Scansion—the beating out of the rhythm of Shakespeare's verse—is a fundamental skill for the performer. To the degree that it has a practical application in spoken delivery of the lines it is relatively simple to learn to do. Midsummer is a nearly ideal play in which to first practice the skill because it is extremely regular, but offers at least a few examples of all the kinds of complications that actors regularly encounter.
Crucial to speaking and performing Shakespeare's verse is the ability to scan the lines and understand their inherent rhythm. "Performer Mode" does not attempt to fully scan and mark every line (using the familiar x / x / x / x / x / notation, or any other system) but it does seek to assist beginners with identifying the main scansion issues in the play and give even experienced professionals a way to double check troublesome lines.
"Performer Mode" provides the overview needed for delivery of the lines while sight-reading or rehearsing. The aim is to make as transparent as possible to moments of decision and the options available to the actor.
First, although the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries are often written with high proportions of verse, they are rarely completely written in poetic forms. A Midsummer Night's Dream is about 80% verse. A quick look at Unit 6, a prose scene, compared to the five units that precede it, will suffice to make the difference clear. Prose lacks the regularity of line length and metricality of verse. Where verse begins each line with a capital letter (whether or not it is the beginning of a sentence) and stops short of the right margin, prose runs completely to the margin and does not "start over" until the beginning of a new paragraph.
In the case of prose, there is no intended rhythmic pattern, hence there is nothing to scan.
Even in verse scenes, the vast majority of lines in the play are unmarked in the performer mode, because they need no intervention by the actors. That is to say, the verse in Midsummer is surprisingly regular. With the exception of a single speech that is fully annotated in the text, Shakespeare uses only three basic meters in this play, (pentameter, tetrameter and—for the purpose of parody in Pyramus and Thisbe—"fourteeners") all with an iambic pulse. For the most part, simply speaking the words as written will yield the desired effect. Anyone who has learned that Shakespeare's lines go "de-DUM | de-DUM | de-DUM | de-DUM | de-DUM|" will find ample confirmation because a large number of lines in Midsummer do so and one must be stubbornly perverse and unmusical about delivery to prevent this straightforward effect. Below are examples, with their feet marked by vertical strokes, for clarity:
These lines are examples of strict iambic pentameter, and because they can be read right off the page without complication "Performer Mode" does not comment on them.
Special note: On rare occasions, about 35 times in this play, a single line of verse can be shared by two or more speakers. You can tell that this is the case because the verse is arranged on the page with the words of the second speaker indented beyond that of the first. Here is such an arrangement:
Because the line is regular, "Performer Mode" does not annotate it, but the second speaker needs to be sure not to "break the verse," i.e. don't leave a pause, before speaking.
The problem with the "de-DUM | de-DUM | de-DUM | de-DUM | de-DUM|" rule of thumb is that it is a vast oversimplification. Shakespeare doesn't really write in strict iambic pentameter, and it is rare to find an extended passage utilizing it. Poets of the Elizabethan period generally favored blank verse, a form of unrhymed iambic pentameter that extensively employs three minor variations to provide flexibility and reduce monotony.
These variations are easily observed, and their effect is easy to hear. A wide number of different terms are used to identify them, however, which can be confusing to the novice.
1. Heads (trochaic inversions)
The first of these variations is called, simply, a "head" in this volume. Heads occur when a trochee is substituted for the first—and only the first—iambic foot of the line. (A trochee is the opposite rhythm from an iambus; instead of "de-DUM" it goes "DUM-de.") This effect is also sometimes called the inverted opening, strong opening, trochaic variation, or hard start.
Here are a few lines that use this variation:
Like perfectly regular lines, these lines really have no actor decisions to be made in them either, because no one says "ra-THER, chan-TING, or scorn–FUL." Simply speaking the line naturally, without "talk-KING bizarrely” will yield Shakespeare's intended rhythm. Heads provide a small burst of power, and a bit of rhythmic variety, but they are unexceptional within the rules of blank verse as Shakespeare and his contemporaries practiced it and do not require a special notation in performer mode.
