Shakespeare’s Language and Art – II – A. J. Drake's Shakespeare Site

Shakespeare’s Language and Art, Part 2 of 2

Shakespeare’s Iambic Pentameter Blank Verse

Meter. What is blank verse? It’s Shakespeare’s go-to pattern or meter for conveying dramatic dialogue, and it makes up the great majority of his plays’ content. This pattern is made up of a series of unstressed and stressed syllables, divided into five distinct but interlocking units. Iambic pentameter is the technical term for blank verse. Iambic pentameter lines will contain five units (called “feet”), with each consisting of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. This unit is called an iamb. [1] So a regular iambic foot consists of a pair of syllables, the first one unaccented ( ˘ ) and the second accented ( ʹ or ˉ ). For ease, we may prefer just to bold the syllable to show that it is accented, and leave it unbolded to show that it is unaccented. [2] A regular line of iambic pentameter looks like this, with “|” used as a separator between each foot:

|˘ ʹ | ˘ ʹ | ˘ ʹ | ˘ ʹ | ˘ ʹ | or….

Beat. All English verse is rather like music in the sense that it has a beat. The beat of blank verse is in keeping with the strongly accentual quality of ordinary English. The basic beat will run, as shown above, de Dum de Dum de Dum de Dum de Dum. As with music, you can tap your foot to such a regular, strong beat. So the beat is the constant, steady pulse of the verse line. Remember these lines from “Rock and Roll Music” by Chuck Berry: “It’s got a back-beat, you can’t lose it….”

Rhythm. The rhythm of a line of poetry refers to the movement of sounds flowing across the basic pattern. The rhythm is established by the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables as we move from one foot to the next through to the end of the metrical line. It may be easiest to talk about rhythm if we suggest that a long series of perfectly metrical iambic pentameter lines, pronounced in a sing-song fashion, would soon become tiresome. We would only be bringing to audibility the barebones, taxonomic pattern of the meter itself. No one likes monotony. To think of rhythm is to think of a certain complexity, a certain sophistication, of the “notes” that play across a basic, unvariegated framework.

What is a poet’s concern with metrical patterns and rhythms? Poets want to convey a certain meaning with a certain tone or attitude, so they will of necessity vary the stresses in ways that best allow this to happen. Most verse lines generate a rhythm that differs strategically from the bare “sing-song” metrical pattern, thus adding variety. The underlying beat will stay the same—it’s what we keep coming home to: the basic metrical pattern (iambic pentameter) will be there in the background to guide us, but the rhythm may shift to suit the poet’s purpose, thereby adding variety and priming our attention. That seems like an adequate way to understand the interplay between meter, beat, and rhythm. [3]

How can we describe the “variations” used by the poet? Poetics offers several rearrangements of stress [4] within a given foot. Aside from the iamb itself ( ˘ ʹ ), which is the most common unit, [5] the most common substitutions are the anapest and the trochee, with occasional use of the dactyl (adjective: dactylic), spondee (adjective: spondaic) and the pyrrhic foot:

Anapest      ˘ ˘ ʹ   a very common variation for an iamb
Trochee       ʹ ˘      a fairly common variation for an iamb
Dactyl          ʹ ˘ ˘ epic or heroic verse is in dactylic hexameter

Spondee ʹ ʹ common in classical verse, occasional in modern
Pyrrhic ˘ ˘ common in classical verse, occasional in modern

A number of benefits flow from using iambic pentameter blank verse. The first is that any kind of iambic pattern sounds close to everyday speech—if you listen for an iambic flow in English conversations, you’ll often hear it.

Aside from the everyday quality of blank verse, there’s also a sense of freedom from the demands of rhyming. Milton, who didn’t care to be always hemmed in by rhyme schemes, says it best in his preface to Paradise Lost:

THE Measure is English Heroic Verse without Rime, as that of Homer in Greek, and Virgil in Latin; Rhime being no necessary Adjunct or true Ornament of Poem or good Verse, in longer Works especially, but the Invention of a barbarous Age, to set off wretched matter and lame Meeter; grac’t indeed since by the use of some famous modern Poets, carried away by Custom, but much to thir own vexation, hindrance, and constraint to express many things otherwise, and for the most part worse then else they would have exprest them. [6]

A third benefit associated with blank verse is that it can free up the poet to adopt a searching or questioning tone. Neoclassical rhyming heroic couplets are very fine, but there’s a certain declamatory attitude, a self-certitude, to them. A few of Alexander Pope’s excellent heroic couplets from his “Essay on Criticism” will make the point:

True wit is nature to advantage dressed;
What oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed;
Something, whose truth convinced at sight we find
That gives us back the image of our mind.

