HAMLET TO HAMILTON
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  • Episode Guide
    • Seasons >
      • Season One >
        • S1 E1: Defining Verse Drama
        • S1 E2: Content Dictates Form
        • S1 E3: Schwumpf, There It Is
        • S1 E4: Heresy!
        • S1 E5: So You Think You Know Scansion?
        • S1 E6: Whose Line (Ending) Is It Anyway?
        • S1 E7: What's My Line (Ending)?
        • S1 E8: First Folio and Emotive Formatting
        • S1 E9: The Rules of Emotive Formatting
        • S1 E10: Silences, Spacing, Stage Directions & Shared Lines
      • Season Two >
        • S2 E1: The Earliest Arthur: Thomas Hughes
        • S2 E2: Verse Drama Meets Opera: John Dryden
        • S2 E3: Burlesque and Verse Drama: Henry Fielding's "Tom Thumb"
        • S2 E4: Defenestrating Lancelot!
        • S2 E5: Empowering Guinevere
        • S2 E6: More Hovey, More Honey
        • S2 E7: Melodrama!
        • S2 E8: Gilbert and Sullivan Do King Arthur...Kinda
        • S2 E9: King Arthur and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Play
        • S2 E10: New Arthur, New Millennia
        • S2 E11: A Philosophical "King Arthur" by Lucy Nordberg
        • S2 E12: The First Folio in the 21st Century: Daniel James Roth's "The Tragedy of King Arthur"
        • S2 E13: Stage Violence and Verse: "The Table Round" & "The Siege Perilous" by Emily C. A. Snyder (2019)
      • Season Three >
        • S3 E1: What IS A Soliloquy?
        • S3 E2: Redefining Verse Drama
        • S3 E3: Deep Dive: Exploring Hamlet's Seven Soliloquies
        • S3 E4: Is This A Soliloquy I See Before Me? Exploring Macbeth
        • S3 E5: The Villain Soliloquies: Richard III, Iago, Edmund Don John...and Petruchio?
        • S3 E6: Out, Out! Damn Soliloquy: Exploring Madness
    • Bonus Episodes >
      • Interviews >
        • Interview: Peter Oswald
        • Interview: Glyn Maxwell
        • Interview: Kasia Lech
        • Interview: Caeden Musser
        • Interview: Deb Victoroff
      • Round Tables >
        • Round Table of the Round Table: Lucy Nordberg, Daniel James Roth, Emily C. A. Snyder
        • Round Table: Daniel James Roth, Grace Bardsley, Benedetto Robinson
      • BAR(D) TALKS
      • Unhinged Rants
  • Additional Resources
    • Types of Verse >
      • What is Verse?
      • Prose vs. Poetry
    • Meter and Scansion >
      • What is Meter?
      • Rhythm and Prosody
      • Stressed and Unstressed Syllables
      • Prosody (Wikipedia)
    • Timeline of Arthurian Verse Drama
  • Patreon
    • Fractured Atlas

Rhythm and Prosody

Introduction

Prosody is the study of the rhythm of speech.  Different languages have different ways of creating rhythm.  In these articles, we will be looking at Anglophone (English) examples, but you may find that rhythm works differently in your language. 

  • It's important to consider how your language works, since much of the vocabulary we still use in prosody was developed millennia ago, and is applicable primarily to the Greek language.  For an overview of classical Greek ideas of prosody, click here.
 
  • In these articles, please note that much of the vocabulary (such as "flex syllables," "syllabic families," "syllabic vs. accentual rhythms," etc.) has been developed by Emily C. A. Snyder to help define how Anglophone Prosody functions.  Anything that has been developed by Emily C. A. Snyder will be marked with an asterisk *

Peculiarities of English

English is an accentual-syllabic language.  What this means is that our rhythm is created in two ways: through syllables (the different units of a word) and accent (whether those units are stressed or unstressed). 

However, English also has flex syllables* which are typically monosyllabic words that may or may not be emphasized, depending on the speaker's intonation, and the rhythm of the words surrounding it.  Flex syllables will be covered in separate articles.

Vocabulary

  • Prosody: The study of the rhythm of speech.  We break down prosody by metric feet.
  • Metric Foot: A single unit of one (1) beat and the rhythms over it.
  • Rhythm: Is the interplay of syllables and accents over a beat.
  • Syllabic Rhythm*: The number of syllables on a foot. 
  • Accentual Rhythm*: The accents attributed to each syllable in a foot. Accentual rhythm will be covered in the next article.

Syllabic Rhythm*

In this article, we're going to look at syllabic rhythm.  A syllable is a single unit of a word.  So the word "music" has two syllables: "mu - sic."  Some helpful terminology:
  • Monosyllable: A word with only one (1) syllable.  Example: "Yes."
  • Disyllable: A word with two (2) syllables.  Example: "Mu-sic."
  • Trisyllable: A word with three (3) syllables.  Example: "Wan-der-ing."
  • Tetrasyllable: A word with four (4) syllables.  Example: "In-for-ma-tion."
  • Pentasyllable: A word with five (5) syllables. Example: "Pen-ta-syl-la-ble"...and so on

A monosyllabic word contains only one (1) syllable.

