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

When Juliet, awaiting Romeo, speaks the inverted “GALlop apace, you fiery-footed steeds” (3.2.1), her impatience reveals itself metrically: she cannot wait for the stressed syllable. Other variations on the iambic pentameter include syllabic ones: Hamlet's most famous line “To be, or not to be; that is the question” (3.1.58) ends on an extra unstressed syllable (sometimes this is called a “feminine” ending). Perhaps this is suggestive of the unfinished nature of Hamlet's thought here. (Cicely Berry, veteran voice coach of the Royal Shakespeare Company, suggests that these additional syllables “occur less frequently in the histories where action is more definite, perhaps swifter and less considered.” 2 )
    Lines are broken between speakers, often suggestive of powerful, even sexual, awareness of each other's rhythm: the first encounter between Katherine and Petruccio in The Taming of the Shrew , for instance, or the taut exchanges between Angelo and Isabella in Measure for Measure . The tension between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth as they absorb, jumpily, the aftermath of Duncan's murder, is enacted through the suspension between 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 at the castle doors. In an essay on the play, the Romantic poet and opium addict Thomas de Quincey noted that this knocking wakes the playworld from the dreamlike trance in which the murder takes place: but the beat of the pentameter is a more subtle version of the same thing: “the pulses of life are beginning to beat again.” 4 That iambic pentameter has a beat like the human heart is a nice conceit—and it is helpful to try to connect poetic rhythm with physiological ones (but it's a rather Anglocentric view: other languages have quite different poetic meters even as their speakers have the same somatic ones).
    If iambic pentameter is not an English bodily phenomenon, neither is it an English dramatic tradition. Elizabethan playwrights did not have a history of iambic pentameter plays. Medieval mystery plays were composed in a variety of stanzaic structures; aural unity was partly achieved through alliteration. Mid-sixteenth-century interludes and comedies were often written in rhyming couplets. Gammer Gurton's Needle (published 1575 but probably written in the reign of Mary or Edward) gives us an example from university drama: “Alas, Hodge, alas! I may well curse and ban / This day, that ever I saw it, with Gib and the milk-pan”; 1.4.1–2). 5 At the end of the century the successful professional company, the Queen's Men, were performing the flat-footed “fourteeners” (a line of seven stressed syllables) of Sir Clyomon and Sir Clamydes (published 1599). Listen to this dialogue between Juliana and Sir 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 by me.
    The problem is obvious: the long fourteener unavoidably breaks into two parts and becomes jog trot.
    It was Christopher Marlowe who established blank verse (“blank” because it does not rhyme) as the medium of dramatic poetry and exploited the range of the more fluid pentameter line. He announced his innovation 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 Tamburlaine
    Threatening the world with high astounding terms.
    He distances himself from earlier drama both in subject matter (he promises soldiers not clowns) and in sound (he promises not rhymes but rhetoric: “high astounding terms”). It was an acoustic paradigm shift. Thereafter almost every