OK so I can’t be the only person who was a little bit sceptical when Jared said (at Torcon) that Gadreel talked in iambic pentameter (“I bet he just talks in iambs but not in petameter,” I thought) (OH MAN I AM SUCH A GEEK) – but turns out I was being unfair. He only does it in Holy Terror and Road Trip, the two episodes where Gadreel’s true identity has been revealed: but all the lines above are taken from those episodes and all of them are lines of iambic pentameter (there are more but the gifset was getting too long).
[Hopefully this explanatory section isn’t too obnoxious, as everybody everywhere in the world has to do Shakespeare at school (and why not, he’s awesome) so you probably know this; but in case you needed your memory jogged:
Poetry written in iambic pentameter is written in lines of five two-syllable feet (called ‘iambs’). The first syllable is unstressed and the second syllable is stressed: for example, the word ‘comPARE’ makes up an iamb because in natural English speech you stress the second syllable. Shakespeare uses this metre a lot, e.g. ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day’.
In the gifs I’ve put stressed syllables in red. If you read the lines stressing those syllables, you should find that fits with the natural cadence of the words.
Jared’s performance of the lines doesn’t always stress those syllables with complete regularity – for example, he says ‘But Metatron, would that not make YOU God?’ – but that’s just good reading. If everybody read iambic pentameter with repetitive, exaggerated emphasis it would sound really boring and unnatural. OK, end of English class!]