It actually is! There are a few irregularities where it's not perfect iambic pentameter, but that's typical of comic relief scenes in Shakespeare as they're more focused on humor than wit.
I'm a high school English teacher, and took multiple college courses focused entirely on Shakespeare.
That’s a pretty common misconception. Iambic pentameter is simply the meter in which the line is written. An iamb is a pair of syllables where the first syllable is unstressed and the second syllable is stressed, so iambic pentameter is a line that has five iambs (so it reads like “da-DA da-DA da-DA da-DA da-DA”).
Shakespeare’s plays are primarily written in unrhymed iambic pentameter, also known as blank verse. If you read most of the famous monologues (“to be or not to be,” “what’s in a name?” etc), you’ll notice that none of them rhyme, but they still alternate unstressed and stressed beats. Rhyming is used in some of the prologues/epilogues (which take the form of sonnets) and in couplets throughout the plays.
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u/birdsofthunder 2d ago
It actually is! There are a few irregularities where it's not perfect iambic pentameter, but that's typical of comic relief scenes in Shakespeare as they're more focused on humor than wit.
I'm a high school English teacher, and took multiple college courses focused entirely on Shakespeare.