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Comment by SilasX | Hacker News Reader

Rant: I missed lot of Shakespeare appreciation when they somehow failed to teach that (other) people actually like how iambic pentameter sounds, and this is critical to enjoying it. Nothing about how Shakespeare is voiced has ever registered as sounding particularly pleasant to me. The word choice, sure, but not the meter or stressing.

They taught that Shakespeare used iambic pentameter, and how you're "supposed" to stress it, but it came off to me as "technical curiosity you're supposed to memorize" not "universal experience of enjoyment" that I apparently don't share.

My lighting talk about this: https://www.instagram.com/p/DZUcvP8CWhB/

Non-social media link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1G58CMUDf-M4loe3MeEus-9gNA5T...

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Yeah, Shakespeare is not going to land if iambic pentameter doesn't sound like anything special to you. It's a big part of why many Shakespearean quotes stick so hard in people's brains, like 'To be or not to be', 'But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?' and 'If music be the food of love, play on'. If all of these have to carry their weight with only their literal words on the page, and not how they're actually said and stressed, they're going to be a lot less memorable.

Thank you for recognizing the situation I was in! (Nit: "to be or not to be" is probably a bad example of something that depends on iambic for memorability.)

Also, when I tried rewriting that soliloquy for modern ears, it didn't even occur to me to keep the meter; that never registered as a noteworthy aspect of it.

One other thing: keep in mind what it's like to be in high school. For the vast majority of your life, you're told to do things "because I said so". So the idea that there might be an actual good reason for stressing Shakespeare the right way ... didn't stand out as an obvious hypothesis.

I'm curious: does any poetic metre stick out to you as 'nice' or making texts easier to remember? Or is this just some part of the human condition that's completely alien to you? I've heard similar things from some people about music in general ('it's just noise; I don't see why you think it sounds nice'), so it wouldn't really surprise me if that were the case.

Meter does matter to me, and I do enjoy music. Just the every-other-syllable stress with natural stresses in iambic pentameter doesn't resonate.

In the lightning talk, I contrast IP with ska music, which I like, and which is characterized by stressed off-beats (which resonate with me) and mis-stressing the syllables to fit the meter (which also resonates with me).

Edit: Another thing about the high school experience: Shakepeare kind of fit a pattern of "stuff everyone professes to like but whose enjoyment seems to be fake/performative" (along with pop music, sports, and the taste of alcoholic drinks). I joke that if I were gay, I'd include everyone else's apparent heterosexuality in that pattern.

Oh wow I remember having read/heard that it was helpful for memorization, never occurred to me to think that there was an impact for some listeners too.

Meter is a very basic part of English poetry that is usually taught. Almost all popular music and poetry has meter.

Again, it was taught[1]. The fact that (speaking it with) one meter sounds particularly pleasant (to some people), and that this is a big part of its appeal (to those who like it) was not taught.

IOW, it's the difference between "these words in this poem rhyme" vs "this poem sounds nice because these words rhyme". Which, incidentally, is an analogy I make in the lightning talk to explain why this part would be glossed over: people assume that appreciation of rhyming/iambic pentameter is universal.

[1] "They taught that Shakespeare used iambic pentameter..." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49378069

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