I'm neither a poet nor a playwright; I really don't know (but I'm glad he did).

Prosody - the musical, rhythmic quality of speech - is emphasised in verse. If a sentence runs over one-and-a-half lines, you can speak it as a normal sentence, with no pause after the first line and a pause in the middle of the second; the song-like quality will still come through, but it becomes easier for an audience to make sense of.

I think this applies to a lot of verse; not just Shakespeare's plays. If you read a sonnet like Ozymandias as a set of distinct lines, it sounds boring and stilted. If you speak it as a tale told by a traveller in a bar, it's much more engaging and exciting. The metre is carried by the words, they don't need help from the speaker.

Some of the best political speeches have that kind of song-like rhythm, although they aren't verse. I'm thinking of e.g. Churchill, or the Gettysburg Address.

Well, I sort of agree. A halting, too-strongly-pushed, stopping-at-the-end-of-every-line reading doesn't exactly let the lines sing. But there is an art to reciting iambic pentameter whereby it can attain the naturalness of speech while still retaining that underlying rhythm. When it's done well, you might not even realise they're doing it - until your ear is attuned enough to pick it up.

I really think this is a dying art, by the way. If you see a Shakespeare production, at least here in the UK, the actors older than about sixty are able to imbue the lines with that underpinning iambic rhythm; the younger actors don't know how or don't bother. For me, that means they don't really catch that song-like quality. I really think those older actors might be the last generation to properly know how to scan.

>Some of the best political speeches have that kind of song-like rhythm, although they aren't verse. I'm thinking of e.g. Churchill, or the Gettysburg Address.

Incidentally, somewhere I came across Arthur Quiller-Couch discussing this. He used as his example this speech of Edmund Burke, which he claimed achieved its power by means of hidden iambic pentameter:

>The calculation of profit in all such wars is false. On balancing the account of such wars, ten thousand hogsheads of sugar are purchased at ten thousand times their price. The blood of man should never be shed but to redeem the blood of man. It is well shed for our family, for our friends, for our God, for our country, for our kind. The rest is vanity; the rest is crime.

He points out that three fragments are actually iambic lines:

>Are purchased at ten thousand times their price... >Be shed but to redeem the blood of man... >The rest is vanity; the rest is crime.

Of course, this was in a time when the audience's ear (though perhaps not conscious mind) would be better attuned to that rhythm.