Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff, a production of I Heart Radio,
Speaker 1: Hey brain Stuff. Lauren Vogelbaum here. If you've ever studied Shakespeare,
Speaker 1: you're probably familiar with or have at least heard of,
Speaker 1: iambic pentameter. While the term may sound intimidating, it's just
Speaker 1: a rhythm and length of speech that comes pretty naturally
Speaker 1: in the English language. Shakespeare used iambic pentameter because that
Speaker 1: natural rhythm replicates how we speak every day, with those
Speaker 1: singsong quality. That also makes it easier to memorize and perform,
Speaker 1: especially when it rhymes a little. To begin to understand
Speaker 1: iambic pentameter, first consider that there are two basic types
Speaker 1: of writing, poetry and prose. Before the article. This episode
Speaker 1: is based on how Stuff Work. Spoke with Paul Voss,
Speaker 1: associate professor at Georgia State University in Atlanta, who specializes
Speaker 1: in Renaissance literature and Shakespeare, and to explain the difference.
Speaker 1: He said, simply, rows is the language of everyday speech.
Speaker 1: By contrast, poetry often has a type of rhythm or
Speaker 1: beat like a song. This rhythm is called meter. Poems
Speaker 1: also have verses, which are lines or other groupings of
Speaker 1: words in a poem, Definitions for the subtypes of verses
Speaker 1: depend on whether they rhyme and have meter. Rhymed versus
Speaker 1: both rhyme and have a meter, blank versus don't have
Speaker 1: a rhyme but do have a meter, and free verses
Speaker 1: have neither rhyme nor meter. Metered verse is made up
Speaker 1: of units called feet. Each foot will consist of stressed
Speaker 1: and unstressed syllables, not stressed as in oh, I have
Speaker 1: a deadline and I'm running behind, but stressed as in
Speaker 1: verbally emphasized or accented. Different types of feet include, for example,
Speaker 1: the trophy, which consists of one accented syllable followed by
Speaker 1: one unaccented syllable. You can hear this in ed Girl, Impose,
Speaker 1: the raven, and the silken sad uncertain rustling of each
Speaker 1: purple curtain. Another type is the dactyl, which is one
Speaker 1: accented syllable followed by two unaccented ones. Meanwhile, as spondi
Speaker 1: has two accented syllables, and an I am has one
Speaker 1: unaccented syllable followed by an accented one. But when you
Speaker 1: write a poem in metered verse, you use mostly one
Speaker 1: type of foot throughout to create a rhythm. This might
Speaker 1: all sound complicated, but languages like English, how these stresses
Speaker 1: built in. Think of how the word is languages not languages.
Speaker 1: The word itself three syllables, one accented and two unaccented,
Speaker 1: is a dactyl. The word carrot, for example, is a tropy,
Speaker 1: and the word describe is an i am a single
Speaker 1: syllable words can fill in for either a stressed or
Speaker 1: unstressed part of a foot, depending on the con text. Okay,
Speaker 1: so iambic verse is metered verse made up of feet
Speaker 1: that are unaccented than accented. But what about the pentameter part.
Speaker 1: The prefect's penta is Greek for five, so pentameter means
Speaker 1: five meter, which means there are going to be five
Speaker 1: ft to this meter before the pattern repeats. So a
Speaker 1: line of iambic pentameter has five ft made up of
Speaker 1: two syllable sequences that follow an unaccented than accented pattern
Speaker 1: for a total of ten syllables in each line. A
Speaker 1: meter can come in different lengths. U trimeter has three
Speaker 1: ft per line, haptometer has seven, and the different lengths
Speaker 1: can have different effects. In poetry, Voss pointed out that
Speaker 1: the lower the number of feet, the more sing songing.
