Shakespeare on Toast: Getting a Taste for the Bard
Page 9
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-DUMs 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
Deciding 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.
Without the contractions, things can get a bit stressful and you have to go for alternative rhythms:
It’s technically possible, but it’s a less natural, more awkward rhythm.
Contraction is a common trait in modern regular speech and informal writing, the most obvious example we still use probably being o’clock instead of o’th’clock (which in turn is contracted from of the clock) when telling time. Part of a word or a whole word is removed, letting two (sometimes three) words blend together. They’re easy to find in modern texts of Shakespeare because of the apostrophe.
It’s an easy thing to automatically correct, and many reading Shakespeare out loud for the first time pronounce, for example, th’allowance with four syllables:
Rather than:
It’s the same rule we discovered earlier when looking at the metrics of a line – if Shakespeare wanted a particular word spoken carefully, he wouldn’t contract it. If it’s contracted, it should be spoken quickly, and informally, like everyday speech. For example, the first line and a half of a speech from Macbeth (Act 1, Scene 7, lines 1–2), marked up, could be read like this:
The first line wants the attention: it’s a healthy line of ten syllables. If Shakespeare hadn’t contracted ’tis and ’twere (making it is and it were), it would be a line of twelve syllables.
Shakespeare wanted this a regular line of pentameter – though as you can see from the mark-up, despite the contractions helping to stress the important words like done, well and quickly, it’s still not evenly stressed. Why? Perhaps because the two sequences of weak syllables (when ’tis and the second It were) add pace to the lines – an appropriate effect for someone talking about being in a hurry.
An uneven yet regular line of metre, for a man who is becoming fairly uneven himself, and who is only a scene away from hallucinating a dagger …
If Shakespeare had wanted Macbeth to come onstage and speak slowly and carefully, he’d have written
If it were done when it is done, then it were well
Much more measured and controlled. Contraction brings speed: it makes characters speak faster than they would do if they were spelling out every syllable – a note for the actor, that the character is speaking (and so therefore thinking) quickly or is excited.
Contractions are a part of normal everyday speech, so in using them in his verse, Shakespeare knew that what is normally a very formal style of writing could sound much more colloquial. Not only that, it adds possible character notes for the actors, keeps the pace of the metre up, allows for the stress of particularly important words, and, with the associated informality, brings the audience in closer.
One of the great things about iambic pentameter is that because a strong stress usually falls on the last word of the line of metre, it acts as a vocal springboard into the next line. Try saying the two lines above together, with the stress on ’twere, instead of well as it should be, and you’ll see what I mean.
But if you’re not an actor, why am I getting you to act this? More to the point, what on earth does all this mean in practical terms, and what good does it do us when reading Shakespeare?
I’ve a good answer. This very elaborate way of writing poetry, because of the rules that govern it, tells the reader which words to stress when that piece of poetry is being read out loud. Telling the reader which words to stress is, for all intents and purposes, the same as someone directing an actor.
Of course, when you direct an actor, there’s more to it than ‘which words do you stress’. Sometimes you might want to tell them when to move, where to move to, who to stand close to. Perhaps, if you’re feeling particularly inventive in your capacity as director, you might want to start directing the emotions that the text requires your actors to act out.
Shakespeare found a w
ay not only to tell his actors which words to stress, but all the other things too.
This is why I’m taking so much time to explain the fundamentals of poetry, because once it’s clear what iambic pentameter actually is in practical terms, we’ll discover how Shakespeare directed his actors. This is the key to Shakespeare. Not in understanding Shakespeare – I hope I’ve made it clear that you can understand and enjoy Shakespeare without learning these literary terms and conceits – but in owning Shakespeare. Because what he did with this very popular style of poetry, this type of metre, was revolutionary.
He turned it on its head, made it do things that other writers didn’t, twisted it and played with it and broke every single one of the rules I’ve just explained to you, improvising like a great jazz player.
