In his study of prosody, Timothy Steele expresses an important concern about the relationship between verse form and content: “I worry that I may have appeared, in discussing the expressive potentials of form, to have recommended the view that form is or should be a reflection of content. This view is far from my sense of poetry. Form is distinguishable from content.”[1] My own sense of poetry accords with Steele’s, but many critics take a diametrically opposed view. Mary Kinzie, for example, confidently declares that “Form should follow theme” and enshrines the Form Follows Theme doctrine as a key concept in her analysis of poetry.[2] It may, however, be possible to analyze a formal element like meter without always turning it into a species of rhythmical onomatopoeia.
This essay attempts to demonstrate that the idea of meter as slave to meaning is untenable and that recognizing how meter can be and usually is unbound from content can facilitate a much richer appreciation of the contribution meter makes to our experience of verse. After addressing the general issue of meter’s relationship to meaning, I will focus on an analysis of Shakespeare’s blank verse rhythms and explore how they make the experience of his plays more complex and more engaging.
Jurij Lotman states emphatically that all the systems of sound patterning in poetic language are too inextricably linked to the content of a poem to have any independent function. Thus, he says, such sound patterns should always be treated as semiotic, as message bearing signs. According to Lotman:
No matter how we attempt to separate sound from content, whether to exalt or denounce the author suspected of isolating the sound of poetry from its meaning—we are faced with a hopeless task. In an art form which uses language as its material (verbal art), sound cannot be separated from meaning. The musical sound of poetic speech is also a means of transmitting information, that is, transmitting content, and in this sense it cannot be set in opposition to other means of transmitting information which are characteristic of language as a semiotic system.[3]
Similarly, Seymour Chatman insists that metrics “aids in esthetic evaluation to the extent that meter and meaning are mutually appropriate. Too easy assumptions of ‘expressive form’ need close examination, but if such appropriateness exists or is even merely useful as a metaphor for something less expressible, metrical analysis qualifies as an important preoccupation of literary criticism.”[4] Chatman assumes that a critic’s one concern must be meaning and argues that critics must bring meter into the fold of semiotics and treat it as they do other linguistic phenomena. Rather than subjecting meter to “esthetic evaluation” Chatman actually wants to make it a component of hermeneutic interpretation. He implies that if meter and meaning are not “appropriate” to one another, metrics has little value for understanding literary art.
The notion that meter is a semiotic phenomenon enjoys wide acceptance and the support of many other distinguished proponents. Roman Jakobson, for instance, says, “Poetic meter . . . has so many intrinsically linguistic particularities that it is most convenient to describe it from a purely linguistic point of view,” and he speaks optimistically about “the possibility of writing a grammar of the meter’s interaction with the sense.”[5] Enthusiasm for such a project is not limited to twentieth century structuralists. Alexander Pope’s famous dictum, “The Sound must seem an Eccho to the Sense,” articulates “What oft was Thought, but ne’er so well Exprest” by generations of previous and subsequent students of literature.[6]
Few critics subject such assertions as Pope’s to any thoughtful analysis. Samuel Johnson, one of the few who has, declares, “This notion of representative metre, and the desire of discovering frequent adaptations of the sound to the sense, have produced, in my opinion, many wild conceits and imaginary beauties.”[7] Even the pronouncements of a critic as distinguished as Johnson have not quieted the persistent belief that meter’s primary function is, or ought to be, a mimetic one. In repeating and extending Johnson’s arguments, this essay is beating a dead horse—beating it because it refuses to lie down.
James I. Wimsatt, following in the Johnson tradition, concludes that the widely accepted notion “that poetry’s sounds depend on verbal meaning for effect seems fallacious.”[8] Responding to William K. Wimsatt’s arguments that Pope’s use of rhyme is superior to Chaucer’s because Pope’s rhymes consistently serve as rhetorical embellishments to the content of the lines,[9] James Wimsatt shows that “the effectiveness of Chaucer’s rhyming is independent of the direct relationship of the rhyme pairs to the verbal logic of the poem.”[10] He further demonstrates the folly of extrapolating from those instances where rhymes do reinforce the meaning of a passage to a general theory of prosodic value:
While rhetorical effects are important, especially in the later periods of English poetry, the mystical all-encompassing mimological power, direct and indirect, asserted for them does not exist. . . . Even with the most mimetic poetry, we must look beyond the rhetorical for the whole import of poetry’s sounds, which resides primarily in the musical force of the phonetic pattern independent of the verbal statement.[11]
Although James Wimsatt focuses his analysis on rhyme, his conclusions clearly seem applicable to other aspects of prosody and sound patterning.
Like rhyme, meter need not reinforce meaning to have value. Instances where meter serves a rhetorical function do, of course, exist. Take, for example, these oft quoted, highly self-conscious couplets by Pope:
x / x / x / / / x /
When A | jax strives, | some Rock’s | vast Weight | to throw,
x / x / x / x / / /
The Line | too la | bours, and | the Words | move slow;
x / x / x / x / x /
Not so, | when swift | Camil | la scours | the Plain,
/ x x / x / x / x / x /
Flies o’er | th’unbend | ing Corn, | and skims | along | the Main.
