are weak. That’s quite a structured framework within which to write, and as a result working in that steady metrical rhythm can impose certain things on your writing.

It can make you invent new words to fit the rhythm, and it can make you shorten or lengthen words. It can also affect how you order your words, particularly if you want to make sure a certain word gets a stronger stress.

Vasty
is a good example of how Shakespeare invented a new word so as not to upset the flow of the metre. The word
vast
already existed, but in the opening Chorus speech of
Henry V
(lines 11–12) he needed a two-syllable word that expressed the same ‘wide-open’ quality of
vast
to make the metre work:

The rhythm bounces along nicely. He could have used
vast
in its original form:

But with two strong stresses together, the rhythm stumbles. If you want a particular word and the sense it conveys, but it hasn’t enough syllables, then just make it longer –
vast
becomes
vasty
.

Sometimes the demands of the metre can make you add a syllable in a different way. In this line from
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
(Act 2, Scene 1, line 26), you can see how an -
ed
ending is needed to make the rhythm work:

This occurs hundreds of times in Shakespeare’s plays. Play editors often mark an -
ed
ending with an accent, -
èd
, as above, if the metre calls for you to stress it. Stressing the -
ed
keeps the iambic rhythm – it doesn’t mean that the -
ed
should be given a particularly strong vocal stress, just that it shouldn’t be ignored. To ignore it would do this:

Say it out loud, patting the rhythm in the
de-
DUM
de-
DUM
way I explained earlier. The rhythm staggers on
lov’d boy
. Adding the -
ed
ending and making it a two-syllable word –
lov-ed
rather than
lov’d
– keeps the metre regular.

The opposite of this is to remove a syllable and make a
contraction
– shortening a word to fit the metre. For example, contracting
overleaps
to
o’erleaps
(and so changing it from a three-syllable word to a two-syllable word) can have two helpful consequences: it can give a line ten syllables in total rather than eleven (and so keep the metre regular); and it can force the stress of one particular word in a line, rather than another:

This is a straightforward example from
Hamlet
(Act 2, Scene 2, lines 602–3), using similar contractions to ones we still use in speech today. Contracting
play is
to
play’s
and
I will
to
I’ll
– contracting two-syllable words to one – keeps the lines with ten syllables, and forces stress onto the important words like
catch, thing
and
King
. It’s a rhyming couplet, too, and making the metre help the rhyme is what it’s all about in rhyming couplets.