A multisyllabic word contains more than one syllable.

How many syllables can be on a foot?

A metric foot can have any number of syllables over it.  It's like music: so long as you go really fast (or hit beats really slow) you can cram a lot of syllables per beat.

For example, at the 3:10 marker of Eminem's song, "Godzilla" off his 2020 album, Music to be Murdered By, Eminem was able to load 224 words (300 syllables) into a mere 31 seconds. This section averages out to about 10.65 syllables (or 7.23 words) per second.   (Source: Men's Health)

The first line of that third verse begins with: "Fill 'em with the venom, and eliminate 'em."  The first beat can be felt on "fill."  The next beat isn't felt until "lim" of "e-lim-in-ate." 

That means that in the first foot of Eminem's verse, there are eight syllables: "Fill 'em with the ven-om and e-"

Picture

Putting it together

When scanning (studying) a piece of meter*, we always begin with the metric feet.  In "Godzilla," Eminem uses four (4) strong beats per measure.  For our purposes we would then say:
  • Because there are four (4) strong beats
  • That means that the line has four (4) feet
  • So we would call it tetrameter
Then we look at the syllabic rhythm.*
  • Just looking at prosody of the first metric foot, we see eight (VIII) syllables
  • That means that we can say the first foot, and possibly the whole verse, uses octosyllabic rhythm

Annotating Meter*

To annotate metric feet/beat and syllabic rhythm:
  • Metric feet will be listed with Arabic numbers (1, 2, 3, etc.)
  • Syllabic rhythm will be listed with Roman numerals (I, II, III, etc.).  We can also call this "single, double, triple, quadruple" syllabic rhythm.
So what would we call the meter of Slim Shady's insanely fast verse on "Godzilla?"  Well, presuming that most of that verse uses about eight syllables per beat, it would be:

VIII / 4
Octosyllabic Tetrameter

That is: Eminem averages about eight syllables per beat, with each line having four metric feet/beats.  Phew.  That is damn fast.
Picture

Next up!

Syllabic rhythm is only one way that English uses rhythm.  Let's take a look next at Accentual Rhythm.
Next

Related Episode: So You Think You Know Scansion?

Intellectual property of Emily C. A. Snyder
© 2022

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  • Home
    • Team
    • Turn to Flesh Productions
    • DM Me Podcast
  • Episode Guide
    • Seasons >
      • Season One >
        • S1 E1: Defining Verse Drama
        • S1 E2: Content Dictates Form
        • S1 E3: Schwumpf, There It Is
        • S1 E4: Heresy!
        • S1 E5: So You Think You Know Scansion?
        • S1 E6: Whose Line (Ending) Is It Anyway?
        • S1 E7: What's My Line (Ending)?
        • S1 E8: First Folio and Emotive Formatting
        • S1 E9: The Rules of Emotive Formatting
        • S1 E10: Silences, Spacing, Stage Directions & Shared Lines
      • Season Two >
        • S2 E1: The Earliest Arthur: Thomas Hughes
        • S2 E2: Verse Drama Meets Opera: John Dryden
        • S2 E3: Burlesque and Verse Drama: Henry Fielding's "Tom Thumb"
        • S2 E4: Defenestrating Lancelot!
        • S2 E5: Empowering Guinevere
        • S2 E6: More Hovey, More Honey
        • S2 E7: Melodrama!
        • S2 E8: Gilbert and Sullivan Do King Arthur...Kinda
        • S2 E9: King Arthur and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Play
        • S2 E10: New Arthur, New Millennia
        • S2 E11: A Philosophical "King Arthur" by Lucy Nordberg
        • S2 E12: The First Folio in the 21st Century: Daniel James Roth's "The Tragedy of King Arthur"
        • S2 E13: Stage Violence and Verse: "The Table Round" & "The Siege Perilous" by Emily C. A. Snyder (2019)
      • Season Three >
        • S3 E1: What IS A Soliloquy?
        • S3 E2: Redefining Verse Drama
        • S3 E3: Deep Dive: Exploring Hamlet's Seven Soliloquies
        • S3 E4: Is This A Soliloquy I See Before Me? Exploring Macbeth
        • S3 E5: The Villain Soliloquies: Richard III, Iago, Edmund Don John...and Petruchio?
        • S3 E6: Out, Out! Damn Soliloquy: Exploring Madness
    • Bonus Episodes >
      • Interviews >
        • Interview: Peter Oswald
        • Interview: Glyn Maxwell
        • Interview: Kasia Lech
        • Interview: Caeden Musser
        • Interview: Deb Victoroff
      • Round Tables >
        • Round Table of the Round Table: Lucy Nordberg, Daniel James Roth, Emily C. A. Snyder
        • Round Table: Daniel James Roth, Grace Bardsley, Benedetto Robinson
      • BAR(D) TALKS
      • Unhinged Rants
  • Additional Resources
    • Types of Verse >
      • What is Verse?
      • Prose vs. Poetry
    • Meter and Scansion >
      • What is Meter?
      • Rhythm and Prosody
      • Stressed and Unstressed Syllables
      • Prosody (Wikipedia)
    • Timeline of Arthurian Verse Drama
  • Patreon
    • Fractured Atlas