by Ben Crystal
* * *
Scene 6
A kitchen: 154 ways to cook an egg
Talking of metrical genius – and ducking aside from the plays for a moment – I need to take a sonnet interlude. Shakespeare wrote 154 sonnets that we know of, and there is a lot of academic discussion about them.
The three most common themes are: why did he write them, why did he write so many of them, and what do they mean? In other words, are the sonnets about him and the people he was in love with, or are the characters completely fictional? Again, we’re back to trying to divine the man from his work.
There are hundreds of books discussing what the story of the sonnets is, whether the Dark Lady character was a mistress of Shakespeare’s, or based on someone he knew (25 of the sonnets are addressed to a woman commonly referred to as the ‘Dark Lady’), whether Shakespeare himself is actually one of the characters he writes about, and whether the sonnets reveal his supposed homosexuality.
None of this is important to me. I’m fascinated by what he did with the metre in this little canon of work.
He seems to have written most, or at least begun to write them, over a two-year period from 1594 when the plague hit London and the theatres were closed.
Even though he was at the beginning of his writing career, he’d already begun to realise that iambic pentameter can be pretty flexible; that the rules that govern it are open to a certain amount of ‘negotiation’. Or, as Shakespeare seemed to have decided, a lot of negotiation, and his sonnets are a good case in point.
A standard English sonnet is a form of verse strictly consisting of fourteen lines of iambic pentameter. These fourteen lines are traditionally broken up into three sections (known as stanzas) of four lines (a stanza of four lines is called a quatrain), with six alternating rhymes, followed by a final rhyming couplet!
Confused? It’s a whole lot simpler when you look at it like this: a sonnet’s rhyme scheme goes
abab cdcd efef gg
The different letters of the alphabet represent different rhymes: a rhymes with a, b with b, and so on. Here’s Sonnet 18, a classic (and rather famous) abab cdcd efef gg sonnet:
quatrain 1
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
a
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
b
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
a
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:
b
quatrain 2
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
c
And often is his gold complexion dimmed,
d
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
c
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimmed:
d
quatrain 3
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
e
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;
f
Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
e
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:
f
rhyming couplet
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
g
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
g
It’s worth pointing out that temperate and date would have been pronounced differently, and so rhymed much better in Shakespeare’s time, but that small point aside, this is the time-honoured way a normal, conventional English sonnet should go. There’s no arguing with it. If you wanna write an English sonnet you write fourteen lines, you write them iambically, and you use the abab cdcd efef gg rhyme scheme. End of.
However, of the 154 known sonnets Shakespeare wrote:
one of the sonnets doesn’t use the standard rhyme scheme: Sonnet 126 has just six rhyming couplets;
one (Sonnet 145) is written with four beats per line instead of five, i.e., iambic tetrameter instead of iambic pentameter;
one sonnet (20) has eleven syllables in every line. A line of metre with an extra syllable is known as having a feminine ending (interestingly, the sonnet is primarily about a woman);
only one of the sonnets (150) was written in standard iambic pentameter, i.e., a standard fourteen lines of ten syllables, with only iambic feet.
Think about that for a moment: he’s supposed to be writing in iambic pentameter, but as iambic pentameter goes, he plays only one pure song of it (with Sonnet 150) and riffs around the form for the other 153. I’m not going to get into this too deeply, but I’m keen to point out just how much he played around with the style.
A very good friend of mine called Will Sutton, delighted with his initials one day, learnt all 154 of Shakespeare’s sonnets off by heart. As well as being profoundly clever, he has a very good party-piece.
Will thinks that Shakespeare wrote 154 sonnets because that’s the maximum number of syllables there can be in a sonnet:
a standard sonnet has fourteen lines of ten syllables = 140 syllables in total;
a sonnet that has a feminine ending on every line has eleven syllables in every line: fourteen lines of eleven syllables = 154 syllables.
There are never more than 154 syllables in any of Shakespeare’s sonnets … Why not have 154 mini-experiments in sonnet writing?
It’s an interesting idea. Suddenly, this body of work looks like the writing of someone trying to work out exactly what this style of poetry could do. What could it take before it broke? Is it possible, when he’s supposed to be writing in iambic pentameter, to take two syllables away from every line – so four strong beats per line instead of five? Well, he has a go with Sonnet 145. Here are the first five lines (I’ve added a syllable count before each line, and a suggested stress mark-up):
It’s the only sonnet in the canon written in this metrical form. When Will Sutton performs it, he raps it – and the four-beat, slightly a-rhythmic form does suit a rap beat rather well. You’ve never heard a Shakespeare sonnet until you’ve heard it rapped …
The sonnets are important because Shakespeare played with iambic pentameter in exactly the same way in his plays. A lot of the fundamental tricks of the writing trade that Shakespeare played with as a playwright, he seemed to try out first in the sonnets.
