Terry Eagleton's example of the literary, the first line of Keats's poem “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, is also an example of the most common metrical pattern in Shakespeare's writing: iambic pentameter. Iambic pentameter structures a pattern of five paired unstressed/STRESSED syllables that we usually render as “de-DUM, de-DUM, de-DUM, de-DUM, de-DUM”: hence “Thou STILL unRAVished BRIDE of QUIetNESS.” There are thousands of iambic pentameter lines in Shakespeare: “But soft, what light through yonder window breaks” (Romeo and Juliet 2.1.44) or “When I do count the clock that tells the time” (Sonnet 12) or “If music be the food of love, play on” (Twelfth Night 1.1.1) or “False face must hide what the false heart doth know” (Macbeth 1.7.82). But iambic pentameter shows up, as many critics have pointed out, in lots of everyday situations too: “We hold these truths to be self-evident” (the first line of the American Declaration of Independence); “the baffled king composing Hallelujah” (Leonard Cohen's “Hallelujah”); “A skinny cappuccino, please, to go” (us, in Starbucks). On the one hand, iambic pentameter is part of a package of qualities epitomizing the literary; on the other hand, it crops up in prose, popular song, and everyday speech. Which is it?
An example from Shakespeare may help us answer that question. Stage directions in Shakespeare's plays are always in prose. In the first quarto edition of King Lear (1608) we find the following direction for Regan to stab a servant: Shee takes a sword and runs at him behind (H2r). The theater person who prepared the version which reached print many years later in 1623 reduced the direction to the essential: Killes him (TLN 2155), which gets the job done. The quarto simply offers extra details about the way in which the killing is staged. But it adds something else too: a line of poetry. The quarto stage direction is a perfect example of iambic pentameter. Is this an example of Shakespeare at work, having penned dialogue in iambic pentameter and not switched off the rhythm when he wrote the stage direction? Or is it another example of the poetic rhythms of everyday speech? Of course, it's both.
Writing about poetic forms, Derek Attridge describes pentameter verse as having “a relatively weak rhythmic architecture, neither dividing into half-lines nor forming larger units. It can be rhymed or unrhymed, stanzaic or continuous. It makes no use of virtual beats [silent beats implied by the rhythmic pattern].” “These characteristics,” writes Attridge “make it particularly suited to the evocation of speech and thought.”2
Shakespeare can use iambic pentameter lines as part of formal, literary, heightened language, or as an indication of more conversational speech. Let's consider the exchange between Juliet and her Nurse about the unexpected guest at the Capulets' party:
Nurse: His name is Romeo, and a Montague,
The only son of your great enemy.
Juliet: My only love sprung from my only hate!
(1.5.135–7)
This is poetic iambic pentameter but it is also idiomatic conversation. The Nurse offers information: Romeo's names, his parentage. But it is also highly patterned: Juliet's one-line response is structured as an antithesis and a paradox. The effect here is as much to do with vocabulary and word order as with rhythm.
This kind of variety operates not only within dialogue but within each pentameter line. Iambic pentameter is always tipping towards the stressed beat, so its cadence moves quickly: inverting that rhythm is preemptive, eager. Richard's well-known opening “NOW is the winter of our discontent” (Richard III 1.1.1) suggests, in its stressed first syllable, that just as he can seize the expected meter, so he will seize the throne. When Juliet, awaiting Romeo, speaks the inverted “GALlop apace, you fiery-footed steeds” (3.2.1), her impatience reveals itself metrically: she cannot wait for the stressed syllable. Other variations on the iambic pentameter include syllabic ones: Hamlet's most famous line “To be, or not to be; that is the question” (3.1.58) ends on an extra unstressed syllable (sometimes this is called a “feminine” ending). Perhaps this is suggestive of the unfinished nature of Hamlet's thought here. (Cicely Berry, veteran voice coach of the Royal Shakespeare Company, suggests that these additional syllables “occur less frequently in the histories where action is more definite, perhaps swifter and less considered.”2)
Lines are broken between speakers, often suggestive of powerful, even sexual, awareness of each other's rhythm: the first encounter between Katherine and Petruccio in The Taming of the Shrew, for instance, or the taut exchanges between Angelo and Isabella in Measure for Measure. The tension between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth as they absorb, jumpily, the aftermath of Duncan's murder, is enacted through the suspension between them of a pentameter line:
Did you not speak?
