SHAKESPEAREWROTE IN THERHYTHMS OFEVERYDAYSPEECH

Myth

11Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systemati-cally from everyday speech. If you approach me at a bus stop and murmur‘‘Thou still unravished bride of quietness’’, then I am instantly aware that Iam in the presence of the literary. I know this because the texture, rhythm andresonance of your words are in excess of their abstractable meaning . . . Yourlanguage draws attention to itself, flaunts its material being, as statementslike ‘‘Don’t you know the drivers are on strike?’’ do not.1

Terry Eagleton’s example of the literary, the first line of Keats’s poem‘‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’’, is also an example of the most common metricalpattern in Shakespeare’s writing: iambic pentameter. Iambic pentameterstructures a pattern of five paired unstressed/STRESSED syllables that weusually render as ‘‘de-DUM, de-DUM, de-DUM, de-DUM, de-DUM’’:hence ‘‘Thou STILL unRAVished BRIDE of QUIetNESS.’’ There arethousands of iambic pentameter lines in Shakespeare: ‘‘But soft, whatlight through yonder window breaks’’ (Romeo and Juliet 2.1.44) or‘‘When I do count the clock that tells the time’’ (Sonnet 12) or ‘‘Ifmusic be the food of love, play on’’ (Twelfth Night 1.1.1) or ‘‘Falseface must hide what the false heart doth know’’ (Macbeth 1.7.82). Butiambic pentameter shows up, as many critics have pointed out, in lotsof everyday situations too: ‘‘We hold these truths to be self-evident’’(the first line of the American Declaration of Independence); ‘‘the baffledking composing Hallelujah’’ (Leonard Cohen’s ‘‘Hallelujah’’); ‘‘A skinnycappuccino, please, to go’’ (us, in Starbucks). On the one hand, iambicpentameter is part of a package of qualities epitomizing the literary; on

30 Great Myths About Shakespeare, First Edition. Laurie Maguire and Emma Smith.© 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2013 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Shakespeare wrote in the rhythms of everyday speech 73

the other hand, it crops up in prose, popular song, and everyday speech.Which is it?

An example from Shakespeare may help us answer that question. Stagedirections in Shakespeare’s plays are always in prose. In the first quartoedition of King Lear (1608) we find the following direction for Reganto stab a servant: Shee takes a sword and runs at him behind (H2r).The theater person who prepared the version which reached print manyyears later in 1623 reduced the direction to the essential: Killes him (TLN2155), which gets the job done. The quarto simply offers extra detailsabout the way in which the killing is staged. But it adds something elsetoo: a line of poetry. The quarto stage direction is a perfect example ofiambic pentameter. Is this an example of Shakespeare at work, havingpenned dialogue in iambic pentameter and not switched off the rhythmwhen he wrote the stage direction? Or is it another example of the poeticrhythms of everyday speech? Of course, it’s both.

Writing about poetic forms, Derek Attridge describes pentameter verseas having ‘‘a relatively weak rhythmic architecture, neither dividing intohalf-lines nor forming larger units. It can be rhymed or unrhymed, stanzaicor continuous. It makes no use of virtual beats [silent beats implied bythe rhythmic pattern].’’ ‘‘These characteristics,’’ writes Attridge ‘‘make itparticularly suited to the evocation of speech and thought.’’2

Shakespeare can use iambic pentameter lines as part of formal, literary,heightened language, or as an indication of more conversational speech.Let’s consider the exchange between Juliet and her Nurse about theunexpected guest at the Capulets’ party:

Nurse: His name is Romeo, and a Montague,The only son of your great enemy.

Juliet: My only love sprung from my only hate!

(1.5.135–7)

This is poetic iambic pentameter but it is also idiomatic conversation. TheNurse offers information: Romeo’s names, his parentage. But it is alsohighly patterned: Juliet’s one-line response is structured as an antithesisand a paradox. The effect here is as much to do with vocabulary andword order as with rhythm.

