Marina Tarlinskaja. Shakespeare and the Versification of English Drama, 1561-1642
2015; University of Arkansas Press; Volume: 49; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2374-6629
Autores Tópico(s)Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism
ResumoMarina Tarlinskaja. Shakespeare and the Versification of English Drama, 1561-1642. Farnham, Surrey and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014. xii + 411 pp. ISBN 9781472430281. / We would, declares Claudius in Shakespeare's Hamlet. An iambic pentameter here completes one line and begins another. meter serves as a guide to the sense and hence to correct delivery of this succession of monosyllables. first do is to be stressed, the second not, while the second would is to be stressed, the first not; should and when also receive stress. the initial two words that begin the sentence, after a midline stop, either That or we might reasonably be allowed more stress than the other, giving Claudius's maxim--urging that ought to act while have the will to so--a trochaic beginning or keeping it iambic throughout. Few modern readers take any interest in such matters. Most recently published academic articles on Shakespeare be unaffected were his plays entirely in prose. London's Telegraph reported (October 20, 2013) that Some of the biggest stars of stage and screen confess ignorance about blank verse. Zoe Wanamaker, who has performed in dozens of the bard's plays, said 'I don't know really what iambic pentameter is. Somebody has to tell me.' Somebody ought to. gist of the matter is easily enough communicated. template, norm, or paradigm of a blank verse, or unrhymed iambic pentameter, line is a succession of five pairs of syllables, of which the second is more stressed than the first: ti-TUM ti-TUM ti-TUM ti-TUM ti-TUM; or, to cite a line from Peter Reading's poem C, ha | Ha ha | Ha ha | Ha ha | Ha ha. Shakespeare comes close to such simple conformity to the abstract scheme in Of hand, of foot, of lip, of eye, of brow in Sonnet 106. But The seas incarnadine in Macbeth also conforms, once the second i of multitudinous has been slurred as non-syllabic: The MULtiTUD(i)nous SEAS inCARnaDINE history of early modern English dramatic blank verse is of increasing experimentation in the fitting of words, phrases, and sentences to the theoretical, normative, underlying pattern. Playwrights gradually made more use of so-called feminine or double endings--in which an additional unstressed syllable ends the line--some even frequently employing monosyllables for the purpose. They crammed extra unstressed syllables within lines, varied the position and weight of internal pauses, carried the sense over from one line to the next without any syntactical halt, incorporated more trochaic feet, especially at the beginnings of lines or after a heavy midline caesura, and started to split lines between two or more speakers. counts of such features in the Shakespeare canon that were made by nineteenth-and early twentieth-century scholars, with varying degrees of accuracy and sophistication, were summarized by E. K. Chambers in his monumental William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems (1930). Marina Tarlinskaja's aim is to chart these and other developments by means of her own Russian Formalist approach, associated with such great scholars as Mikhail Gasparov, and in doing so to place Shakespeare within the wider context indicated by her title--the evolving versification of English drama, 1561-1642. In 1562, Gorboduc by Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville was performed; in 1642, the theatres were closed by Act of Parliament. Playwrights responded to a changing rhythmical Zeitgeist in individual ways, and the diverse methods by which they achieved variety while retaining a dominant iambic pulse may serve to characterize them as surely as their vocabulary, syntax, imagery, use of contracted and colloquial forms, and so on. details of a playwright's or poet's prosody are essential elements of his or her style. So among Tarlinskaja's most significant findings are those concerned with attribution and chronology. …
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