TEN

DRAMATIC VERSE

Early dramatic verse seems at first glance to be as regularly patterned as lyric verse. This is particularly true for medieval plays and for Shakespeare’s immediate predecessors. Shakespeare’s own earlier plays contain verse which almost always has ten syllables per line, occasionally nine or eleven, and beat and light syllables usually alternate. Even such passionate and individually characterized speeches as those of Romeo and Juliet rarely break the pattern. Here is one of Juliet’s urgent outbursts from Act III Scene 2:

When playing Juliet in a reproduction Elizabethan theatre over fifty years ago, I certainly used secondary stress on “to”. This was partly because I was aware of how an Elizabethan might have spoken the line and partly because I then lived most of the time in Devon, surrounded by speech rhythms closer to Shakespeare’s own than RP is. I would now probably syncopate: | whip you | ´ to the | west , as most of the time I speak RP (which only has a binary plus-or-minus stress system) among RP speakers, and this is probably what the average audience at a Shakespeare production would expect of the well-bred Juliet nowadays.

Over the last half-century most of the few remaining secondary stresses in RP have disappeared, along with the loss of many initial and medial unstressed syllables (such as the o [ə] in police and the e [ə] in counsellor), so that our speech is rhythmically even less like Shakespeare’s than it used to be. (Older speech habits are often preserved by churchmen, especially in their sermons, but most of us can more easily find them through our memories of how our parents and grandparents spoke, or by listening to very old films or to recordings from the BBC archive.)

In his later plays, Shakespeare’s verse is more flexible. There are fewer long set speeches. There is more brisk dialogue, often quite colloquial in tone, much of it in prose rather than verse. Even the set speeches in verse, however, show a greater rhythmic freedom than appears in the early plays. In Hamlet Act II Scene 2 the First Player, a senior actor with some years of professional experience, parodies an outmoded style of writing in an immensely long and old-fashioned speech, which is, nevertheless, moving. The Ghost of Hamlet’s father also speaks an old-fashioned style of verse, but the younger generation of characters have a much freer kind of verse rhythm, with many examples of syncopation and of feet which do not have the standard two syllables. Read aloud the following examples.

PLAYER:

There are four trisyllabic feet here, which add a little variation to the rhythm. More noticeable are the monosyllabic feet, three of which highlight important themes in the play: “arms”, the “gules” (red splashes of blood) resulting from their use, and the tragic destiny of “sons”. Weight is added to these keywords by the preceding feet which are, in each case, disyllabic even-feet. The other monosyllabic foot crisply visualises the extent of the bloodshed in the expression | Head to | foot . There is no syncopation.

After a brief prose interchange among Polonius, Hamlet and the Player, Hamlet soliloquizes in a more fashionable style of verse with less of a sing-song rhythm:

In the seven complete lines here, equivalent in length to the passage from the Player’s speech above, there are five trisyllabic feet, five monosyllabic feet and one obvious example of syncopation.

More significantly, there are several places where it is difficult to decide exactly how the words should be emphasized, giving optional patterns of scansion. For example, the following alternatives would be acceptable to many actors:

These three alternatives would alter the total scores of foot types by adding another trisyllabic foot and two more monosyllabic feet.

This high number of possible optional readings is characteristic of dramatic verse, where the author climbs inside the skin of his character and imagines his mood and manner of speaking: it is much rarer in lyric verse, where the poet writes as himself or as one of his regular personae and, presumably therefore, for one of his own voices.

Later in the speech there is an outburst of cursing that gives rise to a line of four feet, as accepted by most editors, although early printed texts vary the lineation. (Whichever text you work from, you cannot recover exclusively five-foot lines.) It seems as if Shakespeare allows a whole silent foot while Hamlet pulls himself together and resorts to action. “This is most brave,” he cries, “that I

Not only is there a pause a foot long after “Foh” as Hamlet regains his equilibrium, but “Hum” in the next line presumably represents a scarcely audible “Hmmm”, as Hamlet stops talking (for the space of a foot) in order to think.

Shakespeare’s most famous line can be spoken in a variety of ways, often including a silent foot. Over many years I have collected the following versions from performances and rehearsals of both professional and amateur productions of Hamlet:

All of these seem to me to be acceptable in the context of a performance. I have even known actors to adopt different scansions on different nights, depending on the degree to which, as Hamlet, they felt able to think logically or to argue passionately, or were overcome by the horror or bleakness of their situation.

Shakespeare’s middle and last plays are full of lines like this, that can be interpreted and spoken in a variety of ways. One reason why the Ghost, for all his passionate outcry against his wife and Claudius, has a kind of other-worldly dignity, is the fixity of his lines, almost all ten syllables long and without syncopation:

There are in the first seven lines (to compare with the other two passages above) four trisyllabic feet, just one foot “power” that might be monosyllabic, but was probably disyllabic, and no absolutely certain instances of syncopation (unless you read: | witchcraft | ´ of his | wit ). Every line has ten syllables (the apparent exception, the eighth line, contains “even”, often printed as “e’en”, which was usually pronounced as a monosyllable in the theatre).

In the last plays, such as The Winter’s Tale, there is more syncopation than in Hamlet’s soliloquies and many more lines that are capable of varied interpretations and stressing. Here is Polixenes’ response in Act I Scene Two to Leontes’ request that he stay as a guest a little longer:

POLIXENES:

How would you say these lines? Try marking them. Here is one possible version:

In the seven complete lines as scanned above there are five trisyllabic feet and one foot with four syllables. There are three monosyllabic feet (four, if you include “even” as “e’en”) and one case of syncopation. The important aspect of this passage. however, is that only lines 2, 4 and 5 seem to me to have a single clear-cut scansion: the rest are debatable, open to varying possibilities of phrasing and emphasis; many of the likely alternatives would introduce further examples of syncopation (e.g. | trouble: | ´ to save | both ).

It looks, then, as if dramatic verse more often than lyric verse has feet that are not the disyllabic norm. Most important of all, dramatic verse is characterized by its flexibility, by its capability of being spoken in a variety of ways by different actors — or even by the same actor in different performances. Although the pattern of the whole play contains sufficient lines to establish the basic metre, there are many individual lines (usually, but not always, fewer than half the total) whose scansion is not, as it were, fixed. In this regard, such verse comes close to the nature of a transcript of emotional speech, where it is difficult to say for certain exactly how it should be scanned. A transcript of a company report or of a BBC news bulletin, on the other hand, would almost certainly be given exactly the same beat and light syllables by a large number of different readers. Lyric verse, while more flexible in nature than a news bulletin, is much closer to that in rhythmic predictability than it is to dramatic verse.

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