How to Read Shakespeare: Understanding Iambic Pentameter
It's easier than you think.
Every year at school, I was taught Shakespeare, but, only in the final year of my literature major, did I learn how to read Shakespeare.
By ‘read Shakespeare’, I mean reading poetic metre, iambic pentameter. Despite the fact that Shakespeare writes almost entirely in metre, most schools either don’t teach students how to read metre, or teach it so poorly that they do more harm than good.
At my high school — a good high school — the English teacher handed us the prologue of Romeo and Juliet .
‘See,’ she said, ‘it goes di-dum di-dum di-dum di-dum di-dum, up and down, up and down,’ like it was obvious what this meant.
This approach to teaching poetic metre has three problems: 1) it is not obvious what di-dum means; 2) hearing the di-dum di-dum in poetry requires practise, even for native English speakers; and 3) many, many lines in Shakespeare are not di-dum di-dum di-dum di-dum di-dum.
I’m going to teach you how to read iambic pentameter. I’m assuming you know nothing about metre.
I’ll start with what di-dum actually means (Stress). Then I’ll move to what happens when you put five di-dums together (Metre). Finally, I’ll tell you what to do when a di-dum becomes a dum-di (Metrical Techniques).
Before we begin, you must remember: poetry lives in sound, not ink. For the examples I use, do not read them in your head. Say them out loud and listen to yourself as you say them. Learning about stress and metre is almost impossible if you do not listen to yourself speak.
Part 0: Prologue
To explain poetic metre, I will (mostly) use the prologue of Romeo and Juliet as an example:
Two households, both alike in dignity,
In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.
From forth the fatal loins of these two foes
A pair of star-cross’d lovers take their life;
Whose misadventured piteous overthrows
Do with their death bury their parents’ strife.
The fearful passage of their death-mark’d love,
And the continuance of their parents’ rage,
Which, but their children’s end, nought could remove,
Is now the two hours’ traffic of our stage;
The which if you with patient ears attend,
What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend.
Part 1: What is Stress?
Maybe you’ve heard iambic pentameter is about ‘stress’, that some syllables have more ‘stress’ than others. This is true. When speaking, some syllables have more weight, more emphasis than others.
Every native English intuitively uses stress when they speak. Even for native English speakers, however, it takes practise to consciously notice stress.
‘From ancient grudge’
Say it out loud.
Even if you’d never read those words before, you knew where the stresses went. ‘From ancient grudge’. You emphasised ‘an’ and ‘grudge’, suppressing ‘from’ and ‘cient’.
Try stressing it the opposite way. Try saying: ‘From ancient grudge’.
You can do it, but it goes against your every instinct as an English speaker. If someone said these words like that, you’d think they were batty.
Every English speaker can tell when stress has gone wrong, but it takes practise to hear when stress is being used correctly. This is especially true when the differences between stress and un-stress are subtler.
A pair of star-crossed lovers
It’s clear that ‘a’ and ‘of’ are unstressed, but ‘crossed’, too? The difference between stress and unstress here is subtler. It takes a bit to train your ear to hear it, but the difference does exist.
Part 1b: What Is Not Stress
Part of why it’s so difficult to understand metre is that there’s a lot of nonsense written about it.
Various online ‘guides’ to poetic metre seem to have no idea how stress works.
One such guide, and even a Wikipedia page (which ‘has multiple issues’), misunderstand stress. They take a line from Troilus and Cressida and mark the stresses thusly:
Cry, cry! Troy burns, or else let Helen go.
This is wrong.
The correct stress pattern is:
Cry, cry! Troy burns, or else let Helen go.
I can see where the misunderstanding comes from. Some people think that a syllable has a single stress value regardless of context.
‘Well, if “cry” is stressed here, how could it not be stressed there. It’s the same word!’
This is the tricky thing about stress: a syllable’s stress depends on the syllables surrounding it.
Here’s a rule of thumb: English speakers don’t like to put stresses next to each other. We can, but it takes conscious effort. There must be a slight pause between the stresses, either natural or forced.
A natural pause is usually marked by a comma, full stop, colon, etc. For example, ‘Having failed, (pause) John went home.’
As for forced pauses, the offending guide to poetry correctly calls, ‘Sit down!’ a spondee (two stresses next to each other). To emphasise both words equally, you need to put a little pause between ‘sit’ and ‘down’. If you said it calmly, normally, without the pause, you’d say, ‘Sit down.’
Most often there is no pause.
Compare ‘His face is red’ with ‘His red face’. In the first, ‘face’ and ‘red’ are stressed, but, in the second, only, ‘face’ is. This is because, in the second ‘red’ and ‘face’ are next to each other. English speakers unstress the last syllable of the adjective and stress first syllables of the noun. In ‘His face is red’, where the adjective and noun are buffered by ‘is’, an English speaker can naturally stress both ‘face’ and ‘red..
