Shakespeare on Toast: Getting a Taste for the Bard by Ben Crystal Page A

hear a rhythm when we hear a recurring pattern of strong and weak beats, so really we’re asking which are the strongly stressed syllables and which the weak?
    There are several possibilities in metrical poetry, but here are the two main types of metrical feet (I’ve used BOLD CAPITALS to make it as clear as possible where the stronger stress is):
    An
iambic
foot. In Greek, an
iamb
means a weak syllable followed by a strong (
de- DUM
). A naturally iambic word is
com- PARE
.
A
trochaic
foot. The opposite of an iamb, a
trochee
(pronounced
TROH -key
) means the syllables go strong-weak (
DUM -de
). A naturally trochaic word is
E -asy
. So is
TRO -chee
, for that matter.
    If an iambic foot sounds like
de- DUM
, then five iambs together would look like this:

    Say it out loud. One
de- DUM
every second, patting yourhand on your leg every DUM . It doesn’t really matter how fast you say it, as long as the rhythm is constant:
    de- DUM de- DUM de- DUM de- DUM de- DUM
    That is a line of iambic pentameter – a line of metre with five iambic feet.
    Ten syllables evenly stressed
weak- STRONG
, or stressed
iambically
, means that the weak stresses should always be on the odd syllables – the 1st, 3rd, 5th, 7th and 9th – and the strong stresses all on the even syllables – the 2nd, 4th, 6th, 8th and 10th (working out where the stresses are in Shakespeare’s speeches is tremendously important to an actor, as we’ll see later).
    Going back to the two questions again, we know the opening line from Sonnet 18 has ten syllables (or five beats) in it, so it’s a line of pentameter. We know that the word
compare
is pronounced iambically (
com- PARE
), so we can assume the rest of the line is iambically stressed too:

    Note that an iamb doesn’t have to sit over one word, e.g.,
    de- DUM
    mer’s day
    Metrics are driven first and foremost by rhythm, not sense.
    When looking at a piece of Shakespeare’s poetry, instead of writing
de- DUM
over the top of the words, we can just as easily show the weak and strong stresses a different way:

    So now, marked up, the rhythm of a line of iambic pentameter looks like this:

    And with the line from Sonnet 18:

    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.
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    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
    it’s what is easy to say in one breath;
therefore it sounds as natural as possible;
therefore we hear something that is essentially human in it: the size of our lungs and the underlying pulse of our bodies is what this verse is built on;
and as far as learning goes, a line of iambic pentameter is within an easy memory span;
therefore the steady recurring rhythm makes it easy to memorise the lines – very useful when you’re performing six or seven different plays a week, as Shakespeare’s actors would have been doing …
    ----
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    I think therefore iamb …
    The rhythm that this pairing of syllables