More rarely, and a little more surprisingly, heads can also occur at the beginning of phrase, even if that happens mid-line. That is, they also happen immediately after a punctuated break at midline, which is technically termed a caesura. (This break is marked in lines in this essay with this double vertical stroke: ‖.) When they do so, the pattern is still that only one poetic foot is reversed and then the line returns to its normal pattern.
Here is an example of such a line:
Again, this line is not marked out for special treatment in performer mode, because it is quite natural to emphasize both occurrences of "dotes," and would be very odd to choose to say "dotes IN."
Finally, it is theoretically possible for a line to have a head at both the beginning and at the midline caesura and still be considered "regular variations," and some of Shakespeare's later plays contain such lines, but none occur in Midsummer.
In Midsummer, Shakespeare frequently uses a second variation of line or phrase beginnings in which the first foot consists only of a single stressed syllable. Scholars think of these as iambic feet with a silent first syllable, like a musical rest. These empty syllables are technically known as “catalexes;” the singular is “catalexis.” (Warning about terminological confusion: In classical Greek and Roman poetry, these unexpectedly empty syllables often sit at the end–rather than the beginning–of the line, and some scholars use the term exclusively for such cases, but when scanning Shakespeare the term is almost always used for headless lines.)
The empty syllable is marked in this essay and in "Performer Mode" with this convention: (X). You will sometimes see these empty feet marked with a carat ^ in traditional scanning systems, but that is not the convention used in this edition because the symbol is not visible enough for sight-reading.
This variation is very rare when the meter is iambic pentameter, although Midsummer does contain one example, made a little trickier because it also has a head after the caesura.
That said, an extremely common meter for supernatural characters in this play is iambic tetrameter (a line of four, rather than five, iambic feet) and more of these lines are headless than are completely regular. There are dozens of instances in the play.
Here are two examples:
And an entire speech (Unit 51, lines 322-327) in iambic tetrameter in which all lines are headless:
Again, there is nothing specifically to do, except perhaps leave a tiny pause (often filled with a gesture or a step) where the empty syllable is, so that the underlying musical beat remains recognizable.
3. Tails (Feminine Endings)
The last of these common variations is the use of an extra, unstressed syllable at the end of the line. This variation is technically known as a "feminine" ending, a name borrowed from French poésie because it tends to be produced by use of grammatically feminine nouns (which, in French, often end with an extra unaccented syllable compared to their masculine forms) at the ends of lines.
In English, where nouns are not gendered, this terminology has been contested for some time because it sounds sexist instead of grammatical. Many people now call it a weak, double or soft ending instead. Because this variation happens at the end of a line, it is also sometimes known as a line end variation. This edition of the play calls it, simply, a "tail." It is marked in scanned lines below by preceding the syllable with a left parenthesis: (
Here are a few examples from the play:
In all these cases, the effect is palpable, but there is no real decision to be made. The line sounds perfectly normal through ten syllables, and then–surprise!–it is not quite finished. One more, gentle syllable follows. What actor would simply leave the syllable off, however? These effects are built into the lines and need no special marking in performance mode. These are still cases where the actor simply says the line.
There is an important point about tails that needs special attention. Like heads, they apply to both lines and phrases. That is, a phrase that ends at mid-line (i.e. just before a caesura) can also have a tail, although this is uncommon, especially in early plays. In a technical sense, this is not controversial, but even many experts tend to forget this rule and get very confused when this phenomenon (called an epic caesura) occurs.
These are eleven syllable lines–exactly like a line with an ordinary tail–but the extra syllable is not where it is expected rhythmically. There are a number of these in Midsummer, and even though no decision needs to be made by the actor, these lines cause so much confusion that most are annotated in this edition. In the attached note, the line is fully scanned to help explain what is going on and reassure the actor that despite the odd feel, the line is still regular within the “rules” as Shakespeare understood them.
