Shakespeare and the Versification of English Drama, 1561-1642

Marina Tarlinskaja

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317056348
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism of Shakespeare
• Index: Literature

Surveying the development and varieties of blank verse in the English playhouses, this book is a natural history of iambic pentameter in English. The main aim of the book is to analyze the evolution of Renaissance dramatic poetry. Shakespeare is the central figure of the research, but his predecessors, contemporaries and followers are also important: Shakespeare, the author argues, can be fully understood and appreciated only against the background of the whole period. Tarlinskaja surveys English plays by Elizabethan, Jacobean and Caroline playwrights, from Norton and Sackville's Gorboduc to Sirley's The Cardinal. Her analysis takes in such topics as what poets treated as a syllable in the 16th-17th century metrical verse, the particulars of stressing in iambic pentameter texts, word boundary and syntactic segmentation of verse lines, their morphological and syntactic composition, syllabic, accentual and syntactic features of line endings, and the way Elizabethan poets learned to use verse form to enhance meaning. She uses statistics to explore the attribution of questionable Elizabethan and Jacobean plays, and to examine several still-enigmatic texts and collaborations. Among these are the poem A Lover's Complaint, the anonymous tragedy Arden of Faversham, the challenging Sir Thomas More, the later Jacobean comedy The Spanish Gypsy, as well as a number of Shakespeare's co-authored plays. Her analysis of versification offers new ways to think about the dating of plays, attribution of anonymous texts, and how collaborators divided their task in co-authored dramas.

Chapter 1
Why Study Versification? Versification Analysis; Tests

1.1. Versification as part of literature and a tool for attribution

Verse form is a substantial part of poetry, so without studying versification our knowledge of a literature and its history is incomplete. Versification is an essential component of English Renaissance drama. Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline playwrights put much effort into composing their works in verse, so there must have been more purpose to their pains than merely complying with a tradition. The form of verse is not just a symbol of poetry; it adds to what is expressed in the texts. Here are two illustrations. The first example: verse form helps us to understand and interpret dramatis personae. Shakespeare opposes his characters not just by assigning verse to kings and prose to clowns; Shakespeare’s noble heroes speak in constrained verse, and villains speak in looser verse. Othello gradually changes from a noble hero to a villain, and his syntax and verse form evolve with his character’s evolution (Tarlinskaja 1987a, Chapter 4). A second example: English poets emphasize important features of the content with the help of accentual “deviations” from the prevailing iambic rhythm ta-TA-ta-TA-ta-TA… “Deviations” that emphasize meaning, called rhythmical italics (see below) work not unlike onomatopoeia. They accompany and accentuate what is expressed in the line, e.g., Claps her pale cheek, till clapping makes it red (Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis, 469)¹ instead of something more “iambic”: He claps her cheek… And these are just two possibilities of how verse form can enrich verse semantics.

Analysis of versification, as it turns out, is helpful in dating plays, in attribution of anonymous texts, and finding out how collaborators divided their task in co-authored texts. Dating and attribution of Elizabethan and Jacobean dramas are attracting scholars in various fields of linguistics and literary criticism. Shakespeare has been the central figure of the quests; but to identify Shakespeare’s hand in doubtful texts we need to see what his predecessors, contemporaries, and followers were like. This is what this book is about: Shakespeare against the background of his literary setting. The research material is iambic pentameter verse texts: poems and, particularly, plays. The period covered in the book is fascinating. In the 1530s–40s Wyatt and Surrey gradually re-established iambic verse that, created by Chaucer in the late fourteenth century, seems to have deteriorated in the next century. In the 1560s iambic pentameter was winning the genre of drama. The 1580s was the time when the Marlowe revolution began to occur. In the 1590s the looming figure of Shakespeare made the period shine. The early 1600s saw the flourishing of Shakespeare and the emergence of great Jacobean playwrights and the genre of tragicomedy. And the 1640s witnessed the enforced end of the Caroline period.

Scholars have been studying this period in a quest for attribution of anonymous or co-authored plays, but few comprehensive studies of versification between 1561 and 1642 have been undertaken. Poets of the same epoch share common versification features. However, each author, even a minor poet, had his own particulars, his own voice, and the particulars change with time. To mimic a poet’s verse rhythm is much harder than to imitate his lexicon and phraseology. Even skillful and seemingly successful counterfeits and hoaxes have been unmasked with the help of versification analyses.² And establishing authorship and chronology is only one reason why versification deserves research: verse form is not a mere vessel for the contents; it is part of the contents.

Most Renaissance plays are written in blank (unrhymed) iambic pentameter. Rhymed couplets sometimes conclude a scene or an act; larger inserts of rhymed verse perform a stylistic role, for example to accompany situations of pathos or comical exchanges. Later authors inserted large chunks of prose into their plays. Prose passages occur in comedies more often than in histories and tragedies. When prose passages are numerous and verse utterances of one character (for example, a master) alternate with prose responses of another (a servant), as in comedies, verse rhythm loses momentum, acquires a larger diapason of variation (Tarlinskaja 1987a, Chapter 3), and makes attribution challenging. Longer portions of uninterrupted verse text create more reliable material for versification analysis. Because most of Shakespeare’s dramatic verse is iambic pentameter, we concentrate on this meter.

