Why do characters share iambic pentameter?
The woods decay, the woods decay and fall The key to the historic success of the line is its being neither too long nor too short. If it were any longer, the reader would have to emphasise the metre a little more, in order to assert control of the line. You can hear this need asserting itself in English poetry written in the longer classical line, the hexameter. You have to assert the metre, otherwise you will get lost. But if the iambic pentameter is properly written, you shouldn’t have any difficulty understanding how it goes. The poet should have written it so that it comes trippingly off the tongue. Characters all use the iambic pentameter so that the play or poem flows evenly, it sounds like the spoken word as opposed to one ‘fed’ to the character.
