This article takes seriously Robert Greene and/or Henry Chettle’s 1592 claim that there is something bombastic about Shakespeare’s blank verse by focusing on its so-called ‘metrical end-stop’. After sketching a survey of the metrical end-stop in early blank verse, it considers the resources with which Shakespeare sought to shift his verse style away from that particular prosodic feature. The article concludes by thinking about the late blank verse of The Winter’s Tale as a metrical rejoinder to Greene, whose Pandosto it versifies—though it is a rejoinder that ultimately proves equivocal.
Shakespeare’s Blank Verse: An Alternative History is a study of both Shakespeare’s versification and its place in the history of early modern blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter). It ranges from the continental precursors of English blank verse in the early sixteenth century through the drama and poetry of Shakespeare’s contemporaries to the editing of blank verse in the eighteenth century and beyond. Alternative in its argumentation as well as its arguments, Shakespeare’s Blank Verse tries out fresh ways of thinking about meter—by shunning doctrinaire, almost mathematical ways of apprehending a writer’s versification, and by reconnecting meter to the fundamental literary, dramatic, and social questions that animate Shakespeare’s drama.
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