Shakespeare on Toast: Getting a Taste for the Bard (16 page)

And that is exactly what Shakespeare realised.

He could help his actors – and more importantly his audience – and point them towards the important bits, stick a flag in them and say, ‘Hey, listen to this, if you remember this later it’ll help you understand
why
this character is doing what they’re doing.’

I suppose the modern equivalent would be a sudden chord of music in a soap opera, a character, unseen by her husband, turning towards the camera and looking distraught, knowing the child she’s carrying isn’t really his …

Here’s a piece from
The Taming of the Shrew
(Act 4, Scene 2, lines 2–6) to illustrate the point. Kate’s complaining that she’s been starved by her new husband:

K
ATE

The more my wrong, the more his spite appears.

What, did he marry me to famish me?

Beggars that come unto my father’s door

Upon entreaty have a present alms,

If not, elsewhere they meet with charity.

Count the syllables of the lines of poetry.

You should find that there are five lines of ten syllables (five lines of pentameter); I do not say five lines of
iambic
pentameter …

If we were to mark up the first few lines with × and \ they might look like this:

First of all, the marks back up our pure pentameter claim. There are five × and five \ = ten syllables per line.

Also, Shakespeare has somehow made the most important words like
wrong, spite
, and
marry
even syllables (and so more strongly stressed when spoken), and the less important words like
the
and
to
all odd syllables.

Something else that’s interesting: there’s one word in the speech which isn’t the ‘right’ way round – to make it clearer I put the first syllable of the word in bold type. If this is pure iambic pentameter, you’d have to say
begg-
AR
, stressing the second syllable. But that doesn’t sound right. Not only does it not sound right to our ear, the word
beggar
has never been pronounced that way, now or 400 years ago; the stress has always been on the first syllable of the word.

If Shakespeare had wanted the word stressed normally and not upset the metre, he could have written
A
beggar
… and the metre would force the natural stress of
BEGG
-ar
.

But he didn’t. Putting the word first in the line means
we can’t say it iambically as
begg-
AR
. He’s given the line a
DUM
-de opener – a trochee.

Why did he want a trochee
there
? It’s the only trochee in the whole speech …

What if Shakespeare deliberately switched the stress of the first foot in that sentence from an iamb to a trochee, forcing a brief change in rhythm and so making the actor pick the word out from among the rest, to make it clear how uncomfortable and unusual a thing begging is for Kate …?

Kate, despite being the
shrew
(= troublesome individual) of the play’s title, is a lady of a family with money, and so the idea of her begging, or even knowing how to beg, would be ridiculous to her. A complete unknown. And the trochaic stress emphasises that nicely.

Interesting idea, isn’t it?

Now I want to categorically state something here: I’m not saying Shakespeare was sitting and writing, thinking ‘Oh, I’ll slip in a nice trochee here, that’ll go down well with my actors, and the audience might notice something too.’ Of course he didn’t. Writing this way was as natural to him as changing TV channels with a remote control is to you or me. I doubt he ever had to think about it.

That was quite a detailed look at one word in one speech. To go to the other extreme for a moment, take a look at this extract from
King Lear
:

L
EAR

Why should a Dog, a Horse, a Rat have life,

And thou no breath at all? Thou’lt come no more,

Never, never, never, never, never.

Pray you undo this Button.

(Act 5, Scene 3, lines 304–7)

This is from right at the end of the play: Lear is dying, his two eldest daughters have died, everything is a mess. Most importantly, his favourite daughter has been hanged, and her body is in his arms.

It’s a heartbreaking moment, possibly my favourite moment from the whole canon, for two reasons. The first is that Shakespeare takes Lear from the macro to the micro in the space of two lines – from talking about never seeing his daughter alive ever again, to asking one of his servants to undo a button on his shirt, because he’s having trouble breathing.

The second reason I like this moment so much has to do with the metre (surprise, surprise).

Here’s one possible reading for these lines:

We start with two regular lines of iambic pentameter.

We finish with a breathless mix of stresses.

In the middle, we have the same word repeated over and over. Notice though, that it’s not iambic (we don’t pronounce
never
as
ne-
VER
).

In the midst of all the pain, all the anguish, as his heart is breaking – to point out just how entirely screwed up the world at large is, but particularly how torn apart Lear himself is – Shakespeare gives him an entire line of trochaic pentameter in a play (don’t forget) that is supposed to be written in iambic pentameter.

Genius.

Never say never again

When you’ve the strength for it, you’re too young, when you’ve the age, you’re too old. It’s a bugger, isn’t it?

Sir Laurence Olivier,
On Acting
(1986)

Apparently first acted by Richard Burbage – Shakespeare’s lead actor, who also first played Hamlet and Othello – playing King Lear has been described as being similar to climbing Everest.

After losing everything, going mad, recovering, then seeing your favourite daughter die, Shakespeare gives you this beautiful line. Sir Robert Stephens, Sir Ian McKellen, Sir Nigel Hawthorne and Sir Ian Holm are a few of the greats to have played this part in recent years, and they all spoke this line completely differently. The sudden shift from iambic pentameter to trochaic nearly always brings a staggering shift in emotion with it, whether the line is whispered, gets louder as it progresses, is shouted, or – well, the options are endless …

Scene 6

A kitchen: 154 ways to cook an egg

T
alking 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: