Resources for determining the meter of a line in Shakespeare

Question

Most of Shakespeare's plays are written in iambic pentameter,‎ which is part of what makes the verse so powerful.‎ However,‎ due to differences between different manuscripts of the text, and words that have a different number of syllables in Shakespeare's English than ours,‎ it is often hard for a layperson to determine how a given line breaks up into the appropriate meter.‎

For example,‎ this line of Richard II where John of Gaunt addresses his son Henry Bolingbroke:‎

Go, say I sent thee forth to purchase honour
And not the king exiled thee; or suppose
Devouring pestilence hangs in our air
And thou art flying to a fresher clime

It is hard for me to see how you could fit the first line into ten syllables.‎

I'm wondering if there is some scholarly work that has broken the lines up,‎ or someone who comments on these things,‎ or merely if anyone has tips for a novice trying to find the meter for verses in Shakespeare when it seems ambiguous.‎

Answer 1

Reading comes first

Shakespeare’s plays are written to be spoken by actors on stage, to convey meaning, nuance, and emotion to an audience. This dramatic purpose comes first, before considerations of metre. So the way to scan Shakespeare’s verse drama is to start by reading it aloud, and figuring out where the stress needs to go to best convey the sense, without worrying (at this stage) where the foot boundaries go, or how to fit the stresses into the metre.

Here’s how I read this passage (stressed syllables in bold):

Go, say I sent thee forth to purchase honour
And not the king exiled† thee; or suppose
Devouring pestilence hangs in our air
And thou art flying to a fresher clime

_{† See the “Language change” section below for “exiled”.}

In the first line, I’ve put stress on “I” rather than “sent” because Gaunt is saying that it would be expedient to pretend that he has sent Bolingbroke away, not the king. Thus the “I” in the first line contrasts with the “king” in the second, and both words should be stressed to bring out this contrast. For the same reason I have stressed “our” in the third line. In the second line, I’ve put a stress on “or” to bring out that Gaunt is casting about for alternative ways to console his son.

But if you have a different interpretation of the passage, you might prefer to put the stress on other words! If you disagree with me about the point being to contrast “I” and “king”, then you might prefer to stress “sent” in the first line and leave “our” unstressed in the third. Similarly, you might prefer to stress “thee” rather than “or” in the second line. There are many ways to deliver Shakespeare.

Once you have a line-reading that you like, then you can figure out how to scan it as iambic metre.

Exceptions in iambic metre

Shakespeare was writing in iambic pentameter. But if every line were to scan perfectly, the result would be terribly monotonous. Some flexibility in metre is necessary to allow the poet to break the monotony, employ a wider and more natural choice of expressions, and throw stress on significant parts of the line. So within the English poetic tradition, iambic metre came to allow certain kinds of exception.

Strictly speaking, each of the five feet should be iambic. But that proved hard to manage in any spirited and spontaneous kind of language. Custom quickly came to license the following exceptions, and if we must date the event it was during that period when modern English was finding its poetic language, a period concluded triumphantly in the verse of Sidney and Spenser.

1. Two unstressed syllables could replace the one which iambic permits, if “elision” was possible whether actually in speech, or only theoretically.

2. An extra unstressed syllable after the tenth made a “feminine ending,” and did not count.

3. In any foot except the last the iambic could be reversed, i.e., replaced by a trochaic foot.†

These are substantially the exceptions as codified by [Robert] Bridges in The Prosody of Milton‡, the best handbook we have on iambic pentameters. What Bridges codified was Milton’s code, as it had been for several generations the code of Milton’s predecessors, and would be for his successors over a century and a half; since then it has been well known to poet-prosodists, and adhered to systematically when they pleased. But it is not quite complete, in my judgment. I wish Bridges had added:

4. Any two successive iambic feet might be replaced by a double or ionic foot.

_{John Crowe Ransom (1956). ‘The Strange Music of English Verse’. The Kenyon Review 18:3, p. 471.}

_{† Most prosodists also allow substitution by a spondee, including in the last foot. ‡ Sic; the work is titled Milton’s Prosody.}

With these exceptions in mind, we can scan my preferred reading as follows. In the first line the first two feet are substituted with trochees (Ransom’s exception 3) and there is a feminine ending (exception 2):

Go, say | I sent | thee forth | to purch- | ase honour

The second line is regular:

And not | the king | exiled | thee; or | suppose

In the third line the fourth foot is substituted with a trochee and the fifth with a spondee, but there is a problem with the third foot, which doesn’t have any stress:

Devour- | ing pest | ilence | hangs in | our air

We can rescue the scansion by placing a little stress on “-lence”, a so-called “promoted stress” or “secondary stress”, making the foot an iamb. English always has some variation in stress on adjacent syllables, so this is not unreasonable.

