Bardisms Read Online Free Page B

(- èd ), and I will point out other places where the scansion demands an unusual pronunciation.
    I will also point out where it’s best to disregard what the scansion suggests when it leads to a reading that’s overly pedantic, technical-sounding, weird, and alienating. Would any English-speaker’s instincts produce this reading?
friends ROM-ans COUNT-ry-MEN lend ME your EARS
    Unlikely. Although technically correct, this is instinctively wrong. It sounds bizarre, herky-jerky, shouty. Let the scansion go, and you’ll find that the line will probably come out more like this:
FRIENDS, ROM-ans, COUNT-ry-men, LEND ME your EARS
    Spoken according to natural instinct, the line turns out to be iambic pentameter in name only. Its natural rhythm is far more nuanced and interesting. Shakespeare regards iambic pentameter as more of a guide than a prescription; a map, not a destination. He’s like a jazz musician, establishing a baseline rhythm, then improvising around it, syncopating it into something much more loose and free. Actors are trained to understand this, and to recognize that for every line of verse, there’s the scansion that the meter suggests and the scansion that natural instinct suggests; that is, there’s the metric stress and the natural stress . The best actors know that scansion can provide important, often surprising, information about the words in the lines, but that this information is only useful insofar as it helps clarify what the line is trying to say. Think of scansion and meter as tools that refine your instincts, but don’t replace them.
    STEP 6: Phrasing with the Verse Line: Cover the Speech with a Piece of Paper and Read It One Line at a Time

    Take a look at how this Bardism, Shakespeare on the Evil Maniac in a Horror Movie, is arranged:
’Tis now the very witching time of night,

When churchyards yawn and hell itself breathes out

Contagion to this world. Now could I drink hot blood,

And do such bitter business as the day

Would quake to look on. Soft! Now to my mother. 5

—H AMLET , Hamlet , 3.3-358-362
    In other words, “It’s now dead midnight, when graves gape open and hell breathes disease into the world. Now I could guzzle hot blood, and do the kind of terrible things that daylight itself would shudder to behold.—Take it easy!—Now I’ll visit my mom.”
    Notice what happens at the end of each line in the excerpt. Lines 1 and 3 are marked with commas, and line 5 ends with a period. That punctuation falls where it does because the thoughts expressed in lines 1, 3, and 5 all end at the ends of the lines. That is, there is a change or development in the direction of Hamlet’s thinking between night and when , and between blood and and , and the commas denote the end of one phase of that thinking and the beginning of the next. And Hamlet completes a thought about his mom with mother , so the period marks that stop. Lines 1, 3, and 5 are therefore called end-stopped lines, because the ideas on them stop where the verse line ends.
    Lines 2 and 4, however, have no punctuation at all. They don’t need any, because the thoughts they express continue unbroken from the end of one line onto the start of the next. Line 2 is about how hell itself breathes out contagion , but that thought is too long to fit on one line of iambic pentameter, so Shakespeare spreads it over two lines, dividing it between out and contagion . Similarly, line 4 is concerned with business the day would quake to look on . Again, this unbroken thought, too long for line 4 to contain, spills onto line 5. Lines 2 and 4 are not end-stopped; the thoughts they express don’t stop at the ends of the lines. Their thoughts run onto the next line, and so we call them run-on lines. *
    How should one phrase this language? Lines 1, 3, and 5 take care of themselves. The fact that they’re end-stopped will automatically make any Hamlet break his phrasing at the ends of the lines, precisely where the commas and period indicate a