What exactly do you mean by ‘meter’ and how is learning about it helpful?Īll of Shakespeare’s sonnets and many of his plays are written in what’s called “iambic pentameter,” meaning that these texts are written in rhythmic lines with ten syllables of text in each line (typically, anyway). Ultimately, we hope you’ll find that it’s actually much easier to read verse in meter than not to do so. When Shakespeare’s text is spoken in proper meter, it flows beautifully and the speaker sounds far more fluent, even if nothing else in their relationship to the text has changed. And as with English grammar or organic chemistry, a lot of people would probably prefer to go their entire lives without ever learning about it or encountering it “in the wild.” However, I personally am a strong advocate of the idea that being familiar with meter makes reading Shakespeare much more accessible. Even just a little bit of meter work will further your understanding of the entire text and make you a better, more engaged reader overall! Why read in meter?įor most people, reading and/or teaching Shakespeare is daunting enough without discussion of meter. We’re also hoping to give you some ideas as to how you can easily begin doing your own scansion (metrical analysis). Our primary aim in this post is to give you a sense of how reading Shakespeare in meter can enrich your experience of his plays. There was just too much we wanted to say! (If you missed them earlier, be sure to catch up on Part I and Part II of introducing new readers to Shakespeare.) From the remaining possible meters the meter is chosen that lies closest (in the Levenshtein sense) to the target pattern.After writing two other posts on Shakespeare, we realized that we simply needed to dedicate an entire post to a discussion of reading Shakespeare in meter. if a syllable is less stressed than one of its neighbouring words and at least as much stressed as the other neighbouring word, then it is downgraded (coded as 0) Īfter this revision, the meter is still not finalised.if a syllable is stressed more than one of its neighbouring words and at least as much stress as the other neighbouring word then it is upgraded (coded as 1).To determine the meter for as many syllables as possible the following rules are applied: With this information of stress per word we do not have the meter yet, among other things because many words consist of one syllable. if a word ends in a vowel, while its follow-up starts with a consonant, then these two syllables are seen as one syllable with the stress on the highest weighted syllable of the two syllables involved.by means of an apostrophe left out syllables do not count.This stress information is determined on the basis of the Celex information in combination with the following heuristics: apply these two rules, but only if the resulting meter lies closer (in the Levenshtein sense) to the ideal pattern of meter: There are four weight classes for syllables: heavy, light, unstressed and unknown. For any given line of verse firstly the relative weight of the syllables in the individual words is determined. The meter is coded internally as a string of ones and zeroes. A 0 means unstressed, while a 1 means stressed.
Simply paste in the Dutch poem you wish to process and click 'Submit'. The meter is represented as zeroes and ones.
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