Back to Aristotle…

…his writings on Poetics to be exact. It describes the move from the use of masks and chanted choric tragedy i.e. highly stylised; the movement is towards a spoken theatre and development of character, which needed a popular rhythm.

That rhythm is a breath containing 10 syllables. It is known as iambic pentameter and i.p. as its known amongst thesps is spoken as if slapping a conspiracy theorist:

‘like that, like that, like that, like that, like that.’

It is built into every human, in the rhythm of heart and mind in synch, each informing the other. Passions and reason fighting one another in words meant to be spilt from actors lips, like a will o the wisp, it appears and disappears.

The trick he has of using the same letters in different combinations to almost hide the word he just used. His concepts arise and melt and reappear in a different apparel. He clothes his words and undresses them to expose what they can and cannot contain. Then he elaborates on it or drops it and jumps to another aspect.

My friend Ben said recently in respect to speaking verse, and i paraphrase:

‘the heart lights the fire,
that cooks the brain,
that makes you speak.’

So after quoting my contemporary, we remove as swift as thought, to the old Greek, Aristotle. That student of Plato, who was in turn, student to Socrates. Aristotle, the daddy of Aristotelian logic, which is the basis of Western reason and patterns of thinking, first had this to say about the proper metre for the stage:

‘Once dialogue had come in, Nature herself had discovered the appropriate measure. For the iambic is, of all measures, the most colloquial: we see it in the fact that conversational speech runs into iambic lines more frequently than into any other kind of verse;’

p.57, Aristotle’s Poetics with an introductory essay by Francis Fergusson.

Is it any wonder that Iambic Pentameter became so popular in the theatre of the 1580’s and 90’s?