Bardisms Read Online Free Page A

a given rhythm. That rhythm is created by the individual syllables in the words of the line, some of which receive stress and some of which don’t. The art and science of counting the stressed and unstressed syllables in a line and then affixing to them a label that helps readers navigate the poem is called scansion , and it serves to identify the poem’s meter , or time signature.
    The most important meter for anyone working on Shakespeare is the famous iambic pentameter . That’s a fancy label for a verse line whose count ( meter ) is five ( penta , as in pentagon ) so-called feet , or sets of syllables, which are iambs . An iamb is a foot comprising two syllables, the first of which is unstressed and the second stressed. It sounds like this: dee-DUM . New York is iambic: new YORK . So are Detroit ( de-TROIT ) and hello ( hel-LO ) and goodbye ( good-BYE ) and shalom ( sha-LOM ). Standard scansion notation marks the first syllable with a caret and the second with an accent mark: ň ń .
    Put five iambs next to one another, and they look, and sound, like this:
     

    ňń     ňń     ňń     ňń     ňń
     

    dee-DUM dee-DUM dee-DUM dee-DUM dee-DUM
     

    Any verse that conforms to that ten-syllable, fivefold, unstressed-STRESSED pattern is labeled iambic pentameter or its non-technical synonym, blank verse .
Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears

(friends ROM-ans COUNT-ry-MEN lend ME your EARS)

Now is the winter of our discontent

(now IS the WIN-ter OF our DIS-con-TENT)

There is a tide in the affairs of men

(there IS a TIDE in THE af-FAIRS of MEN)

To be or not to be, that is the question

(to BE or NOT to BE that IS the QUES-[tion])
Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow

(to-MOR-row AND to-MOR-row AND to-MOR-[row])
    All Shakespeare, and all iambic pentameter.
    Trained Shakespearean actors bang through the stressed and unstressed syllables in their scripts like so many Tito Puentes drumming away at a very literate set of timbales:
the FAULT dear BRU-tus IS not IN our STARS

ba-BANG ba-BOOM ba-BING ba-BLAM ba-BUMP

but IN our-SELVES that WE are UN-der-LINGS

dee-DUM dee-DUM dee-DUM dee-DUM dee-DUM
    This percussive analysis reveals all sorts of fascinating things about the rhythm of Shakespeare’s lines:
It can tell you that a certain word you thought was unimportant actually falls in a position where the scansion gives it stress. “In” in the two lines above is an interesting case. Most of us would ignore that little word, but Cassius deliberately stresses it both times he uses it. Bang out the meter on your tabletop, and you’ll hear that interesting detail.

    It can tell you that a certain word is pronounced differently in Shakespeare than we’re used to hearing it. That special pronunciation might require you to emphasize a given syllable in a surprising way, as in this antithesis-crammed line from Much Ado About Nothing : “Thou pure impiety and impious purity!” Impious , the opposite of pious, which we pronounce im-PYE-us , is pronounced IM-pyus in this line as it is every time it’s used in Shakespeare, and here purity is pronounced with two syllables, not three: PURE-tee . Thou PURE im-PYE-uh-TEE and IM-pyus PURE-tee. Without hammering through the scansion, we’d never say the words correctly.

    It can point to inflections in prefixes or suffixes to words, like that famous stressed -ed at the ends of words that’s such a prominent part of Shakespeare’s characteristic sound. Octavius Caesar opens Act 5 of Julius Caesar with this Bardism, Shakespeare on the Occasion of Good News:

Now, Antony, our hopes are answered.
If you pronounce answered with two syllables, as a modern English speaker instinctively would, the line will only have nine syllables, not the ten that iambic pentameter demands. Only by stressing the -ed ending will the meter be complete, and only then will Shakespeare’s hopes be answerèd.
    Throughout this book I will mark inflected -ed endings with an accent grave