Various online ‘guides’ to poetic metre seem to have no idea how stress works. Part of why it’s so difficult to understand metre is that there’s a lot of nonsense written about it. It takes a bit to train your ear to hear it, but the difference does exist. It’s clear that ‘a’ and ‘of’ are unstressed, but ‘crossed’, too? The difference between stress and unstress here is subtler. This is especially true when the differences between stress and un-stress are subtler. If someone said these words like that, you’d think they were batty.Įvery English speaker can tell when stress has gone wrong, but it takes practise to hear when stress is being used correctly. You can do it, but it goes against your every instinct as an English speaker. You emphasised ‘an’ and ‘grudge’, suppressing ‘from’ and ‘cient’. Even for native English speakers, however, it takes practise to consciously notice stress.Įven if you’d never read those words before, you knew where the stresses went. When speaking, some syllables have more weight, more emphasis than others.Įvery native English intuitively uses stress when they speak. Maybe you’ve heard iambic pentameter is about ‘stress’, that some syllables have more ‘stress’ than others. What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend. The which if you with patient ears attend, Is now the two hours’ traffic of our stage Which, but their children’s end, nought could remove, The fearful passage of their death-mark’d love,Īnd the continuance of their parents’ rage, Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.įrom forth the fatal loins of these two foesĪ pair of star-cross’d lovers take their life ĭo with their death bury their parents’ strife. To explain poetic metre, I will (mostly) use the prologue of Romeo and Juliet as an example: Learning about stress and metre is almost impossible if you do not listen to yourself speak. Say them out loud and listen to yourself as you say them. For the examples I use, do not read them in your head.
Finally, I’ll tell you what to do when a di-dum becomes a dum-di (Metrical Techniques).īefore we begin, you must remember: poetry lives in sound, not ink.
Then I’ll move to what happens when you put five di-dums together (Metre). I’ll start with what di-dum actually means (Stress). I’m assuming you know nothing about metre.
#Scansion examples shakespeare how to#
I’m going to teach you how to read iambic pentameter. This approach to teaching poetic metre has three problems: 1) it is not obvious what di-dum means 2) hearing the di-dum di-dum in poetry requires practise, even for native English speakers and 3) many, many lines in Shakespeare are not di-dum di-dum di-dum di-dum di-dum. ‘See,’ she said, ‘it goes di-dum di-dum di-dum di-dum di-dum, up and down, up and down,’ like it was obvious what this meant. Despite the fact that Shakespeare writes almost entirely in metre, most schools either don’t teach students how to read metre, or teach it so poorly that they do more harm than good.Īt my high school - a good high school - the English teacher handed us the prologue of Romeo and Juliet. William Hogarth (source)Įvery year at school, I was taught Shakespeare, but, only in the final year of my literature major, did I learn how to read Shakespeare.īy ‘read Shakespeare’, I mean reading poetic metre, iambic pentameter.
0 kommentar(er)
