How to Teach Your Children Shakespeare (10 page)

da DUM

So a perfectly regular line of iambic pentameter—which is made up of five iambs—sounds like this:

da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM

Here is the first line of
Twelfth Night
. It’s an example of perfectly regular iambic pentameter.

If music be the food of love play on
.

Say it aloud to your children and ask them if they can hear the five beats.

If
MU
sic
BE
the
FOOD
of
LOVE
play
ON
.

One Two Three Four Five

da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM

Many of the most famous lines in Shakespeare are in regular iambic pentameter.

The quality of mercy is not strained
.

The
QUA
li
TY
of
MER
cy
IS
not
STRAINED

Notice, though, that actors don’t speak iambic pentameter with five equal stresses. Instead, they say their lines in the way that sense demands. Thus an actor would speak the first line above with four stresses:

If
MUS
ic be the
FOOD
of
LOVE
,
play
ON
.

Have your children say the line this way and listen to how natural it sounds:

If
MUS
ic be the
FOOD
of
LOVE
,
play
ON
.

Similarly, an actor would speak the second example with three strong beats:

The
QUA
lity of
MER
cy is not
STRAINED
.

Some iambic pentameter lines, however, do have five strong beats when spoken properly:

But
SOFT
,
what
LIGHT
through
YON
der
WIN
dow
BREAKS
.

One of the most wonderful things about iambic pentameter is how closely it imitates normal English speech. It is just the length we speak before needing a new breath, and it has the bounce and flexibility of a typical English sentence. This is why so many of the great English writers adopted this form as the basis for their dramatic poetry. (French dramatic poetry, by contrast, is based on a six-beat line called an alexandrine, which, I have been told by native French speakers, mirrors natural French speech.) Bear in mind that when Shakespeare uses iambic pentameter, he isn’t trying to be fancy or “poetic.” He is simply telling his story as clearly and accurately as possible. The fact that it often sounds “poetic” in the high-flown sense is because he has so much to say, and because what he has to say is so complex.

The Lone Ranger

Not all Shakespeare’s lines of poetry, however, are in regular iambic pentameter. In fact, most of his lines are irregular. This means that they still have five beats and they still approximate an English speaker’s phrasing, but they don’t gallop along only in iambs. A regular line goes:

da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM

But an irregular line might go:

da DUM DUM da da DUM da DUM da DUM

Where ox lips and the nod ding vio let grows
,

Or it might go:

DUM da da DUM da da DUM DUM DUM

I know a bank where the wild thyme blows
,

Point out to your children that the line

I know a bank where the wild thyme blows

is in irregular iambic pentameter and has the same rhythm as the famous Lone Ranger Theme (which is based on the final section of the
William Tell Overture
by Rossini). Have your kids try it out.

DUM da da DUM da da DUM DUM DUM

(da da) DUM da da DUM da da DUM DUM DUM

(da da) DUM da da DUM da da DUM DUM DUM

(da da) DAAAAAAH! da da da DUM DUM DUM

I
know a
bank
where the
wild thyme blows
,

(oh)
I
know a
bank
where the
wild thyme blows
,

(oh)
I
know a
bank
where the
wild thyme blows
,

(I know a)
baaaaaaank
where the
wild thyme blows!

Remind them that they just sang a line of irregular iambic pentameter. Then ask your children why they think Shakespeare doesn’t write all his iambic pentameter in regular form. Why does he vary it? There are three reasons, and I’ll bet your children will get at least one of them right before you tell them.

First, if you had to hear one regular iambic pentameter line after another for an entire play, it would put you to sleep. It is the variation in the lines that keeps the experience alive and interesting.

The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne

Burned on the water. The poop was beaten gold;

Purple the sails, and so perfumèd that

The winds were love-sick with them…

Each line in this passage has a different rhythm, and so it feels vital and exciting.