This kind of variety operates not only within dialogue but withineach pentameter line. Iambic pentameter is always tipping towards thestressed beat, so its cadence moves quickly: inverting that rhythm ispreemptive, eager. Richard’s well-known opening ‘‘NOW is the winter ofour discontent’’ (Richard III 1.1.1) suggests, in its stressed first syllable,that just as he can seize the expected meter, so he will seize the throne.When Juliet, awaiting Romeo, speaks the inverted ‘‘GALlop apace, you

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fiery-footed steeds’’ (3.2.1), her impatience reveals itself metrically: shecannot wait for the stressed syllable. Other variations on the iambicpentameter include syllabic ones: Hamlet’s most famous line ‘‘To be, ornot to be; that is the question’’ (3.1.58) ends on an extra unstressedsyllable (sometimes this is called a ‘‘feminine’’ ending). Perhaps this issuggestive of the unfinished nature of Hamlet’s thought here. (CicelyBerry, veteran voice coach of the Royal Shakespeare Company, suggeststhat these additional syllables ‘‘occur less frequently in the histories whereaction is more definite, perhaps swifter and less considered.’’2)

Lines are broken between speakers, often suggestive of powerful, evensexual, awareness of each other’s rhythm: the first encounter betweenKatherine and Petruccio in The Taming of the Shrew, for instance, or thetaut exchanges between Angelo and Isabella in Measure for Measure. Thetension between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth as they absorb, jumpily,the aftermath of Duncan’s murder, is enacted through the suspensionbetween them of a pentameter line:

Did you not speak?When?

Now.As I descended?

(2.2.16)

The scene’s rhythms are further punctuated by the insistent knocking atthe castle doors. In an essay on the play, the Romantic poet and opiumaddict Thomas de Quincey noted that this knocking wakes the playworldfrom the dreamlike trance in which the murder takes place: but the beatof the pentameter is a more subtle version of the same thing: ‘‘the pulsesof life are beginning to beat again.’’4 That iambic pentameter has a beatlike the human heart is a nice conceit – and it is helpful to try to connectpoetic rhythm with physiological ones (but it’s a rather Anglocentricview: other languages have quite different poetic meters even as theirspeakers have the same somatic ones).

If iambic pentameter is not an English bodily phenomenon, neitheris it an English dramatic tradition. Elizabethan playwrights did nothave a history of iambic pentameter plays. Medieval mystery playswere composed in a variety of stanzaic structures; aural unity waspartly achieved through alliteration. Mid-sixteenth-century interludesand comedies were often written in rhyming couplets. Gammer Gurton’sNeedle (published 1575 but probably written in the reign of Mary orEdward) gives us an example from university drama: ‘‘Alas, Hodge,alas! I may well curse and ban / This day, that ever I saw it, with Giband the milk-pan’’; 1.4.1–2).5 At the end of the century the successful

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professional company, the Queen’s Men, were performing the flat-footed‘‘fourteeners’’ (a line of seven stressed syllables) of Sir Clyomon and SirClamydes (published 1599). Listen to this dialogue between Juliana andSir Clamydes in the play’s first scene:

Juliana: My faith and troth if what is said by me thou dost perform.Clamydes: If not, be sure, O Lady, with my life I never will return.Juliana: Then, as thou seemst in thine attire a virgin’s knight to be,

Take thou this shield likewise of white, and bear thy name byme.

The problem is obvious: the long fourteener unavoidably breaks into twoparts and becomes jog trot.

It was Christopher Marlowe who established blank verse (‘‘blank’’because it does not rhyme) as the medium of dramatic poetry andexploited the range of the more fluid pentameter line. He announced hisinnovation in the prologue to Tamburlaine (1587):

From jigging veins of rhyming mother wits,And such conceits as clownage keeps in pay,We’ll lead you to the stately tent of war,Where you shall hear the Scythian TamburlaineThreatening the world with high astounding terms.

He distances himself from earlier drama both in subject matter (hepromises soldiers not clowns) and in sound (he promises not rhymesbut rhetoric: ‘‘high astounding terms’’). It was an acoustic paradigmshift. Thereafter almost every dramatist of the early 1590s tried to soundlike Marlowe: Peele, Greene, Nashe, Shakespeare, Anon. And it is notjust authors who are aware of the sound of Tamburlaine (the hero andthe play); literary characters themselves frequently mention what it islike to hear, or talk like, Tamburlaine. Simon Eyre, shoemaker-turned-mayor in Thomas Dekker’s comedy The Shoemaker’s Holiday, says heis not nervous about meeting royalty because he ‘‘knows how to speakto a Pope, to Sultan Soliman, to Tamburlaine and [if] he were here’’(20.59–60).6