Constraining oneself to this verse pattern, one would be hard pressed to convey any tone other than “Listen up, a timeless truth is being propounded!” But that kind of certitude isn’t usually what Shakespeare means to convey. Most often, plain, supple blank verse suits him best. To be fair, there are various rhyme schemes—the Petrarchan sonnet, the English sonnet, the Spenserian stanza, and others—that do allow a poet to strike up various moods. It’s just that for conveying dramatic action, blank verse functions as a blank slate: dramatists can do whatever they like with it.

But to move on from the above definitions and justifications, how should we proceed with the marking-up of a verse passage for an actor’s practical performance?

Below is a typical blank-verse passage in a Shakespeare play, Julius Caesar. The lines are spoken in Act 1, Scene 1 by the angry tribune Marullus, who is determined to give the common people of Rome a piece of his mind for “mak[ing] holiday to see Caesar.” Let’s start by scanning the passage merely to show the bare accentual pattern. All we want to do is show that this is indeed iambic pentameter, and to see if when we read it out in that basic pattern, any of the accents fall on words in an unnatural way:

It seems as if the pattern leads to all the words being pronounced with their accents just as we would say them in everyday, non-poetical use. In other words, the verse pattern isn’t making us mispronounce any of the words just to suit the metrical pattern. [8] In the strictest metrical sense, then, this is very regular blank verse.

But of course, we aren’t going to read the lines this way in actual performance. Pronouncing the lines as strictly iambic might honor the back-beat, the pattern, but it would overwhelm any nuanced sense we may hope to draw from the passage, leaving us with a comical sing-song recitation that would make the audience laugh at us.

How, then, shall we play the music off of the “back beat” of strict iambic pentameter? Let’s read the passage for its meaning, its sense, feeling, and attitude, and then see how it looks when scanned for practical performance. We know that Murellus is angry with the plebeians for deserting their workday to celebrate Caesar. It helps to know that Murellus clearly prefers Pompey, Caesar’s murdered rival, over the current “Great Man”: the “tribune of the people” is aggrieved at how easily these commoners have forgotten Pompey, whom they once adored as they now fawn upon Caesar. Let’s speak the passage with that information in mind. Here is one possible scanning result:

There are a relatively small number of changes from the barebones pattern, but they make a difference. For example, in the second line, “O” is accented, and “you” is unaccented, making a trochee, while “hard hearts” has been changed to a spondee, “hard hearts.” In practice, “hearts” would probably be pronounced with somewhat more emphasis than “hard,” but it’s hard to indicate that difference using standard type. So the most accurate way to describe this unit would be “semi-spondaic.”

The foot “Knew you” is accented as a trochee, “Knew you,” with strong emphasis to indicate Murellus’s angry, condescending tone towards the wayward plebeians. In the fourth line, “Have you” would probably be pronounced in a very light, almost unstressed manner, and then “climb’d up” would be pronounced as a trochee. In a few of the lines, the final foot is basically unstressed, i.e. treated as a pyrrhic unit.

Opinions may vary, but this seems like a reasonable estimation of how to pronounce the above lines in keeping with the desired feeling and tone. Along with pregnant pauses, gestures, and other things in a trained actor’s bag of tricks, such a reading captures the meaning and the feeling that we would like to draw from the passage. The audience, we hope, will understand from this opening passage that Caesar’s ascendancy has made him not only a lot of fair-weather, holiday-loving friends but also serious enemies, men who do not mean him well.

Incidentally, there is another obvious way that an actor’s reading will affect the basic metrical pattern: actors will almost certainly respect a given line’s internal punctuation (commas, periods, dashes, exclamation points), which may indicate that a thought has come to an end, or taken a sudden turn, and so forth. The passage from Julius Caesar that we are working with is actually pretty smooth, but just to give an example, the words, “Knew you not Pompey?” might occasion a short pause afterwards, giving the actor a chance to express his feeling of exasperation with the commonfolk’s behavior. In some cases, however, a verse line may be split between two characters, and so break off right in the middle. This kind of “split line” might call for a somewhat longer pause. Example from Julius Caesar:

Brutus: “What means this shouting? I do fear the people
Choose Caesar for their king.”

Cassius: “Ay, do you fear it?”

Brutus and Cassius share line 80, which if strung together would be “Choose Caesar for their king. Ay, Do you fear it?” In this case, the scansion for basic patterning seems to run, “Choose Caes- | ar for | their king. | Ay, Do | you fear it?” | But clearly, in the more nuanced “performance-oriented scansion,” this line will undergo some changes in its practical stress patterning. Perhaps the last two feet could run, | Ay, Do | you fear it?” | That makes for a trochee and an amphibrach (or iamb with a feminine ending).

In sum, what have we learned from this guide? Well, a good deal of pedantic, pettifogging ink has been spilled over the centuries about “scansion” and “prosody,” along with some brilliant commentary on poetics in the broadest sense. But as readers who just want to get the most out of our experience studying Shakespeare and other Elizabethan-Jacobean playwrights, all we really need to do is read dramatic verse for its sense, including whatever we can gather from the immediate context of the lines in question regarding feeling, attitude, tone, purpose, and so forth.

We will use our knowledge (of the words in the text, of human nature, etc.) and our common sense, and if we do that, we will get the accents right almost every time. The iambic pentameter or some other pattern will give us our starting point, and we’ll take things from there.

Remember, too, the importance in Shakespeare of antithesis, which we can define as “setting the word against the word” in a way that ensures the memorable quality of the speech. [9] An ear for antithesis is vital to any good reader of Shakespearean verse.

Finally, let’s have a quick look at a form that Shakespeare uses in addition to blank verse in his plays. He often casts characters’ dialogue in prose form. Sometimes he does this to suit the characters (they may be working-class) or some less than elegantly poetical situation, but in truth, there’s no neat rule for when Shakespeare uses prose. Still, prose is more conversational, and less formal. It seems like language that is stepping back from the somewhat elevated status we give it when we classify it as poetry. [10]

Below is a passage spoken by Leontes’s counselor Camillo in The Winter’s Tale. When you scan it, you’ll easily discern that it does not fit into a regular pattern. Let’s use the Folger Shakespeare Library’s online copy, slightly edited but respecting the line breaks as given to suit the original Folio editors’ needs: [11]

Sicilia cannot shew himselfe over-kind to Bohe-
mia: They were trayn’d together in their Child-hoods;
and there rooted betwixt them then such an affection,
which cannot chuse but braunch now….

The very first line has 16-17 syllables (depending on how we pronounce “Sicilia,” and we can’t scan the line as iambic without having to wrench words from their ordinary accentual pattern. The second line would work as trochaic pentameter, but that’s the reverse of iambic. This is more or less plain, ordinary speech, not poetry per se, and to convey the basic information that Camillo has to offer, Shakespeare evidently thought prose would be the most appropriate choice.

Prose, then, is another form to be aware of as we read Shakespeare’s plays. Textual scholars have pointed out that he tends to be comfortable using more of it in his later plays, but he uses it in the earlier plays as well.

Endnotes

[1] The term iambic is somewhat uncertain in derivation; OED suggests that ἴαμβος (iambos) derives from the Greek verb ἰάπτω, iaptō, I attack verbally. (Greek satirists used iambic trimeter.) But Wiktionary says, “this could just be folk etymology.”

[2] Strictly, we should use ˉ for classical Latin and Greek meters since this marking indicates syllabic quantities (length of the syllable in pronunciation), not stress-based accents.

[3] From the Greek rhythmós, ῥυθμός, “any measured flow or symmetry”; verb rheō, ῥέω, “flow, run, etc.”

[4] These rearrangements of stresses are sometimes called “substitutions,” though some people find that term rather confusing.

[5] The usual estimate is that around 80-90% of foot-units in Shakespeare’s plays are iambs.

[6] Milton, John. “The Verse.” Prefatory matter to Paradise Lost. The Milton Reading Room. Accessed 9/18/2024.

[7] This unstressed final syllable need not add another foot to the verse; it’s called a “feminine ending.” Technically, a feminine ending resulting in a three-syllable metrical foot | ˘ ʹ ˘ | could be called an amphibrach, if one wants to use this rather arcane description.

[8] Perhaps “ba-tle-ments” and “chim-ney-tops” seems odd, but in ordinary speech, we do place a slight accent upon the final syllable of these words.

[9] For comments on antithesis, please see the first of these two guides on Shakespeare’s art and language.

[10] That is, when it has a set pattern of accented and unaccented syllables, rhymed couplets or intricate rhyme schemes, etc.

[11] See the online Folger Shakespeare Library’s facsimile copy of the 1623 Folio, and go to electronic page 297. The line breaks in such passages, by the way, generally correspond in printed texts to the amount of space that was available in the authoritative copy from which the editors and printers are working. Still, we respect these breaks when quoting Shakespeare’s prose.