(upbeat music)
-: Hi everyone, my name is Kim Douthit
and today we're gonna 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 wanna 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, "What am I looking at?
"This doesn't make any sense."
But I bet if I ask 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, "O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore 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."
That's from "A Midsummer 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 gonna 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?
Pentagon, Pentagram. What does 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.
Cause when we speak,
our speaking pattern we stress
and not stress parts of words.
Like my name. My full first name is Kimberly.
Now if I stressed every syllable of that word, Kimberly!
That's a really aggressive way to introduce myself.
I say, Kimberly, 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 in I am
is an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable.
So let's clap this out. If we do unstressed and stressed.
(clapping)
You can also point, point on the stressed.
So in 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 10 syllables in total in the line.
So if we clap out 10 syllables,
unstressed and stressed,
one, two, three, four, five, (clapping)
Does that make you think of anything?
What if you clapped it out on your chest?
Pum pum, pum pum, pum pum, pum pum.
What does that make you think of?
A heartbeat, right?
Pum pum, pum pum. What if we stomped it out,
if we went (stomping).
You got kind of a gallop going right?
So if you think back to what I was saying
about when Shakespeare writes in 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.
And 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 is 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, dow.
But what through der dow.
That is not really a sentence, is it?
But what are the stressed words?
Soft, light, yon, win, 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, (clapping)
and deep, desires. (clapping)
So what are the non-stressed words?
We have, Let, light, my, and, de.
Again, that's not really anything.
What about the stressed words?
Not, see, black, deep, sires.
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 gonna 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."
Hmm! 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."
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 were 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 of 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 scan that.
"They met me in the day of success and I..."
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 have 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 Thisbe,
which is performed by characters
in A Midsummer Night's Dream.
This is Pyramus speaking and he says,
"Sweet Moon, I thank thee for the sunny beams.
"I thank thee, Moon, for shining now so bright.
"For by thy gracious, golden, glittering gleams,
"I trust to take of truest Thisbe site.
"But stay O spite! But mark, poor knight.
"What dreadful dole is here! Eyes, do you see?
"How can it be? O dainty duck! O 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.
(upbeat music)