Eyre means, primarily, that he can hold his own in terms of tone andvocabulary. But other literary characters are equally sensitive to poetryand prose rhythms and the differences between the two. In George Peele’sThe Old Wife’s Tale (1595) a character who has just spoken in hexameterverse (verse of six stressed syllables) says, ‘‘I’ll now set my countenanceand to her in prose’’ (l. 641).7 When Orlando greets Ganymede/Rosalindin As You Like It – ‘‘Good day and happiness, dear Rosalind!’’ – Jaquestakes this as his cue to exit: ‘‘Nay, then, God b’wi’you an you talk in

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blank verse’’ (4.1.29–30). Jaques has just been conversing with Rosalindin prose; he draws the audience’s attention to the fact that the scene is nowchanging register from (satiric) prose to (Petrarchan) poetry. Rosalindis similarly sensitive poetically when Celia first quotes Orlando’s lovepoems to her: she criticizes them for being hyper-metrical (having ‘‘morefeet than the verses would bear’’; 3.2.162–3). And in this play even thegoatherd Audrey wonders what ‘‘poetical’’ means. When Benedick triesto write a love poem in a play written almost entirely in prose, Much Ado,he is aware of literary precedent: classical lovers like Leander and Troilus‘‘still run smoothly in the even road of a blank verse’’ (5.2.32–3). Blankverse is synonymous with poetry. When the players arrive in Elsinore,Hamlet anticipates that the boy actor playing the lady ‘‘shall say her mindfreely, or the blank verse shall halt for’t’’ (2.2.326–7). In other words, ifshe is censored or interrupted, the lines will not scan.

It is interesting to note the dates of these three Shakespeare plays; theycluster together in the period 1598–1600. These are plays in which thecharacters are intensely aware of the relations between drama and life;part of that awareness is a self-consciousness about sound. In the sameperiod, in Julius Caesar (1599), Cassius comments on the inept rhymesof the poet who has entered with a couplet to try to reconcile Cassiusand Brutus: ‘‘How vilely doth this cynic rhyme!’’ (4.2.185).8 Brutusagrees, calling the poet a ‘‘jigging fool’’ (4.2.189) – a pejorative phraselike Marlowe’s ‘‘jigging wits’’ (the RSC Shakespeare edition glosses it as‘‘rhyming in a jerky and metrically unsophisticated manner’’; our italics).As the RSC gloss indicates (and our italics emphasize), references torhyme are often in tandem with references to meter. They are part of anawareness of what poetry sounds like.

In Marston’s Antonio and Mellida (1599), a discussion about metermoves quickly to a dialogue about rhyme (and is also filled with doubleentendres: as those highly charged split pentameter lines attest, poeticrhythm has a sexual component). Balurdo tries to compose a poem. Hispage, Dildo, identifies an error in Balurdo’s versification; he then offers a(bathetic) rhyme:

Balurdo: I’ll mount my courser and most gallantly prick –Dildo: ‘‘Gallantly prick’’ is too long, and stands hardly in the verse, sir.Balurdo: I’ll speak pure rhyme and so will bravely prank it

That I’ll to love like a – prank – prank it – a rhyme for ‘‘prankit’’?

Dildo: Blanket.

(4.1.268–73)

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Benedick has the same problem in Much Ado: ‘‘I can find out no rhymeto ‘lady’ but ‘baby’’’ (5.2.35–6).

The mechanicals in Midsummer Night’s Dream don’t discuss rhymebut they too are metrically aware. When they plan to add a prologue totheir interlude, their first consideration is the meter in which it shouldbe written. Quince proposes ‘‘eight and six’’ (alternating lines of eightsyllables and six syllables); Bottom favors two more: ‘‘let it be writtenin eight and eight’’ (3.1.22–4). A character in Chapman’s comedy TheGentleman Usher (1605) proposes composing ‘‘in a verse of ten’’ (i.e.pentameter) (2.2.71).9 We in the audience are inescapably aware ofShakespeare’s prosody, if only because the characters call our attentionto it. But although meter and rhyme are often invoked in plays, wecannot consider these references independently of references to languagegenerally. Characters from the comic Polonius in Hamlet to the romantichero in Antonio and Mellida are consistently linguistically aware. Hereis Polonius trying to be a literary critic: ‘‘‘mobbled queen’ is good’’(2.2.507). Here is Marston’s Antonio, confronting the inadequacy ofsimiles to express the beauty of his beloved:

Come down; she comes like – O, no simileIs precious, choice or elegant enoughTo illustrate her descent. Leap heart, she comes,She comes.

