Iambic pentameter – Shakespeare
Iambic pentameter is the rhythm Shakespeare mostly used when writing poetry.
Most of Shakespeare’s famous quotations are iambic pentameter.
“I am a Bic (iambic) writer living in a penthouse (pentameter) and if you make too much noise I’ll use my SPEAR (Shakespeare).”
We saw earlier that:
An iambic foot has a short syllable followed by a long syllable – SL
and pentameter = five feet per line.
So an iambic pentameter must look like:
Each beat of the line is on the long stress. There are five beats per line in iambic pentameter.
Examples of Shakespeare’s famous iambic pentameter
Example 1
NOTE:
Did you notice something different in line three above? This line actually starts with a spondee – two stressed syllables (see Spondaic). “Rough” and “winds” have equal stress. It just shows that rules can be broken: occasionally changing the rhythm in this way gives variation and, in this case, draws attention to the roughness of the “winds”.
Example 2
Example 3
