Shakespeare of Stratford/Shakespeare's Metrical Development

by Tucker Brooke

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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

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.