alt Hacker NewsRant: I missed lot of Shakespeare appreciation when they somehow failed to teach that (other) people actually like how iambic pentameter sounds, and this is critical to enjoying it. Nothing about how Shakespeare is voiced has ever registered as sounding particularly pleasant to me. The word choice, sure, but not the meter or stressing.
They taught that Shakespeare used iambic pentameter, and how you're "supposed" to stress it, but it came off to me as "technical curiosity you're supposed to memorize" not "universal experience of enjoyment" that I apparently don't share.
My lighting talk about this: https://www.instagram.com/p/DZUcvP8CWhB/
Non-social media link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1G58CMUDf-M4loe3MeEus-9gNA5T...
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Meter is a very basic part of English poetry that is usually taught. Almost all popular music and poetry has meter.
Yeah, Shakespeare is not going to land if iambic pentameter doesn't sound like anything special to you. It's a big part of why many Shakespearean quotes stick so hard in people's brains, like 'To be or not to be', 'But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?' and 'If music be the food of love, play on'. If all of these have to carry their weight with only their literal words on the page, and not how they're actually said and stressed, they're going to be a lot less memorable.