In Shakespeare's hands unrhymed iambic pentameter--that is, blank verse--is capable of producing great variety and subtlety of effect. (See verse and prose.) In his early plays (for us, MND, the two Henry plays) his blank verse tends to be more regular than it is in his later plays (King Lear and, especially, The Winter's Tale), where his rhythms are often very flexible. So don't worry if a line does not seem to alternate unstressed with stressed syllables in a regular pattern: the variations are as important as the regularities. The analysis of verse rhythm is called scansion. Here's a line that scans as regular blank verse: "The course of true love never did run smooth" (MND, 1.1.134). But your scansion will depend on your dramatic interpretation of the line; conversely, your dramatic interpretation may be affected by your scansion. In the line above, do you want the dramatic stress to fall on "love" or "true love"? Try reading it both ways, and see how the rhythm gives clues to meaning.
Here are some important variations and additions. An extra unstressed syllable at the end of a line produces what's technically called a feminine ending, e.g. "If you do chance to hear of that blind trait or" (KL, 4.5.35). The line immediately preceding it in Lear is a short line: "So, fare you well." That short line, which requires a pause at its end, and the next line with its extra syllable combine to make Regan's shocking statement about killing Gloucester all the more powerful. (Say it aloud.) Some lines of blank verse reach a natural pause (conventionally indicated by punctuation) at the end of the line; others require you to run on (technically, that's called a run-on line). In the following passage from WT, Leontes uses both run-on and end-stopped lines. Notice how the run-on lines give a sense of accelerating passion to his speech:
There may be in the cup
A spider steeped, and one may drink, depart,
And yet partake no venom, for his knowledge
Is not infected; but if one present
Th' abhorred ingredient to his eye, make known
What he hath drunk, he cracks his gorge, his sides,
With violent hefts. I have drunk and seen the spider.
(2.1.39-45)
A pause within a line is called a caesura. Notice in the passage above how Shakespeare varies the placement of his caesuras: there are two weak pauses in the second line, another in the middle of line three, and a very decided caesura in line four, after "infected"; the next caesura comes late in line five, after "eye," and launches the run-on from line five to six. The very decided pause in the final line in this passage prepares us for Leontes' crazy conclusion, "I have drunk and seen the spider." Notice that in order to find five stressed syllables in that line you've got to scan the phrase "I have drunk" as two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed: "With violent hefts.//I have drunk and seen the spider."
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