Shakespeare's Metrical Art

✍ Scribed by George T. Wright

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2019
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 365
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

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.

✦ Table of Contents

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