Stress and Rhythm in the Speaking of Shakespeare’s Verse: A Performer’s View

There is a frequent problem that I and others, from what they tell me, experience when listening to Shakespeare’s verse: hearing the words but straining, often without success, to grasp what is being said. Even when all the words are audible, the thoughts and images packed into the verse seem to arrive as an intractable jumble. Too often, after hearing a speech on stage or screen, have I turned to my companion and asked, “What did he/she just say?”—only to receive a shrug of incomprehension. (For many, but anathema to me, this seems to be an accepted part of attending a play by Shakespeare: “Happy with its physical action and emotional intensity, who needs all the words?”) Yet sometimes I understand the content of the verse quite effortlessly—when spoken by Judi Dench or Kenneth Branagh, for instance, as notated below. In part, this is because they stress only the important “content” words in a line. In addition, however, they tend to time those stressed words to an even, rhythmic beat. It was my hearing this beat or cadence in their vocal technique (perhaps intuitive), and experiencing the communicative value of the isochronism (equal time intervals) that creates it, that led me to explore and identify it as a crucial reason for the difference between these two types of theatrical experience. That, in turn, led me to the proposals I offer here.

Now, Shakespearean actors do not much like being told how to say a line. In my experience, we dislike in particular admonitions about the meter of his verse. We may well suspect, perhaps from past encounters, how confused and ultimately ignored rules in this area are likely to be. Rules about rhythm are apt to be even less welcomed. Indeed, some directors and performance scholars question the value of any verse-speaking rules, as Abigail Rokison points out (8–28). This makes my task here all the more challenging, as I present observations and discoveries, both in performances and in the literature, which lead to a new approach—yes, with rules—to the scansion and performance of Shakespeare’s verse.

Traditional Scansion

Comprehension problems begin with traditional metrical scansions, such as these:

Various metrical theorists use such scansions—e.g., with stresses shown by upper-case letters—to explain how the verse should be spoken:² with a relative stress on every even numbered syllable, giving five non-stress/STRESS alternations in each ten-syllable line. (I demonstrate aloud the above and other scansions in this article on a podcast at http://www.press.jhu.edu/journals/podcasts/20150901.mp3.) The second verse shows permissible variations: TELL her, a stress reversal (trochaic substitution), rarely present more than once per line; and -tune, an eleventh, unstressed final syllable (feminine ending). This simple pattern of alternation, unfortunately, is often called “iambic pentameter,” which suggests pausing between iambic feet—rarely if ever intended by users of the term.

Though few people realize it, stresses in English are typically sounded by a rise in pitch (occasionally a drop), which is the easiest and most effective way to give prominence to a syllable;³ prolonging the vowel may contribute; loudness is like a grunt and not much used. Thus we may scan the prescribed pattern with a device the linguist Dwight Bolinger often uses:

In practice, this up-and-down of pitch (W. K. Wimsatt, Jr.’s “tilt” 785), is the only feasible tonal means of creating the alternation with which traditionalists want us to deliver the verse.⁴ Presumably, they think it is what Shakespeare intended and indeed must have used as an actor.

It is, of course, an unnatural way to speak, as even its advocates acknowledge.⁵ Schoolmasters in Shakespeare’s era discouraged it as a kind of sing-song “tune,” not sufficiently “actorly” (Hardison 97–101). It is not surprising that it is rejected nowadays as abnormal and obtrusive by theorists, such as Stanley Leathes, D.W. Harding, and others...