What is meter? Look at an example of alternating stressed (accented, X) and unstressed (x) syllables in a “text”:

Our mind registers the recurrences of stresses on odd syllables in this “text.” When a “stress” is omitted from time to time, we still expect the alternation X x X x X x X x… Each new line adds confirmations to the expectation, and when the expectation is not confirmed, our mind is “frustrated”; we experience a “frustrated expectation.” This is how the English poetic tradition has created rhythmical italics: playing upon the audience’s “frustrated expectations” the poets began to use them in support of meaning. Our expectations are confirmed and re-confirmed in every additional line. The places where we expect stressed syllables are called metrically strong syllabic positions, or S. And those places where we expect unstressed syllables are called metrically weak, or W. When a weak position gets a stressed syllable, it frustrates our expectation, and is noticed. When a strong position, where we expect a stressed syllable, does not receive it, we notice again, and our expectation is frustrated again. Thus, the binary alternation X x X x X x… settles down in our mind as an expectation; we say that we have figured out the meter. In the example above, it is SWSWSWSW, or a trochee. An experienced reader figures out various meters even in Frost. An inexperienced reader will find it difficult to see an iambic alternation even in Pope’s poetry. But “the collective experience” is what constitutes a literary tradition. That’s why Wyatt struggled with his iambs: Wyatt had no tradition to lean on, and his readers had even less. Middleton, however, a Jacobean playwright, had a tradition to rely on, he was sure that his audience was aware of it, so he played with his meter and composed “meaning-supporting” groups of deviating syllables. The expectations and their frustrations can be measured. The “frustrations” exist only because there is a meter. Where there is no meter, there is no expectation, as in prose.

Thus, a meter can be defined as an “expectation” of the audience, and also as a scheme, a general law that guides and restricts the choice and combinations of words in verse; in the case of our plays—in iambic pentameter. The restrictions concern both the number of syllables in a line and the placement of stressed and unstressed syllables. For example, the line Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds (Shakespeare, Son. 94.14) may appear during any period of English iambic pentameter, while And admiring the lilies more than weeds is not iambic; such lines never appear even in the loose verse of Jacobean poets.

One of the cornerstones of metrical analysis is to differentiate actual stressing from the abstract metrical scheme. By “actual stressing” I do not mean variants of performance by different modern actors (the number of such variants is almost endless), but a “neutral” oral rendering based on what a speaker knows about grammar, phonology, and the meaning of words and phrases in his language. The distinction between actual stresses and the metrical scheme was the subject of heated debates in Russia in the early twentieth century. The scholars were perplexed: how is it possible that a poem contains so few “perfect” iambic lines, and yet the reader knows that the text is iambic? So they came to the conclusion that there must be a model for all lines, both “perfect” and “imperfect,” a general scheme, a meter. We discern the abstract scheme, the “metrical sound keyboard,” from the sequence of lines in a poem. The lines are iambic if they adhere to the rules of the meter. James Bailey, emphasizing the difference between a meter and actual stresses, wrote: “One of the main ways English poets achieve rhythmical variety in iambic meters is to play off occasional unexpected rhythmical ‘irregularities’ against the ‘metrical sound board’” (Bailey 1975, p. 38). The poet knows the meter before he writes a poetic text: he has read many poems composed in this meter; few poets invent a new meter. But as soon as the poem is created, the meter can be extracted out of the text: the reader, or listener, perceives the underlying metrical scheme. Thus, a meter both precedes a poetic text and is reconstructed from it. Sometimes, as we know, we have to “juggle” several lines in our mind before we figure out the meter. What is the segment: And made dust and dropped stove-length sticks of wood? Is it prose, or an iambic line? Yes, it is an iambic line, and it comes from an iambic pentameter poem “OUT, OUT—” by Robert Frost; here are the first three lines:

The buzz saw snarled and rattled in the yard,
And made dust and dropped stove-length sticks of wood,
Sweet-scented stuff when the breeze drew across it.

This text is iambic for Frost, but it ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Why Study Versification? Versification Analysis; Tests
• 2 How It All Began: From Surrey's Aeneid to Marlowe's Tamburlaine
• 3 Early Elizabethan Playwrights: Kyd, Marlowe, Greene, Peele, Early Shakespeare. 2, 3 Henry VI and Arden of Faversham.
• 4 Shakespeare's Versification: Evolution. Co-authored Plays. The Poem A Lover's Complaint
• 5 Jacobean and Caroline Playwrights: From Shakespeare to Shirley
• 6 Conclusions: Shakespeare and Versification, 1540s-1640s
• Appendix A: Verse Form and Meaning: Rhythmical Italics
• Appendix B: General Tables B.1-B.16
• Glossary
• References
• Index