RHYTHM: The Pulse of Life in a Play
Research Notes
Context
A drama is a constructed object which exists in a given time span and which can be repeated.
• Its materials are words and physical activities.
• Its form is human action, human change.
• The manner of its presentation requires live performance through acting.
• A play, by itself, is not art but only one ingredient for the creation of drama.
Drama does not come into being except when performed live on stage; in script form, a play is merely a potential drama.
A drama is an art object which, like all other art objects, depends on a form-matter principle. The six qualitative, functional elements of drama are:
Form
 |
Plot
Character
Thought
Diction
• Economy
• Liveliness
• Rhythm
Sounds
• Acoustics
• Phontics
• Rhythm
• Melody
Spectacle
|
Matter |
Reading down the list, Each element is form to those below it, and reading upwards, each element is material to those above. (E.g., thought is everything that goes on inside a character, it’s the form that results from a character’s emotions, qualities, ideas. Likewise, words are the stuff of which a character’s thoughts are composed.)
So in discussing rhythm, we’re discussing a very particular aspect of the craft of playwriting that is affected by and colors other elements of a drama.
Rhythm is not a vague “something” that a writer merely develops a feeling for, but rather is the quality to be consciously brought out in each syntactical unit, and in larger units as well. Rhythm can occur on any of the quantitative levels of the poetic structure – i.e. sounds, syllables, words, phrases, clauses, sentences, beats, segments, scenes, acts, and whole plays.
Definitions
The pulse is the vital rhythm of life; the heartbeat is a human’s rhythmic pattern.
Rhythm in drama means patterned time. Drama is an auditory and visual time art, and rhythm is one of its characteristics, at once structural and expressive.
Rhythm in anything can be defined simply as stress pattern, as organized repetition of emphasis.
Rhythm is the continuous motion that pushes spoken language forward, in more or less regular waves, as the musculature of the speech organs tightens and relaxes, as energy pulsates through the words we speak and hear, as the brain marshals multiple stimuli into ordered patterns.
Rhythm is a patterning of energy simultaneously produced and perceived; a series of alternations of build-up and release, movement and counter-movement, tending toward regularity but complicated by constant variations and local inflections.
Rhythm is what makes a physical medium (the body, the sounds of speech or music) seem to move with deliberateness through time, recalling what happened (by repetition) and projecting itself into the future (by setting up expectations), rather than just letting time pass it by.
Rhythm is felt as much as it is heard or seen.
The rhythm of the English language is fundamentally a matter of syllables and stresses. Operating together, syllables and stresses give spoken English the rhythmic drive it needs to keep it going: like all rhythms, that is, it enables the muscular movements to happen with a certain evenness and predictability. (Imagine trying to saw through a log if the arm and hand muscles, instead of working rhythmically, moved in irregular spasms.)
Any small combination of stressed and unstressed sound creates a metrical unit. Various kinds of such units when arranged regularly make meter, but when arranged irregularly they make cadence. Both are rhythmic.
Meter is an organizing principle which turns the general tendency toward regularity in rhythm into a strictly-patterned regularity, that can be counted and named.
Because drama is materially an organization of words, the best kind of drama—i.e., the most fully organized—is verse drama. And the best kind of prose drama contains strong cadences.
A beat is a burst of energy that is part of a repeating and structured pattern. Beats are not just heard: what makes a particular sound a beat is the way that it engages with the body and not just the ears and brain. We say that a stretch of language has beats when, on hearing it, or reading it aloud, we sense an impulse to move at regularly occurring places.
Whatever the genre, rhythm remains, essentially, beat – whether the 4/4 time of rhapsodies or the urgent tempos of rap. Rhythm is repetition, incantation, timing – perhaps comedic, perhaps dramatic. Rhythm is that deep-down sense of music that is as inborn as a heartbeat.
EMOTION
Verbal rhythm is not so much a technical matter as it is emotional expression. As a person’s feelings grow more intense, his speech tends to become more rhythmic. In daily life, passionate expression has noticeable rhythm. The angry man, the mourning woman, and even the jolly drunk—their speech becomes more regular as their emotion rises to a climax.
Music in Words
Every dramatist, writing for actors’ voices and listeners’ ears, is a composer of a special kind of music, the melody of human speech.
Among the six qualitative parts of drama, melody is the material of diction, and diction stands as form to melody. Individual sounds, thus, are even more basic materials in play construction than are individual words. A word, in this sense, is a formulated group of sounds and groups of words create melodic patterns. Melody, as Aristotle pointed out, is at once the most pleasurable part of drama and the basic material of the literary part of the constructed play.