(An Essay on Criticism 370-73)
As many prosodists have noted, the occurrence of three heavy stresses in a row (“Rock’s vast Weight,” “Line too la-,” “Words move slow”) slow down the first two lines. Conversely, both the return to regular iambs and the short vowel sounds of “swift Camilla” in line three accelerate the pace, and line four accelerates it further through elision (“o’er th’un-”). Yet even here, not all the metrical patterns work in such a neatly mimetic fashion. The fourth line is an alexandrine, and its extra foot surely slows the line rather than accelerating it.[12] Moreover, that second couplet includes several very slow syllables: “scours,” “o’er,” “corn,” “along.” Though sound may echo sense in the first couplet, in the second the echo is, at best, partial. Many readers have been so dazzled by these lines that they think that Pope’s evidence makes his point, yet the lines themselves demonstrate that Pope’s verse contradicts the principle of representative form as often as anybody else’s.
Examples of metrical mimesis are extremely rare in Shakespeare, which in itself should tell us something about the value of representative meter. Consider, however, the opening line of sonnet 12:
x / x / x / x / x /
When I | do count | the clock | that tells | the time[13]
This perfectly iambic line distributes four of its five stresses to two pairs of alliterating, monosyllabic words; moreover, the alliterations match the prominent sound repetitions of “tick-tock.” Thus the meter could persuasively be said to mime the sound of the ticking clock to which the line alludes.[14]
Any attempt to generalize from such examples about the function of meter encounters two major obstacles. First, as I will soon demonstrate, the relationship between a given metrical event and the sense of the line in which it occurs is arbitrary.[15] Second, instances of conspicuous metrical mimesis are rare; indeed, their very rarity gives them a prominence denied to their less flashy metrical siblings.
Moreover, a specific metrical variation can achieve radically different effects in different contexts. Carol M. Sicherman cites the following five lines as a representative sample of the various effects that metrical pauses can generate:
/ x x / x / x / x / x
Un | der my bat | tlements. | ^ Come, | you spirits
(Macbeth 1.5.40)[16]
x / x / x / x / x /
As you | shall give | th’ advice. | ^ By | the fire
(Antony and Cleopatra 1.3.68)
/ / x / x / x / x /
Blow, winds, | and crack | your cheeks! | ^ rage, | ^ blow!
(King Lear 3.2.1)
x / x / x / x / x /
^ Stay! | ^ Speak, | ^ speak, | I charge | thee speak!
(Hamlet 1.1.51)
x / x / x / x / x /
Is goads, | ^ thorns, | ^ net | tles, tails | of wasps
(Winter’s Tale 1.2.329)
Sicherman notes, “Metrical pauses serve endless expressive purposes: a midline shift of mood (Lady Macbeth, Antony), Lear’s summoning of breath for still greater explosions; Horatio’s terror impeding then permitting speech, and Leontes’s clotted deformity of speech as of mind.”[17] The metrical pause does not bear some independent meaning that then interacts with the meaning of a particular line; it serves, rather, as a tool of virtually unlimited flexibility that can adjust to the situation in which it occurs.
George T. Wright offers an analysis of Shakespeare’s sonnet 29 (“When in disgrace with Fortune and men’s eyes”) that provides another example of how identical metrical structures can generate diametrically opposed effects. Wright observes, “Throughout this poem the meter tends to depart from the normal pattern in the odd lines and to return in the even lines, especially in the lines that end the quatrains and the final couplet.”[18] The regularly iambic even lines apparently express opposite emotions. Thus, says Wright, line 4 (“And look upon myself and curse my fate”) seems “expressive of the speaker’s despair,” while the final line (“That then I scorn to change my state with kings”) seems “blessedly regular . . . with a muted contentment” (80-81). In summarizing the effects of metrical structures in sonnet 29, Wright notes that “like most sound effects in poems they reinforce whatever mood or feeling the poet is expressing, but what is remarkable here is the poet’s power to make the same metrical effects convey quite opposite feelings as the poem’s outlook alters” (80). Here again, the meter does not have any meaning in itself that could echo or interact with the sense of the lines. Instead, an auditor presumably assimilates the meter to its context.
When I say that meter has no meaning, I am using the term “meaning” in a particular sense. Like Dan Sperber, “I take the notion of meaning to include the relationship between message and interpretation such as is characteristic of all codes, even when these interpretations do not enter into analytic relationships proper to the semantics of natural language.”[19] Thus saying that meter has no meaning is equivalent to saying that no code (that is, no set of message/interpretation pairs) exists that describes the relationship between metrical events and semantic interpretations. For meter to have meaning in this sense, each metrical event would have to correspond to a fixed set of interpretations, like words in a dictionary. No such correspondence exists.
