Should the audience be able to HEAR iambic pentameter?
I had such a wonderful question on my YouTube channel a while back. The question was, in essence. “Should the audience be able to hear iambic pentameter when it’s being performed?”
This is a great question to dive into as actors, because it’s linked to a big myth around acting Shakespeare: that we need to “do the iambic pentameter”.
Some actors, when they first start with Shakespeare, think they need to make the words SOUND like iambic pentameter.
They might have heard that iambic pentameter sounds something like this: dee DUM dee DUM dee DUM dee DUM dee DUM. (That’s the five beats, with a light stress and heavy stress in each beat. If that’s completely new to you, you can watch my video explaining iambic pentameter here.)
With this in mind, a beginner actor might pick up a Shakespearean monologue and try and make it sound like, dee DUM dee DUM dee DUM dee DUM dee DUM.
So… “To BE or NOT to BE, that IS the QUE…stion”. Hmm.
And then they think… “Help! What do I do with that last syllable? That’s not supposed to be there! And why do I sound so weird and unnatural??
One of Shakespeare’s most famous lines is technically not even in iambic pentameter!
The answer is: you sound weird and unnatural because iambic pentameter doesn’t need to be heard by the audience. Shakespeare worked with the rhythm so the syllables you’d naturally emphasise already fall on those heavy stresses (the “DUM”S), and when they don’t, it’s supposed to be a little bit jarring. Instead of forcing the text to fit the rhythm, you just need to notice when it DOESN’T fit, and lean into that.
That weird extra syllable at the end of the line? That’s there to upset the rhythm, to make you (the actor and the character), as well as the audience, feel uncomfortable. You were just in a comfortable regular dee-DUM rhythm before, and suddenly you were jolted out of it. That makes the audience sit up and take notice.
To use a terrible analogy (I’m really good at those), it’s like going for a pleasant ride on a horse through the countryside, then a horse jumps over a small branch without you being prepared for it. That’ll snap you back into paying attention pretty quickly.
Or take a musical analogy (which is what I used to answer the question on my channel):
“It is sort of in-built, but it does require the actor to understand and work with it. To extend the musical analogy, it’s like the music is on the page for you, but you do actually need to look at it and work with what’s there - you can’t just keep the notes and ignore the rhythm, so to speak. You have to really do your best to figure out what’s there and bring it out in your delivery. Unfortunately what we’re working with (to take the analogy even further) is music from centuries ago that’s hard to read and has been edited and adapted by a bunch of different people all claiming to understand it best. So everyone disagrees on how it should sound.”
I continued,
“In my opinion, a general audience isn’t going to really ‘hear’ the metre and recognise it the way you would if you heard a limerick or a haiku; probably only directors, actors and educators will hear it (or super keen Shakespeare buffs!). I guess going with the musical analogy again, if you have musical training then you might listen to a song and recognise what time signature it’s in, but the average person isn’t going to be thinking about that.
Also in my opinion, it is actually supposed to sound like everyday speech, albeit incredibly beautiful and poetic! So in that sense it’s in-built - it isn’t meant to be spelled out for the audience like “here is the end of the line”, and a slower pace is totally fine. The metre is there because it feels really satisfying, plus Shakespeare uses it to give the actors clues about what’s going on and how to say things.”
He replied: “When you describe it like that… the audience may understand it subconsciously (as it's claimed to be styled after a part of average day to day speech) but only when you pay close attention does it knowingly reveal itself.”
Now we’re on the money!
If there’s one thing I want you to know about speaking Shakespeare’s language, it’s this: iambic pentameter is largely intuitive. That means you are already doing it, without even knowing!
Iambic pentameter was the most popular rhythmic structure of Shakespeare’s day because it’s a rhythm we used often in everyday speech. Shakespeare was particularly adept at choosing how to phrase his character’s thoughts so the rhythm was powerful and acted as a springboard for the actors.
Shakespeare had a knack for manipulating a phrase to create the most powerful rhythm for the actor.
I finished off our chat by saying:
“Yes, that’s exactly it. I think of verse speaking as essentially “what should I stress (emphasise), and how do I stress it?” with the goal being the audience’s understanding and connection. I believe that when audiences see Shakespeare and they don’t know what’s going on or they don’t feel connected to the characters in anyway, the actors and directors have failed. That’s a generalisation of course - sometimes people just aren’t interested or don’t want to be there etc, but there are just too many examples out there where the actors haven’t done the work or haven’t been given the right help, and therefore don’t give the audience the best chance of connecting. Shakespeare has given us a LOT of clues in the text that can help us connect as actors, and our job is to find the clues and act on them. Unfortunately many actors don’t know how to find the clues! Which is exactly why I’m making these videos.”
If you want to know a few easy ways to spot these clues in the text, you might like this blog post: 3 Quick Tips for Handling Shakespeare’s Language.
