My name is Isabela Calixto. This podcast is brought to you by UnB.

A special thanks to
Michelle Alvarenga who made me do this and to my girlfriend, Luciana Pereira who can’t
stop talking about Shakespeare. She helped me writing the script and insisted on reading
the exemples for this podcast.

Shakespeare’s Metric
I: Introduction: what is metric?
There are many ways to look at Shakespeare’s writing. For example, you can try analyzing
the symbolism in his plays, as in the rich symmetry in Macbeth’s witches’ prophecies or
Othello’s heavy metaphors on black and white. Alternatively, one can look at the rich inner
dialogues of his characters in search for the thesis of his plays, or at the many intricate
inversions of his sonnets to explore their hidden meaning and secret muse. Today, however,
we will look at a specific and celebrated aspect of Shakespeare’s writing: the metric.

Metric refers to the poetic meter, which, according to the Cambridge Dictionary, is “the
rhythm of a poem, produced by the arrangement of syllables according to the number and
type of beats in each line”. This means that a poet can choose to arrange words in a certain
way to produce different rhythmic patterns and allude to different ideas. For example, a
writer can use a number of syllables with a certain pattern of stress to build momentum in a
poem, as Edgar Allan Poe did on his famous poem “The Raven”:

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,

Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore—

In these first two lines, we have a good idea of how the rhythm of a poem can affect its tone.
The repeated beats, one strong syllable and one weak one, create a sense of dread in the
reader and propels them along the poem. You could even say that it resembles a very
famous cinematic soundtrack: (daaaa-dum). These two main notes of the Jaws soundtrack,
one of the most famous horror movies to date, are very similar to the two beats of “The
Raven”, which is also a work in the horror genre.

Shakespeare’s sonnets, however, do not have such a dreary mood to them.

Instead, they are famous for their romantic and emotional themes.

Their language, heavily relying on metaphors of nature, also helps create a lighter tone,
even if at times it turns melancholic.

Their meter consists of 14 lines, divided in three groups of four lines (called quatrains) with
alternating rhymes and two final consecutive rhyming lines (a couplet).

This structure was not created by Shakespeare, but he made it so popular among
English-speaking poets that today it is often referred to as a “Shakespearean sonnet”, and
its meter is the most famous buzzword of all matters Shakespeare: the iambic pentameter.
II: The Iambic Pentameter
In Shakespeare’s sonnets, the famous meter is called “iambic pentameter”. An iamb is a
type of two-syllable beat, one unstressed and one stressed. For example, in Hamlet we
have:

“To be, / or not / to be, / that is / the ques/tion”

In each pair of syllables, the first one is “weak” and the second one is “strong”, or
emphasized by stress, which creates a rhythm. In Shakespeare’s plays, it helped actors
memorize the rhyming lines and set the tone of a scene. In his sonnets, it creates the pattern
characteristic to poems.

“Pentameter” refers to the number of pairs of syllables in a line. In this case, “penta” from the
Greek for “five”. In Romeo and Juliet, we have a famous pentameter:

“But, soft! 1/ What light 2/ through yon 3/ der win 4/ dow breaks5?”

As you can see, each section is divided by sound, not by word or spelling, as it is the nature
of a play to be recited out loud. In total, a single line of iambic pentameter has 10 syllables,
and half of them are stressed. It is an established meter that was also not created by
Shakespeare but was popularized by him, and as a general rule this pattern is the core of all
of the bard’s sonnets.These first two lines from sonnet XVIII are a classic example of this:

“Shall I / compare / thee to / a sum / mer's day?

Thou art / more lo / vely and / more tem / perate”

III: Why the Iamb?

This meter is notably very natural for the English speaker, as it is very easily reproduced in
everyday conversation. So much so that Shakespeare weaves verses in iambic pentameter
in his plays in the middle of dialogue, as in this example from Othello:

“This was her first remembrance from the Moor” (Emilia, 3:3, Othello)

In any language, there are natural rhythms in which speakers tend to speak and write. In the
case of English, words tend to have few syllables, which means that two-syllable beats are
very easy to create and rhyme. It also means that the iambic pentameter will inevitably
stretch or compress words according to the rhythm:

“Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,”

This line from sonnet XVIII seems to linger on the word “darling” due to the metric of the
iamb, which stresses the first syllable but not the second one. By the same token, “rough” is
the unstressed part of the first iamb and so sounds shorter when read out loud.
Another reason why this meter is so well-loved is because it’s an écho of our own natural
biological rhythm: the iamb resembles a beating heart. There is a reason why Shakespeare
didn’t write full plays in iambic, besides the practical impossibility of the task.

It is often used in moments that characters are showing their hearts, or their true selves. In
particularly passionate or introspective scenes, characters will be so overwhelmed with
emotion that they will turn to poetry to verbalize their true feelings and thoughts. It is similar
to guidelines followed by music theorists and composers of musical theater, which say that,
once a character’s emotions are too big to speak, they should sing, and once they are too
big to sing, they should dance.

In his sonnets, one of the purest expressions of passion in Shakespeare’s body of work, it is
easy to understand why they are written in the rhythm of the human heart. Consequently, by
analyzing its beats (its heartbeats, if you will), and any variations of it it’s possible to better
understand the emotions behind each line.

IV: Variation: Trochee (and other stresses?)

Going back to Poe’s Raven, we can see it is not, in fact neither iambic nor a pentameter. It is
a variation on the two-syllable beat called the trochee, which consists of a stressed syllable
and a unstressed one:

“Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,”

As mentioned before, this rhythm brings on an ominous beat to the poem, a forward
momentum, due to the first syllable, not the second, being the strongest one. The most
famous Shakespeare line in this meter is the witches’ chanting in Macbeth:

“Double, double toil and trouble;

Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.”

The meter here is the exact opposite of the iamb, so if the iamb is the natural, pleasant
rhythm of the heart, the trochee is eery, unnatural and ominous. However, it is not only used
to set a tone of horror, but also to indicate a variation on a sonnet’s “heart rate”:

Gilding the object whereupon it gazeth;

In this case, the emphasis on the first syllable of “gilding” stresses the
verb “gild” and the object of the gilding, instead of the “-ing” and the
article “the”. You might even say that the poet’s heart skipped a beat
while writing it.

V: Modern interpretations
It is no coincidence that the word “sonnet” comes from the Italian word for “sound”. This
format, despite its rigid structure, has a musical quality to it when read out loud and lends
itself very well to music. Specifically, hip hop has a surprisingly compatibility to Shakesearian
sonnets, which is tied to how the iambic pentameter can be sung on different tempos and
beat speeds.

On his 2011 TEDtalk in Aldeburgh, hip hop artist and rapper Akala demonstrated how
adaptable this meter is to a genre spaced over 500 years apart. He proved, once again, the
atemporality of this meter and how language and rhythm can transcend time and
generations.

(insert here Akala rapping sonnet XVIII)

rapper