Shakespeare!!! Please help me.

jamit

Ok this doesn't really have anything to do with the band, but it does poetry. I have this huge research paper on Shakespeare that I have to do, and I need to know what iambic pentameter, alliteration, and prose are. Any help would be much appreciated.
Thanks.

DriftingInThinAir

You've come to the right place... I'm a huge Shakespeare fan and in fact write many sonnets which involve iambic pentameter. An iamb is a set of 2 syllables, one unstressed and the other stressed, and pentameter means there are 5 sets of iambs, for a total of 10 syllables in a line. For example:

--The demon relents not, midst silent screams,
Feeding on lack of strength and faint belief.
Seething inside this disease shall remain;
Her love, the only tonic for the pain.--

Thats from one of my sonnets.. if you count the syllables in each line they add up to 10. And though it may not be perfect, for the most part the rhythm is an unstressed syllable followed by stressed syllable throughout.

Alliteration is the repitition of a single consonant throughout two ore more words for effect. In the same poem i wrote an example would be:

--This horror my heart holds hostage within--

The repitition of the H is an example of alliteration.

And finally, prose is just the ordinary language used in writing. There is no set rhythm or meter and allows for more free writing.

For the entire sonnet that i extracted examples from check out the link: http://forums.pearljam.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=22900
It's a few posts deep.

Hope this helps and good luck! Any more questions let me know, im more than willing to answer.

Peace

jamit

I can not thank you enough! Life saver.