When?
Now.
As I descended?
(2.2.16)
The scene's rhythms are further punctuated by the insistent knocking at the castle doors. In an essay on the play, the Romantic poet and opium addict Thomas de Quincey noted that this knocking wakes the playworld from the dreamlike trance in which the murder takes place: but the beat of the pentameter is a more subtle version of the same thing: “the pulses of life are beginning to beat again.”4 That iambic pentameter has a beat like the human heart is a nice conceit—and it is helpful to try to connect poetic rhythm with physiological ones (but it's a rather Anglocentric view: other languages have quite different poetic meters even as their speakers have the same somatic ones).
If iambic pentameter is not an English bodily phenomenon, neither is it an English dramatic tradition. Elizabethan playwrights did not have a history of iambic pentameter plays. Medieval mystery plays were composed in a variety of stanzaic structures; aural unity was partly achieved through alliteration. Mid-sixteenth-century interludes and comedies were often written in rhyming couplets. Gammer Gurton's Needle (published 1575 but probably written in the reign of Mary or Edward) gives us an example from university drama: “Alas, Hodge, alas! I may well curse and ban / This day, that ever I saw it, with Gib and the milk-pan”; 1.4.1–2).5 At the end of the century the successful professional company, the Queen's Men, were performing the flat-footed “fourteeners” (a line of seven stressed syllables) of Sir Clyomon and Sir Clamydes (published 1599). Listen to this dialogue between Juliana and Sir Clamydes in the play's first scene:
Juliana: My faith and troth if what is said by me thou dost perform.
Clamydes: If not, be sure, O Lady, with my life I never will return.
Juliana: Then, as thou seemst in thine attire a virgin's knight to be, Take thou this shield likewise of white, and bear thy name by me.
The problem is obvious: the long fourteener unavoidably breaks into two parts and becomes jog trot.
It was Christopher Marlowe who established blank verse (“blank” because it does not rhyme) as the medium of dramatic poetry and exploited the range of the more fluid pentameter line. He announced his innovation in the prologue to Tamburlaine (1587):
From jigging veins of rhyming mother wits,
And such conceits as clownage keeps in pay,
We'll lead you to the stately tent of war,
Where you shall hear the Scythian Tamburlaine
Threatening the world with high astounding terms.
He distances himself from earlier drama both in subject matter (he promises soldiers not clowns) and in sound (he promises not rhymes but rhetoric: “high astounding terms”). It was an acoustic paradigm shift. Thereafter almost every dramatist of the early 1590s tried to sound like Marlowe: Peele, Greene, Nashe, Shakespeare, Anon. And it is not just authors who are aware of the sound of Tamburlaine (the hero and the play); literary characters themselves frequently mention what it is like to hear, or talk like, Tamburlaine. Simon Eyre, shoemaker-turned-mayor in Thomas Dekker's comedy The Shoemaker's Holiday, says he is not nervous about meeting royalty because he “knows how to speak to a Pope, to Sultan Soliman, to Tamburlaine and [if] he were here” (20.59–60).6
Eyre means, primarily, that he can hold his own in terms of tone and vocabulary. But other literary characters are equally
sensitive to poetry and prose rhythms and the differences between the two. In George Peele's The Old Wife's Tale (1595) a character who has just spoken in hexameter verse (verse of six stressed syllables) says, “I'll now set my countenance and to her in prose” (l. 641).7 When Orlando greets Ganymede/Rosalind in As You Like It—“Good day and happiness, dear Rosalind!”—Jaques takes this as his cue to exit: “Nay, then, God b'wi'you an you talk in blank verse” (4.1.29–30). Jaques has just been conversing with Rosalind in prose; he draws the audience's attention to the fact that the scene is now changing register from (satiric) prose to (Petrarchan) poetry. Rosalind is similarly sensitive poetically when Celia first quotes Orlando's love poems to her: she criticizes them for being hyper-metrical (having “more feet than the verses would bear”; 3.2.162–3). And in this play even the goatherd Audrey wonders what “poetical” means. When Benedick tries to write a love poem in a play written almost entirely in prose, Much Ado, he is aware of literary precedent: classical lovers like Leander and Troilus “still run smoothly in the even road of a blank verse” (5.2.32–3). Blank verse is synonymous with poetry. When the players arrive in Elsinore, Hamlet anticipates that the boy actor playing the lady “shall say her mind freely, or the blank verse shall halt for't” (2.2.326–7). In other words, if she is censored or interrupted, the lines will not scan.
