Shakespeare's Metrical ArtThis is a wide-ranging, poetic analysis of the great English poetic line, iambic pentameter, as used by Chaucer, Sidney, Milton, and particularly by Shakespeare. George T. Wright offers a detailed survey of Shakespeare's brilliantly varied metrical keyboard and shows how it augments the expressiveness of his characters' stage language. |
Contents
Early Expressive Pentameters | 20 |
Pattern and Variation | 38 |
Flexibility and Ease in Four Older Poets | 57 |
Shakespeares Sonnets | 75 |
The Verse of Shakespeares Theater | 91 |
Prose and Other Diversions | 108 |
Short and Shared Lines | 116 |
Long Lines | 143 |
Trochees | 185 |
The Play of Phrase and Line | 207 |
Shakespeares Metrical Technique in Dramatic Passages | 229 |
What Else Shakespeares Meter Reveals | 249 |
Some Metrically Expressive Features in Donne and Milton | 264 |
Verse as Speech Theater Text Tradition Illusion | 281 |
Percentage Distribution of Prose in Shakespeares Plays | 291 |
Main Types of Deviant Lines | 292 |
More Than Meets the Ear | 149 |
Lines with Extra Syllables | 160 |
Lines with Omitted Syllables | 174 |
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Common terms and phrases
accentual actors anapests appear beat blank verse broken-backed line caesura Chapter characters Chaucer combinations Coriolanus couplets Cressida Donne Donne's dramatic verse effect elision Elizabethan enjambment epic caesura example expressive extra syllable feeling feet feminine endings foot Gascoigne half-line Hamlet headless hear Henry hexameter iambic line iambic pentameter iambic pentameter line iambs Julius Caesar King Lear language later plays later poets line-types line's Macbeth meter metrical pattern metrical variations metrists midline break minor words monosyllabic normal Othello passage pause phrasal playwrights poems poetic poetry prose punctuation pyrrhic readers regular rhetorical rhyme rhythm rhythmic Richard II scene seems segments sense sentence Shake Shakespeare shared lines short lines Sidney's sonnets sound speak speaker speare's speech speechlike Spenser spoken spondaic spondee stanza stressed position strong structure style syllables syntactical syntax theater thee thou tion trochaic trochee Troilus unstressed syllables usually verb verse lines voice vowels Wyatt