The rhyme scheme is: a-b-a-b, c-d-c-d, e-f-e-f, g-g. All in iambic pentameter … Five iambs, two syllables each. MICHAEL WITMORE: OK, here’s the assignment. Previous: Shakespeare in India | Next: Shakespeare and World Cinema The actors who you hear reading the sonnets are Elyse Mirto and Bo Foxworth of The Antaeus Theater Company in Los Angeles. We had help from Bob Auld and Deb Stathopulos at the Radio Foundation in New York and Phil Richards and Matt Holzman at KCRW public radio in Santa Monica, California. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster and Esther Ferington. This episode, called “Press Among the Popular Throngs,” was produced by Richard Paul.

Originally broadcast February 10, 2016, and rebroadcast with an updated introduction on August 21, 2018. Read an interview with Erik Didriksen on our Shakespeare & Beyond blog.įrom the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast series. Listen on iTunes, Google Play, SoundCloud, or NPR One.

The Tumblr where Didriksen has posted these sonnets has become so popular that he’s published a book, Pop Sonnets: Shakespearean Spins on Your Favorite Songs. Our guest on this podcast episode is Erik Didriksen, who takes hit songs from artists like Taylor Swift and Coldplay and rewrites them as Elizabethan-style sonnets. Each line of a sonnet has 10 syllables, so it includes 2 iambic pentameters.There’s something that never ceases to astound when it comes to Shakespeare – the way this 400-year-old playwright continues to pop up in popular culture. To mark for iambic pentameter, start by counting the syllables in each line as they are read aloud. It goes like this:Īdditionally, the lines of a sonnet include iambic pentameter (refer to definition above). To mark the rhyme scheme, you give the same letter of the alphabet to each matching rhyme or similar sound.

So, Shakespearean sonnets ALWAYS have the same rhyme scheme, with the rhyming sound being at the end of each line. Shakespearean sonnets always consist of 3 quatrains and 1 couplet.Ĭouplet- 2 consecutive lines of verse with end rhyme It has a specific rhyme scheme and a “ volta” or a specific turn. Shakespearean sonnet- In poetry, a sonnet has 14 fourteen lines and is written in iambic pentameter. Iambic pentameter- It can be described as a line consists of ten syllables, where the first syllable is stressed, the second is unstressed, the third is stressed and so on until it reaches the 10th line syllable. Rhyme Scheme- a consistent pattern of rhyme throughout a poem

Shakespeare sonnets iambic pentameter