Drama is a temporal art – it happens through a span of time. A sequence of sounds—one after another, overlapping or simultaneous—is what the dramatist actually writes.
Spoken language moves.
Its movements – which are always movements of meaning and emotion at the same time as movements of sound – achieve a varied onward momentum by setting up expectations that are fulfilled, disappointed, or deferred.
Speech always happens, as a process of unfolding sounds and significations, echoing and anticipating each other, and poetry aims at a precision that makes every word count as something experienced meaningfully through the body at the same time as it is understood by the mind. The engine that drives this sonorous and meaningful activity is rhythm.
BLANK VERSE
Simply defined, blank verse is any metrical, unrhymed verse. Modern playwrights sometimes choose to write drama in blank verse. Shakespeare and Marlowe wrote in “heroic” blank verse, unrhymed lines in iambic meter, usually iambic pentameter.
Free Verse
Free verse is, in one sense, the simplest kind of verse. It uses a very straightforward device to bring about a focus on the movement of the language: the introduction into the continuous flow of prose language, which has breaks determined entirely by syntax and sense, of another kind of break, shown on the page by the start of a new line, and often indicated in a reading by a slight pause. The line on the page has an integrity and function of its own. This has important consequences for the movement and hence the meaning of the words.
IN GENERAL
Rhythm should serve meaning, and should not call attention to itself.
Rhythm is most useful in making emphasis, meaning, tone, contrast, and emotional expression.
Emotion is likely to be more clearly rhythmic the more intense it becomes.
The basic difference between prose rhythm and verse rhythm is that in prose there is far less regular repetition of pattern.
Well-ordered rhythm means clearer sentence structure.
Studies have shown that in human speech the time interval between stressed syllables of English tends to be uniform, and when too many syllables occur between syllables possessing natural stress, speaking rate is increased and confusion results.
A writer controls rhythm by consciously arranging pauses as well as accents (in both punctuation and stage directions).
A play expands and contracts, breathes, throughout its playing time. A tense moment is followed by release. Moments “breathe” in and out within a scene, scenes breathe within an act, and acts within a play. Tension and release give a play life and encourage an audience to emotionally breathe with the play.
One way to arrange the order of scenes in a play is to think of yourself as arranging a sequence of musical pieces for a chamber concert (in which a duet may be followed by a trio, perhaps followed by a solo, etc.) In sequencing scenes and emotional moments, consider: What experience do I want the audience to have now, at this moment? And now, at this moment?
Mamet insists that his characters prefer iambic pentameter and that he indulges them, if loosely” “None of us think about it, but we tend to speak that way. I mean, most of the blues is written that way, too: ‘I hate to see that evening sun go down.’ That’s iambic pentameter. Look here, you know, I could sit and talk to you all day, but finally at the end, what would we say? That you and I had sat and that we spoke, but what we’d spoken of—what would that be? The tíme, the pláce, the rádio, the dáy—OK, so you see here I’m on my way to a sonnet that’s all iambic pentameter.”
SOME SPECIFICS
Sentence rhythm often results from the selection and placement of modifiers. Each sort of modifier (word, phrase, clause) provides a special rhythmic effect.
Single word modifiers tend to make a sentence staccato or emphatic.
Pam was a small, curt, angry girl.’
Phrase modifiers create a more complex and smoother rhythm.
Through the terminal shuffled men with briefcases and with overcoats but with faces.
Clause modifiers make rhythm of greatest extension and weight.
The guy Cass expected to meet walked to him, set down his suitcase, and kissed him so passionately that everyone turned to stare.
Some writers classify sentences as loose, periodic, and balanced.
In a loose or informal sentences, first come the sentence essentials, then the modifiers.
He made his decision after pondering the financial advantages, considering the loss of friends, and discerning the benefits to his reputation.
In a periodic or suspenseful sentence, the modifiers precede the essentials.
Running, skipping, and sometimes trudging through mud puddles, Eleanor hurried to Rumpus.
In a balanced or formal sentence, grammatical units of the same order are juxtaposed.
One does not make love to a body; one always makes love to a total net worth.
Not just complete sentences, but a series of sentence fragments, eventually make a rhythmic whole.
R: He’s the Player.
