![]() ![]() Finding a balance between a too-strict adherence to a metrical line and too-liberal variation from it is, among modern poets, devoutly to be wished for. Shakespeare is frequently far more flexible but, importantly, flexes the pattern without disrupting it. Compare the blank verse of Shakespeare to that of many modern Formalist poets. For this reason, the line isn’t an Iambic Pentameter line but a variant within the larger Iambic Pentameter pattern. The line closes with a feminine ending in the fifth foot. Not a big deal, but this stuff interests me.Īnyway, I prefer an iambic reading knowing that not everyone will. Note: Baer later mis-attributes the witch’s chant in Macbeth () as being by Shakespeare- an addition which most Shakespearean scholars recognize as being by Middleton. And that meter tells us that is receives the emphasis, not that. If one wants to emphasize that for interpretive reasons, who am I to quarrel? But the closest we have to Shakespeare’s opinion is what he wrote and the meter he wrote in. Baer’s argument seems to be: Most modern readers will read the foot as a trochee, therefore Shakespeare must have written it as a trochee. All he says is that “most readers will substitute a trochee after the first three iambs” – which hardly justifies the reading. ![]() How does Baer know Shakespeare’s intentions? How does he know that Shakespeare, in this one instance, means to subvert the iambic meter? He doesn’t tell us. He writes: “After the heavy caesura of the colon, Shakespeare alters the dominant meter of his line by emphasizing the word that over the subsequent word is. That said, William Baer, in his book Writing Metrical Poetry, typifies arguments in favor of emphasizing that. There’s a feeling of resignation and, perhaps, self-conscious humor in this metrical reading. The one question, the only question, ultimately, that everyone must answer. And this is how most modern readers read the line.īy putting the emphasis on is, in keeping with the Iambic Meter, the meaning of the line takes on a more subtle hue – as if Hamlet knew the question all along. It sounds as though Hamlet were looking for the question, the conundrum, and once he has found it he says: Ah ha! That is the question. Putting the emphasis on that subtly alters the meaning of the line. To assume less is to assume that he was mindlessly writing a verse he either didn’t or couldn’t comprehend.Īn actor has some latitude in how he or she wants to perform a line, but choosing to ignore the meter is akin to ignoring slurs or other markings composers provide in musical scores. Shakespeare was writing within a tradition, was a genius, and knew perfectly well when he was or wasn’t varying from the Iambic Pentameter pattern of blank verse. To be |or not |to be: |that is|the questionįirst to the disclaimer: There is no one way to scan a line but, as with performing music, there are historically informed ways to scan a poem.To be |or not |to be: |that is |the questionīut if you google around, you may find the line more frequently scanned as follows:.Metrically, the first line is possibly one of the most interesting and potentially ambiguous in the entire speech. The Shakespearean Sonnet, as Shakespeare writes it, is the working out of a proposition or conflict that finds a kind of solution in the epigrammatic couplet at its close. The speech, in effect, is the reverse of the Shakespearean Sonnet that saves its epigrammatic summing up for the last line. Shakespeare is effectively communicating to us some of the reason for Hamlet’s hesitancy. There will be no working out or self-discovery. He wants to cleanly and clearly establish in the playgoers mind the subject of the speech. (I’ve numbered the lines for the convenience of referencing.)ġ.) The first line, in a single line, sums up the entirety of the soliloquy – as though Shakespeare were providing crib notes to his own soliloquy. If any of the symbols or terminology are unfamiliar to you check out my posts on the basics of Iambic Pentameter & scansion. So, the post mostly reflects my own interests and observations – and isn’t meant to be a comprehensive analysis. The only annotation I haven’t found (which is probably deemed unnecessary by most) is an analysis of the blank verse – a scansion – along with a look at its rhetorical structure. And if you’re a student or a reader then you probably have a book that already provides first-rate annotation. As far as this soliloquy goes, there’s a surplus of good online analysis. ![]()
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