Further, a line can have a tail at both the caesura and the line end, so it can have twelve syllables and still be technically regular with variations. These are very rare, but there are examples in Midsummer, and they are notated and fully scanned in student mode. There is still no decision to be made by the actor, but to avoid confusion these are identified.
Here is an example of such a line:
Try saying it once without the tails, and you can hear that it is a regular line that just happens to have two tail variations.
In all these cases, there is really nothing for the actor to do except to say the line as written. As Shakespeare and his contemporaries practiced the art of writing blank verse these variations were thought of as adding variety, but not as making the lines irregular. Because of this, most lines with variations are not marked in this edition, although mid-line tails are sometimes notated because they can confuse even experienced readers and performers. The issue is learning to recognize these “regular lines with variations,” rather than doing anything about them.
Finally, it is worth noting that multiple variations can occur in a single line. Here is an example of a double tail with a head:
The previous sections were about seeing how Shakespeare understood “regular” lines in a more complex way than we have generally been taught. While it is certainly important to develop this more nuanced perspective, it is not the main issue.
For anyone speaking Shakespeare’s lines aloud, scansion is primarily about understanding and applying the elasticity of the spoken English language. (Or put another way, spoken English is more versatile than its written counterpart. Too much analysis of Shakespeare’s lines treats the written lines with a rigidity that is neither appropriate, nor historically accurate.)
For performers and students speaking aloud the greatest challenge to scanning the verse is the surprisingly large number of lines that don’t appear at first glance to be regular, but which probably are. The reason being that many lines contain elastic words, that is, words or word combinations that can vary in their length depending on context. For example, the word interest is commonly thought to be a three-syllable word, in-ter-est, and so it is usually divided in a dictionary. In everyday usage, however, it is typically pronounced in-trest: two syllables. In the drama of the early modern period both pronunciations are used interchangeably, depending on the needs of the meter.
There are hundreds of such cases where the printed form of the word does not immediately convey the manner in which the word fits into the metrical pattern. In addition, there are word combinations that are likewise elastic, for example, “to add” or “the edge,” where side-by-side vowels often combine into a single sound: t’add, or th’edge.
In both kinds of these cases, the dictionary syllable count can be quite misleading. We don’t actually speak in the same way as we write, with ev-er-y / word / ful-ly / pro-nounc’d / and / sep-a-rat-èd, so as to keep entirely distinct from its neighbors. We frequently blur syllables–and even whole phrases–together in ways that are often labeled "mumbling" but are useful real-life tricks for compressing data and speeding communication. (This compression is the reason that it is so hard to understand native speakers of a foreign language you are studying, and why they have so much trouble understanding you.) “I have got to…” becomes “I gotta.” “Could have” comes out sounding like “could of” or even just “couda.” An entire range of vowel sounds, when moved to an unstressed position, simplify into the all-purpose schwa [ə], and are sometimes just left out altogether.
Spoken English is full of elisions and contractions that are so common as to go largely unnoticed, and which are now often explicitly purged from formal writing.
Our reverence for Shakespeare’s linguistic brilliance sometimes makes us think that he didn’t speak like a normal person, and he didn’t understand how normal people speak. Neither belief is true. The earliest printed versions of Shakespeare’s plays often contained indications of his keen ear. Where “Ile” was often printed in the early modern period, editors later modernized it to “I’ll.” Recently, a tendency to formalize his spelling (and to prioritize readers over users) has resulted in “I will.” Similarly, “Ore” became “o’er” and now is sometimes printed “over” without regard for the resulting addition of a syllable.
In many other cases, the first printing didn’t necessarily record the shortening, but it is clear, nonetheless. Modern editions are extremely reluctant to print “sprite” where the quartos and folios say “spirit,” even when it provides a rhyme for “quite.” But why? Too much reverence works against good verse speaking.
