Why Shakespeare loved iambic pentameter - David T. Freeman and Gregory Taylor
View full lesson: http://ed.ted.com/lessons/why-shakespeare-loved-iambic-pentameter-david-t-freeman-and-gregory-taylor Shakespeare sometimes gets a bad rap in high schools for his complex...
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To someone first encountering the works of William Shakespeare, the language may seem strange. But there is a secret to appreciating it. Although he was famous for his plays, Shakespeare was first and foremost a poet. One of the most important things in Shakespeare's language is his use of stress. Not that kind of stress, but the way we emphasize certain syllables in words more than others. We're so used to doing this that we may not notice it at first. But if you say the word slowly, you can easily identify them. Playwright, computer, telephone. Poets are very aware of these stresses, having long experimented with the number and order of stressed and unstressed syllables, and combined them in different ways to create rhythm in their poems. Li...
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To someone first encountering the works of William Shakespeare, the language may seem strange. But there is a secret to appreciating it. Although he was famous for his plays, Shakespeare was first and foremost a poet. One of the most important things in Shakespeare's language is his use of stress. Not that kind of stress, but the way we emphasize certain syllables in words more than others. We're so used to doing this that we may not notice it at first. But if you say the word slowly, you can easily identify them. Playwright, computer, telephone. Poets are very aware of these stresses, having long experimented with the number and order of stressed and unstressed syllables, and combined them in different ways to create rhythm in their poems. Li...
