Shakespeare on Toast: Getting a Taste for the Bard (17 page)

It’s worth pointing out that
temperate
and
date
would have been pronounced differently, and so rhymed much better in Shakespeare’s time, but that small point aside, this is the time-honoured way a normal, conventional English sonnet should go. There’s no arguing with it. If you wanna write an English sonnet you write fourteen lines, you write them
iambically, and you use the
abab cdcd efef gg
rhyme scheme. End of.

However, of the 154 known sonnets Shakespeare wrote:

Think about that for a moment: he’s supposed to be writing in iambic pentameter, but as iambic pentameter goes, he plays only one pure song of it (with Sonnet 150) and riffs around the form for the other 153. I’m not going to get into this too deeply, but I’m keen to point out just how much he played around with the style.

A very good friend of mine called Will Sutton, delighted
with his initials one day, learnt all 154 of Shakespeare’s sonnets off by heart. As well as being profoundly clever, he has a very good party-piece.

Will thinks that Shakespeare wrote 154 sonnets because that’s the maximum number of syllables there can be in a sonnet:

There are never more than 154 syllables in any of Shakespeare’s sonnets … Why not have 154 mini-experiments in sonnet writing?

It’s an interesting idea. Suddenly, this body of work looks like the writing of someone trying to work out exactly what this style of poetry could do. What could it take before it broke? Is it possible, when he’s supposed to be writing in iambic pentameter, to take two syllables away from every line – so four strong beats per line instead of five? Well, he has a go with Sonnet 145. Here are the first five lines (I’ve added a syllable count before each line, and a suggested stress mark-up):

It’s the only sonnet in the canon written in this metrical form. When Will Sutton performs it, he raps it – and the four-beat, slightly a-rhythmic form does suit a rap beat rather well. You’ve never heard a Shakespeare sonnet until you’ve heard it rapped …

The sonnets are important because Shakespeare played with iambic pentameter in exactly the same way in his plays. A lot of the fundamental tricks of the writing trade that Shakespeare played with as a playwright, he seemed to try out first in the sonnets.

We’ll never know for sure what his intention was in writing them, but it’s clear to me that at least part of his plan was to see how far he could go with the metre, playing and improvising, jazz-like, before launching into the creation of a rather fine canon of work.

Scene 7

An orchestra pit

I
f you look at all of Shakespeare’s plays over the twenty years or so he was writing, you can see that there is a steady change. While the verse in his early plays was a very standard and fairly unsurprisingly solid iambic pentameter, after the theatrical hiatus due to the plague and two years writing sonnets and playing with the metre, his verse becomes more and more complex, and much less predictable. It took him time and practice to hone and learn his craft.

Take a look at this speech from
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
(c. 1594), and then one from
Macbeth
(written much later in Shakespeare’s career, in 1606):

P
UCK

The King doth keep his revels
here tonight
.

Take heed the Queen come not within his sight,

For Oberon is passing fell and wrath

Because that she as her attendant hath

A lovely boy stolen from an
Indian king
.

She never had so sweet a changeling,

And jealous Oberon would have the child

Knight of his train, to trace the
forests wild
.

But she perforce withholds the lovèd boy,

Crowns him with flowers, and makes him all
her joy
.

(
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
, Act 2, Scene 2, lines 18–27)

M
ACBETH

If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well

It were
done quickly
. If the assassination

Could trammel up the consequence, and catch

With his surcease success – that but this blow

Might be the be-all and the
end-all!
– here,

But here, upon this bank and shoal of time,

We’d jump the life
to come
. But in these cases

We still have judgement here – that we but teach

Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return

To plague
the inventor
. This even-handed justice

Commends the ingredience of our poisoned chalice

To our
own lips
. He’s here in double trust …

(
Macbeth
, Act 1, Scene 7, lines 1–12)

Look at where the full stops are in Puck’s speech, then look at where they are in Macbeth’s speech; I’ve made the end of the sentences bold, to emphasise the point.

As Shakespeare got more sophisticated with his use of metre, so too did the structure of the lines. Without even beginning to take either speech apart or look at what any of it means, a quick glance will show you that the former
is fairly evenly laid out, and the latter kinda all over the place.

If we assume Shakespeare is a grand master of iambic pentameter (and he was), then if he wanted a thought to finish at the end of a line of metre, he could work it so it did. If he didn’t, and he made a thought end halfway through a line of metre, he must have done so intentionally.

Following that assumption, if the thoughts are clear and simple, then they’ll finish at the end of a line of metre:

The King doth keep his revels here tonight.

is a very good example of that. If we take a thought from Macbeth’s speech:

This even-handed justice

Commends the ingredience of our poisoned chalice

To our own lips.

you can see that it spills into three lines of metre, starting and finishing halfway through a metrical line.

If a thought finishing at the end of a metrical line implies clear, simple, straightforward thinking, then a mid-line ending implies hurried, unclear, confused thinking.

Both are great character notes.

A mid-line ending is, essentially, a character
interrupting themselves (or being interrupted by others). Halfway through one thought, something else occurs to them, and they go off on a tangent. The speech above from
Macbeth
has a couple of examples of this:

We’d jump the life
to come
. But in these cases

We still have judgement here – that we but teach

Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return

To plague
the inventor
. This even-handed justice

Commends the ingredience of our poisoned chalice

To our
own lips
. He’s here in double trust …

Mid-line endings only really start to happen in a more focused way later in Shakespeare’s writing, as he got used to what he could do with the metre. Thought and (metrical) line go together in Shakespeare’s early writing, as the
Dream
extract shows. Later, the thoughts overwhelm the lines, as in Macbeth’s speech.

Shakespeare took this breaking up of the metre further with
shared lines
, where a character’s line finishes halfway through a line of metre, and the next character picks up the other half of the metrical line. There’s an example immediately after the speech we just looked at from
Macbeth
– again, I’ve provided a syllable count:

A line of ten syllables, split evenly, so the actors know that (in order to keep the metre bouncing along nice and regularly) Lady Macbeth should come straight in with her line as soon as Macbeth has spoken his.

We know this to be the case because there are plenty of occasions where Shakespeare doesn’t want his actors to immediately come in with their line. In Act 3, Scene 4 of Macbeth, when Macbeth sees Banquo’s ghost at the banqueting table, he speaks to the Ghost:

M
ACBETH

Thou canst not say I did it; never shake

Thy gory locks at me.

R
OSS

Gentlemen, rise. His highness is not well.

(
Macbeth
, Act 3, Scene 4, lines 49–51)

Ross has a line of ten syllables. Macbeth’s first line is a line of ten syllables. The first word in each line is capitalised.
It’s definitely in iambic pentameter. Macbeth’s second line is only six syllables long, so in order to make sure the regular de-
DUM
de-
DUM
rhythm of the metre isn’t thrown out of sync, the actor playing Ross has to wait two beats (marked in bold with
x
and
\
):

Perhaps Macbeth is entranced, or stunned in fear by the ghost; perhaps Ross is equally transfixed to see his king acting so strangely. Whatever reason the actors give, the two-beat gap in the metre is there, and needs to be filled somehow. More on that in Act 5.

In Shakespeare’s earlier writing, these shared lines were mostly used for characters to interrupt each other; in his later writing, he realised he could make it mean much more, and he understood that he could use these metrical nuances to actually orchestrate the pace of a scene.

It was very clear to his actors what he was doing. He was directing them.