Scene 5
Breaking the law at Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club, London
Jazz music came from the blues, which in turn took a lot of its structure from classical music. Dance music, electronica, break-beat, ragga, garage, grunge, house, deep house, hip-hop, trip-hop, ambient trip-hop and countless others – all of them originate from the basic forms that classical music is based on.
Musicians often take an original form and put their own mark on it, changing and developing it into ‘something else’. Many musicians do it, but jazz musicians in particular are known for working in this way.
A jazz musician like Miles Davis, or a modern classical musician like Philip Glass, will often play the same section, or riff, of music over and over again, with slight variations every time, making it up as they go along. The slight change will surprise them and you, sometimes make you laugh because you weren’t expecting a sudden change, or that note in that place, because everything beforehand led you to expect that after A and B comes C, but the musician gives you Q.
Shakespeare did exactly the same: he learnt the rules of iambic pentameter, then seemed to take great delight in playing around as much as possible with the form. A lot of the reason for all the excitement about this is that although he wasn’t the only writer of the time who played with metre in this way, as we’ll see in Act 5, the subtleties that came from his playing with it are truly staggering.
A criticism often laid at the door of Christopher Marlowe, one of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, is that in his early writing he rarely broke the rules of the metre (the solid structure of iambic pentameter means that once you hit that de-DUM de DUM rhythm, you can keep going for hours) and that his characters’ speeches would endlessly roll on in straight, regular iambic pentameter:
de-DUM de-DUM de-DUM de-DUM de-DUM
de-DUM de-DUM de-DUM de-DUM de-DUM
de-DUM de-DUM de-DUM de-DUM de-DUM
de-DUM de-DUM de-DUM de-DUM de-DUM
Looks boring, doesn’t it? Some would say it sounds quite boring too. Whether or not this criticism is true, is not our concern. Everyone has to start somewhere. What really crumbles my cookie is what Shakespeare began to do when he got going, and Shakespeare did this: a speech would be rolling along quite innocently …
de-DUM de-DUM de-DUM de-DUM de-DUM
de-DUM de-DUM de-DUM de-DUM de-DUM
de-DUM de-DUM de-DUM
Then, of a sudden, Shakespeare would use a word that can only be pronounced, or stressed, STRONG-weak – DUM-de – like FEATH-er. And the speech would look – or more to the point sound – like this:
de-DUM de-DUM de-DUM de-DUM de-DUM
de-DUM de-DUM de-DUM de-DUM de-DUM
de-DUM de-DUM DUM-de
And as a member of the audience you hear those two DUMS together and think ‘Hang on! What was that? This is the Royal Iambic Pentameter after all! You can’t mess with that. I’ve spent ages learning what that means, you can’t change it now I’ve got the hang of it.’ Whatever that character has just said must have been really important to break such an important rule.
And that is exactly what Shakespeare realised.
He could help his actors – and more importantly his audience – and point them towards the important bits, stick a flag in them and say, ‘Hey, listen to this, if you remember this later it’ll help you understand why this character is doing what they’re doing.’
I suppose the modern equivalent would be a sudden chord of music in a soap opera, a character, unseen by her husband, turning towards the camera and looking distraught, knowing the child she’s carrying isn’t really his …
Here’s a piece from The Taming of the Shrew (Act 4, Scene 2, lines 2–6) to illustrate the point. Kate’s complaining that she’s been starved by her new husband:
KATE
The more my wrong, the more his spite appears.
What, did he marry me to famish me?
Beggars that come unto my father’s door
Upon entreaty have a present alms,
If not, elsewhere they meet with charity.
Count the syllables of the lines of poetry.
You should find that there are five lines of ten syllables (five lines of pentameter); I do not say five lines of iambic pentameter …
If we were to mark up the first few lines with × and they might look like this:
First of all, the marks back up our pure pentameter claim. There are five × and five = ten syllables per line.
