When you’re learning to perform Shakespeare, you spend some time studying how verse works. When does he use it, when is it “regular” verse, when is it not, and when does he abandon verse altogether and use prose instead?
Ultimately, we learn that Shakespeare is sending signals to us through the way he uses (and intentionally misuses) verse. The “why” of his poetry reveals what’s going on with the characters who speak the lines.
Many high school students also study Shakespeare, and the very rhythms that illuminate Shakespeare’s meaning to actors can make it feel very obscure to 9th graders grappling with Romeo and Juliet. Teachers often spend so long on iambic pentameter that at the end of class, the students don’t realize it’s a story about young people falling love for the first time, duels, family feuds, sex, poison, lovers being separated, and being misunderstood by your parents.
The form, in this case the verse, is there to amplify the meaning. We get into trouble when we get so into the details of the form (as described in the article below) that we lose the sense of what we’re saying, and why. It doesn’t make sense to speak the lines with an exact iambic rhythm; the audience will lose the understanding of what the character is saying.
As I was reading this article, it occurred to me that we make the same mistake when we get caught up in the form of our speech or our presentation rather than its function. We spend a lot of time shoehorning our messages into a slide deck or a report template–not exactly the iambic pentamenter of our era, but definitely a form we’re familiar with!
We need to start with asking: What are we trying to achieve? What key message must get across? Then we can make sure the form we choose matches the outcome we seek.
