 Hi, everyone. My name is Kim Downford, and today we're going to be talking about the language and rhythm of Shakespeare. You don't need a whole lot of materials for this, mostly you and yourself. We'll be dealing with a little bit of text, but don't worry, we will show you any text you need to know. If you want to take some notes, feel free to grab a writing utensil or something to write on. Now, I know the language of Shakespeare can be really intimidating. When I first started learning Shakespeare, I was like, ah, what am I looking at? This doesn't make any sense. But I bet if I asked you right now to quote Shakespeare, you'd be able to do it. How about to be or not to be? That is the question. Or a Romeo, Romeo, where for art thou Romeo, even double, double toil and trouble, fire burn and cauldron bubble, or one of my personal favorites, friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears. Can you think of others that you might know? I bet there's some stuff you didn't even realize was from Shakespeare. A lot of phrases that we now use, those originate in Shakespeare. The phrase, in a pickle, that's from the tempest. Flesh and blood is from his play Hamlet. Off with his head, that's Richard the Third. The course of true love never did run smooth. It's from a mid-summer night's dream. There's more than you can count. Shakespeare is all over our language. In fact, he had a lot of words and phrases that had never before been written down until he used them. He would turn nouns into verbs, connect words that had never been connected before. We owe so much of our contemporary language to him. Words like bedroom, birthplace, bloodstained, excitement, farmhouse, fortune teller, green-eyed, hot, blooded, invitation, stealthy, tongue-tied, watchdog. Like, I'm sorry, that's really cool. One of the hallmarks of Shakespeare's writing. When characters were experiencing emotions about love or passion or their state in the world, they would start speaking in what we call iambic pentameter. Now, if you've never heard that word before, don't worry, we're going to break it down. That's what I like to do when I'm not entirely sure what a word is. I break it into smaller pieces. So let's first look at the word penta. Do we know other words that have penta in them? Penta gone, pentagram. What do those words have in common? Five, right? They have five sides. Penta means five. How about the word meter? Now, we're looking at meter in terms of poetry. So a meter is just a pattern of the verse or a poem, usually dealing with stressed syllables and unstressed syllables. Because when we speak, our speaking pattern, we stress and not stress parts of words. Like, my name. My full first name is Kimberley. Now, if I stressed every syllable of that word, Kimberley! That's a really aggressive way to introduce myself. I say Kimberley. The first word is stressed. The first syllable is stressed. The other two are unstressed. Think about your own name. Why don't you give it a try? Do you stress or not stress parts of the syllables of the word? Now, let's try clapping it out. Because an iamb is an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. So let's clap this out. If we do unstressed and stressed, you can also point, point on the stressed. So an iambic pentameter is just a line of verse that has five metric feet, each consisting of one stressed and one unstressed syllable. That means there's ten syllables in total in the line. So if we clap out ten syllables, unstressed to stress, one, two, three, four, five. Does that make you think of anything? What if you clapped it out on your chest? What does that make you think of? A heartbeat, right? What if we stomped it out? If we went, you got kind of a gallop going, right? So if you think back to what I was saying about when Shakespeare writes an iambic pentameter, when characters are feeling love or passion or thinking about their state in the world, what happens to our heart? It gallops, it races, it starts to accelerate. So let's look at a line from Romeo and Juliet. The line is, but soft, what light from yonder window breaks. Now let's clap out the points of the meter. Ready? But soft, what light from yonder window breaks. So what Shakespeare's doing there, he's showing us the parts of the line that are the most important. So let's take a look at the non-stressed words. What are the non-stressed words we have, but, what, through, der, now. But what's through der, now? That is not really a sentence, is it? But what are the stressed words? Soft, light, yon wind breaks. Even without the rest of the syllables, you get an idea of the feeling of that line. Let's take a look at another line from the Scottish play Macbeth. Let not light see my black and deep desires. Now let's clap out the rhythm first. Let not light see my black and deep desires. So what are the non-stressed words? We have let, light, my, and d. Again, that's not really anything. What about the stressed words? Not see black deep desires. Yeah, that's a much stronger statement. All right, let's try one more. This is one of the most famous lines from Shakespeare. This is the start of Hamlet's to be speech. We're going to clap it out, all right? To be or not to be, that is the question. I must have messed that up. Let's try that again. To be or not to be, that is the question. What's going on there? There's an extra syllable. That's 11 syllables, not 10. That means that we're ending on an unstressed line. That's a little bit different. So now say that line aloud. To be or not to be, that is the question. To be or not to be, that is the question. How do you feel when you say that out loud? Does it feel questioning? Like something is a little off with yourself? So why would Shakespeare write a line like that? Why would he put that extra unstressed beat in that line? First, let's break down the line. The line to be or not to be, what is he saying there? He's saying to be, should I be or should I not be? Should I live? Should I not live? That's the question. That is the question I'm asking myself. Should I live or not live? Now that's not a question you ask if you are feeling completely normal. So it shows you in that rhythm that this character is feeling off. He's off with his heartbeat. He's off with the world around him. So within the meter, Shakespeare is telling you how this character feels. That was one of the most brilliant things. Now when this does happen, when you have that unstressed at the end, this is what's called a feminine ending. It means that when we do end on that stress, that's called a masculine ending or a strong ending. I can't say that I love that we call the unstressed and weaker ending a feminine, but it is what it is. Now is this how Shakespeare always wrote? No. He did not always write in iambic pentameter, contrary to what a lot of people think. He wrote in a couple different manners. He wrote in what's called prose. And prose is just ordinary speech, how I'm talking to you right now, how we talk to each other on a day to day. In Shakespeare, prose are often used when characters are writing letters, maybe when they're giving a speech. Let's take a look at some text from a letter that Macbeth writes to Lady Macbeth. Now this is a letter that he writes, remember, they met me in the day of success and I have learned by the perfectest report they have more in them than mortal knowledge. When I burned in desire to question them further, they made themselves air into which they vanished. Now what happens if we try to break that down into a meter? Let's see if we can we can scan that. They met me in the day of success and that doesn't really work, right? There isn't that heartbeat feeling to it. He also wrote in what's called rhymed verse. Now this is where the verse rhymes exactly like you would think. Usually in either rhyming couplets or he would rhyme every other line. This is used a lot for sensational passages, for lyrical points. Anytime you have a play within a play, that happens a lot in Shakespeare. He loved plays within plays. Anytime you had some of the other worldly characters speaking, a lot of times they would speak in rhymed verse. Here's a little example of that. This is from a play within a play, Pyramus and Thisby, which is performed by characters in a Midsummer Night's Dream. This is Pyramus speaking and he says, Sweet moon, I thank thee for thy sunny beams. I thank thee moon for shining now so bright. For by thy gracious golden glittering gleams I trust to take of truest Thisby's sight. But stay, oh spite, but mark, poor knight, what dreadful doll is here? Eyes do you see? How can it be? Oh dainty duck, oh dear. Now the play is designed to be funny. It is designed to be deliberately bad, but you hear those rhymes. Beams, gleams, bright, sight, spite, night, and so on. Now with that I'm going to end our little session on rhyme and meter. I hope that you're able to look at some of Shakespeare's plays and you can try to see when the characters are speaking in iambic pentameter, when they're speaking in prose, or rhyme verse. Thank you so much for joining me today and talking a little bit about Shakespeare. Again, I'm Kim Douthit and I hope you have a wonderful day.