Scansion for actors: where the verse tells you to breathe

Scansion has a bad reputation with actors, and it earned it. It is usually taught as a thing you label: five feet, unstressed then stressed, here is a trochee, well done. Labelled and put down.

That is not what it is for. The verse is a set of instructions from the only rehearsal room that mattered, written by somebody who knew the actors would get one reading and then perform it. Where the line is regular, it is carrying you. Where it breaks, something is happening to the person speaking, and you are being told what.

Everything below uses one scene, Macbeth Act I, Scene VII, because it contains almost every case you will meet and because you can go and rehearse it at the bottom of this page. The line breaks in the quotations come from a standard lineated text of the play; the scene page here serves speeches as continuous text, so where a line ends is something you have to bring with you.

The line is the unit, not the sentence

The single most useful thing in this article: the verse line, not the sentence, is what Shakespeare wrote in. Ten syllables, five stresses, and then a decision about whether to keep going.

That matters because your instinct, trained on prose, is to breathe at commas. Verse asks you to think in lines and let the sentence run across them. When you take a breath in the middle of a line because there is a comma there, you break a unit that was built whole. When you refuse to pause at the end of a line because the sentence is not finished, you throw away the small lift that the line ending gives the next word for free.

One regular line, so you know what regular sounds like

I ´dare do ´all that ´may be´come a ´man

Ten syllables, five stresses, alternating exactly. The marks sit over the beats. Say it out loud with those five pushed slightly and you will hear that the meaning and the metre want the same thing: the words that carry the argument are the words the metre already lifts.

That is what a regular line feels like, and you need it in your ear, because the useful lines are the ones that are not.

Ten syllables that fight the pattern

The scene opens with this:

If ´it were ´done when ´'tis done, ´then 'twere ´well

Ten syllables, every one of them a single-syllable word, and the pattern falls on “it”, “done”, “‘tis”, “then” and “well”. Say it that way and it is nonsense: nobody stresses “it” and “then” in a sentence about murdering a king.

Now say what the sense wants:

If it were ´done when 'tis ´done, then 'twere ´well

Three stresses, not five, and two of them on the same word. The line is a bed of ten monosyllables with nothing in it to tell you where to put the weight, which is exactly what a man circling the same thought sounds like. He is not building an argument. He is turning one word over: done, done, done.

That collision is the point of scanning. You are not looking for the right answer. You are looking for the places where the pattern and the sense pull in different directions, because that gap is where the character is.

When the first foot turns over

The commonest irregularity in Shakespeare is the first foot flipped: a stressed syllable where an unstressed one belongs. It is a shove at the start of the line.

´Vaulting am´bition, which o'er´leaps it´self

“Vaulting” cannot be said any other way, and Shakespeare knew it when he put it there. The line starts on the stress and then settles back into the pattern for the rest of its length.

Practically: when a line opens on a stressed syllable, the character has arrived at something, not eased into it. Do not smooth it out to make it scan. The bump is the direction.

Short lines are stage directions

A line with fewer than ten syllables is not a mistake, and it is not the poet running out. It is almost always one of two things: a pause you are being asked to take, or a line that somebody else is going to finish.

Macbeth ends a speech in this scene on four words:

Not cast aside so soon. Was the hope drunk

Six syllables and four. Together, ten. Macbeth’s last half-line and Lady Macbeth’s first are one verse line, split between two people, and the metre is telling her not to leave a gap. She comes in on top of him. If you play that exchange with a considered pause in the middle, you have taken a line apart that was written as one breath, and you have made her patient, which she is not.

Lines split three ways

The same scene does it again, harder, at the hinge of the whole argument. Lady Macbeth finishes on “Have done to this.” Macbeth answers “If we should fail?” She answers “We fail?”

Four, four and two. One pentameter, three pieces, two people. There is no room in it for anybody to think. The moment the play turns on is written as the fastest line in the scene.

This is the single most valuable thing scansion gives an audition speech: it tells you which silences are real and which ones you invented. A short line at the end of a speech means take the pause. A short line answered by another short line means do not.

The line that never finishes

Just before Lady Macbeth enters, Macbeth is mid-image, and the verse stops after five syllables on “And falls on th’ other”. The sentence has no object and the line has no second half. The next thing that happens is her entrance.

You will find this printed with a dash. It is not punctuation for its own sake: half a line followed by an entrance means the entrance is what stopped him, and the half you are not given is the half he never got to say. Play the interruption, not a trailing-off.

The eleventh syllable

The line after the opening runs long:

“It were done quickly. If th’ assassination”

Eleven syllables, and the last one is unstressed. That extra weak beat at the end is standard and usually means nothing on its own. What it does mean is that you should not lean on the last word to make it land like a drumbeat. The line falls away instead of closing, and the thought runs on into the next line, which is exactly what his thinking is doing.

Count before you decide a line is irregular. Eleven syllables ending soft is normal. Nine is not, and nine is worth investigating.

When the editor tells you to sound the -ed

Look at how “-ed” endings are printed. A modern edition of Macbeth will give you both of these:

• “pluck’d”, “dash’d”, “wish’d” - one syllable, the vowel dropped
• “drenchèd”, “cursèd” - two syllables, the accent telling you to sound it

That accent is not decoration. It is an instruction, put there by an editor who counted the line and found it a syllable short without it. The Macbeth text on this site prints “their drenchèd natures” with exactly that mark. When you see the accent, sound the ending; when you see an apostrophe, do not. It is the cheapest syllable you will ever get right.

Twenty minutes with a pencil

You do not need to scan a whole speech. You need to find the four or five places where the verse is doing something.

• Count the syllables in every line. Mark the ones that are not ten. That takes five minutes and finds most of what matters.
• On the short lines, decide: pause, or shared line? If the next speaker’s first words complete ten, it is shared, and you do not stop.
• Read the whole speech once landing only on the line endings, ignoring every comma. It will sound strange and it will show you the shape.
• Then mark the lines where the pattern and the sense disagree, and choose. That is the acting decision, and it is a decision, not a rule.

Do it with a pencil on paper. Ten minutes of counting will change more about how a speech sounds than an hour of running it will.

The scene below opens with Macbeth already selected, so you can hear where the lines break against another voice rather than in your own head. It asks for the microphone when you press Rehearse and not before.