It is interesting to note the dates of these three Shakespeare plays; they cluster together in the period 1598–1600. These are plays in which the characters are intensely aware of the relations between drama and life; part of that awareness is a self-consciousness about sound. In the same period, in Julius Caesar (1599), Cassius comments on the inept rhymes of the poet who has entered with a couplet to try to reconcile Cassius and Brutus: “How vilely doth this cynic rhyme!” (4.2.185).8 Brutus agrees, calling the poet a “jigging fool” (4.2.189)—a pejorative phrase like Marlowe's “jigging wits” (the RSC Shakespeare edition glosses it as “rhyming in a jerky and metrically unsophisticated manner”; our italics). As the RSC gloss indicates (and our italics emphasize), references to rhyme are often in tandem with references to meter. They are part of an awareness of what poetry sounds like.
In Marston's Antonio and Mellida (1599), a discussion about meter moves quickly to a dialogue about rhyme (and is also filled with double entendres: as those highly charged split pentameter lines attest, poetic rhythm has a sexual component). Balurdo tries to compose a poem. His page, Dildo, identifies an error in Balurdo's versification; he then offers a (bathetic) rhyme:
Balurdo: I'll mount my courser and most gallantly prick –
Dildo: “Gallantly prick” is too long, and stands hardly in the verse, sir.
Balurdo: I'll speak pure rhyme and so will bravely prank it
That I'll to love like a—prank—prank it—a rhyme for “prank it”?
Dildo: Blanket.
(4.1.268–73)
Benedick has the same problem in Much Ado: “I can find out no rhyme to ‘lady’ but ‘baby’” (5.2.35–6).
The mechanicals in Midsummer Night's Dream don't discuss rhyme but they too are metrically aware. When they plan to add a prologue to their interlude, their first consideration is the meter in which it should be written. Quince proposes “eight and six” (alternating lines of eight syllables and six syllables); Bottom favors two more: “let it be written in eight and eight” (3.1.22–4). A character in Chapman's comedy The Gentleman Usher (1605) proposes composing “in a verse of ten” (i.e. pentameter) (2.2.71).9 We in the audience are inescapably aware of Shakespeare's prosody, if only because the characters call our attention to it. But although meter and rhyme are often invoked in plays, we cannot consider these references independently of references to language generally. Characters from the comic Polonius in Hamlet to the romantic hero in Antonio and Mellida are consistently linguistically aware. Here is Polonius trying to be a literary critic: “‘mobbled queen’ is good” (2.2.507). Here is Marston's Antonio, confronting the inadequacy of similes to express the beauty of his beloved:
Come down; she comes like—O, no simile
Is precious, choice or elegant enough
To illustrate her descent. Leap heart, she comes,
She comes.
(Antonio and Mellida 1.1.151–4)10
In its monosyllabic—but repeated—simplicity, “She comes” is every bit as “poetic” as a simile.
Partly thanks to humanism (see Myth 2), Shakespeare's was a linguistically self-aware age. Meter is part of a composite package of poetic language that includes vocabulary and metaphor and rhyme and rhetorical devices. Together they are a play's soundscape. And when you include stage noise—like the knocking in Macbeth, or the “sennet” or “alarums” sounding—it is clear that there is a lot more to the “sound” of Shakespeare than the mechanical scansion of lines.
We must not forget that prose has a rhythm too. Prose may not scan according to rules, as poetry does, but it has its own internal balance, incremental developments, and repetitions, all of which work on our ear in a fashion similar to poetry. Malvolio bursts upon the midnight revelers in Twelfth Night with “My masters, are you mad?” (2.3.83). The alliterative frame gives the phrase a neat symmetry, not unlike rhyme; but the phrase also has an acceleration of rhythm because of the three monosyllables which lead to the terminative emphasis on the adjective “mad”—a significant theme in the play.
