#iamb

Identity is a queer thing.

When I define who I will be,

Someone defines myself at me—

Identity with hollow ring.

I am who I am meant to be,

And yet I’m not who many think.

Brown and white, or purple and pink,

I am the shades they will not see.

If I will float, or if I sink,

Depends on how I will present

In each daily environment.

If I last is not writ in ink.

I do not write this just to vent.

What I want is just to find peace

And, from the bonds on me, release.

Before my life and time are spent.

And when the force on me does cease,

I will breathe deep from the free air,

And I will finally declare

Through night, the glinting, sparkling, silver fur sprant almost numbly, as a wolf had trotted. He ran so subtly as a rapid blur, with all the time for him alone allotted.

The moon routinely has had shone, the light so wearily reflecting. Same as the wolf had mirrored lunar dim, so gray but bright, through drunken forest single goal pursuing.

Invisibly, and barely touching ground, the beast just skimmed the non-forgetting night. And leaden shadow to its owner bound shone silver glim below the flaming sprite.

Abruptly forest trembled, and the wolf abstained his drive beneath the starry glare. And to his gaze a view of graceful bloom was clear – a glade in blossom – world of flare.

The scents of beauty have absorbed the dole - the flowers tenderly effloresced by the moon. The wolf had shivered, ready for one howl, inhaling the intoxicating fume.

A shudder ran from tail to moisted nose; the silver wave was lifting silky hair. The wolf had bent, preparing on his paws to jump, but sang a sudden quaint prayer.

The Song consumed entire blooming valley, crisscrossing fragrance of unspoken dreams. With force of life it lit the starry alley, and petals dropped in silence mellow tears.

“Would you care if I died?”

She asked.

Oh that question. As if it had a simple answer besides ‘yes, I would,' It doesn't, it is much more than that. This girl walks each step as a declaration of herself. A question like this needed to be answered as a revelation of life itself, so I did.

How to read Shakespeare aloud is mainly in the department of acting. Two seminal books you might look at are John Barton’s Playing Shakespeare, and Peter Hall’s Shakespeare’s Advice to the Players.

But, honestly, my inclination is to tell you to begin by just reading Shakespeare, and preferably reading it out loud. Having tried first will give you a starting point after which, if you still feel the need to develop your understanding, these famous directors’ books might take you further. What you need is a foundation based on your own experience of reading the texts.

As far as iambic pentameter goes, it’s just a style of poetry made up of five (as in pentagon) iambs, which are two syllable units made up of a short(unstressed) syllable followed by a long (stressed) syllable. The word ‘aloud’, for instance, is an iamb. 

This sounds all a little confusing when explained in words, but it really isn’t. All it means is that you have a line of poetry made of five ba-DUH rhythms: ba-DUH  ba-DUH  ba-DUH  ba-DUH  ba-DUH. Or, to give the example everyone uses from Shakespeare’s poetry (sonnet 18),

But Shakespeare’s verse isn’t always made up of straightforward iambic pentameter (sometimes it’s not written in iambic pentameter at all). Take the beginning of Henry V, for instance:

The verse starts with a trochee (which is the opposite of an iamb – it has a long stress followed by a short stress: BAH-da), and the effect is attention-grabbing. The second line is one syllable short.

Knowing about the various techniques Shakespeare uses can certainly help you to understand why his writing sounds the way it does, but it’s not strictly necessary for knowing how to read the plays. Just because it’s in iambic pentameter, it doesn’t mean you have to read it any differently. Part of the reason it’s written like that is because it sounds like the natural rhythm of spoken English, and it’s often counter-intuitive and extremely unnatural to read it emphasising the rhythms and the end of the lines.

So what you do need to watch out for, instead of trying to work out the iambic pentameter in lines, is how to verse flows. Well edited versions are useful: all you have to do is keep reading until you reach a punctuation mark. For instance, in the lines from Henry V I just quoted you can’t stop at the end of the first line, even though the line ends there: ‘O for a muse of fire that would ascend’… Ascend what? It needs to keep going straight onto the next line to make sense: ‘O for a muse of fire that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention’. 

In fact, iambic pentameter is there to help you, rather than hinder you. Historically, Shakespeare’s troupe had very little time to prepare their plays; they did them with hardly any rehearsal, so the language had to do some of the work for them. The rhythmic style of writing forces the actor to speak the lines in a certain way, and often does a lot to convey the emotions of a character (by making the actor speed up and slow down on a verbal level). Iambic pentameter is something that happens rather than something you consciously do or think about (unless you’re doing textual analysis)

So if you’re sensitive to the flow of the language, the rhythm should actually come naturally; you’ll start to hear and feel it. Just let the verse carry you, instead of trying to impose the rhythm you think it ought to have onto it.