Shakespeare's metrical art
George T. Wright (Author)
A poetic analysis of the great English poetic line, iambic pentameter, as used by Chaucer, Sidney, Milton, and particularly by Shakespeare. It offers a survey of Shakespeare's brilliantly varied metrical keyboard and shows how it augments the expressiveness of his characters' stage language.
Print Book, English, 1988
University of California Press, Berkeley, 1988
xiv, 349 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm
9780520060579, 9780520076426, 0520060571, 0520076427
15656961
The iambic pentameter line
Chaucer and Wyatt: early expressive pentameters
The sixteenth-century line: pattern and variation
Flexibility and ease in four older poets
An art of small differences: Shakespeare's Sonnets
The verse of Shakespeare's theater
Prose and other diversion
Short and shared lines
Long lines
Shakespeare's syllabic ambiguity: more than meets the ear
Lines with extra syllables
Lines with omitted syllables
Trochees
The play of phrase and line
Shakespeare's metrical technique in dramatic passages
What else Shakespeare's meter reveals
Some metrically expressive features in Donne and Milton
Conclusion: Verse as speech, theater, text, tradition, illusion
Appendices: Percentage distribution of prose in Shakespeare's plays
Main types of deviant lines in Shakespeare's plays
Short and shared lines