Shakespeare on Toast: Getting a Taste for the Bard (12 page)

Understand iambic pentameter and you understand Shakespeare.

For whatever reason – although I imagine the phrase itself is part of the problem – iambic pentameter is the main stumbling block with Shakespeare, where most people, myself included, have fallen. Those words confused me more than I’d like or care to admit.

They seemed like a very pointless pairing of difficult academic words, used to describe even more pointless, difficult words. Of course, they’re nothing of the sort, but that’s the way I felt at the time. So many of the good things about Shakespeare seemed shrouded in mystery and out of my reach, hidden behind other, similarly impenetrable words.

Nowadays when I run workshops and say those dreaded words, a shiver runs through everyone like I’ve set a curse. A dark cloud falls over the room. A look of fear enters everyone’s eyes …

But what ‘it’ is, is simple. What it means is a little more complicated, but you could go through the rest of your life thoroughly enjoying Shakespeare on a rudimentary level
and know only that iambic pentameter was the popular style of writing poetry in Shakespeare’s time.

Think about it in terms of Italian opera. I don’t speak Italian, but I could go to an opera sung in Italian and I’d enjoy it on a basic level: I’d revel in the fights, the lights, the sounds, and the raw emotions. Or I could (and one day, I promise myself, I will) learn a little Italian, maybe read the libretto before I go.

Or, in this case, learn a bit of Shakespearian before going to see a play of his, and unlock a treasure chest of life-changing jewels in his work.

I’m getting a little carried away. Everything we’ve looked at so far are the doors and windows to the House of Shakespeare.

The foundation of it all, though, is poetry. Understand how iambic pentameter works, and you can talk to Shakespeare.

I mean it. You can have a conversation with him.

Act 4

Catch the Rhythm

Scene 1

Theatre Way, Wigan

B
efore we dig into iambic pentameter itself, an important distinction needs to be made. There are two main types of speech in Shakespeare’s plays, and they’re most commonly referred to as
poetry
and
prose
.

You speak prose.
Prose
is just a word for normal, free-flowing speech or text, and although there are rules that govern it, they are neither as obvious nor as formal as the rules that you find in poetry.

It’s important to note that any one word of the English language can be found in either poetry or prose – one writing style doesn’t exclude a particular set of words. To be entirely accurate, perhaps I should say there are some words that are
more likely
to turn up in one style than another, but that doesn’t really concern us here.

To pick a fictional character purely at random, here’s the Reverend Clement Hedges, from the film
Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit
(2005), speaking in prose:

H
EDGES
This was no man. Does a man have teeth the size of axe blades? Or ears like terrible tombstones? By tampering with nature, forcing vegetables to swell far beyond
their natural size, we have brought a terrible judgement on ourselves.

And the same speech rewritten as poetry:

H
EDGES

This was no man. Does a man have teeth

The size of axe blades? Or ears like terrible tombstones?

By tampering with nature, forcing vegetables to swell

Far beyond their natural size, we have brought

A terrible judgement on ourselves.

The words are all the same, I simply broke the speech up into lines, and that’s the first giveaway with poetry. It’s written in lines and at the beginning of each line the first letter is capitalised (I should say that this may not be true for some modern poetry you might come across, but in Shakespeare, this is how it is).

Now it’s probably fair to say that this now-slightly-poetic extract might not be remembered in hundreds of years’ time, but the techniques I used to make it pretty are the same ones that modern poets use, and they’re similar to the ones Shakespeare used.

Ending lines with
Does a man have teeth
and
we have brought
makes the reader question what’s going to come next. It brings an anticipation to the line, if only for a second.
It makes it more dramatic. Leaving the punchline by itself on the last line gives a comic pacing to the reading of it.

Breaking some of the standard rules of English grammar (that a new line = a new sentence, for example) to emphasise particular points of a piece of writing, as I’ve done with Hedges’ most learned observation, is essentially what Shakespeare did.

However, what’s particularly important when having a gander at Shakespeare, is how the thoughts of a character sometimes go with the lines of poetry, and sometimes the thoughts break over the lines of poetry.

A full stop usually indicates the end of a
thought
, traditionally known as a sentence, but the word
sentence
takes us back down the Literature road: they’re actors’ texts, so we’re going to stay on Theatre Way and call them
thoughts
. People write in
sentences
, they speak in
thoughts
. If I had broken Hedges’ speech up into parcels of sense, or thought, it would have looked more like this:

H
EDGES

This was no man.

Does a man have teeth the size of axe blades?

Or ears like terrible tombstones?

By tampering with nature,

Forcing vegetables to swell far beyond their natural size,

We have brought a terrible judgement on ourselves.