Most attempts to ascribe meaning to meter are occasional, haphazard, and opportunistic. The critic works backwards, starting with an interpretation of the line and then inventing a way in which the meter could be argued to convey the already identified meaning. Thus the agitated mental state of a character is said to be imitated by some break in metrical form. Russ McDonald cogently identifies and skewers this standard critical gambit: “When the verse gets rocky, then Prospero or Posthumus or Leontes is said to be under stress and probably raving. If stylistic criticism can’t do better than that, then it deserves the neglect to which the critical establishment of the last two decades has cheerfully consigned it.”[20] Such opportunistic observations do not establish a convincing correspondence between meter and meaning nor could they serve as the basis for a coherent theory of metrical mimesis.
When critics do attempt to articulate a grammar or code for meter, such attempts usually come in the form of impressionistic generalizations about how particular metrical variations affect meaning. Wright, for example, abstracting from his analysis of two brief passages from Shakespeare (Twelfth Night 1.1.1-8 and Macbeth 2.3.106-18), offers the following correspondences between metrical variations and expressive effects: “more pyrrhics for speed, softness, lightness; medial trochees for violence anger, abruptness, shock; spondees for intensification and emphasis” (234). Although this list does present a metrical code (albeit a limited and vague one) Wright himself cautions against employing it in that way. He notes that “some of these devices may be used for other purposes as well as for those listed above. The possible combinations are too numerous for any catalogue to exhaust, and individual passages are too subtle for the devices to work in easily predictable ways” (234-35). If the relationships between metrics and semantics are so open-ended and unpredictable, then there is no metrical code, and meter does not, in my sense of the term, have meaning.
Jiri Levy has made what T. V. F. Brogan calls “the most extensive and sophisticated effort to map out the relationships between sound (acoustic structures) and meaning (semantic effects).”[21] Although Levy’s system operates at a high level of generality and abstraction, it too fails to produce even in principle a code for relating sound to sense. Levy presents three principles of acoustic formation: 1) continuity/discontinuity, 2) equivalence/hierarchy, 3) regularity/irregularity.[22] He then says, “Each of the three principles of arrangement on the physical level has its structural correlative on the semantic level” (46). Levy next lists three “nuclear semantic functions”: 1) coherence/incoherence, 2) lack of intensity/intensity, 3) predictability/unpredictability (46-47). This system would seem to offer the basis for a genuine metrical grammar by pairing the acoustic functions with the semantic ones. Levy, however, says, “There are no one-to-one relations either a) between the members of the set of prosodic devices and the principles of acoustic arrangement, or b) between the acoustic principles and the set of nuclear semantic functions” (52). In other words, any prosodic effect can obey any of the principles of acoustic formation, and any of those acoustic principles can correspond, or not, to any of the semantic functions. While Levy’s system may provide a technical vocabulary to describe a given relationship between sound and sense, it does little to establish a grammar of their relationships. Moreover, Levy casually and consistently implies that identifying relationships between sound and sense is the sole duty of prosodists.
Rejecting the notion that some code or grammar links metrical events to meanings may help us accept the idea that literary analysis can perform functions other than interpretation. An exclusive devotion to interpretation can blind us to how particular elements of literary texts operate.[23] The desire to justify every critical observation as an element of an interpretation leads critics to draw particular attention to mimetic metrical events and then to generalize from such examples about the functions of meter at large.[24]
I submit that mimetic metrical events, for all their flashiness, may actually lessen the impact of meter on an audience, that meter achieves its greatest effects when it is not an auxiliary to sense. Meter is an acoustic pattern superimposed on the semantic content of a line. When meter mimes those contents the two systems of order align perfectly. Such a literary achievement is genuine but trifling. As Johnson said of representative meter, “Beauties of this kind are commonly fancied; and when real are technical and nugatory, not to be rejected and not to be solicited.”[25] Mimetic meter may even diminish the vividness and immediacy of the literary experience by drawing attention to the ingenuity of the author. Moreover, such self-conscious coincidence resolves all tension between sound and sense and thus makes our experience blander than it would otherwise be. The metrical pattern’s independent energy is stifled in order to provide further emphasis to an already dominant organization.
Substantively unharnessed metrical patterns, however, retain their potential energy. Unbound to the meanings with which they coexist, they can stimulate the ears and minds of audiences independently. When sound and sense remain independent, the mind perceives the same string of words in two distinct orders simultaneously. Just as polyphonic music gains much of its appeal by maintaining two separate thematic lines, so meter, when it retains its autonomy, expands the experience of the lines it inhabits—the experience rather than the paraphraseable content. Mimetic meter collapses this distinction, thus rendering prosody more prosaic. Prosody unbound to meaning increases the complexity of a literary experience by adding an independent layer to it; mimetic meter flattens out and simplifies such an experience.
Consider again the opening line of Shakespeare’s sonnet 12:
x / x / x / x / x /
When I | do count | the clock | that tells | the time.