G: His play offended the King—
R: --offended the King—
G: --who orders his arrest—
G: --so he escapes to England—
R: On the boat to which he meets—
G: Guildenstern and Rosencrantz taking Hamlet—
R: --who also offended the King—
G: --and killed Polonius—
R: --offended the King in a variety of ways—
G: -- to England. (Pause) That seems to be it.
Rhythm is not simply a matter of metrics. Winston Churchill’s stirring rhetoric depended less on meter, per se, than on the rhythms of individual words, e.g., the tough muscularity of “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.”
John F. Kennedy favored a speaking style of neat staccato bursts. Asked how he became a hero, he replied iambically, “It was involuntary. They sank my boat.”
Speeches intended to move audiences need to be ringing, strong, visceral. And they often achieve these effects through rhythmic repetition.
For him it was a dark passage which led to nowhere, then to nowhere, then again to nowhere, once again to nowhere, always and forever to nowhere, heavy on the elbows in the earth to nowhere... now beyond all bearing up, up, up and into nowhere, suddenly, scaldingly, holdingly all nowhere gone and time absolutely still and they were both there, time having stopped and he felt the earth move out and sway from under them. (For Whom the Bell Tolls)
Writers can also build rhythm through the subtle and wavelike effects on the reader of long sentence upon short, of quiet pauses and little breaths.
The hall of the house was cool as a vault. Mrs. Dalloway raised her hand to her eyes, and, as the maid shut the door to, and she heard the swish of Lucy’s skirts, she felt like a nun who has left the world and feels fold round her the familiar veils and the response of old devotions. The cook whistled in the kitchen. She heard the click of the typewriter. (Mrs. Dalloway)
Parallelism builds rhythm, and nonparallelism kills it (e.g., “I came for the purpose of burying Caesar, not to praise him.”)
If it’s impossible to craft a list of exactly parallel elements, at least try to let the length of the phrases build, so that you end up with a crescendo, not a cacophony:
Have JelloO brand gelatin. Because it’s cool (like ice cream), smooth (like pudding), light (like chiffon pie), refreshing (like sherbet), and tastes like fruit.
English speech rhythm has a preference for the alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables. For instance, we tend to prefer phrases that are alternating to phrases that contain back-to-back stresses: most people will say “blue and sparkling eyes” rather than “sparkling and blue eyes,” because the first phrase separates the stressed syllables by unstressed ones.
We may actually pronounce certain words differently in order to avoid successive stresses, like the word “unknown” in the following examples: “the unknown soldier”, “this unknown clarinetist.”
FUNCTIONS OF POETIC RHYTHM
The Poem in General
Heightened language: A poem’s use of rhythm is one important way in which its language is heightened; that is to say, it is made to seem a special language demanding special attention. The heightening of language also produces a certain impersonality, a public quality.
Consistency and unity: A poem is usually experienced as a single entity, and one reason for this is its rhythmic consistency.
Forward movement and final closure: Related to the consistency of a poem is the sense that during its course it is moving forward and that at its end it reaches a point of finality, rather than just stopping.
Memorability: Because of its heightened and intensified language, poetry lodges itself in the brain more easily than prose.
Mimetic suggestiveness: In rather general ways, the choice of a particular rhythmic form for a poem can suggest particular physical qualities.
Emotional suggestiveness: The choice of a particular rhythmic form can also imply a certain emotional coloring. Though the association of rhythmic qualities and emotional states is no doubt a matter of cultural conditioning, it seems likely that there is a physiological connection as well, since emotions manifest themselves directly in the way we expend muscular energy.
Literary associations: The rhythm of one poem can allude to the rhythm of others – whether to a specific poem or group of poems or to an entire tradition of poetry.
Within the Poem
Emphasis: Organized rhythm sets up expectations, and any departure from the expected norm is potentially a moment of emphasis.
Articulation: A departure from a norm that has been set up can also mark a shift of subject or tonality, as when a poem moves into a different meter and thereby alters the focus and feeling of a poem.
Mimetic effects: A common type of commentary on poetic rhythm involves relating a particular rhythmic sequence in a poem to a quality or event referred to by the words (e.g., “the double double double beat / Of the thundering drum”)
Emotional effects: More important than imitations of the world referred to by the words are the ways in which changes in the mental state of the imagined speaker of the words are suggested by the rhythm.
Meaning in process: Because verse heightens the reader’s sense of language moving through time, the poet can suggest meanings that are then modified or contradicted a moment later.
Connection and contrast: Aside from the general unifying power or organized rhythm, it is also possible for particular parts of a poem to be connected by rhythmic similarities.