The first thought takes up a full line of poetry. So do the second and third thoughts. But the fourth thought overflows into three lines of poetry. The way it overflows brings a slightly different dimension to the dramatic tension of the writing.

If the poem were read out loud, the reader would need to make it clear that while the last three lines are three different lines of poetry, they are still one thought. Other wise, when read aloud, it’ll just sound like prose, and the vast effort the writer has put into writing it as poetry would be wasted.

So it’s become normal practice for the end of a line of poetry to be acknowledged in the voice, somehow – a rising inflection, or a slight pause, perhaps – to indicate that while the line of poetry has ended, the thought has not.

Scene 2

A kitchen, baking verse-cake

P
oetry
then, as far as we’re concerned, is any text that has been written in lines.
Verse
is poetry that has been given a particular rhythm. You might hear the two terms used interchangeably. I’ll do my very best not to do that.

Much of Shakespeare’s work is written in verse: he made his actors (and so therefore his characters too) speak a lot of the time in rhythmical poetry; a brilliantly simple device to make his kings sound kingly. This gives birth to a general rule: ordinary people speak in prose, kings and queens speak in verse (though it’s not always this way round: remember earlier in the book where Kent in
King Lear
, disguised as an ordinary commoner, mocks Cornwall – he doesn’t just use complicated words to go ‘out of his dialect’, he switches into verse, the speech of kings, and back again to prose. We’ll see more of this later.).

The hierarchy of speech in Shakespeare, going from a low emotional intensity and a prosaic language, to high emotion and very poetic language, goes like this:

If you’re trying to express something that prose won’t do justice to, then switch to blank verse. If that isn’t forceful enough, moving up to rhyming verse or a sonnet (a fourteen-line rhyming poem) might do it: when Romeo and Juliet first meet and dance together, Shakespeare gives them a sonnet to share, to convey to the audience the height of their emotions and the importance of their first meeting (I’ll look at sonnets in a bit more detail later on in this Act).

But if your emotions can’t be expressed in any other way, then you just gotta sing! Desdemona’s willow song in Act 4, Scene 3 of
Othello
, and Ophelia’s terribly sad song in Act 4, Scene 5 of
Hamlet
are beautiful examples.

Verse is why a lot of people think Shakespeare writes in an odd-looking way – why the plays look so different from modern English when you see them on the page – and is
probably a large part of the reason why many people take one look and say
Shakespeare wrote in a different language
.

Here are a couple of examples from Shakespeare, first verse from
Hamlet
, then prose from
Much Ado About Nothing
:

H
AMLET

To be, or not to be – that is the question;

Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles

And by opposing end them.

(Act 3, Scene 1, lines 56–60)

B
ENEDICK
(coming forward) This can be no trick. The conference was sadly borne. They have the truth of this from Hero. They seem to pity the lady; it seems her affections have their full bent. Love me?

(Act 2, Scene 3, lines 215–18)

Sometimes Shakespeare writes in verse, sometimes he writes in prose. As we saw earlier (
here
) with the Kent/Cornwall extract from
King Lear
, sometimes he switches from one to the other in the same scene, in the same conversation between two characters, and like a lot of the other innocuous-looking inconsistencies in Shakespeare’s writing, this can either be ignored, or be seen as a good character note.

With the
King Lear
example, in order to emphasise Kent’s switch from high, flowery language back to his commoner’s tongue, Shakespeare makes him switch back to prose. Using Caius’ voice again, and taking away the beauty of verse, Kent’s reply is twice as powerful.

Shakespeare could have written Benedick’s speech in verse, and it might have looked something like this:

B
ENEDICK

This can be no trick. The conference was sadly borne.

They have the truth of this from Hero. They seem

To pity the lady; it seems her affections

Have their full bent. Love me?

But Shakespeare
didn’t
write it in verse. For some reason, for this moment in Benedick’s life, Shakespeare wanted him to speak in prose. Benedick speaks in verse elsewhere in the play, so why not here? Well, there are probably a dozen reasons. Verse would force the actor to deliver the lines more dramatically, and perhaps, as Benedick is alone on stage, he’s more relaxed and so he doesn’t feel the need to heighten the style of his speech.

Whatever the reason, the point is that there
is always a reason
why one character speaks in prose, another in verse, or the same character switches styles during a scene. (As we’ll see later, modern editors of Shakespeare sometimes
change lines which are prose in the Folio to verse.) It’s one of a number of clues that Shakespeare left in his writing for his actors to find, so that they’d speak his words in the exact way he wanted them to, without his ever having to ask them directly.