By Giverny Forbes If mu- / -sic be / the food / of love, / play on
Iambic Pentameter Meter Rhythm Shall I compare thee to a summers day? Part One Part Two Iambic Pentameter in Hamlet Play within a play To be or not to be?
Ten syllables in each line Five pairs of alternating unstressed and stressed syllables Each pair of syllables is called an iambus Each iambus is made up of one weak and one strong beat Shakespeare often played around with iambic pentameter to give colour and feeling to his character’s speeches.
Pentameter has a strong soft, strong soft rhythm.
By chance, or nature's changing course untrimmed. But thy eternal summer shall not fade Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st; Nor shall death brag thou wand'rest in his shade, When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st, So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate. Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, And summer's lease hath all too short a date. Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, And often is his gold complexion dimmed; And every fair from fair sometime declines,
But, woe is me, you are so sick of late, So far from cheer and from your former state, That I distrust you. Yet, though I distrust, Discomfort you, my lord, it nothing must.
In Hamlets famous speech ‘to be or not to be that is the question’. Shakespeare uses ‘Feminine Ending’. This is the mixing up of the rhythm. He did this by adding an extra unstressed beat at the end of a line to emphasize a character’s sense of contemplation. Shakespeare also reverses the order of the stresses in some iambi to help emphasize certain words or ideas. This is called Inversion.
To be, or not to be: that is the question: Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep; No more; and by a sleep to say we end