Shakespeare's metrical art

366 Pages·2000·15.649 MB·English

by  Wright, George Thaddeus

Shakespeare's
Metrical Art
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Shakespeare's
Metrical Art
GEORGE T. WRIGHT
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Berkeley Los Angeles London
This book is a print-on-demand volume. It is manufactured
using toner in place of ink. Type and images may be less
sharp than the same material seen in traditionally printed
University of California Press editions.
University of California Press
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California
University of California Press, Ltd.
London, England
©1988 by
The Regents of the University of California
First Paperback Printing 1991
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wright, George Thaddeus.
Shakespeare's metrical art.
Includes index.
1. Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616—Versification.
2. English language—Early modern, 1500-1700—-
Versification. I. Title.
PR3o85.W75 1988 822.3'3 87-10931
ISBN 0-520-07642-7
Printed in the United States of America
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum
requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-I992 (R 1997)
(Permanence of Paper). @
For Jerry, the long love
that in my thought doth harbour
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Contents
Preface ix
1 The Iambic Pentameter Line 1
2 Chaucer and Wyatt: Early Expressive Pentameters 20
3 The Sixteenth-Century Line: Pattern and Variation 38
4 Flexibility and Ease in Four Older Poets 57
5 An Art of Small Differences: Shakespeare's Sonnets 75
6 The Verse of Shakespeare's Theater 91
7 Prose and Other Diversions 108
8 Short and Shared Lines 116
9 Long Lines 143
10 Shakespeare's Syllabic Ambiguity: More Than Meets the Ear 149
11 Lines with Extra Syllables 160
12 Lines with Omitted Syllables
174
13 Trochees 185
14 The Play of Phrase and Line 207
15 Shakespeare's Metrical Technique in Dramatic Passages 229
16 What Else Shakespeare's Meter Reveals 249
17 Some Metrically Expressive Features in Donne and Milton 264
18 Conclusion: Verse as Speech, Theater, Text, Tradition, Illusion 281
Appendix A: Percentage Distribution of Prose
in Shakespeare's Plays 291
vii
Contents
Appendix B: Main Types of Deviant Lines
in Shakespeare's Plays 292
Appendix C: Short and Shared Lines 294
Notes 297
Main Works Cited or Consulted 325
Index 339
viii
Preface
Poetry is language composed in verse, that is, language of which an
essential feature is its appearance in measured units, either as written text
or in oral performance. Although other units, larger or smaller, play an
important part in poetry, in literate cultures the line is the indispensable
unit of verse and the one by which we recognize its nature. Paragraphs of
prose lack this essential feature: in different printed versions the separate
lines may end at different words without injury to meaning or form; dif-
ferent printed versions of poems must retain the lines as they are. If a line is
too long to print on a narrow page or column, the printer must use some
conventional means to show that the leftover words belong with the ones
they follow. Even when the sense of one line runs over to the next, it is
important to the form of a poem that the lines be preserved intact.
If the line is the basic unit of a poetic text, meter and stanza measure
the line in respect to units smaller or larger than the line. The meter of a
line is its inner rhythmical structure, which in English we understand as a
relationship between stressed and unstressed syllables. Since poems do not
normally change their meter in every line but establish and confirm re-
petitive rhythmical patterns, often we must read several lines of a poem
before we can hear a pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables that in-
heres in all of them, with or without variation. Once we can hear the basic
pattern, we can recognize it as it is realized differently in all the succeeding
lines; we listen for the returning pattern. Although the term stanza usually
designates a particular arrangement of lines (a certain number of them in
a design that may mix long lines and short, and with a specific patterning of
rhymes), it is probably the best word we have to signify our more general
interest in the way lines combine to form larger prosodic units. Meter lets
us hear the line's inner relations, stanza its outer connections.
ix