Because understanding the meter is the central issue for verse speakers, the main use of notation in "Performer Mode" is clarifying the scansion. Whenever possible, typographical conventions are adopted to show where the actor must take action. Elisions (the internal elimination of a syllable from a word) and contractions (the loss of a syllable by combining words) are indicated by apostrophes. Eighteenth century editors routinely employed this device, but the contemporary tendency is to eliminate such conventions. This, admittedly, makes the printed page cleaner and easier to read, but if often obscures the clues to the metrics that were once available. (In this edition, if ease of reading is your immediate concern, you can always just click into any other mode to see the unaltered text. Only "Performer Mode" is orthographically organized around scansion issues.)
Another frequently used convention is the adoption of the superscripted “gamma” [ ᵞ ] to indicate a blurring of a commonly independent syllable spelled with an “i” into the next syllable, like the ends of the words “Indian” and “Athenian” when those are pronounced “yan.”
The verse in Midsummer is so regular that if you understand variations and elasticity, there are less than a dozen instances of irregular lines. If fact, the quality of the verse is so dependable that deviations are used to diagnose corruption in the transmission of the text. Because copyists, typesetters, and proofreaders can make mistakes, words were sometimes left out of lines. Handwriting was sometimes misread so the wrong word was inserted into the text. Other minor issues occasionally marred the accurate passing down of the text.
It has often been said that irregularity should be treated as an acting note, which is a useful attitude, but not until after it has been thoroughly investigated as a textual problem. The manner in which modern editorial and performance practice most diverge is the degree to which contemporary editors seeks to preserve the bibliographic history of the text even if it means printing obviously flawed lines, while dramaturgs/directors tend more often to prefer emendation (even if the text cannot be definitively shown to be corrupted) if it results in a regular line that is easier to speak and understand. This edition favors the latter approach, with appropriate annotation.
Occasionally, words in Shakespeare's plays scan with fewer syllables than we might expect. In many cases this is because we actually speak English much more informally than we write it. For example, in everyday conversation, only people with pedantically exact diction say "be-ing" as a two-syllable word. Almost everyone shortens it to "bing." It is never written in the shorter form, however. Our eyes can fool us, but Shakespeare had an excellent ear and often constructed lines according to how they actually sound, not how they look.
A few words were pronounced differently in Elizabethan times, usually because of the elimination of an internal syllable consisting of a single vowel sound: "innocent" was commonly pronounced "inn'cent,"" perjury" became "perj'ry," and "venomous" contracted to "ven'mous." All such cases in the play are noted in "Performer Mode," and clicking on the word will bring up a full explanation with a pronunciation guide. Contemporary performance practice almost universally observes these cases because these words are still easily intelligible without the missing syllable.
The "The+vowel" and "To+vowel" Rules
In normal speech, when the words "the" and "to" are followed by words that begin with a vowel sound the two words are combined in a way that leaves only one vowel sound. Notice how everyone actually says "t'arrange" not "to/arrange." You usually hear "th'ending" not "thee/ending." Shakespeare honored our actual speech patterns. He wrote verse that accounts for the changes we normally introduce. These scansion instances are easily addressed, since it is what we normally do. They merely require us to avoid the kind of over-enunciation that we sometimes assume that Shakespeare needs – but doesn't!
The Missing V Rule
A much more complex consideration arises from the extensive elimination of particular consonants in the middle of words (medial Vs, but occasionally also medial THs and Ks) in Shakespeare's era. We are used to seeing this as a poetic convention when applied to the words "over" (o'er) and "ever" (e'er), but most people are very surprised how widely it applies to other words like: devil, heaven, evil, given, having, whether, hither, other, and taken. All these cases reduce the word length by a full syllable, which we do not expect because there is no modern equivalent. The difficulty is doubled because, for easy legibility, these contractions are almost never marked in modern printed texts.
