Book Review: Shakespeare’s Metrical Art by George T. Wright

Art by Elliot Skow

Sam: Let’s dive right in, the book’s main ideas don’t take long to explain. Iambic pentameter, the dominant verse form used by Shakespeare, permits a great deal of rhythmic flexibility; and that flexibility can be exploited for expressive purposes. The verse can be even and balanced, or it can trip along quickly; it can lumber and lurch and break free—whichever suits the needs of rhetoric or sense, and all without breaking “the rules” of iambic pentameter. But—whoever thought otherwise? Why is this a publishable idea?

Bill: Maybe it's all obvious to us, because we have Shakespeare’s verse to read; but it wasn’t always obvious, and indeed was discovered only after much experiment and failure. Because they thought they had to, early (English) Renaissance poets stuck to quite monotonous pentameter, with little variation from the basic “unstressed-STRESSED” pattern.

Sam: I admit that’s true.

Bill: Of course sometimes they achieved great beauty, despite the limitations they took themselves to labor under. Famously, Chidiock Tichbourne wrote this “Elegy” the day before he was hanged (1586; this is just the first stanza):

My prime of youth is but a frost of cares;
My feast of joy is but a dish of pain,
My crop of corn is but a field of tares,
And all my good is but vain hope of gain:
The day is past, and yet I saw no sun,
And now I live, and now my life is done.

It’s all monosyllables, a relentless da-DUM da-DUM, each line dividing into 4+6 syllables. But in this case those features suit the theme, and achieve an exquisite effect. You can see, though, that this sort of writing is ill-suited to dialogue in the theater, or even the poetry of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. The rhythmic flexibility in Shakespeare’s verse really was an important discovery. (Or maybe a re-discovery of things Chaucer knew, but that had been forgotten.)

Bill: Why is iambic pentameter so flexible?

Sam: Because, despite what its first practitioners or its later detractors may have thought, not all stressed syllables need to be equally stressed; and repeated stresses, and repeated non-stresses (“pyrrhics and spondees”), are in fact allowed, not to mention the occasional “trochaic inversion” (STRESSED-unstressed).

Bill: That makes it sound like any ten-syllable line, no matter what its rhythm or stress-pattern, is a line of iambic pentameter. But that’s not true! What, according to Wright, are the “limits” of iambic pentameter?