![]() ![]() ![]() One of the things my teacher hammered into my adolescent head was the concept that you don’t stop at the end of a line unless that’s actually where the thought ends. I learned a lot about elision - particularly when it comes to slurring vowel sounds together - and I learned about enjambment. In my AP class, we had to recite Latin poetry aloud, which meant careful attention to the cadence of the lines. Years before anyone had bothered to explain to me what iambic pentameter is, beyond perhaps a token mention of “that’s the stuff they make sonnets out of,” I was beating out the long and short vowels of Ovid, Catullus, and Horace. ![]() I came to scansion through Latin long before I came to it through English. Once we get through the basics of syllables, feet, and pentameter, we get to play with the aspects of scansion that pertain more to character and performance. This workbook follows a far different structure than our usual Study Guides, based on the scaffolding of language skills rather than on elements of a play’s plot, history, and staging challenges. Shakespeare's scripts are only unusual in that instead of using these visual clues, he puts his stresses in the meter.As I mentioned a few weeks ago, my current project is building a scansion workbook - a practical guide to understanding, marking, and performing meter in Shakespeare’s plays. And we see this all the time in modern scripts. to indicate all those words have equal stress, or using italics or CAPS or bold to indicate stressed words. Don't sweat it if you disagree and would move one up or down the line, so would I on any given day.Īlso, take note that we do so much writing nowadays on the internet, in which we are trying to convey our natural speaking styles. In terms of that continuum, I sometimes change my mind about the order of the ones in the middle. As if the speaker had decided to stand up against his roommate, only to be reminded that his roommate is a body builder, before retreating meekly away. But since I also believe that more stresses= more force, it made sense to try to convey that sense of "in your face" and "backing off meekly". I used to use little jokes for the "sounds like", such as all political names, or names of cities. You're just running on a low, steady hum of some emotion. So they all trail off at the end as if followed by "." but as they are all the same, not one of them is more "spiked" than another. Many times you may have a fairly regular piece, but it's full. On the other hand, if most of the surrounding lines are more broken than this, so that it is the most regular line you have, it represents more of a cooling off. It's not a huge emotional spike, but it sticks out in the regular meter, showing you are heating up a little. ![]() If all your other lines are regular, and then you suddenly have a feminine ending, making it the most broken line you have, that is important. I know, that sounds like a contradiction. It's still an important clue in that something unusual is happening. In that sense, it might be a more intellectual and cool form of broken meter, or just a very slight change in emotion, just one degree on the thermometer or a mere blip in the line graph. or in other words, function much as the elipses have in this sentence. or made you wonder to yourself if that was the right word to choose. It may indicate that the word you just said has struck you in some way. though it is the correct beat for the pattern of the first line, it creates an unstressed beat (at the end of the line) followed by another unstressed beat (at the beginning of the next line) which may be well suited for a brief pause between.it lifts at the end (rather than a stress beat), almost as if you are trailing off or asking a question,.the only alteration is at the very end, after the normal line has all been regular,.I personally dislike the sound of the "ee-on", as it tends to stick out like a sore thumb when you're using an American dialect to do Shakespeare, but I guess I can't quibble if that's what the meter is doing. Shakespeare seems to use either as it suits him, so sometimes the right pronunciation of "derision" is "der-IS-shun" and sometimes it's "der-IS-ee-ON". The suffix "-ion" comes from other languages, primarily French, wherein it is pronounced as two syllables, "ee-on".If you're having trouble working out a line, try both pronouncing and dropping the -ed and see if it helps. Sometimes this will be marked for you, as in “stopp'd.” However this is notoriously unreliable, as it is not consistent (marked ones are usually right, but unmarked ones may not be). This was another place that Shakespeare could drop a syllable if needed. Keep in mind that -ed at the end of a word (past tense of a verb) was usually pronounced in those days (we have since dropped this for all verbs except those that end in d's or t's). ![]()
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