Malvolio continues with two triadic structures: “Have you no wit, manners, nor honesty? … Is there no respect of place, persons, nor time in you?” (2.3.83–9). Shakespeare uses triads in blank verse too: Antony's “Friends, Romans, countrymen” in Julius Caesar (3.2.74); the Bastard in King John muses “Mad world, mad kings, mad composition!” (2.1.562). Shakespeare's prose and poetry are here using the same rhetorical structures; his prose and his poetry overlap.
The close relationship between prose rhythm and poetic rhythm can be seen in a phrase in Florio's translation of Montaigne that clearly caught Shakespeare's ear as much as his eye. In Florio's translation of “An Apologie of Raymond Sebond,” Montaigne wonders “whether it be lawfull for a subject … to rebell and take arms against his prince.”11 In Hamlet the prince wonders whether “'tis nobler in the mind to suffer … / Or to take arms against a sea of troubles” (3.1.59–61). Florio's/Montaigne's literal use of arms (to oppose one's ruler) becomes in Shakespeare a metaphor (material arms against a liquid sea would be of little use). But what seems to have caught Shakespeare's attention first was the syntactical balance of Florio's prose. In prose he heard poetry.
The contemporary poet Peter Porter has said that “a poem is a form of refrigeration that stops language going bad.” The same can be said of Shakespeare's prose. Just as we cannot separate iambic pentameter from everyday speech, neither can we entirely separate prose from poetry.
Notes
1 Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983), p. 2.
2 Derek Attridge, Poetic Rhythm: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 166.
3 Cicely Berry, The Actor and the Text (New York: Applause Theater Books, 1987), p. 63.
4 Thomas de Quincey, “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth,” in Miscellaneous Essays (The Project Gutenberg EBook of Miscellaneous Essays, by Thomas de Quincey; accessed 8 July 2012; http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10708/10708-8.txt).
5 Gammer Gurton's Needle, in Five Pre-Shakespearean Comedies, ed. Frederick S. Boas (1934; reissued Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970).
6 Thomas Dekker, The Shoemaker's Holiday, ed. Robert Smallwood and Stanley Wells, Revels (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999).
7 George Peele, The Old Wife's Tale, ed. Charles Whitworth (London: A. & C. Black, 1996).
8 In all other Shakespeare editions this is 4.3.133.
9 George Chapman, The Gentleman Usher, ed. Robert Ornstein in The Plays of George Chapman (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1970).
10 John Marston, Antonio and Mellida, ed. G.K. H
unter (London: Edward Arnold, 1965).
11 Michel de Montaigne, The essays or morall, politike and militarie discourses of Michaell de Montaigne, trans. John Florio (London, 1603): ‘An Apology of Raymond Semond’, p. 254 (sig. Z1v).
Myth 12
Hamlet was named after Shakespeare's son
We all enjoy equivalence, symmetry, and circularity, from the fun of card games like Snap through the fascination of identical twins, to the pleasure of coincidence or a delight in rhyme. In Julius Caesar Cassius dies on his birthday (“This day I breathèd first. Time is come round, / And where I did begin, there shall I end”; 5.3.23–4). So did Shakespeare: he was baptized on 26 April, and can have been born only two or three days before that; he died on 23 April. The birthday of England's national poet coincides with the day dedicated to England's national saint. The age at which Shakespeare died—52—is the same as the age at which Augustan Rome's greatest poet died: Virgil.
The relationship of the name of Shakespeare's son, Hamnet, to the tragic hero, Hamlet, comes into this same pleasurable category of seeing or seeking equivalence. Sigmund Freud, for one, was confident that the son and the prince were the same. In The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) he wrote:
it can of course only be the poet's own mind which confronts us in Hamlet. I observe in a book on Shakespeare by Georg Brandes (1896) a statement that Hamlet was written immediately after the death of Shakespeare's father (in 1601), that is, under the immediate impact of his bereavement and, as we may well assume, while his childhood feelings about his father had been freshly revived. It is known, too, that Shakespeare's own son who died at an early age bore the name of “Hamnet”, which is identical with “Hamlet”.1
30 Great Myths about Shakespeare Page 10