Whoa, put down that club! I know Shakespeare doesn't ramble. Every word he puts on the page is to the point, and actors and directors ignore that at their peril. I do think that in The Two Noble Kinsmen, which the world agrees he wrote in collaboration with John Fletcher, you can occasionally feel Shakespeare marking time. In Act 1, Scene 1, it takes Theseus 225 lines to make up his mind; in almost identical circumstances in A Midsummer Night's Dream, it takes Theseus only 126 lines. But Shakespeare has to move at Fletcher's pace. This is one of the reasons why The Two Noble Kinsmen isn't as popular as, say, A Midsummer Night's Dream.

But I ramble. The topic is lines that have too many syllables in them to be iambic pentameter. Regular iambic pentameter has 10 syllables: an unstressed followed by a stressed, repeated five times. A good example is Orsino's first line in Twelfth Night: "If MU-sic BE the FOOD of LOVE, play ON."

So, if that's the model, how is an actor to deal with these sprawling freaks from Act 3, Scene 1, Lines 120-127 of Romeo and Juliet, with the second, fifth, and eighth lines containing 11 syllables each:

Alive in triumph, and Mercutio slain?
Away to heaven respective lenity, And fire-eyed fury be my conduct now!
Now, Tybalt, take the 'villain' back again
That late thou gavest me; for Mercutio's soul
Is but a little way above our heads,
Staying for thine to keep him company.
Either thou or I, or both, must go with him.

The first thing, please, is to take what you find on the page seriously. Yes, it could be a printer's error, but 400 years of editors have come up with moderately accurate guesses as to what Shakespeare wrote, and most reliable editions put the best guesses on the page. Don't try to make a line that is clearly too long fit into regular iambic pentameter, like Cinderella's ugly stepsister with the glass slipper. Start by figuring out why the line is too long. If you get to play Romeo, you will discover in what mood he greets Tybalt. Romeo tells us: "fire-eyed fury." If the character is in a "fire-eyed fury," why would he produce even, dreamy poetry like Orsino? No, Romeo's words spill out of him faster than regular iambic pentameter can confine, just as if he were a human being in a murderous rage. Here's a case from Act 3, Scene 3, Line 457 of Othello:

Even so my bloody thoughts with violent pace...

That's 12 syllables. Othello says his thoughts are moving with violent pace, so his speech is too, what with too many syllables crammed into one line.

And here's the Duke of York — in Richard II, Act 2, Scene 3, Lines 86-88 — greeting his banished nephew, Bolingbroke, who has defied the king's orders and returned to England. York, governor in King Richard's absence, is full of righteous anger:

Tut, tut, grace me no grace, nor uncle me no uncle! I am no traitor's uncle, and that word "grace" In an ungracious mouth is but profane.

Notice how the first line has 13 syllables and the second has 11? And is it just that long lines happen in Shakespeare when a character gets angry? Well, no. While I do think there's a relationship between these characters' anger and the syllabic excess, characters don't always have to be angry to get garrulous. Here's Emilia talking to Cassio in Othello, Act 3, Scene 1, Lines 44-47:

The Moor replies
That he you hurt is of great fame in Cyprus
And great affinity, and that in wholesome wisdom
He might not but refuse you; but he protests he loves you...

Gentle Emilia is not in a rage — she's trying to reassure Cassio about his suit to be reinstated as Othello's lieutenant — but she's definitely in a hurry: Her second line here is 11 syllables, her third is 13, and her fourth is 14. She's supposed to be attending on Desdemona, not standing in the front yard gossiping. She wants to give Cassio all the comfort she can, but she doesn't have leisure to be discursive, so she pours the information into him as quickly as possible.

"I get it," you're saying. "Too many syllables in a line always means to say it quickly." Well, no, I don't mean that either. How the lines come out of your mouth will be the result of the usual pitched battle between you and the play's director — the process we jocularly call collaboration. Probably in these cases the character is speaking quickly, but no one formula is going to apply to all of Shakespeare. Here's a contrary example from Act 1, Scene 1, Lines 54-55 of Richard II, in which Mowbray defends himself against Bolingbroke's accusations in the presence of the king:

First, the fair reverence of your Highness curbs me
From giving reins and spurs to my free speech...

Despite a 12-syllable first line, Mowbray is clearly not speaking quickly. He'd like to give Bolingbroke a tongue-lashing as well as broken bones and contusions, but he's trying to stay civil in the king's presence. His line is too long, but it comes out of him slowly. He tells us exactly that: He'd like to drop the reins and dig in with the spurs, but respect for the king causes him to pull back on the words he's longing to spit at Bolingbroke.

In King Lear, faced with mistakes they've made, the characters, sooner than admit to those mistakes, will blank out, go crazy, or even drop dead. Here's Gloucester in Act 4, Scene 1, Lines 32-37, after he's been blinded, getting sidetracked and increasing his syllabication to 11 in the fourth line:

I'th'last night's storm I such a fellow saw,
Which made me think a man a worm.
My son Came then into my mind, and yet my mind
Was then scarce friends with him.
I have heard more since.
As flies to wanton boys are we to th' gods:
They kill us for their sport.

Gloucester is on the edge of realizing that he made a mistake in driving his son Edgar away and then trying to have him caught and hanged. He can't think the thought. Line 4 is not only too long; it ceases to be verse and degenerates into prose. Gloucester speaks slowly because he's grappling ineffectually with a very unpleasant idea. We all like the poetry of the "flies/gods" lines, but their source is Gloucester's attempt to avoid any responsibility for his actions by blaming everything on the gods.

Also, that bushel of apostrophes in Gloucester's first line ("I'th'last") indicates the contractions you'd have to use to make the line scan, and it's printed that way in the Folio. I'm against those contractions. I'd prefer you say, "In the last night's storm," doing minor damage to the scansion, because if you say the nonexistent word "ithlast," you'll turn the audience to stone. And similarly, please don't say "tooth gods" at line 5. Achilles, in Troilus and Cressida, Act 4, Scene 5, Lines 241-245, is up next:

Tell me, you heavens, in which part of his body
Shall I destroy him — whether there, or there, or there —
That I may give the local wound a name,
And make distinct the very breach whereout Hector's great spirit flew?
Answer me, heavens!

These lines — especially the first two, at 12 syllables each — are definitely not spoken hastily. Achilles is slowly circling Hector, eyeing him as a meat cutter would eye a live steer he's preparing to butcher and calculating: How many roasts, how many steaks? Achilles' deliberate pace and his lip-smacking anticipation add to the horror of what he's talking about.

"Well, this is no help," you're saying. "Your examples contradict each other!" They are from different characters and different plays — why would they all have the same purpose? But it's like dealing with anything else in Shakespeare: First you have to pay attention to the verse. If it's haywire, don't assume poor, bumbling Shakespeare has screwed up again. Most likely he's making a point, and to discover his point you'll have to examine the scene, your character's motives, and ultimately the whole play. And you must always use your own good brains.


Deloss Brown taught Shakespearean acting for 11 years at the Juilliard School and has taught Shakespeare for Writers at New York University for 19 years and counting. He has directed eight of Shakespeare's plays, but fortunately Shakespeare is bulletproof. He teaches privately. He coaches privately and can be reached at delossbrown@prodigy.net.