For those who are reading Shakespeare's works for the first time, especially if you are reading the original works, his diction may seem a bit strange, but there is a secret to appreciating his works.
Although he is best known for his plays, Shakespeare was first and foremost a poet.
The most important thing about Shakespeare's language is his accent. Instead of stressing a word, certain syllables in the word are emphasized.
In fact, when we read English, we are so accustomed to doing this that we generally don’t notice it.
But if you read a word slowly, you can hear it
For example:
Playwright, computer, phone
< p>Poets pay great attention to these stresses. They have long experimented with the number and order of various stressed and unstressed syllables, and used different combinations to produce the rhythm of poetry.Like songwriters, poets express their ideas by repeating a recognizable rhythm, which is called rhyme.
Like music, poetry has special terms to describe these rhythms.
In a line of poetry, meter is a certain amount of heavy and light syllables that form an independent unit, just like different beats in music contain different numbers of beats. A line of poetry usually has several meters.
For example, a long and short pattern is a foot with three syllables, the first syllable is a stressed syllable, and the last two are unstressed syllables.
Long and short patterns can create smooth and powerful verses, like Robert Browning's poem "The Lost Leader"
"For a handful of silver he left us, just for A ribbon adorned his clothes."
Another type of meter is the iambic, which is two syllables long, with the first stressed syllable followed by the unstressed syllable.
The iambic meter in Shakespeare's "Macbeth" gives the witches' spells an ominous and eerie feel.
“Don’t be afraid of hard work, don’t be afraid of trouble, the boiling foam in the cauldron has turned into a ripple”!
But Shakespeare used iambic. This two-syllable meter is exactly the opposite of iambic.
So the first one is a light syllable, and the second one is Stressed syllables, such as "To be or not to be."
Shakespeare's favorite meter is iambic pentameter, and each line of poetry is composed of five two-syllable iambics
Total ***Ten syllables, many of Shakespeare's famous lines use this meter:
"Can I compare you to the brightness of a summer day?"
"Rise up , beautiful sun! Drive away the jealous moon."
We can see that in iambic, regardless of punctuation or word length, the meter depends on the sound, not the spelling.
Iambic pentameter may sound technical, but there is an easy way to remember its meaning
"Iambic" is pronounced a lot like "I am" (a homophonic )
Now, expand this into a sentence that is exactly iambic pentameter.
"I am a pirate with wooden legs"
This pirate can only walk step by step, which can be associated with Shakespeare's favorite meter, iambic pentameter. Ten steps completed.
This pirate can also help me remember the light and heavy syllables in it.
If we imagine the footprints he left on the beach: curves represent light syllables, shoe prints represent heavy syllables
"If music is the food of love, then keep playing"
Of course, most of the lines in Shakespeare's plays are ordinary prose, but if you read them carefully, you will find that Shakespeare's words become poetry.
Especially iambic pentameter, just like we appreciate the poetry in our lives, feels passionate, introspective, or majestic.
Whether it's Hamlet pondering the meaning of his existence, or Romeo expressing his love, these characters use iambic pentameter to express their emotions and their situations.
Now one question remains: why does Shakespeare use iambic pentameter at these moments, rather than iambic hexameter or tetrameter?
It is said that iambic pentameter is easier for actors to remember and easier for the audience to understand, because iambic pentameter is very consistent with English.
But there might be another reason: next time you're in an emotional high, like the one that made Shakespeare's characters sing, put your hand on the left side of your chest and see what you can feel ?
The rhythm of your heart beating is also a melodious thump, thump, thump, thump, thump.
Shakespeare’s most poetic lines not only talk about inner thoughts, they follow the rhythm of the heartbeat.
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