If you found this video on the variations of iambic pentameter useful, check out some of my other videos linked in the description! Let me know what content you would like to see in the future!
Your videos are great and I love them, but I do not understand why, at minute 5.40, in the first sentence the first TOMORROW has two syllables, while the second and third ones have three.
Hi Federica, thanks for the question! It seems like this video has a little glitch in it, which corrects at 5:46 to show three syllables instead of two. Apologies for the confusion, sometimes when I render the videos these glitches happen but I must not have caught this one!
Hi, nice work! love this, I have a question, In "to be or not to be that is the question" why "that" is stressed? How do you know it should be stressed? if you follow what comes before, to "be" (be) is stressed so the next word (that) should be unstressed. Why "that" is stressed then? thanks
Hi, that's a great question! In this particular line, 'that' is a trochaic inversion, meaning that the stressed pattern comes first rather than the unstressed. Shakespeare uses trochaic inversions to emphasise certain words or phrases so that the audience will pay more attention to them. In this example, Hamlet is asking a very important question, 'to be or not to be', so by putting the stress on 'that' and breaking the iambic pattern, he is conveying the gravity of this decision to the audience. It isn't always easy to tell when a certain syllable should be stressed or unstressed, so a good trick is to speak the lines out loud. Most of the time you will be able to hear where the emphasis should go, as Shakespeare mimics our everyday speech. However, keep in mind that part of the beauty of Shakespeare, and of literature in general, is that it is open to interpretation, and different people may read the lines in different ways. I hope that answers your questions!