As previously noted, the double alliteration on stressed syllables makes the metrical pattern ostentatiously noticeable in this line. Since a critic has no reliable code of semantic equivalences for any given metrical phenomena (for instance, “iambs trot” or “dactyls drag”), he or she must invent some link between them in order to interpret the meter. The critic may notice that the line is discussing clocks and that the line has a steady, regular, iambic beat. The critic’s knowledge about how clocks sound provides a handy excuse for relating the meter and alliteration to the meaning. By harnessing the sound of the line to its sense, the critic can argue that the meter mimes the sound of a clock.
Now consider the following line:
x / x / x / x / x /
We mourn | in black, | why mourn | we not | in blood?
(1 Henry VI 1.1.17)
The acoustic patterns here are quite similar to those in the previous example. The meter is perfectly regular iambic pentameter; there is an alliteration on “black” and “blood” and a conduplicatio of “mourn,” and all four of those key words are stressed syllables. Here, however, I doubt a critic could fabricate any convincing argument that the meter makes the line seem blacker, bloodier, or more mournful. The meter does not mime the sense of the lines. The formal sound patterns in this line do not lend themselves to easy mimetic links, and so a critic cannot form the kind of clear analog between the meter and the meaning that was possible in the first example.
“We mourn in black, why mourn we not in blood?” fails to achieve any clear relationship between its meter and its meaning, but that failure gives the line great evocational power. The metrical pattern here is as clear, strong, and obvious as in the previous example, yet here the meter cannot be persuasively said to communicate anything. A reader of the line can find no precise match between sound and sense that would harness the ostentatious sound patterns. This very absence of meaning, however, can make the line seem pregnant with unharnessed meanings, meanings just beyond our conceptual grasp. Such aural patterning tantalizes us by hinting at potential but undelivered significance.
Both Sonnet 12.1 and 1 Henry VI 1.1.17 exhibit ostentatious aural patterning. The 1 Henry VI line is, in fact, the more ostentatiously patterned of the two. Moreover, the elements of both lines include subtle patterns not easily harnessed into semiotic service. In Sonnet 12.1, for instance, the vowel sounds in “I” and “time” link the beginning and the end of the line. The line also includes patterns of straightforward alliteration (the-that-the) and intricate consonance (the k-kl-tl-t sequence in “count,” “clock,” “tells”, “time”). In “We mourn in black, why mourn we not in blood?”, alliteration stresses the likeness between the two things distinguished by the line. And “blood”—which is a substance, not a color—becomes the color red when contrasted to “black.” And the two “in”s are alike and not. The first says “wearing,” and so, therefore, does the second. But the idea of doing something while all bloody from battle also operates in our experience of the line. The big difference between the two lines is that Sonnet 12.1 presents a point of attachment for a time-honored critical move, one made without notice of any effects except the kind critics are accustomed to distorting for profit.
Once we abandon the attempt to see meter as a redundant expression of content, we may come to a fuller understanding of how verse rhythms actually contribute to Shakespeare’s works. One remarkable feature of Shakespeare’s metrical style is its restless variety. According to Wright, “The principle that Shakespeare mainly follows in his dramatic verse . . . is that virtually every moment must be marked by some significant change in form, emotional temperature, point of view, or other stylistic or dramatic feature” (239). These relentless variations help the meter maintain its active and independent effects on an audience. Although people are very good at perceiving patterns, they are equally adept at screening out patterns that become too familiar, which is why chiming clocks can disturb a visitor’s sleep while going unnoticed by their owners. Slight, continuous variations of a pattern, on the other hand, are very difficult to ignore, which is why the not-quite-regular dripping of a leaky faucet can so easily keep us awake. Unlike the dripping faucet, however, the perpetual discrepancies of Shakespearean rhythm seldom register on a conscious level. Shakespeare maintains the effectiveness of his prosodic effects partially through a variety of continual departures from blank verse.
All of Shakespeare’s plays except Richard II and King John include passages in prose, and some, like Much Ado About Nothing and The Merry Wives of Windsor, contain more prose than verse. Audiences rarely take conscious notice of shifts from verse to prose. People often feel a bit surprised when told, or reminded, that most of the sleepwalking scene in Macbeth is prose. People feel similarly startled when someone tells them that Hamlet’s “What a piece of work is a man” speech is prose not verse. We usually notice that blank verse is verse only when we hear it mis-spoken from the stage. Although we may not consciously notice either verse or prose rhythms, those rhythms do, I believe, register in our experience of Shakespearean language.
Switching between prose and verse can create a subliminal contrast between scenes. For instance, in Much Ado About Nothing 2.3, Don Pedro, Leonato, and Claudio talk about Beatrice’s “secret” love for Benedick while Benedick eavesdrops; in the next scene, 3.1, Hero and Ursula talk about Benedick’s “secret” love for Beatrice while Beatrice eavesdrops. These scenes are variously parallel and dissimilar. One element of dissimilarity exists because 2.3 is spoken in prose and 3.1 in verse.