The same goes for ‘Troy burns’. If there was a syllable separating ‘Troy’ and ‘burns’, then both ‘Troy’ and ‘burns’ would be stressed. (For example, ‘Troy, it burns’, ‘Troy is burning’, or even the two-syllable name of Troy, ‘Troija burns.) Because they are next to each other, however, the noun (‘Troy’) becomes unstressed and the verb (‘burns’) becomes stressed.
Again, to understand this you must speak aloud and listen to yourself. The differences in stress can be subtle, but you will learn to notice them.
Part 2: Metre
You can’t read poetry like a novel. You can’t read poetry like a novel because poetry has metre. Metre is the pattern of stresses in a poem.
Shakespeare wrote his plays in iambic pentameter. An iamb is the di-dum we know so well, an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one (u-S). Pentameter means each line contains five iambs.
(In Part 3, we will see why this name is very misleading, but don’t worry about that now.)
This is where metre gets tricky. I said before that English speakers intuitively know where stresses should go. Unfortunately, poetry often demands you put stress in unintuitive places. If all the stresses were intuitive you could read poetry like a novel: just speak and you would naturally stress the right syllables.
Try reading the first line of the prologue like a novel:
Two households, both alike in dignity.
You probably read it:
Two households, both alike in dignity.
This is wrong. This is wrong because Shakespeare writes in iambic pentametre. There should be five stresses. The poetic reading is:
Two households, both alike in dignity.
But didn’t I say that English speakers naturally know where stress goes? Didn’t I say that going against intuition requires us mangle our words?
Not quite. Sometimes the placement of a stress is unintuitive, but not absurd.
For example, take lexical words (e.g. ‘of’, ‘about’, ‘by’, ‘both’ — words which are mainly grammatical). We don’t tend to stress these words, but we can stress them when we’re making a point (e.g. ‘Government for the people, by the people’). We can stress these syllables, and poetry often demands that we do stress them:
both alike
Similarly, in words like ‘dignity’, it is unintuitive, but not absurd to say: ‘dignity’.
It certainly is not as absurd as saying, ‘dig-NEE-ty’, which Shakespeare would never expect you to do.
Ironically, this is another part of poetry that is intuitive for native speakers: knowing when stress patterns are unintuitive but not too unintuitive.
So, we’ve learnt what iambic pentameter is. Just take any line in Shakespeare and stress every other syllable.
Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. As I said, the name ‘iambic pentameter’ is very misleading.
Part 3: When Iambic Pentameter Isn’t Iambic
Over 1000 lines of di-dum di-dum di-dum di-dum di-dum would get very boring. Nearly every poet will mix up the pattern.
This is why the name ‘iambic pentameter’ is unhelpful. A line of five iambs is just the starting point. Five iambs in a row are not necessary — they are not even ideal.
Part 3a: Inverting an Iamb
Try reading this line:
Do with their death bury their parents’ strife.
Poetry demands we put stress in unusual places, but no poet would expect you to say:
Do with their death bih-REE their parents’ strife.
Shakespeare hasn’t made a mistake. This is a common technique where an iamb is inverted: the di-dum becomes a dum-di.
Metrically, the line is:
u-S / u-S / S-u / u-S / u-S
The third iamb is inverted.
The correct way to read the line is:
Do with their death bury their parents’ strife.
Part 3b: Swapping Stresses Between Iambs
There is another kind of metrical technique, very similar to inverting an iamb.
As shown above, inversion means making a u-S into S-u.
We can also trade the stress in one iamb for the unstressed syllable in the next:
u-S / u-S becomes u-u / S-S
There are no examples of this in Romeo and Juliet’s prologue, so I’ll take one of Romeo’s line from the end of the play.
And never from this palace of dim night
Now, you could perform it as:
And never from this palace of dim night
You could. It’s perfectly sensible. But we could improve it just by trading one stress.
And never from this palace of dim night
The actor is encouraged to emphasise both ‘dim’ and ‘night’. As I said in Part 1b, English speakers need to put a little pause between two consecutive stresses. To stress both ‘dim’ and ‘night’, Romeo must linger over the words. The lingering may last a mere fraction of a second, but English speakers notice.
Some of you may be asking why this talk of inverting iambs and swapping stresses matters.
Part 3c: Why This Matters
By knowing that iambs can be inverted, you know how to read the line, not just metrically but emotionally. Putting two stresses (‘death’ and ‘bury’) next to each other tells the performer to put some real heft behind these words. After so many lines of di-dum di-dum di-dum, we have dum-dum, like two bashes on a drum. Fundamentally, inversions like this are stage directions for the actor, a suggestion on how to emote.
