Shakespeare's Metrical Art

This 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 Preface 1. The Iambic Pentameter Line 2. Chaucer and Wyatt: Early Expressive Pentameters 3. The Sixteenth-Century Line: Pattern and Variation 4. Flexibility and Ease in Four Older Poets 5. An Art of Small Differences: Shakespeare's Sonnets 6. The Verse of Shakespeare's Theater 7. Prose and Other Diversions 8. Short and Shared Lines 9. Long Lines 10. Shakespeare's Syllabic Ambiguity: More Than Meets the Ear 11. Lines with Extra Syllables 12. Lines with Omitted Syllables 13. Trochees 14. The Play of Phrase and Line 15. Shakespeare's Metrical Technique in Dramatic Passages 16. What Else Shakespeare's Meter Reveals 17. Some Metrically Expressive Features in Donne and Milton 18. Conclusion: Verse as Speech, Theater, Text, Tradition, Illusion Appendix A: Percentage Distribution of Prose in Shakespeare's Plays Appendix B: Main Types of Deviant Lines in Shakespeare's Plays Appendix C: Short and Shared Lines Notes Main Works Cited or Consulted Index