Act 4, Scene 7
Scene 7
An orchestra pit
I
f you look at all of Shakespeare's plays over the twenty
years or so he was writing, you can ~ee that there is a
steady change. While the verse in his early plays was a very
standard and fairly unsurprisingly solid iambic pentam­
eter, after the theatrical hiatus due to the plague and two
years writing sonnets and playing with the metre, his verse
becomes more and more complex, and much less pre­
dictable. It took him time and practice to hone and learn
his craft.
Take a look at this speech from A Midsummer Night's
Dream (c. 1594), and then one from Macbeth (written much
later in Shakespeare's career, in 1606):
Knight of his train, to trace the forests wild. But she perforce withholds the loved boy, Crowns him with flowers, and makes him all her joy. (A Midsummer Night's Dream,
Act 2, Scene 2, lines 18-27)
MACBETH
If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well
It were done quickly. If the assassination
Could trammel up the consequence, and catch
With his 'Surcease success that but this blow
Might be the be-all and the end-all! - here,
But here, upon this bank and shoal of time,
We'd jump the life to come. But in these cases
We still have judgement here - that we but teach
Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return
To plague the inventor. This even-handed justice
Commends the ingredience of our poisoned chalice
To our own lips. He's here in double trust ...
(Macbeth, Act 1, Scene 7, lines 1-12)
PUCK
The King doth keep his revels here tonight.
Take heed the Queen come not within his sight,
For Oberon is passing fell and wrath
Because that she as her attendant hath
A lovely boy stolen from an Indian king.
She never had so sweet a changeling,
And jealous Oberon would have the child
Look at where the full stops are in Puck's speech, then look
at where they are in Macbeth's speech; I've made the end
of the sentences bold, to emphasise the point.
As Shakespeare got more sophisticated with his use of
metre, so too did the structure of the lines. Without even
beginning to take either speech apart or look at what any
of it means, a quick glance will show you that the former
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SHAKESPEARE ON TOAST
Act 4, Scene 7
is fairly evenly laid out, and the latter kinda all over the
place.
If we assume Shakespeare is a grand master of iambic
pentameter (and he was), then if he wanted a thought to
finish at the end ofa line ofmetre, he could work it so it did.
If he didn't, and he made a thought end halfway through a
line of metre, he must have done so intentionally.
Following that assumption, if the thoughts are dear
and simple, then they'll finish at the end of a line of metre:
ing themselves (or being interrupted by others). Halfway
through one thought, something else occurs to them, and
they go off on a tangent. The speech above from Macbeth
has a couple of examples of this:
We'd jump the life to come. But in these cases
We still have judgement here - that we but teach
Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return
To plague the inventor. This even-handed justice
Commends the ingredience of our poisoned chalice
To our own lips. He's here in double trust ...
The King doth keep his revels here tonight.
is a very good example of that. If we take a thought from
Macbeth's speech:
~
\
This even-handed justice
Commends the ingredience of our poisoned chalice
To our own lips.
you can see that it spills into three lines of metre, starting
and finishing halfway through a metrical line.
If a thought finishing at the end of a metrical line
implies clear, simple, straightforward thinking, then a mid­
line ending implies hurried, unclear, confused thinking.
Both are great character notes.
A mid-line ending is, essentially, a character interrupt­
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Mid-line endings only really start to happen in a more
focused way later in Shakespeare's writing, as he got used
to what he could do with the metre. Thought and (metrical)
line go together in Shakespeare's early writing, as the Dream
extract shows. Later, the thoughts overwhelm the lines, as
in Macbeth's speech.
Shakespeare took this breaking up of the metre further
with shared lines, where a character's line finishes halfway
through a line of metre, and the next character picks up
the other half of the metrical line. There's an example
immediately after the speech we just looked at from
Macbeth - again, I've provided a syllable count:
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SHAKESPEARE ON TOAST
MACBETH 5
Hath he asked for me? LADY
6-lO
Know you not he has?
(Macbeth,Act 1, Scene 7, line 30)
A line of ten syllables, split evenly, so the actors know that
(in order to keep the metre bouncing along nice and reg­
ularly) Lady Macbeth should come straight in with her line
as soon as Macbeth has spoken his.
We know this to be the case because there are plenty of
occasions where Shakespeare doesn't want his actors to
immediately come in with their line. In Act 3, Scene 4 of
Macbeth, when Macbeth sees Banquo's ghost at the ban­
queting table, he speaks to the Ghost:
MACBETH Thou canst not say I did it; never shake Thy gory locks at me. Ross
Gentlemen, rise. His highness is not well.
(Macbeth, Act 3, Scene 4,lines 49-51)
Ross has a line of ten syllables. Macbeth's first line is a line
of ten syllables. The first word in each line is capitalised.
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Act 4, Scene 7
It's definitely in iambic pentameter. Macbeth's second line
is only six syllables long, so in order to make sure the reg­
ular de-DUM de-DUM rhythm of the metre isn't thrown
out of sync, the actor playing Ross has to wait two beats
(marked in bold with x and \):
MACBETH
lO
6
Thou canst not say I did it; never shake
x \x \ x \
x \ x \
Thy gory locks at me. _ _ _ _ _--'
10
Ross
Gentlemen, rise. His highness is not well.
Perhaps Macbeth is entranced, or stunned in fear by the
ghost; perhaps Ross is equally transfixed to see his king act­
ing so strangely. Whatever reason the actors give, the two­
beat gap in the metre is there, and needs to be filled some­
how. More on that in Act 5.
In Shakespeare's earlier writing, these shared lines were
mosdy used for characters to interrupt each other; in his
later writing, he realised he could make it mean much
more, and he understood that he could use these metrical
nuances to actually orchestrate the pace of a scene.
It was very clear to his actors what he was doing. He
was directing them.
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