Speaker 1: A poem will usually sound higher numbers of feet more
Speaker 1: closely mimic colloquial English language speech. I think of Jack
Speaker 1: and Jill, which is in trimitter, versus say, Annabelle Lee,
Speaker 1: which is in heptameter. To identify a type of verse,
Speaker 1: you can count the syllables and look or listen for
Speaker 1: where the accents fall, Just to be careful that you
Speaker 1: pronounced the words as the writer intended. In the case
Speaker 1: of Shakespeare, that might mean speaking differently than we do today,
Speaker 1: or even just from region to region. I think British
Speaker 1: versus American English, and sometimes the writer sort of cheats by, say,
Speaker 1: combining two syllables into one. I think of over versus
Speaker 1: or in that way, it can be a bit of
Speaker 1: a puzzle, but it can also help you find what
Speaker 1: words a poet meant to emphasize. So Shakespeare did write
Speaker 1: overwhelmingly in iambic pentameter. Take famous Sonnet eighteen, Shall I
Speaker 1: compare thee to a summer's day? Though are more lovely
Speaker 1: and we're temperate? Ref wins do shake the darling buds
Speaker 1: of May? And summer's lease hath all too short a date.
Speaker 1: Back in the late thirt hundreds, Jeffrey Chaucer wrote the
Speaker 1: Cannabury Tale in iambic pentameter, and he's sometimes credited with
Speaker 1: inventing it, but it was English playwright and poet Christopher Marlowe,
Speaker 1: a contemporary of Shakespeare in the late fifteen hundreds, who
Speaker 1: first brought iambic pentameter and blank that is, unrhymed first
Speaker 1: to the stage. According to Voss, thanks to Marlowe, iambic
Speaker 1: pentameter became the go to rhythm for both tragedy and comedy,
Speaker 1: and Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists are known for it, and
Speaker 1: probably based on Marlowe's influence, Shakespeare chose to have characters
Speaker 1: speak in iambic pentameter, but not all of his characters did.
Speaker 1: Remember that iambic pentameter is more formal sounding, so when
Speaker 1: Shakespeare wanted to show a less educated character or give
Speaker 1: the impression of buffoonery, he included limericks and prose as dialogue.
Speaker 1: But there are many other examples of iambic pentameter from
Speaker 1: that era. A Pureitan poet and Brad Street used it
Speaker 1: in to My dear and Loving Husband, published in sixteen
Speaker 1: seventy eight. If every two were one, then Shirley we
Speaker 1: If ever man were loved by wife, then the if
Speaker 1: ever wife was happy in a man, Compare with me,
Speaker 1: you women, if you can. But you don't need to
Speaker 1: return to the fifteen and sixteen hundreds to find examples
Speaker 1: of iambic pentameter. Owed to Autumn by John Keats, written
Speaker 1: in eighteen nineteen, also used this type of verse. To
Speaker 1: swell the gourd and plump the hazel shells with a
Speaker 1: sweet kernel to set budding more and still more later
Speaker 1: flowers for the bees until they think warm days will
Speaker 1: never cease for summer has or brimmed their clammy cells.
Speaker 1: Poets a whole century later used it too, like Robert
Speaker 1: Frost and his poem After apple Picking from nineteen fourteen,
Speaker 1: though he mixes pentameter with a few lines of other
Speaker 1: lengths for a more natural speech sound or for emphasis
Speaker 1: or well, you'd have to ask him. Here's an excerpt.
Speaker 1: My instep arch not only keeps the ache, it keeps
Speaker 1: the pressure of a ladder round. I feel the ladders sway,
Speaker 1: is the bows bend, and I keep hearing from the
Speaker 1: cellar bin, the rumbling sound of load onload of apples
Speaker 1: coming in. But iambic pentameter has largely fallen out of
Speaker 1: use today. The majority of today's fiction is written in prose,
Speaker 1: not verse, and even poetry is often written in prose.
Speaker 1: Vus said, the novel has obliterated almost every other type
Speaker 1: of writing. If you are using iambic pentameter today, it's
Speaker 1: almost like using a fountain pen. To be fair, I
Speaker 1: know both publishing poets and people who use fountain pens,
Speaker 1: but the major exception for iambic pentameter seems to be
Speaker 1: in popular music. You can find iambic pentameter in songs
Speaker 1: from the likes of One Direction and Taylor Swift. The
Speaker 1: day's episode is based on the article Shakespeare wrote an
Speaker 1: iambic contameter, But what is that? On how stuff Works
Speaker 1: dot Com written by Carry Whitney. Brainstuffs production of I
Speaker 1: Heart Radio and partnership with how stuff Works dot Com,
Speaker 1: and it's produced by Tyler Clang. For more podcasts my
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