Dialoguing

I just finished reading ten excerpts of dialogue from ten different plays. Everything from Martin McDonagh to Neil Simon, Shakespeare to David Ives. Quite a variety. "After reading all that dialogue," you might say, "you must have gleaned some tidbit of wisdom, some nugget of truth from the masters with which to begin writing." Perhaps. I have observations to be sure, but they are vague, and broad in their nature. The observation that currently presents itself in bold, block letters before my mind’s eye is that dialogue is all about rhythm. No matter the play, the thing that made it good, that made it interesting to read and even more interesting to hear in my mind’s ear, was the rhythm. It sounded natural, like two people speaking, rather than writing. I suppose that this is a problem common to both monologue and dialogue. Things often sound so different when they are written as opposed to spoken.
That looks so obvious to me now that I have spelled it out. No duh. Of course that’s the challenge of writing dialogue in a play, natural rhythm. And yet, if that’s the main thing, what is it that is so fundamentally different about Shakespeare’s dialogue as opposed to David Ives or Patrick Marber? Shakespeare, God among men that he was, had musicality (granted, partially a function of the language that he was able to use,) but still. Reading Shakespeare is akin to a really smooth merlot or a bite of the richest, most decadent chocolate truffle. It just feels good in your mouth and mind. Beatrice and Benedick have some of the most brilliant and successful banter in playwriting history. I think that part of its brilliance is that each line plays off of the one before it. Reading B and B it is impossible NOT to listen to what the line before you is saying because the next line relies so fundamentally on every word being in exactly the correct order. This not only creates rhythm and natural banter (a feat when using the language that Shakespeare was), but also makes it some of the cleverest, most witty dialogue in history.
David Ives or Neil Simon operate in a similar although much more modern way. In David Ives The Philadelphia, other than a few of Marcy’s longer lines, no line is longer than ten words and many of them are only one. This means that the scene moves really quickly which returns us to what appears to be the central point, theme, and problem of dialogue: Rhythm.