All such instances are marked in this text's "Performer" mode, with an attached note referring to them as instances of the "Missing V Rule." In every case, a decision must be made about how to treat it, since audiences are not used to hearing these words without their middle consonants and often cannot understand the word without them. The notes explain how the specific cases are treated in modern performance practice—as there are a variety of strategies about how to preserve both the scansion and the intelligibility.
The Variable Name Rule
Names are notoriously variable in Shakespeare, shifting to meet the needs of the meter. In some cases, the name can appear in two forms: Helen and Helena, for example. Often, however, a name can be pronounced more than one way: Rome-ee-oh, or Rome-yo. Jule-ee-et, or Jule-yet. Neither form is more "correct" than the other. It is simply a matter of discovering how many syllables a name occupies in a given line and finding the pronunciation that fits it. In Midsummer, this is fairly straightforward in all cases but that of Demetrius. His name is frequently shortened to Demetr'us, which feels a bit awkward at first. All cases where adjustments are necessary are indicated in "Performer Mode" with green text and annotated with a full explanation.
The elasticity highlighted above is primarily about elimination of a syllable under specific circumstances, but we also want to consider cases where a syllable is added:
In Shakespeare's time a few words were pronounced with one additional syllable—usually an expanded ending. For example, the past tense of many words was accented. Today, we still have a few words where we occasionally handle these endings in an expanded manner: wretchèd, agèd, and blessèd are all sometimes treated as two-syllable words. In Shakespeare's time this practice applied to many more words, however: wishèd, renownèd, and crazèd all appear in Midsummer, for example.
Words that end in "ion" were also usually expanded: imaginatïon (im-aj-in-a-see-un) and confusïon (con-few-see-un) are so treated in this play.
A fairly substantial number of words in English are still spelled in a way that indicates their former expansions, although we have long since abandoned the extra syllable when two vowel sounds sit side by side: patïence, marriäge, vengëance, and oceän, for example.
In a very small number of cases, possessives also expanded. In Midsummer there is an instance where "moon's" takes the archaic two-syllable form "moonës."
In this edition, anywhere that an expansion is required to maintain the intended meter the word appears in green text while in "Performer Mode," and with the expanded syllable marked just as in the examples in this section. Clicking directly on the word will access an explanatory note.
That Shakespeare spoke some words with an additional syllable, and wrote these rhythms into his verse, does not automatically mean that a modern actor must do so, however. Contemporary performance practice generally considers intelligibility primary, expanding words that can still be easily understood, but not always observing alterations that make words too difficult to understand or drawing too much alienating attention. Scansion notes tell us about the meter of the line, but deciding what to do about such metrical considerations is an aesthetic decision to be made in context. Expanding "ion" endings, especially at the end of lines, was (until recently) frequently avoided. A renewed interest in "Original Pronunciation" is changing that, but adoption is uneven. Expanded past tenses are easily understood, however, so usually spoken.
Especially when an archaic or formal sound might be helpful, for characters from the ancient world, for magical incantations, or to portray stuffy priggishness, it is also common to use the archaic pronunciation despite its odd sound.
Pronunciation of a few words has shifted since Shakespeare's time to accent different syllables than now receive emphasis, and confusingly sometimes the same word is pronounced two different ways inside a single play. This happens because the word was undergoing change in his era, as a few words are still unsettled in ours: both ádvertísement and advértisement are acceptable, for example. Is it banál, or bánal? In Shakespeare's time this applied especially to words that began with "con" or "com": confessor, consort, compact, and complete sometimes have first syllable accents. A couple of others that appear in Midsummer are persévere and revénue. All these cases are marked in the notes in "Performer" mode, with complete explanations and guides to pronunciation, although—like expansions—the performer must still decide how to handle the possible confusion.
It is so common to say that Shakespeare's plays are written in blank verse, that there is a general tendency to overlook the deliberate use of some alternatives in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Although the play is extensively written in blank (that is, unrhymed) verse, it has a very high proportion of couplets that do rhyme. These lines present no particular difficulty beyond an occasional decision about how to treat pairs of words whose pronunciation has changed over time so that they no longer rhyme: move/love, eyes/qualities. Modern practice is usually to use contemporary pronunciations and avoid the historic rhyme. The exception is when a comic or antique effect is desirable.