We’ll never know for sure what his intention was in writing them, but it’s clear to me that at least part of his plan was to see how far he could go with the metre, playing and improvising, jazz-like, before launching into the creation of a rather fine canon of work.
Scene 7
An orchestra pit
If you look at all of Shakespeare’s plays over the twenty years or so he was writing, you can see that there is a steady change. While the verse in his early plays was a very standard and fairly unsurprisingly solid iambic pentameter, after the theatrical hiatus due to the plague and two years writing sonnets and playing with the metre, his verse becomes more and more complex, and much less predictable. It took him time and practice to hone and learn his craft.
Take a look at this speech from A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c. 1594), and then one from Macbeth (written much later in Shakespeare’s career, in 1606):
PUCK
The King doth keep his revels here tonight.
Take heed the Queen come not within his sight,
For Oberon is passing fell and wrath
Because that she as her attendant hath
A lovely boy stolen from an Indian king.
She never had so sweet a changeling,
And jealous Oberon would have the child
Knight of his train, to trace the forests wild.
But she perforce withholds the lovèd boy,
Crowns him with flowers, and makes him all her joy.
(A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act 2, Scene 2, lines 18–27)
MACBETH
If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well
It were done quickly. If the assassination
&nb
sp; Could trammel up the consequence, and catch
With his surcease success – that but this blow
Might be the be-all and the end-all! – here,
But here, upon this bank and shoal of time,
We’d jump the life to come. But in these cases
We still have judgement here – that we but teach
Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return
To plague the inventor. This even-handed justice
Commends the ingredience of our poisoned chalice
To our own lips. He’s here in double trust …
(Macbeth, Act 1, Scene 7, lines 1–12)
Look at where the full stops are in Puck’s speech, then look at where they are in Macbeth’s speech; I’ve made the end of the sentences bold, to emphasise the point.
As Shakespeare got more sophisticated with his use of metre, so too did the structure of the lines. Without even beginning to take either speech apart or look at what any of it means, a quick glance will show you that the former is fairly evenly laid out, and the latter kinda all over the place.
If we assume Shakespeare is a grand master of iambic pentameter (and he was), then if he wanted a thought to finish at the end of a line of metre, he could work it so it did. If he didn’t, and he made a thought end halfway through a line of metre, he must have done so intentionally.
Following that assumption, if the thoughts are clear and simple, then they’ll finish at the end of a line of metre:
The King doth keep his revels here tonight.
is a very good example of that. If we take a thought from Macbeth’s speech:
This even-handed justice
Commends the ingredience of our poisoned chalice
To our own lips.
you can see that it spills into three lines of metre, starting and finishing halfway through a metrical line.
If a thought finishing at the end of a metrical line implies clear, simple, straightforward thinking, then a mid-line ending implies hurried, unclear, confused thinking.
Both are great character notes.
A mid-line ending is, essentially, a character interrupting themselves (or being interrupted by others). Halfway through one thought, something else occurs to them, and they go off on a tangent. The speech above from Macbeth has a couple of examples of this:
We’d jump the life to come. But in these cases
We still have judgement here – that we but teach
Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return
To plague the inventor. This even-handed justice
Commends the ingredience of our poisoned chalice
To our own lips. He’s here in double trust …
Mid-line endings only really start to happen in a more focused way later in Shakespeare’s writing, as he got used to what he could do with the metre. Thought and (metrical) line go together in Shakespeare’s early writing, as the Dream extract shows. Later, the thoughts overwhelm the lines, as in Macbeth’s speech.
Shakespeare took this breaking up of the metre further with shared lines, where a character’s line finishes halfway through a line of metre, and the next character picks up the other half of the metrical line. There’s an example immediately after the speech we just looked at from Macbeth – again, I’ve provided a syllable count:
A line of ten syllables, split evenly, so the actors know that (in order to keep the metre bouncing along nice and regularly) Lady Macbeth should come straight in with her line as soon as Macbeth has spoken his.
We know this to be the case because there are plenty of occasions where Shakespeare doesn’t want his actors to immediately come in with their line. In Act 3, Scene 4 of Macbeth, when Macbeth sees Banquo’s ghost at the banqueting table, he speaks to the Ghost:
MACBETH
Thou canst not say I did it; never shake
Thy gory locks at me.
ROSS
Gentlemen, rise. His highness is not well.