Shakespeare sometimes provides contrast to blank verse by employing brief passages in other meters. The many songs that grace Shakespeare’s plays serve as metrical foils for the blank verse and, when sung rather than spoken, provide an even starker contrast than the prose sections. Shakespeare also occasionally includes rhymed trimeter or tetrameter passages: In As You Like It, Orlando composes largely trochaic tetrameter couplets praising Rosalind (“From the east to western Inde, / No jewel is like Rosalind” 3.2.88-89), and Touchstone parodies them (“Sweetest nut hath sourest rind, / Such a nut is Rosalind” 3.2.109-10). Many of the prologues and epilogues from the plays provide further unpredictable metrical contrasts to Shakespeare’s standard blank verse.
Certain scenes, often those representing a play within a play, employ a rhymed, highly regular style of iambic pentameter that contrasts with Shakespeare’s looser blank verse idiom. The rhyme and the insistently regular meter give the play-within-the-play in Hamlet (3.2.155-260) a quality of highly wrought artifice and self-conscious dignity, but Shakespeare could employ the same techniques for great comic effect. Consider the production of “Pyramus and Thisbe” that concludes A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Whether lending dignity or obliterating it, such passages provide a clear contrast to the flexible, unrhymed verse that dominates Shakespeare’s plays.
Shakespeare often makes conspicuous use of rhyme to highlight particular moments. As countless analysts have noted, he sometimes employs a couplet to punctuate the end of a speech or scene: “Let me, if not by birth, have lands by wit: / All with me’s meet that I can fashion fit” (King Lear 1.2.183-84), “Come, lead me to the block; bear him my head. / They smile at me who shortly shall be dead” (Richard III 3.4.106-07), “Therefore away, and leave her bravely; go. / The King has done you wrong; but hush, ’tis so” (All’s Well 2.3.299-300). Sometimes Shakespeare employs a pair of couplets to close a scene:
Since we cannot atone you, we shall see
Justice design the victor’s chivalry.
Lord Marshall, command our officers-at-arms
Be ready to direct these home alarms.
(Richard II 1.1.202-05)
The double couplet provides a kind of double cadence to close off a scene. Couplets, whether or not in pairs, provide a feeling of closure to a scene precisely because they contrast with the unrhymed lines preceding them. Needless to say, Shakespeare does not use such concluding couplets systematically and is just as likely as not to end a scene without them.
Rhymed passages occur within scenes as well. Shakespeare has Romeo speak in couplets when he first sees Juliet (Romeo and Juliet 1.5.44-49). This outburst of couplets contrasts sharply with the blank verse that surrounds it. In a radically different dramatic context, Kent addresses a series of couplets to Lear, Cordelia, Goneril and Regan, and the court in his banishment speech (King Lear 1.1.180-87). Contrast with blank verse contributes power to both passages. Moreover, such departures from the norm make the norm itself less monotonous.
Although I doubt that audiences consciously notice such shifts in verse form, I do believe they have an effect on an audience’s experience of the plays. Constant, unobtrusive changes in the metrical environment prevent the audience from falling into complacent, monotonous patterns of response. Every shift in metrical form demands a corresponding shift in response from the audience. Although those shifts are so minute that they usually occur without any conscious notice, they do occur and do demand that we remain engaged and active as we process the language that unfolds for us. It is this delightful and complex engagement that makes the various metrical departures valuable for an audience, not any meanings such departures allegedly convey.
However much departures from blank verse may enhance the plays, Shakespeare’s virtuoso handling of iambic pentameter itself provides the primary source of his metrical distinctiveness. The same principle of perpetual variation that so energizes his large scale metrical departures occurs at the level of individual blank verse speeches and lines. As Wright points out, it is “Shakespeare’s profound . . . understanding of perpetual momentary change” that provides “the central dynamic principle of his verse as well as the spring of its dramatic action” (244). Virtually any page of a Shakespearean play will include numerous variations within the standard iambic line. Shakespeare employs the conventionally permitted variations of iambic pentameter constantly.
In addition to the liberal use of rhythmic substitutions within individual lines (from headless and broken backed lines to feminine endings and metrical pauses), Shakespeare also incorporates a wide range of line lengths. His blank verse contains all kinds of lines, from hexameters (“My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical” Macbeth 1.3.139) and heptameters (“Fleeter than arrows, bullets, wind, thought, swifter things” Love’s Labor’s Lost 5.2.261) to iambic monometers: “Be gone!” (Julius Caesar 1.1.52). The frequency both of variations in line length and of rhythmic substitutions within lines makes Shakespeare’s verse less regular than average blank verse.
Part of the reason for this extreme degree of metrical variation is that dramatic verse tends to have looser, more relaxed rhythms than narrative or lyric verse, as a comparison of, say, Romeo and Juliet with Venus and Adonis or the Sonnets would quickly demonstrate. Yet the verse rhythms of fellow playwrights like Christopher Marlowe or Ben Jonson sound quite smooth and tame when compared with Shakespeare’s. Even for a dramatist, Shakespeare’s verse is distinctive in its irregularity.