Of far greater importance: The fairies often speak in iambic tetrameter (four iambic feet per line) rather than pentameter. The principles of scansion do not change, except that the expectation is a line of eight syllables—with variations—instead of ten. The spoken effect can be very different, however. Tetrameter can sound deliberately odd. Many productions of Midsummer heighten this effect by preserving all archaic pronunciations, including historic rhymes, in the performance of the fairies to emphasize their other-worldliness.
Finally, the "Mechanicals" perform a playlet in Act V, which consists of highly alliterative verse reminiscent of medieval theatre—but of such (intentionally) poor quality that it is doggerel. Theoretically, scansion patterns still apply to it but given the parody inherent in the scene, there is little point to obsessing over it. Historic rhymes in the verse, such as good/blood, are often exaggerated to increase the comedy.
One last note: Occasionally Shakespeare breaks up a long passage of verse by inserting a short, blunt prose line (often about four syllables long) right in the middle of a verse dialogue. These are often practical lines, like "Let him come in." These offer interesting rhythmic variety but do not, and are not meant to, scan. They are always isolated, however, and the blank verse pattern returns with the very next line.
In a technical sense, (if one choses to observe every instance of historic pronunciation) virtually every line in A Midsummer Night's Dream is "regular." The uniformity of the verse is quite pronounced. Only two cases of the epic feminine caesura occur in the entire play, and it has far fewer variations that later plays. The very few exceptions, about which there is some scholarly disagreement, are clearly annotated and explained in this edition.
It takes a little bit of practice to learn to identify the instances where the performer must make some small accommodation in order to achieve the regularity that Shakespeare gave the text, but it is much less complicated than learning the technical names for all types of variation and identifying all instances of rhythmic deviation. It is simply a matter of learning how to maintain the intended rhythms.
Of course, for various reasons, contemporary performance practice sometimes substitutes modern pronunciations for archaic ones, but it is best to make such choices after full consideration of the options. In "Performer" mode, scansion notes exist to assist the process of identification and decision-making.
Scanning the verse, of course, is simply preparation for speaking it. It is an attempt to understand where the accentuation falls, and how the rhythm of the line works. Once you do understand it, there are just a few rules-of-thumb that can help you deliver the verse confidently and effectively.
The simplest of these is, “Don’t break the verse.” That is, don’t fill it with unnecessary pauses. A verse line is normally spoken on one breath and without interruption. (A slight pause can be taken at the caesura to mark the end of one phrase and the beginning of another, but even then it is kept to a minimum so that the energy of the line continues to the end.)
The related principle is, “Build to the end of the line.” In contemporary conversation it is common to start an (often half-formed) sentence with great energy, and then trail off while thinking about how to complete it. Verse is exactly the opposite. It builds to the end of the line.
A slightly more complicated rule is, “When in doubt, tip the rhythm in favor of the meter.” While it is true that the iambic rhythm is written into the lines, it is also true that a surprising number of words in English are neutral enough that they can be either stressed or unstressed depending on the inclinations of the speaker. The internet-famous phrase “I never said she stole my money,” for example, can imply seven different meanings contingent upon which word receives the primary emphasis. That is because all of these words can be stressed, and none of them must be.
Of course, that is an extraordinary case, but most blank verse lines have at least some degree of variability in them. This rule suggests that, where some options exists, a good verse speaker makes choices in favor of the meter. In particular, except in clear-cut cases of “heads,” it is very helpful to avoid placing stress on a word in the off-beat position. The most tempting words are pronouns, which rarely carry the stress in Shakespeare’s verse compared with modern speech.
Great verse speaking, on the level of a Judi Dench or Ian McKellen, takes a lifetime to master, but simple rules can help anyone get started correctly and carry them a surprisingly long way.