The fourth line also needs a promoted stress on “to”, but is otherwise regular:

And thou | art fly- | ing to | a fresh- | er clime

What if this doesn’t work?

You might find, after going through this exercise, that your preferred reading can’t be scanned as iambic pentameter, even after employing all the exceptions. There are a few reasons why this might happen:

1. You’ve misunderstood the line and so put some of the stresses in wrong places. You might look at annotated editions of the play to see how other readers have interpreted the line.

2. Shakespeare pronounced some of the words with stresses in different places. For example, “exiled” in the second line of this passage. See the “Language change” section below.

3. The line is exceptional. For example, a couple of lines before this passage, there’s the line:

   Think not the king did banish thee

   which has only eight syllables. Either two syllables two have been lost from this line, or else Shakespeare was content to vary the rhythm with an occasional tetrameter.

Language change

When scanning Shakespeare, we always have to bear in mind that four hundred years of language change have taken place, and so Shakespeare and his contemporaries pronounced words and phrases somewhat differently from us.

In the passage from Richard II the main difficulty of this form is “exiled” in the second line, which is now always pronounced “exiled”, with the stress on the first syllable. However, it seems that Shakespeare could also pronounce it “exiled”, with the stress on the second syllable, if he chose. It has this property in common with many other English words of French origin:

Perhaps there is no language in which, within a comparatively short period, more words have shifted their accent, than has been the case in the English tongue.

Speaking generally, the wholesale stress-shifting which French words had undergone in becoming English ones, had been consummated before Shakespeare’s time; still, the number of deviations from the modern practice in this regard to be found in his works, is a very respectable one. Of such deviations we give examples in the first column of the following list […]

exile (verb) M. N. D. iii, 2, 386.

_{Bastiaan Adriaan Pieter van Dam and Cornelis Stoffel (1900). William Shakespeare: Prosody and Text, pp. 178–180. Leyden: E. J. Brill.}

The line referred to is:

They wilfully themselves exil’d from light,

_{William Shakespeare (c. 1595). A Midsummer Night’s Dream, act III scene II.}

An even clearer example of the phenomenon is this line:

Both you and I, for Romeo is exil’d.

_{William Shakespeare (c. 1595). Romeo and Juliet, act III scene II.}

This kind of internal evidence for pronunciation can never be wholly conclusive: we can’t use the scansion to tell us the stress unless we know what Shakespeare intended it to be, which we don’t. But the line from Romeo and Juliet would be quite ugly with “exiled”.

Resources

There are several web sites which give scansions for Shakespeare’s complete works. But you mustn’t take these as gospel, because as discussed above, the scansion has to follow from the stress that you put on the lines when reading, and that depends on how you interpret the lines, and what you think needs to be conveyed to the audience. Different interpretations will give rise to different scansions.

Prescanned Shakespeare gives the following scansion. Their notation uses ^ for an elision (exception 1), 2 for two unstressed syllables in a foot, T for a “double foot in which three long syllables are put together”, and ?? for a difficult line.

  ,           ,           ,         ,          ,
 Go say^I | sent thee | forth to | purchase | honor  ??
      ,          ,     T  T    T      2     ,
 And not | the king | exiled thee;| or suppose
    ,        ,      ,       ,             ,
 Devour|ing pest|ilence | hangs in | our air
       ,         ,       ,       ,        ,
 And thou | art fly|ing to | a fresh|er clime:

In my opinion this is a terrible way to scan the passage! It is hard to read, misses the sense, destroys the iambic rhythm by substituting all five feet in the first line, and the “double foot [with] three long syllables” is not admitted as an iambic variant by Bridges, Ransom or other prosodists. Therefore I would advise caution when using this site!

Shakespeare Scanned gives:

Go, say I sent thee forth to purchase honour
And not the king exiled thee; or suppose
Devouring pestilence hangs in our air
And thou art flying to a fresher clime

This scansion regularizes all the feet (except for the feminine ending in the first line), which seems a little dull to me. Also, it is hard to reconcile an unstressed “Go” in the first line with the comma that follows it. But at least this scansion is readable, unlike the one at Prescanned Shakespeare.

Example performance

Here’s Michael Pennington delivering the speech at the Royal Shakespeare Company. His choices for this passage are as follows:

Go, say I sent thee forth to purchase honour
And not the king exiled thee; or suppose
Devouring pestilence hangs in our air
And thou art flying to a fresher clime

But other actors will make different choices.

Answer 2

I'm a bit late to the party, but, as the proprietor of Prescanned Shakespeare, I might as well weigh in.

The purpose of scansion, as I understand it (as did Edgar Allan Poe; it is his philosophy from which my approach is derived), is to analyze how to speak a passage naturally while exactly fulfilling the metrical structure.