It may seem odd to praise Shakespearean verse for its irregularity. After all, one of the commonest faults of bad verse is indifference to rhythm. Yet even though we like the regular rhythms of verse, too much regularity becomes tedious. Another common fault of bad verse, as readers of Barnabe Googe or George Turberville know, is enslavement to rhythm. Shakespeare is unusual in writing verse that feels as rhythmically organized as verse that marches to a genuinely predictable, mappable beat, but that is majestically inconsistent about which of its many superimposed principles of organization it will follow at any given moment.
Subsequent poets have had little luck in creating verse meter like Shakespeare’s, verse that combines all the comforts of regularity with all the energy of irregularity. Consider Wright’s remarks on the subject:
Most of his contemporaries preferred a smoother verse, and Spenserian elegance and Jonsonian plainness soon converged on the main path that the English heroic line would henceforth take, a path plotted and smoothed by such seventeenth century craftsmen as Waller, Denham, and Dryden. Shakespeare has remained for centuries an extraordinarily influential poet, and many of his metrical maneuvers are among the most impressive in literature. But his metrical devices were never adopted as a system by any formidable later poet. (264)
One reason later poets could not adopt Shakespeare’s metrical system is that it is fundamentally unsystematic. This does not mean that Shakespeare’s blank verse lacks pattern but rather that it so multiplies pattern that no single patterning system dominates it.
One distinctive feature of Shakespeare’s metrical style deserves special attention: his tendency to create overlapping structures. Enjambment is the most commonly recognized example of such superimposed organizations:
O brave new world
That has such people in’t!
(The Tempest 5.1.183-84)Look with what courteous action
It waves you to a more removed ground
(Hamlet 1.4.60-61)Revenge the jeering and disdain’d contempt
Of this proud king, who studies day and night
To answer all the debt he owes to you
Even with the bloody payment of your deaths.
(1 Henry IV 1.3.183-86)
An enjambment presents an auditor with two independent yet coexistent patterns. Enjambments participate in the formal rhythm that creates a line and at the same time have a separable, independent syntactic identity that is indifferent to the verse rhythm but in no audible conflict with it. That doubling of pattern requires our minds to do two things at once: hear the iambic pentameter line and hear the syntax of the sentence. Though we may never be consciously aware of it, enjambments ask more of our minds than end-stopped lines do, and such extra, unobtrusive demands keep our minds active. In the metrical environment of a Shakespearean play, the mind stays vigilant and engaged at every moment and this, in turn, guarantees that the experience remains vivid and complex.
Two more examples of Shakespeare’s fondness for creating superimposed structures are crescendoing counterpoint and interlacing lines. A crescendoing counterpoint places a sequence of rising stresses on top of a binary sequence of alternating stresses; interlacing lines create two overlapping blank verse lines out of three consecutive half lines. Both these techniques superimpose one metrical structure on top of another. Like enjambments, they enable the members of an audience to apprehend two different structures simultaneously. The effect is the aural equivalent of two color transparencies laid one on top of the other.
W. K. Wimsatt defines what I call crescendoing counterpoint as “a four syllable stress sequence, two iambs, steadily rising, which is a characteristic tensional variant (but not a violation) in English iambic verse.”[26] Wimsatt cites the opening lines of Shakespeare’s sonnet 30 as an example:
/ x x / x / x / x /
When | to the ses | sions of | sweet si | lent thought
x / x / x / x / x /
I sum | mon up | remem | brance of | things past,
I will indicate the crescendos, that occur in the third and fourth feet of line one and in the fourth and fifth feet of line two, with superscript numbers from the weakest (1) to the strongest (4) level of stress:
1 2 3 4
When | to the ses | sions of | sweet si | lent thought
1 2 3 4
I sum | mon up | remem | brance of | things past,
The “of”s are stressed relative to the syllables they follow, but the substantively important words that follow (“sweet” and “things”) ask more emphasis than the “of”s do and yet are unstressed relative to the syllables that follow them, the first syllable of “silent” and the word “past.” These lines maintain a pattern of iambic alternation, since the final syllable of each foot is stronger than the first, yet the overall rhythmic contour rises steadily.
Crescendoing counterpoints occur frequently in the plays, often serving to amplify the end of line:
1 2 3 4
And breathe | short-wind | ed ac | cents of | new broils
(1 Henry IV 1.1.3)
1 2 3 4
From forth | the fa | tal loins | of these | two foes
(Romeo and Juliet 1.1.5)
1 2 3 4
What dread | ful noise | of wa | ter in | my ears!
1 2 3 4
What sights | of ug | ly death | within | my eyes!
