Shakespeare of Stratford/Shakespeare's Metrical Development

SHAKESPEARE’S METRICAL DEVELOPMENT


Shakespeare’s use of poetry, and especially of blank verse, in his dramas shows a strikingly progressive development which is very important both in measuring his intellectual and artistic growth and in corroborating the dates of his various plays. The metrical tests, mainly worked out during the last part of the nineteenth century, require both judgment and imagination for effective use; but when so used they become an indispensable implement for the appreciation of the poet.

The chief facts established by the study of Shakespeare’s use of metre are the following:

(A) In early plays Shakespeare secures variety and an ornate effect by much use of riming couplets, to which he also adds more elaborate metrical forms, such as the quatrain, six-line stanza, and sonnet. In later plays he depends increasingly upon unrelieved blank verse, finally discarding rime altogether, except in inserted songs.

(B) In earlier plays he sticks rather monotonously to the type line of exactly ten syllables. In later plays he gets variety by larger use of eleven-syllable (feminine-ending) and even twelve-syllable lines, which in The Tempest exceed the proportion of one in three.

(C) In earlier plays each line is ordinarily felt as a separate unit, its individuality being marked off by a pause at the end (end-stopped). In later plays this mechanical pattern is broken up by increasing employment of unstopped, or run-on, lines, where one flows into another without a break. In plays of the last period the proportion of unstopped lines is almost one in two.

(D) A special manifestation of the tendency toward unstopped lines, which appears in later plays, is the introduction of ‘light’ and ‘weak’ endings,[1] where the line ends, not simply without a punctuation point or logical pause, but in the middle of a prepositional phrase, between a subject pronoun and its verb, after an auxiliary verb (am, can, have, do, etc.) or a conjunction such as ‘and,’ ‘or,’ ‘than,’ etc. Here there is not only no logical pause, but the mechanical tendency to pause at the close of the line is definitely prohibited and the two verses completely agglutinated. Such lines barely exist in earlier plays, but become a marked mannerism after Macbeth.

(E) Another minor development illustrating Shakespeare’s tendency to substitute flexibility for mechanical precision is the habit of ending speeches in the middle instead of at the close of a line. In earlier plays characters usually speak in blocks of complete ten-syllable verses; in later plays animation and naturalness are gained by frequently splitting a line between two speakers or leaving the last line of a speech incomplete.

Most metrical tests can never be mathematically precise, since the data they are based on—pronunciation, pause, punctuation—are in part a matter of personal taste and habit, and no two calculators will compile identical lists of statistics. Nor, even if the calculations could be made altogether mechanical and scientific, would the tests establish an absolutely accurate order of priority for the plays; for the trend on the poet’s part was unconscious and instinctive, and was subject to check or acceleration by the nature of the material he was working on. It is natural that in a fairy play like A Midsummer Night’s Dream Shakespeare should use more rime than we should expect him to use in a psychological play of the same period; just as it is natural for him to use much more prose in Coriolanus, which deals largely with the Plebeians’ view of life than in Antony and Cleopatra, where the tone is epic and aristocratic. There can, however, be no question about the validity of the general conclusions established by the metrical tests.

The net result of the changes which Shakespeare’s manner of writing went through was the evolution of a type of blank verse uniquely expressive and powerful. The greatest development was made during the period of the great tragedies, from about 1601 till 1608. In this time he came to restrict himself practically solely, except in songs, to prose and blank verse, and his blank verse became steadily more independent of conventional patterns and more fluid in its movement. At the same time Shakespeare’s diction grew bolder and more compressed, heavier with thought and more allusive. The contrast between his middle and his late style is aptly illustrated by two short passages, in Julius Cæsar and Coriolanus respectively, where the poet happens to describe the same scene, viz. a mob of vulgar Romans pressing to see the triumphant return of a successful general. This is in the style of 1599, workmanlike, very lucid, but still a little conventional:


O you hard hearts, you cruel men of Rome,
Knew you not Pompey? Many a time and oft
Have you climb’d up to walls and battlements,
To towers and windows, yea, to chimney-tops,
Your infants in your arms, and there have sat
The livelong day, with patient expectation,
To see great Pompey pass the streets of Rome:
And when you saw his chariot but appear,
Have you not made a universal shout,
That Tiber trembled underneath her banks,
To hear the replication of your sounds
Made in her concave shores?
And do you now put on your best attire?
And do you now cull out a holiday?
And do you now strew flowers in his way,
That comes in triumph over Pompey’s blood?’
(Julius Cæsar, I. i. 40–55)


The words are those of the Tribune Marullus. Note the marvelously different way in which the Tribune Brutus in Coriolanus says the same thing some nine years later:


All tongues speak of him, and the bleared sights
Are spectacled to see him: your prattling nurse
Into a rapture lets her baby cry
While she chats him: the kitchen malkin pins
Her richest lockram ’bout her reechy neck,
Clambering the walls to eye him: stalls, bulks, windows
Are smother’d up, leads fill’d, and ridges hors’d
With variable complexions, all agreeing
In earnestness to see him: seld-shown flamens
Do press among the popular throngs, and puff
To win a vulgar station: our veil’d dames
Commit the war of white and damask in
Their nicely-gawded cheeks to the wanton spoil
Of Phoebus’ burning kisses: such a pother
As if that whatsoever god who leads him
Were slily crept into his human powers,
And gave him graceful posture.’
(Coriolanus, II. i. 224–240)