(Macbeth, Act 3, Scene 4, lines 49–51)
Ross has a line of ten syllables. Macbeth’s first line is a line of ten syllables. The first word in each line is capitalised. It’s definitely in iambic pentameter. Macbeth’s second line is only six syllables long, so in order to make sure the regular de-DUM de-DUM rhythm of the metre isn’t thrown out of sync, the actor playing Ross has to wait two beats (marked in bold with x and ):
Perhaps Macbeth is entranced, or stunned in fear by the ghost; perhaps Ross is equally transfixed to see his king acting so strangely. Whatever reason the actors give, the two-beat gap in the metre is there, and needs to be filled somehow. More on that in Act 5.
In Shakespeare’s earlier writing, these shared lines were mostly used for characters to interrupt each other; in his later writing, he realised he could make it mean much more, and he understood that he could use these metrical nuances to actually orchestrate the pace of a scene.
It was very clear to his actors what he was doing. He was directing them.
Act 5
Enjoy the Play
Scene 1
A London printers, 1622
Here’s a question: how do you direct a company of actors if you’re dead?
As I touched on earlier, if you’re like Shakespeare, you’ll leave clues in your writing, a Da Vinci Code-like treasure map telling your actors what to do when.
The theatre company Shakespeare worked with, The Lord Chamberlain’s Men (later called The King’s Men) had been together since 1594; and it was men – women weren’t allowed to act on stage, so young boy-actors played all the female parts. That company of players carried on working together, apart from a few changes of actors, for most of Shakespeare’s writing career, and would have performed over a hundred plays together.
This group would have known each other incredibly well, and understood how each other worked intimately. As would Shakespeare: when he wrote his plays, he wrote them knowing his actors would be performing them, so he wrote for them as much as he did for his audience.
A writer watching [his own work] wants to see the actors relishing the language.
Harold Pinter, Working With Pinter, 2007
This flexibility in his writing is clear from the way Shakespeare’s clown character changed over the course of his writing. William Kemp was the clown with The Chamberlain’s Men – and so Shakespeare’s main clown – from 1594 to 1599, and was the first to play Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing. Robert Armin took over from Kemp as the company’s clown in 1599, and was the first Feste in Twelfth Night.
It seems that Kemp was a gifted comic, and Armin much more of a singer, so following the change in cast, the clown character in the plays noticeably shifted from a wordy slapstick-clown to the more solemn, singing, melancholic-clown: the writer following the actor’s individual personality.
Scene 2
A graveyard
Had Shakespeare been interested in fame beyond death, he might have done something to make sure his plays survived him. Ben Jonson oversaw the printing of his own collected works in 1616, but Shakespeare did nothing to help his own writing live on.
Fortunately, as we saw in Act 1, his actors saw fit to preserve the works, and thank goodness they did. Thanks, not just because we now have the plays, but because, with the arrival of the Puritans’ rule of the land soon after Shakespeare died, there is now a 40-year hole in theatre history.
Working back from the 20th century, we have actors who’ve worked with actors who’ve worked with actors and so on, right back to the Restoration period, in 1660. Acting techniques passed on and on.
Before 1660? Nothing. Almost all the acting traditions from Shakespeare’s time are lost. There are tales of actors from 1660 who could remember contemporaries of Shakespeare, but the lessons that were passed down from actor to actor in Shakespeare’s time were lost when Civil War broke out in 1642. England became a Commonwealth and the Puritan Parliament, desperate to maintain control of the people, issued an ordinance suppressing all stage plays: theatre,
the use of fine clothes and ‘flippant’ behaviour – all obviously great sins in the eyes of the Puritans – were banned. Soon afterwards, the Globe was torn down.
The Puritans followed up that little coup de grace with an order in 1647 stating that all theatres were to be destroyed, all actors to be arrested and flogged, and anyone caught trying to see a play to be fined. The art, the style and the techniques that Shakespeare wrote for and, likewise, the writing that his actors acted, were being forgotten, and were nearly lost forever.
Nearly. A few years before theatre – and Christmas – was banned, two of Shakespeare’s lead actors thought it might be time to remember their old dead chum Will in style. So what if he never showed any interest in having his plays printed up …
Plus, it might make a few quid.
The First Folio of 1623 … Using the clues that Shakespeare wrote into the First Folio, it’s possible to work out, or at least get an idea of, how Shakespeare’s company worked. The Folio is the closest thing we have to Shakespeare. Although it was printed seven years after his death, it was edited by Henry Condell and John Hemmings, two of his lead actors who would have worked very closely with him. If anyone would know how his plays should be printed, it would be the people who had acted in them.
I know actors who swear by it, and I know actors who don’t know what it is. The First Folio is a number of things, and at first glance it can seem rather daunting.
It’s not like any book you’ll be used to. It’s big, it’s heavy, and the page numbering is all over the place. There are online versions of the Folio text that are slightly more user-friendly, but then there are still the unusual spellings and typeface to deal with.