(Richard III 1.4.22-23)
The modulation in rhythm can, however, occur anywhere in the line:
1 2 3 4
Disguise, | I see | thou art | a wick | edness
(Twelfth Night 2.2.27)
1 2 3 4
Foul devil, | for God’s | sake hence | and trou | ble us not
(Richard III 1.2.50)
Wherever it occurs, crescendoing counterpoint plays the abstract pattern of iambic pentameter (non-ictus/ictus ) against the actual levels of stress that occur in a given line. One of the most often remarked properties of iambic pentameter in English is its ability to incorporate audible variations in stress without losing the thread of its abstract pattern. Indeed, Wimsatt and Beardsley have noted that some tension between the stress patterns of the individual line and the abstract pattern of meter is not only inevitable but also desirable: “It is practically impossible to write an English line that will not in some way buck against the meter. Insofar as it does approximate the condition of complete submission, it is most likely a tame line, a weak line.”[27] Shakespeare’s poetry bucks against the meter more than most, and his crescendoing counterpoints provide an extreme degree of metrical tension.
The counterpoint between a metrical pattern and an actual line relies on our established expectations about a given metrical form. Such expectations “are minutely and rapidly fulfilled or thwarted, creating thereby a complex and subtle interplay of cognitive response.”[28] The occurrence of crescendoing counterpoint requires an especially intense engagement. Shakespeare’s use of it keeps our minds constantly, though unobtrusively, occupied and active.
The second type of superimposed metrical structure is one I call interlacing lines. The phenomenon is common in Shakespearean prosody and has received attention from many scholars. E. A. Abbott called it “amphibious section;” Joseph B. Mayor referred to it as “common section;” Otto Jespersen discusses it without inventing a label; and Wright labels the device “squinting lines” (128-37).[29] By any other name, interlacing uses the second of three consecutive short lines as both the completion of the first and the beginning of a second iambic pentameter line. Consider the following example:
ISABELLA. Or else thou diest to-morrow.
CLAUDIO. Thou shalt not do’t.
ISABELLA. O, were it but my life
(Measure for Measure 3.1.102-03)
Isabella’s first line is an iambic trimeter with a feminine ending; Claudio’s line has two iambic feet; and Isabella’s reply is a perfectly regular iambic trimeter. Thus the middle line first forms the end of one blank verse line and simultaneously serves as the beginning of a second.
Interlacing lines occur frequently in Shakespeare but the conventions of typographical setting often conceal them. Usually, as in the example above, an editor will indent to make the hinge line fit visually with either the preceding or subsequent line. Fredson Bowers has suggested that editors should not indent any of the three interlacing lines and thus retain the open-ended nature of this prosodic structure.[30] In the following examples, I follow Bowers’s suggestion, rather than “cleaning up” the lines as most modern editors do, and also highlight the central hinge line in the interlacing structure:
VIOLA. O, you should not rest
Between the elements of air and earth
But you should pity me!
OLIVIA. You might do much.
What is your parentage?
(Twelfth Night 1.5.274-77)ELY. This would drink deep.
CANTERBURY. ‘Twoud drink the cup and all.
ELY. But what prevention?
(Henry V 1.1.20-21)MESSENGER. News, my good lord, from Rome.
ANTONY. Grates me, the sum.
CLEOPATRA. Nay, hear them, Antony.
(Antony and Cleopatra 1.1.18-19)
However editors handle such lines, they cannot possibly do justice visually to the effect of interlacing lines on auditors. An auditor manages to accept the hinge line first as the end of one pentameter and then, almost instantaneously, as the beginning of another. Interlacing lines demand and facilitate an intricate, though presumably unconscious, feat of mental gymnastics.
Such double jointed constructions again keep the audience on its metrical toes. Wright explains that “when the lines are fluently spoken on the stage, hardly any skilled listener to iambic pentameter can be sure where the pentameter begins and ends. . . . In Shakespeare all we can be sure of at such moments is the iambic rhythm. What we mostly hear are half-line iambic phrases fitted variously together. At such moments our very competence in hearing iambic pentameter is enabling us to deconstruct it, helping to render it problematical” (131). Such lines deny the attending mind any chance for laziness. Listening to interlacing lines is a cognitive challenge, albeit a minor and largely unconscious one.
The effect of such Shakespearean metrical variations has little or nothing to do with verbal meaning. As James Wimsatt says, “One may accept that the pattern of sounds cannot exist independently of a meaningful verbal structure without accepting that the sounds of poetry have no value independent of their support of the verbal meaning.”[31] Crescendoing counterpoint and interlacing lines and all of Shakespeare’s other metrical variations rarely if ever convey any useful semantic information to audiences. They do, however, create an exciting cognitive environment, one in which the mind is constantly responding to new stimuli. This environment consists of substantively unharnessed metrical patterns that do not yield coded messages but establish an independent order that has its own set of cognitive demands and rewards.
Notes
[1] All the Fun’s in How You Say a Thing: An Explanation of Meter and Versification (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1999), 114-15.
[2] A Poet’s Guide to Poetry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 87. Kinzie lists “Form Follows Theme” in her glossary of Poetic Terms, defining it as “The idea that semantic and logical meaning is imitated by one of the six elements [of poetic form] or (more typically) by some combination of them,” 414.
[3] The Structure of the Artistic Text, trans. Robert Vroon (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, 1977), 36.
