Actors new to speaking the verse in the plays of William Shakespeare are often intimidated by technical terminology and what they perceive to be an abundance of rules that should be followed. This ...article describes a Practice as Research study conducted over a seven-year period with student actors in drama schools and working professionals in Canada and the UK. The goal of the study was to develop a training methodology that overcomes the initial anxieties actors may experience and facilitate discoveries about how the verse structure can support actors in performance. The second goal of the research was to help actors to a state of deep embodiment of rhythm and meter which, once achieved, can empower actors to play organically and instinctively rather than analyzing intellectually.
The article deals with versified works of Viktor Dyk from the pre-war period (1897–1914) written in iambic pentameter. It analyses the relationship between the texts’ genre (lyric, satire, drama) and ...their rhythmic features (frequencies of stressing the line-initial and line-final syllables, frequencies of enjambment). The article concludes that Dyk’s lyric poems as well as his drama tend to employ features generally perceived as more literary compared to his satire.
"Schiller’s Don Carlos, written ten years before his great Wallenstein trilogy, testifies to the young playwright’s growing power. First performed in 1787, it stands at the culmination of Schiller’s ...formative development as a dramatist and is the first play written in his characteristic iambic pentameter. Don Carlos plunges the audience into the dangerous political and personal struggles that rupture the court of the Spanish King Philip II in 1658. The autocratic king’s son Don Carlos is caught between his political ideals, fostered by his friendship with the charismatic Marquis Posa, and his doomed love for his stepmother Elisabeth of Valois. These twin passions set him against his father, the brooding and tormented Philip, and the terrible power of the Catholic Church, represented in the play by the indelible figure of the Grand Inquisitor. Schiller described Don Carlos as ""a family portrait in a princely house.” It interweaves political machinations with powerful personal relationships to create a complex and resonant tragedy. The conflict between absolutism and liberty appealed not only to audiences but also to other artists and gave rise to several operas, not least to Verdi’s great Don Carlos of 1867. The play, which the playwright never finished to his satisfaction, lives on nonetheless among his best-loved works and is translated here with flair and skill by Flora Kimmich. Like her translations of Schiller’s Wallenstein and his Fiesco’s Conspiracy at Genoa, this is a lively and accessible rendering of a classic text. As with all books in the Open Book Classics series, it is supported by an introduction and notes that will inform and enlighten both the student and the general reader."
There is a reasonable scholarly consensus that the long (“heroic”) line of Sir Thomas Wyatt is an iambic pentameter. However, a significant number of his long lines are apparently syllabically ...hypometrical, calling into question this interpretation. The doubt is further compounded by Wyatt’s nontrivial use of phrase-medial inversions. I argue that it is nonetheless possible to infer an iambic pentameter intention behind Wyatt’s syllabically hypometrical lines, which can be ‘repaired’ by medial catalexis. Syllabically canonical lines are known to favour major prosodic breaks (Intonational Phrase boundaries) between the second and third foot and, to some extent, between the third and fourth. On the assumption that medial catalexis exploits the natural pauses that occur at the boundaries between Intonational Phrases, what emerges is a significant preference for catalexis to target the weak position of the third verse foot (half-line boundary), followed by the fourth (immediately following the verse-foot adjunct of the second half-line). The finding opens up further possibilities for understanding Wyatt’s other licences, and linguistically informed literary criticism of his verse. The final part of the paper offers some speculations as to the nature of medial catalexis and how it can be approached within a linguistically informed framework compatible with generative metrics.
The aim of this essay is to demonstrate how the rhythmical evolution of English dramatic iambic pentameter parallelled the changes of aesthetic tastes and social values of English society from the ...mid-sixteenth to mid-nineteenth century. During 250 years the evolution of such features as the abundance or absence of enjambments, the use of constrained or loose iambs, and some others corresponds to the changes in the architecture of the theaters, the social structure of the audience, the manners of declamation, the complexity of poetic language, and the types of characters and plots the playwrights used.
Verš a žánr Kolár, Robert
Slovo a smysl : časopis pro mezioborová studia = Word & sense,
2021, Letnik:
18, Številka:
37
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
The article deals with versified works of Viktor Dyk from the pre-war period (1897–1914) written in iambic pentameter. It analyses the relationship between the texts’ genre (lyric, satire, drama) and ...their rhythmic features (frequencies of stressing the line-initial and line-final syllables, frequencies of enjambment). The article concludes that Dyk’s lyric poems as well as his drama tend to employ features generally perceived as more literary compared to his satire.
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