The two passages are within a line of the same length, and they are as nearly as possible identical in the subject, setting, and attitude of the speaker. The earlier one contains one double ending, three unstopped lines, and one word (replication) which might possibly require explanation to modern school children. The later passage has six double endings, fourteen unstopped lines, and at least sixteen words used in strange or obsolete senses. The speech in Coriolanus also contains a typical specimen of the weak ending (sixth line from close), and it concludes in the middle of a line.

The following table gives metrical statistics for the various plays.

Works of dubious or only partial authenticity are indicated in italic. The statistics are given as counted by Fleay,[2] König,[3] and Ingram.[4]

Play Total lines Prose Blank verse Riming lines (5-ft.) % Riming lines % Feminine endings lines % Run-on lines No. light (weak) endings % Speeches ending within line
Comedy of Errors 1770 240 1150 380 19.4 16.6 12.9 0 .6
Love’s Labour’s Lost 2789 1086 579 1028 62.2 7.7 18.4 3 10. 
Two Gentlemen of Verona 2060 409 1510 116 6.5 18.4 12.4 0 5.8
1 Henry VI 2693 0 2379 314 10.  8.2 10.4 4 .5
2 Henry VI 3032 448 2562 122 2.9 13.7 11.4 3 1.1
3 Henry VI 2904 0 2749 155 3.4 13.7 9.5 3 .9
Titus Andronicus 2525 43 2338 144 3.7 8.6 12.  5 2.5
Richard III 3599 55 3374 170 3.5 19.5 13.1 4 2.9
Midsummer Night’s Dream 2251 441 878 731 43.4 7.3 13.2 1 17.3
Richard II 2644 0 2107 537 18.6 11.  19.9 4 7.3
Romeo & Juliet 3002 405 2111 486 17.2 8.2 14.2 7 14.9
King John 2553 0 2403 150 5.5 6.3 17.7 7 12.1
Merchant of Venice 2705 673 1896 93 4.6 17.7 21.5 7 22.2
Taming of the Shrew 2671 516 1971 169 4.4 17.7 8.1 2 3.6
1 Henry IV 3170 1464 1622 84 2.7 5.1 22.8 7 14.2
2 Henry IV 3437 1860 1417 74 2.9 16.3 21.4 1 16.8
Henry V 3320 1531 1678 101 3.2 20.5 21.8 2 18.3
Julius Cæsar 2440 165 2241 34 1.2 19.7 19.3 10 20.3
Merry Wives of Windsor 3018 2703 227 69 6.4 27.2 20.1 1 20.5
Much Ado about Nothing 2823 2106 643 40 5.2 22.9 19.3 2 20.7
As You Like It 2904 1681 925 71 6.3 25.5 17.1 2 21.6
Twelfth Night 2684 1741 763 120 13.7 25.6 14.7 4 36.3
Hamlet 3924 1208 2490 81 2.7 22.6 23.1 8 51.6
Troilus and Cressida 3423 1186 2025 196 8.6 23.8 27.4 6 31.3
Measure for Measure 2809 1134 1574 73 3.6 26.1 23.  7 51.4
All’s Well that Ends Well 2981 1453 1234 280 19.4 29.4 28.4 13 74. 
Othello 3324 541 2672 86 3.2 28.1 29.3 8 41.4
Lear 3298 903 2238 74 3.4 28.5 29.3 6 60.9
Macbeth 1993 158 1588 118 5.8 26.3 36.6 23 77.2
Timon of Athens 2358 596 1560 184 8.5 24.7 32.5 30 62.8
Antony and Cleopatra 3064 255 2761 42 .7 26.5 43.3 99 77.5
Pericles 2386 418 1436 225 18.8 20.2 18.2 82 17.1
Coriolanus 3392 829 2521 42 .7 28.4 45.9 104 79. 
Cymbeline 3448 638 2585 107 3.2 30.7 46.  130 85. 
Winter’s Tale 2758 844 1825 0 0.  32.9 37.5 100 87.6
Tempest 2068 458 1458 2 .1 35.4 41.5 67 84.5
Henry VIII 2754 67 2613 16 .3 47.3 46.3 84 72.4


Footnotes

  1. Light endings are supposed to be less entirely incapable of stress than weak, but the distinction is shadowy.
  2. Trans. New Shakspere Society, 1874, p. 16, for figures in the first four columns.
  3. G. König, Der Vers in Shaksperes Dramen, 1888, pp. 131 ff. for the percentages in columns 5, 6, 7, and 9. It will be observed that the percentages of riming lines given by König in column 5 are in many cases materially different from those which would be obtained by using Fleay’s count of riming and blank verse lines.
  4. J. K. Ingram, Trans. New Shakspere Society. 1874, pp. 442 ff., for figures in column 8.