(Antonio and Mellida 1.1.151–4)10

In its monosyllabic – but repeated – simplicity, ‘‘She comes’’ is every bitas ‘‘poetic’’ as a simile.

Partly thanks to humanism (see Myth 2), Shakespeare’s was a linguis-tically self-aware age. Meter is part of a composite package of poeticlanguage that includes vocabulary and metaphor and rhyme and rhetor-ical devices. Together they are a play’s soundscape. And when youinclude stage noise – like the knocking in Macbeth, or the ‘‘sennet’’ or‘‘alarums’’ sounding – it is clear that there is a lot more to the ‘‘sound’’of Shakespeare than the mechanical scansion of lines.

We must not forget that prose has a rhythm too. Prose may not scanaccording to rules, as poetry does, but it has its own internal balance,incremental developments, and repetitions, all of which work on ourear in a fashion similar to poetry. Malvolio bursts upon the midnightrevelers in Twelfth Night with ‘‘My masters, are you mad?’’ (2.3.83). Thealliterative frame gives the phrase a neat symmetry, not unlike rhyme;but the phrase also has an acceleration of rhythm because of the threemonosyllables which lead to the terminative emphasis on the adjective‘‘mad’’ – a significant theme in the play.

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Malvolio continues with two triadic structures: ‘‘Have you no wit,manners, nor honesty? . . . Is there no respect of place, persons, nortime in you?’’ (2.3.83–9). Shakespeare uses triads in blank verse too:Antony’s ‘‘Friends, Romans, countrymen’’ in Julius Caesar (3.2.74); theBastard in King John muses ‘‘Mad world, mad kings, mad composi-tion!’’ (2.1.562). Shakespeare’s prose and poetry are here using the samerhetorical structures; his prose and his poetry overlap.

The close relationship between prose rhythm and poetic rhythm canbe seen in a phrase in Florio’s translation of Montaigne that clearlycaught Shakespeare’s ear as much as his eye. In Florio’s translation of‘‘An Apologie of Raymond Sebond,’’ Montaigne wonders ‘‘whether it belawfull for a subject . . . to rebell and take arms against his prince.’’11

In Hamlet the prince wonders whether ‘‘’tis nobler in the mind tosuffer . . . / Or to take arms against a sea of troubles’’ (3.1.59–61).Florio’s/Montaigne’s literal use of arms (to oppose one’s ruler) becomesin Shakespeare a metaphor (material arms against a liquid sea would beof little use). But what seems to have caught Shakespeare’s attention firstwas the syntactical balance of Florio’s prose. In prose he heard poetry.

The contemporary poet Peter Porter has said that ‘‘a poem is a formof refrigeration that stops language going bad.’’ The same can be said ofShakespeare’s prose. Just as we cannot separate iambic pentameter fromeveryday speech, neither can we entirely separate prose from poetry.

Notes

1 Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Oxford: Basil Blackwell,1983), p. 2.

2 Derek Attridge, Poetic Rhythm: An Introduction (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1995), p. 166.

3 Cicely Berry, The Actor and the Text (New York: Applause Theater Books,1987), p. 63.

4 Thomas de Quincey, ‘‘On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth,’’ in Mis-cellaneous Essays (The Project Gutenberg EBook of Miscellaneous Essays,by Thomas de Quincey; accessed 8 July 2012; http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10708/10708-8.txt).

5 Gammer Gurton’s Needle, in Five Pre-Shakespearean Comedies, ed. FrederickS. Boas (1934; reissued Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970).

6 Thomas Dekker, The Shoemaker’s Holiday, ed. Robert Smallwood andStanley Wells, Revels (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999).

7 George Peele, The Old Wife’s Tale, ed. Charles Whitworth (London: A. & C.Black, 1996).

8 In all other Shakespeare editions this is 4.3.133.

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9 George Chapman, The Gentleman Usher, ed. Robert Ornstein in The Playsof George Chapman (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1970).

10 John Marston, Antonio and Mellida, ed. G.K. Hunter (London: EdwardArnold, 1965).

11 Michel de Montaigne, The essays or morall, politike and militarie discoursesof Michaell de Montaigne, trans. John Florio (London, 1603): ‘An Apologyof Raymond Semond’, p. 254 (sig. Z1v).