With Iambic Pentameter, Shakespeare himself is directing your performance.
Iambic Pentameter. A topic that really deserves a longer, more in-depth examination than we can go into here. Perhaps several. Indeed, there are books upon books written about this subject, by scholars with multiple abbreviations after their names. But as an actor, that is to say, as one not simply interested in the intellectual, but as one primarily invested in discovering the tools with which to effectively play Shakespeare’s text, I believe there is more to the story than simply understanding how the verse is written. We need to understand why.
Iambic Pentameter is the verse structure that Shakespeare uses most. There are instances where he varies from this structure (which we’ll touch on in a later post), but Iambic Pentameter is Shakespeare’s bread and butter. In fact, for many people, when they hear the phrase, they immediately think of British dialects, tights, and frilled collars. But it doesn’t need to be as stuffy as all that.
If you’ll pardon a barely justifiable simplification, Iambic Pentameter is basically the rhythm of the poetry. Let’s address the first part: Iambic. An iamb is a type of foot (a two-syllable beat), and the makeup of that foot determines how we refer to it. An iamb reads as unstressed/stressed. Or, “deDUM.” Or, better yet, to use a pneumonic device, think of an iamb as an example of the two-syllable phrase “I am.” For example:
“Are you speaking in Iambic Pentameter?”
“Why, yes. I am.”
DeDUM. Unstressed/stressed. That foot has a rhythm, and is designated as an iamb.
Now, try to stay with me, as I'm covering a lot of information in an almost sadistically short post. So, let’s examine the meter of the verse structure, known as Pentameter. Penta as in five, and meter as in... meter, means there are five feet to a line of verse. Therefore, five feet of iambs is known as Iambic Pentameter.
Got it?
It's okay if you're a little lost. Many people, lots of them actors, unfortunately, don't even bother with learning scansion (that’s examining a line of verse to determine the rhythm). But those who do have a handle on Shakespeare's text that allows them to deliver compelling, layered performances. Why? Here's the gold nugget: scansion allows Shakespeare to literally direct you through the rhythm of the text.
Example? Sure.
Let's take that same line we used from Hamlet in an earlier post:
To be or not to be, that is the question.
Now, let's scan this line, and try our best to fit it into Iambic Pentameter, with five feet of iambs.
To BE / or NOT / to BE, / that IS / the QUEST / ion.
It’s probably pretty obvious that to speak this line in any other way would sound a bit wonky. Go ahead and try. I mean…
TO be / OR not / TO be…?
That’s nonsense, and we all know it. More importantly, Shakespeare knew it. That’s why he wrote it the way he did. Iambic Pentameter, in fact, mimics the rhythm of the human heart beat. Think about it.
deDUM / deDUM / deDUM / deDUM / deDUM
It’s a cadence that’s easy to listen to, since we’ve all been hearing that rhythm since we were in our mother’s womb. And what’s more, it makes the lines easier to memorize. The poetry just flows naturally, and when we speak the lines using this meter, they just make sense. Shakespeare knew this, so he utilized this verse structure to be sure that his lines came out of actors’ mouths more closely to the way he intended. You know, just in case someone wanted to try something like:
To be OR not to be, that is THE question.
I’ve seen the speech performed this way, and it’s not uninteresting, but I don’t personally think that is what Shakespeare meant for Hamlet to say. If it were, he’d have made it clear in the scansion. The stressing of the wrong syllable could throw off the meaning of the entire line, and I think Shakespeare has given us clues as to what he was looking for with each carefully crafted line of verse.
To BE / or NOT / to BE, / that IS / the QUES / tion.
I can hear you already, tearing your hair and banging your head against the wall:
“But how do I play this line? It can’t be that simple!”
Oh, it’s not. This is just the tip of the iceberg. It’s gets way more fun from here on out. And remember, none of these are hard and fast rules. There’s no stone tablet somewhere etched with the immutable laws of scansion. Even in this one line of verse, there are loads of clues to be uncovered. Clues that will give us insight into what Shakespeare was thinking when he wrote the lines. There’s even an opportunity to break away from the iamb into another type of foot, but I’ll leave that for another post.
For now, think about Iambic Pentameter, the foundational rhythm of Shakespeare’s verse, and how it can help you speak the poetry in a way that feels natural.
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