Panto in Verse? (Panto Special)
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Not at all, the ancient Greeks wrote both tragedies and comedies in verse: the latter by Aristophanes, and the former by Sophocles, Aeschylus and Euripides. I know about this stuff because Greek drama was one of my subjects at Uni. All the plays were written and performed in verse. Not simple rhyming couplets, but complicated rhythms which they must have worked hard at for years, and we students had to mug up rule after rule about the rhythm or metre, as it was known. This most unpopular topic was called scansion: it will be familiar to English Lit. graduates too. It was all about stressed and unstressed syllables. The two commonest metres were iambic, short – long, or dactylic, a long followed by two shorts. This combination was called a foot. We had two neat mnemonics for the dactylic foot followed by a foot consisting of two long beats (a spondee): strawberry jam tart, or Marylebone High Street. I recall that learning these was absolute agony.
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Am-DramAmateursDave BuchananpantomimeTheatreVerse
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