30 Great Myths about Shakespeare by Laurie Maguire, Emma Smith Read Free Book Online

in excess of their abstractable meaning … Your language draws attention to itself, flaunts its material being, as statements like “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 metrical pattern in Shakespeare's writing: iambic pentameter. Iambic pentameter structures a pattern of five paired unstressed/STRESSED syllables that we usually render as “de-DUM, de-DUM, de-DUM, de-DUM, de-DUM”: hence “Thou STILL unRAVished BRIDE of QUIetNESS.” There are thousands of iambic pentameter lines in Shakespeare: “But soft, what light through yonder window breaks” ( Romeo and Juliet 2.1.44) or “When I do count the clock that tells the time” (Sonnet 12) or “If music be the food of love, play on” ( Twelfth Night 1.1.1) or “False face must hide what the false heart doth know” ( Macbeth 1.7.82). But iambic pentameter shows up, as many critics have pointed out, in lots of everyday situations too: “We hold these truths to be self-evident” (the first line of the American Declaration of Independence); “the baffled king composing Hallelujah” (Leonard Cohen's “Hallelujah”); “A skinny cappuccino, please, to go” (us, in Starbucks). On the one hand, iambic pentameter is part of a package of qualities epitomizing the literary; on 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. Stage directions in Shakespeare's plays are always in prose. In the first quarto edition of King Lear (1608) we find the following direction for Regan to stab a servant: Shee takes a sword and runs at him behind (H2 r ). The theater person who prepared the version which reached print many years later in 1623 reduced the direction to the essential: Killes him (TLN 2155), which gets the job done. The quarto simply offers extra details about the way in which the killing is staged. But it adds something else too: a line of poetry. The quarto stage direction is a perfect example of iambic pentameter. Is this an example of Shakespeare at work, having penned dialogue in iambic pentameter and not switched off the rhythm when he wrote the stage direction? Or is it another example of the poetic rhythms of everyday speech? Of course, it's both.
    Writing about poetic forms, Derek Attridge describes pentameter verse as having “a relatively weak rhythmic architecture, neither dividing into half-lines nor forming larger units. It can be rhymed or unrhymed, stanzaic or continuous. It makes no use of virtual beats [silent beats implied by the rhythmic pattern].” “These characteristics,” writes Attridge “make it particularly 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 the unexpected 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. The Nurse offers information: Romeo's names, his parentage. But it is also highly patterned: Juliet's one-line response is structured as an antithesis and a paradox. The effect here is as much to do with vocabulary and word order as with rhythm.
    This kind of variety operates not only within dialogue but within each pentameter line. Iambic pentameter is always tipping towards the stressed beat, so its cadence moves quickly: inverting that rhythm is preemptive, eager. Richard's well-known opening “NOW is the winter of our 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.