[4] A Theory of Meter (The Hague: Mouton, 1965), 102.
[5] “Linguistics and Poetics,” in Language and Literature, eds. Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), 79, 83.
[6] An Essay on Criticism, 365, 298; all quotes from Pope are from The Poems of Alexander Pope Volume I: Pastoral Poetry and An Essay on Criticism, eds. E. Audra and Aubrey Williams (London: Methuen, 1961).
[7] Lives of the English Poets, Volume III: Swift-Lyttelton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925), 230.
[8] “Rhyme/Reason, Chaucer/Pope, Icon/Symbol” Modern Language Quarterly 55.1 (1994): 24.
[9] “One Relation of Rhyme to Reason: Alexander Pope” Modern Language Quarterly 5 (1944): 323-38.
[10] “Rhyme/Reason, Chaucer/Pope, Icon/Symbol,” 46.
[11] “Rhyme/Reason, Chaucer/Pope, Icon/Symbol,” 26-27.
[12] Pope himself, in another metrically self-referential display, uses an alexandrine to mime slowness: “A need less Alexandrine ends the Song, / That like a wounded Snake, drags its slow length along” (An Essay on Criticism 356-57).
[13] All quotations from Shakespeare come from The Riverside Shakespeare, eds. G. Blakemore Evans, et al, 2d edition (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997); I silently omit the brackets by which the editors signal deviations from their copy texts.
[14] Derek Attridge cites Sonnet 12.1 as an example of representative meter in “The Language of Poetry: Materiality and Meaning,” Essays in Criticism 31.3 (1981): 235.
[15] I use the term “metrical event” as shorthand to refer to anything that happens metrically. The set of metrical events includes: every foot, whether a regular iamb or an accepted variant (like an anapestic substitution); every metrical line, whether short, regular, or long; and metrical pauses (those that fill an otherwise unoccupied position of ictus or non-ictus in the line).
[16] I scan an initially stressed syllable in an iambic line as a stressed monosyllable followed by an anapest (/ | x x /) rather than the more traditional scanning as a trochee and an iamb (/ x | x /). For arguments in favor of scanning this common metrical variation in this way, see Elias Schwartz “Rhythm and ‘Exercises in Abstraction’,” PMLA 77 (1962): 673, and Thomas Cable “Timers, Stressers, and Linguists: Contention and Compromise,” Modern Language Quarterly 33 (1972): 238-39.
[17] “Meter and Meaning in Shakespeare,” Language and Style 15 (1982): 175.
[18] Shakespeare’s Metrical Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 80; subsequent references will appear parenthetically in the text.
[19] Rethinking Symbolism, trans. Alice L. Morton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), 13-14.
[20] “Shakespeare’s Late Line,” paper presented at the Shakespeare Association of America, March 1997, 2.
[21] The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, eds. Alex Preminger and T. V. F. Brogan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 987.
[22] Jiri Levy, “The Meaning of Form and the Forms of Meaning,” in Poetics–Poetyka–Poetika, ed. Roman Jakobson, (The Hague: Mouton & Co.), 46; subsequent references will appear parenthetically in the text.
[23] Stephen Booth points out the underlying bias in favor of “expository coherence” in literary analysis: “Since language obviously exists to convey substance, we are uncomfortable in talking about actions of language that cannot be related to what the poem conveys about its subjects or its author; that is perhaps the reason why poetic elements like verse form, meter, and rhyme are rarely talked about except in instances where they can be said to act as rhetorical auxiliaries to the substance the poem conveys.” Shakespeare’s Sonnets, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 370-71.
[24] Of course, some critics study prosody not to interpret a work but in an attempt to establish authorship or date by comparing elements of prosodic style either to other authors or to other works in a given canon. Here again, prosody becomes a means to some other end. I want to focus on what meter itself does that makes us enjoy it, not on what it communicates to us or what it tells us about an author.
[25] Lives of the English Poets, 232.
[26] “The Rule and the Norm: Halle and Keyser on Chaucer’s Meter,” College English, 31 (1970): 775.
[27] “The Concept of Meter: An Exercise in Abstraction,” PMLA 74 (1959): 111.
[28] The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 243.
[29] E. A. Abbott, A Shakespearean Grammar, (London: Macmillan, 1879), 513-14; Joseph B. Mayor, Chapters on English Metre, 2nd ed. (New York: Greenwood Press, 1901), 168-70; Otto Jespersen, Linguistica: Selected Papers, (Copenhagen: Levin and Munksgaard, 1933), 265-66.
[30] “Establishing Shakespeare’s Text: Notes on Short Lines and the Problem of Verse Division,” Studies in Bibliography 33 (1980): 74-75.
[31] “Rhyme/Reason, Chaucer/Pope, Icon/Symbol,” 24.
For their generosity in reading and commenting on previous drafts of this essay I would like to thank Stephen Booth, Tom Cable, John Rumrich, and the anonymous readers for Texas Studies in Literature and Language.
