Shakespeare Sonnets

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Slide 1

Shakespeare Sonnets

English

Year 9

Slide 2

William Shakespeare

Slide 3

What is a sonnet?

A sonnet is a fourteen-line poem in iambic pentameter.

Iambic what?

Oh dear, this is

going to be a

weird lesson!

Slide 4

Iambic Pentameter

Iambic Pentameter is the rhyth and metre in which poets and playwrights wrote in Elizabethan England. It is a metre that Shakespeare uses.

Slide 5

Heartbeat.

Quite simply, it sounds like this: dee DUM, dee DUM, dee DUM, dee DUM, dee DUM. It consists of a line of five iambic feet, ten syllables with five unstressed and five stressed syllables. It is the first and last sound we ever hear, it is the rhyth of the human heart beat.

Slide 6

Pentameter?

Well an ‘iamb’ is ‘dee Dum’ – it is the heart beat.

Penta is from the Greek for five.

Meter is really the pattern

So, there are five iambs per line!

(Iambic penta meter )

Slide 7

It is percussive and attractive to the ear and has an effect on the listener's central nervous system. An Example of Pentameter from Shakespeare: but SOFT what LIGHT through YONder WINdow BREAKS

Slide 8

Syllables

What is a syllable?

Well, there are three syllables (separate sounds) in the word syllable!

“But soft, what light through yonder window breaks.”

How many syllables are there in that quotation?

Slide 9

“But soft, what light through yonder window breaks.”

Write this down and underline the stressed words. If you cannot remember, go back to slide 5.

This rhyth is iambic pentameter!

Well done!

Slide 10

Back to sonnets.

Well, it is a poetic form.

But it has a certain structure as well as a rhyming pattern.

Slide 11

Rhyming patterns

The Shakespearean sonnet has three quatrains followed by a couplet, the scheme being: abab cdcd efef gg.

More head scratching?

Slide 12

Quatrain?