Macbeth's 'You should be women, and yet your beards forbid me to interpret that you are so' is arguably even harder to scan. So the most famous line in all of Shakespeare is actually an 11-syllable line. For that matter, 'To be or not to be,' starts out with three perfect iambs, but then there's a caesura depending on whether you read 'that is' as a trochee or an iamb ('THAT is the question,' or 'that IS the question'), and then 'the question' is an iambic foot with a so-called feminine ending, an extra unstressed syllable. King Lear's 'Never never never never never,' is, for instance, a perfect trochaic pentameter line. Second, individual lines or feet also clearly stray, with or without editorial involvement.

I don't mean to say they're just making stuff up-there's often good reason to suspect the authenticity of the Folios, since they were published 7 years after Shakespeare died, and were often based on prompt-scripts or actors' memories of the lines-but it is possible that the editors created a consistency of meter that Shakespeare himself didn't intend. Modern editors have taken it upon themselves to 'correct' the text. Based on those, he didn't always finish lines with five feet, even if we take into account lines that are finished by other characters. We don't have any of the plays in Shakespeare's own hand, but the earliest published versions, the First Folio, often show not only unusual versions of some speeches-compare the First Folio 'Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo' speech with most other editions, for instance-but also surprising line breaks. The sonnets, mostly yes, but that is a more rigid form. Good question! A couple of points that may be useful and / or interesting.įirst, he didn't actually write in rigid iambic pentameter.

How to write iambic pentameter sonnet