Also, Shakespeare has somehow made the most important words like wrong, spite, and marry even syllables (and so more strongly stressed when spoken), and the less important words like the and to all odd syllables.
Something else that’s interesting: there’s one word in the speech which isn’t the ‘right’ way round – to make it clearer I put the first syllable of the word in bold type. If this is pure iambic pentameter, you’d have to say begg-AR, stressing the second syllable. But that doesn’t sound right. Not only does it not sound right to our ear, the word beggar has never been pronounced that way, now or 400 years ago; the stress has always been on the first syllable of the word.
If Shakespeare had wanted the word stressed normally and not upset the metre, he could have written A beggar … and the metre would force the natural stress of BEGG-ar.
But he didn’t. Putting the word first in the line means we can’t say it iambically as begg-AR. He’s given the line a DUM-de opener – a trochee.
Why did he want a trochee there? It’s the only trochee in the whole speech …
What if Shakespeare deliberately switched the stress of the first foot in that sentence from an iamb to a trochee, forcing a brief change in rhythm and so making the actor pick the word out from among the rest, to make it clear how uncomfortable and unusual a thing begging is for Kate …?
Kate, despite being the shrew (= troublesome individual) of the play’s title, is a lady of a family with money, and so the idea of her begging, or even knowing how to beg, would be ridiculous to her. A complete unknown. And the trochaic stress emphasises that nicely.
Interesting idea, isn’t it?
Now I want to categorically state something here: I’m not saying Shakespeare was sitting and writing, thinking ‘Oh, I’ll slip in a nice trochee here, that’ll go down well with my actors, and the audience might notice something too.’ Of course he didn’t. Writing this way was as natural to him as changing TV channels with a remote control is to you or me. I doubt he ever had to think about it.
That was quite a detailed look at one word in one speech. To go to the other extreme for a moment, take a look at this extract from King Lear:
LEAR
Why should a Dog, a Horse, a Rat have life,
And thou no breath at all? Thou’lt come no more,
Never, never, never, never, never.
Pray you undo this Button.
(Act 5, Scene 3, lines 304–7)
This is from right at the end of the play: Lear is dying, his two eldest daughters have died, everything is a mess. Most importantly, his favourite daughter has been hanged, and her body is in his arms.
It’s a heartbreaking moment, possibly my favourite moment from the whole canon, for two reasons. The first
is that Shakespeare takes Lear from the macro to the micro in the space of two lines – from talking about never seeing his daughter alive ever again, to asking one of his servants to undo a button on his shirt, because he’s having trouble breathing.
The second reason I like this moment so much has to do with the metre (surprise, surprise).
Here’s one possible reading for these lines:
We start with two regular lines of iambic pentameter.
We finish with a breathless mix of stresses.
In the middle, we have the same word repeated over and over. Notice though, that it’s not iambic (we don’t pronounce never as ne-VER).
In the midst of all the pain, all the anguish, as his heart is breaking – to point out just how entirely screwed up the world at large is, but particularly how torn apart Lear himself is – Shakespeare gives him an entire line of trochaic pentameter in a play (don’t forget) that is supposed to be written in iambic pentameter.
Genius.
* * *
Never say never again
When you’ve the strength for it, you’re too young, when you’ve the age, you’re too old. It’s a bugger, isn’t it?
Sir Laurence Olivier, On Acting (1986)
Apparently first acted by Richard Burbage – Shakespeare’s lead actor, who also first played Hamlet and Othello – playing King Lear has been described as being similar to climbing Everest.
After losing everything, going mad, recovering, then seeing your favourite daughter die, Shakespeare gives you this beautiful line. Sir Robert Stephens, Sir Ian McKellen, Sir Nigel Hawthorne and Sir Ian Holm are a few of the greats to have played this part in recent years, and they all spoke this line completely differently. The sudden shift from iambic pentameter to trochaic nearly always brings a staggering shift in emotion with it, whether the line is whispered, gets louder as it progresses, is shouted, or – well, the options are endless …