Shakespeare William - Shakespeare and the Versification of English Drama, 1561-1642

I do not have a long list of academic advisers and readers to thank; but those who did share with me their ideas and experience have been extremely important in my scholarly life and in the completion of this book. The first to thank is Academician Viktor Maksimovich Zhirmunsky, one of the few lions of the so-called Russian Formalists of the 1920s still living in 1965 when I was a doctoral student. He resided in Leningrad (St. Petersburg) but, though old, he still worked at the Institute of General Linguistics and was on the board of several academic journals. When I wrote my first article and (ignorance is bold!) sent it to our central linguistic journal of the Academy of Sciences, there was really nobody to review it (at that time there were no specialists in English versification, either in Russia, or elsewhere), so Zhirmunsky was asked to look at it. He was a Renaissance man, a specialist in Russian, English, German, and Turkic poetries; he had written books on Goethe and Byron, as well as the now classical Introduction to Metrics , 1925, which has been translated into English. He said to the editors, publish, and expressed a desire to see the young author. From time to time he came to Moscow, so I went to see him. He was an old man, with liver spots on his hands and on his face The meeting was memorable. Among other things, he advised me to look into the versification of English drama. I am following his advice in this book.

The next person to thank is Mikhail Leonovich Gasparov, the greatest scholar of my generation. He was my childhood buddy, my adviser, and intimate friend throughout my adult life. If anyone has been my mentor, it was M. L. Gasparov. This book is dedicated to his memory.

I am very grateful to my Western colleagues, advisers, and friends: James Bailey, Ward Elliott, Richard Proudfoot, and Brian Vickers. I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Douglas Bruster and particularly MacDonald P. Jackson for their reading and editing of the manuscript and for their invaluable advice.

I would like to express my thanks to Ashgate for their eagerness to publish the book, to the Acquisition Editor Erika Gaffney, and the Senior Editor Seth F. Hibbert for his patience in formatting the text, particularly the tables.

I want to thank my husband, Robert C. Milnor, for putting up with me during all these years of hard work; I was not the conventional wife that he had probably expected. I am also grateful for his drawing the figures and formatting the tables. Bob, I love you!

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; Shakespeares 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 characters evolution (Tarlinskaja 1987a, 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 Shakespeares 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 1530s40s 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 poets 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. 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.