A critical piece of knowledge is that syllables are naturally long (stressed) or short (unstressed). Cognitive-psychology research has confirmed this. The core experiment of that confirmation was using words where a stress shift changes it to a different word (e.g., "record", "desert"). They varied either the volume or vowel length of each syllable; listeners always reported that the longer vowel, and not the louder one, was the "stressed" syllable. (e.g., "r'cord vs "rec'rd" or "d'sert" versus "des'rt".) If a syllable takes longer to say, it is, literally, more physically stressful to speak, and we perceive that stress, regardless of the volume at which it is spoken.

Where this immediately applies here is in the word "Go". If this word is spoken naturally, with its long vowel, it will always be perceived as "stressed". The only way to "unstress" it would be to reduce the vowel to a neutral "G'" (like you might naturally say "g'head") and both the context and the punctuation disallow it.

So here are some thoughts line by line.

Go, say^|I (sent^thee) | forth to | purchase | honour

Go, (say^I) | sent thee | forth to | purchase | honour

Both of these are valid scans and can be naturally spoken. (I ordinarily use a "2" to mark two short syllables squished into the space of one, but I'm not sure I trust the fixed-width formatting here, so I put em in parentheses instead.)

I prefer the second of these for a couple reasons. One is that sent is naturally long; it is possible to reduce it via elision, transferring its terminal T to "thee", pronouncing the two words as "sen thee", but I find it less awkward to reduce "I", pronouncing the phrase as "seh uh sent". The second reason is that I prefer a contrast between "sent" and "exile" rather than "I" and "the king"; my interpretation is that it is more honorable to pretend that he has been sent away rather than exiled, regardless of who commanded it.

Also, obviously, I scan this line as trochaic. Nothing wrong with that.

I reject the idea that an extra syllable can hang off the end of a line and be ignored. Try to say such a syllable out loud and you'll find that it demands metrical time (a speaker often instinctively pauses afterward, fulfilling the time value of the missing stressed syllable and thereby adding a sixth foot to the supposed pentametric line)—but the perceptual validity of such a thing isn't what I'm after here. My point in this case is that there's no need to argue for an extra syllable hanging off the end when it can easily be accommodated trochaically.

And not | the king | exiled | thee; or | suppose

And not | the king | [exiled thee]; | (or sup)pose

Each of these scans are metrically valid. In the second version, "exiled thee" is a double foot; I usually use T's above the syllables to indicate that, but, again, not sure about the fixed-width formatting, so I put it in brackets instead. If other prosodists don't recognize the double foot that is an oversight on their part; there is voluminous textual evidence supporting the metrical validity of double feet, in which three long syllables are metrically equivalent to (and take the place of) two long and two short (L+L+L = L+s+L+s). Or, to put it another way, one molossus = two iambs.

The first version requires the word "exiled" to be pronounced "eh-KSILED". I'm not sure that a modern audience would easily catch that pronounciation. Using a double foot makes it possible to pronounce the word in a way that I'd suggest is more natural, these days, both for speaker and listener (ECK-SILED).

The dramatic difference between one and the other is how Gaunt comes up with the second excuse. In the first version, it suddenly occurs to him (thus the stress on "or"). In the second version, it dawns on him while he is saying "the king exiled thee" (represented through the slower pace created by four long syllables in a row).

I also prefer the phrasing of the second version. If the line is spoken with perfect regularity, there are no internal prosodic cues indicating phrase boundaries. Having a slow-to-stop with "KING ECK SILED THEE" and then a speed-to-punch with "orsu POSE" causes a listener to naturally and automatically parse the statements.

Devour|ing pest|ilence | hangs^in | our^air

Devour|ing pest|ilence | hangs in | our^air

This could be a regular line (first version) or a mostly regular line with a trochaic substitution (second version), depending on your elisions (i.e., saying "hang zin" instead of "hangs in" and "ow rair" instead of "our air"). Nothing wrong with either of those—but, now that my attention's been called to it, I see that there's an opportunity created by not "promoting" the syllable "lence":

Devour|ing pest|(ilence) hangs | [in our air]

Having a double foot at the end would allow me to say "hangs in our air" demonstratively; that is, the sustention of these four syllables would let me dramatically represent the pestilent particles persisting all around us in the atmosphere (perhaps with an encompassing wave of my hand).

And thou | art fly|ing to | a fresh|er clime

This line could be perfectly regular, and that's exactly how I scanned it in the first place. Now that my attention's been drawn to it, though, I see an alternative:

And thou | art fly/ing to | a fresh|er clime

This feels more natural to me. When I say this line as regular iambs I feel like I'm swallowing the word "art" and forcing "to" to be more important than it deserves; using a different kind of double foot (L+L+s+s = L+s+L+s) allows me to say "art" more naturally and not have to force stress into the naturally short "to".

So that's the reasoning behind my scanning of these lines. I think it's easy to read naturally and fluently, will be easily parsed and comprehended by listeners, and provides expressive and dramatic opportunity to me as an actor.