Second, Shakespeare uses the variations in the rhythm to create the tensions and the releases, the smoothness and staccatos, the bombast and
sweetness that tell his story. The great Shakespearean director I mentioned in
chapter 4
, Sir Peter Hall, likens Shakespeare’s manipulation of iambic pentameter to the way a great musician plays jazz. First the musician creates a recurring rhythm to set up the beat. Then he starts riffing, and he brings his art to bear through all the variations that make his interpretation so interesting.

Shakespeare’s Best Trick

As we discussed earlier, Shakespeare writes his verse in such a way that he often tells us how to speak his lines. As another great director, John Barton, has said, Shakespeare’s verse is “stage-direction in shorthand.” Our goal is to teach your children to read carefully and look for the clues that show us when Shakespeare wants us to pause, or speed up, or shout, or interrupt. One of my own favorite examples is in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
, when Titania tells Oberon why she insists on keeping the little Indian boy for herself. She explains with passion that the boy is the son of one of her devoted followers who died giving birth to the child.

Let’s look at the whole passage. It’s a difficult speech, and it may take a few minutes to read it with understanding; but what we really care about at the moment are the last two lines. Oberon starts the exchange by saying simply:

I do but beg a little changeling boy

To be my henchman
.

Titania answers him:

Set your heart at rest:

The Fairyland buys not the child of me
.

And now she launches into her speech about the boy’s origins—for me, one of the most beautiful speeches in all of Shakespeare. And remember, we’re looking for the trick that Shakespeare is going to play in the last two lines, a trick that will tell us exactly how to say them:
TITANIA

His mother was a vot’ress
[follower]
of my order
,

And in the spiced Indian air, by night

Full often hath she gossiped by my side
,

And sat with me on Neptune’s yellow sands
[the beach],

Marking th’embarked traders on the flood

[Watching the sailing merchant ships on the tide],

When
[at which time]
we have laughed to see the sails conceive

And grow big-bellied with the wanton wind;

[image: the wind makes the sails puff out the way a

woman’s belly puffs out because she’s pregnant]

Which she, with pretty and with swimming gait
[walk],

Following (her womb then rich with my young squire)
,

Would imitate, and sail upon the land

To fetch me trifles, and return again
,

As from
[as though from]
a voyage, rich with merchandise
.

But she, being mortal, of that boy did die
,

And for her sake do I rear up her boy;

And for her sake I will not part with him
.

Question
: What is Shakespeare’s trick in the last two lines?

Answer
: Every word is a single syllable. It means that the actor playing Titania has to make each word matter—which slows her up and gives the lines a gravity and weight that show us how deeply she cares about what she’s saying. It’s as if each line has ten strong beats:

And for her sake do I rear up her boy;

And for her sake I will not part with him
.

A Note on Simplicity

Shakespeare often gets very straightforward and monosyllabic in his most moving lines. He’ll refer to something commonplace to bring us down
to earth, and he’ll abruptly change from complex poetic lines to simple, monosyllabic statements so that the speech slows down and resounds with a kind of heavy fate. Here is an example from
King Lear
. At the very end of the play, after five acts of rich, complex poetry, when Lear’s daughter has been hanged and he has nothing left to live for, he touchingly reverts to monosyllables and asks to have his tunic unbuttoned so he can breathe more easily:

Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life
,

And thou no breath at all?…

Pray you undo this button. Thank you, sir
.

As one of the greatest Shakespeareans of our time, Stanley Wells, puts it:

That kind of sudden simplicity is among the things that one constantly marvels at in Shakespeare: the way that a plain phrase, the sort of language that out of context would seem entirely unpoetical…, can have a devastating effect because of their placing.

The passage that we’re about to tackle in the next chapter is going to tell us worlds about the uses of poetry. It is from
Twelfth Night
, which happens to be my own favorite play in the Shakespeare canon. It always sounds hollow to praise a work of art in general terms, but I hope to show your children why
Twelfth Night
is a masterpiece that ranks along with Michelangelo’s statue of David and Mozart’s opera
The Marriage of Figaro
as one of the greatest works of the human spirit.