So, does this become a pause-fest, stilted, to the point of becoming a Mamet parody? It can’t. Is this great Agamemnon’s tent, I pray you?Īgain, very short verse lines (and again a difference between texts: the Folger text has Agamemnon’s two speeches as short prose lines, but as all the other speeches by this supreme leader of the Greeks are in verse, and he IS the supreme leader of the Greeks, I’m going to stick with my edition’s verse lines). For example, when Aeneas arrives in the Greek camp, this exchange takes place: In dialogues, the short lines become even more pronounced. In all these cases, the short lines end with punctuation, and in three out of the four, it’s sentence-ending punctuation. Nestor uses one in the middle of his response to Agamemnon (“With those of nobler bulk!” ) and Ulysses uses three in his first three speeches in this scene (“But for these instances.”, “Follows the choking.”, and “Breaks scurril jests,” ). This isn’t last of the short-liners in the play. So while I wouldn’t mind going with the concept of the Homeric shout-out, neither this clue to quicken the pace nor the lack of another Alexandrine line in this speech makes me want to make it all one line. Iambic hexameter in English is sometimes called “Alexandrine.” In this case, there certainly wouldn’t be the clue to pause in fact, the non-iambic opening feet would tend to give the actor a “jump-start” to the line, bringing a quickness to the question. If it’s all one line, it could be a kind of homage to Homer, as The Iliad was written in hexameter, though not iambic rather it was dactylic hexameter, six feet of three-syllable chunks (each with a stressed syllable, followed by two unstressed feet). Roughly iambic hexameter (six feet long), though in this case, with that opening trochee, followed by what looks to me to be a spondee (with both “what” and “grief” stressed). Princes, what grief hath set the jaundice o’er your cheeks?
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