You may say that I’m overthinking things.
Part 3d: Why I’m Not Overthinking Things
This only seems like overthinking to those who don’t think about these things. When it’s your job to write thousands of lines of iambic pentameter, when it’s your job to act out thousands of lines of iambic pentameter, or when it’s just a hobby to read thousands of lines of iambic pentameter, stuff like this becomes second nature.
Finding meaning in an inverted iamb is not overthinking. By this point, it is barely even thinking. It is intuition.
Part 4: Other Metrical Techniques
We’ve covered inverting iambs and swapping stresses, but poets will squeeze as much as they can out of a line.
Part 4a: Adding Syllables
Here’s a trick question: what is the maximum number of syllables in a line of iambic pentameter?
If you said ten, you’re wrong. The answer is eleven.
Every line in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 20 has an extra unstressed syllable tacked on to the end:
A woman’s face with Nature’s own hand painted
Hast thou, the master-mistress of my passion
u-S / u-S / u-S / u-S / u-S / u
This is called a feminine or weak ending. Ending on an unstressed syllable makes the sound of the line softer. You end not with the stress’ bang, but a whisper.
Sometimes a poet will also put an extra unstressed syllable at the beginning of a line
u-u-S / u-S / u-S / u-S / u-S
or drop the line’s first unstressed syllable
S / u-S / u-S / u-S / u-S
but these techniques are rare.
Part 4b: Run-On Lines And Caesuras
Another common metrical technique is enjambment or run-on lines. For example, in Act 1 Scene 3, Lady Capulet says:
The fish lives in the sea, and ’tis much pride ->
For fair without the fair within to hide.
Notice how the first line ends in the middle of a clause. The clause runs over into the next line. This running over encourages the actor to emphasise ‘pride’.
Annoyingly it takes a bit of intuition to know whether a line runs on. The key feature of a run-on line is that there is no natural pause at the end of a line. If you were saying the words in everyday speech, you would not pause after ‘pride’. You would just say: ‘and ’tis much pride for fair without the fair within to hide’.
You can often tell if a line ends with a natural pause by punctuation.
Two households both alike in dignity,
In fair Verona, where we lay our scene.
The comma and full stop tell you to pause. There is no running on from one line to the next. Sometimes, however, the punctuation is absent even though a natural pause exists.
From forth the fatal loins of these two foes
A pair of star-crossed lovers take their life
There is no comma after ‘foes’ but there may as well be: it is the end of a clause. We naturally pause at the end of a clause.
A caesura is the opposite of a run-on line. A run-on line puts an unnatural pause at the end of a line, while a caesura puts a natural pause in the middle of a line.
In fair Verona, (pause) where we lay our scene.
Sometimes, as in the line above, a caesura does not mean much. It's just how you say the sentence. Other times, it is a helpful guide on how to perform. Take Juliet’s balcony lines:
What’s a Montague? (pause) It is nor hand nor foot
She has asked a question, and pauses, pensively, wistfully, before answering.
Conclusion
There are many other metrical techniques, and there are many poetic metres other than iambic pentameter, but these are the fundamentals. If you understand these, you’ll be able to understand Shakespeare.
Appendix: Old Jargon
In many guides to iambic pentameter you’ll see different terminology to what I’ve used.
When u-S becomes S-u, I call it an inverted iamb, while other guides call it a ‘trochaic substitution’ (because a trochee is S-u and it substitutes the iambic u-S).
And when u-S / u-S becomes u-u / S-S, I say the stress of one iamb has swapped places with the unstressed syllable. Other guides say this is a pyrrhic substitution followed by a spondaic substitution (because the first u-S is replaced by a u-u, a pyrrhic, and the next u-S is replaced by a spondee, S-S).
These terms are traditional, and usable, but they’re misleading.
We are not substituting iambs. We are moving around stresses.
This is not just pointless pedantry on my part. (It is pedantry, but it’s helpful pedantry.) In Part 1a, I brought up this misreading of a line:
Cry, cry! Troy burns, or else let Helen go.
The article writer suggests this line begins with two spondaic substitutions. The word ‘substitution’ has fuelled this misreading.
If you’re substituting iambs, why not substitute every iamb? Why not have a whole line of spondees, trochees, or pyrrhics?
When you think in terms of moving stresses around, you can’t misread the line as, ‘Cry, cry! Troy burns, or else let Helen go’.
Where would you get those extra two stresses? You can move the five stresses in the line around, but you cannot create them from nothing.
You should learn the traditional terms for communication’s sake, to speak with people who learned poetry that way. When you’re learning how meter works, however, don’t be lead astray by unhelpful jargon.
