Table of Contents
Preface
1 The Iambic Pentameter Line
2 Chaucer and Wyatt: Early Expressive Pentameters
3 The Sixteenth-Century Line: Pattern and Variation
4 Flexibility and Ease in Four Older Poets
5 An Art of Small Differences: Shakespeare's Sonnets
6 The Verse of Shakespeare's Theater
7 Prose and Other Diversions
8 Short and Shared Lines
9 Long Lines
1O Shakespeare's Syllabic Ambiguity: More Than Meets the Ear
II Lines with Extra Syllables
12 Lines with Omitted Syllables
13 Trochees
14 The Play of Phrase and Line
15 Shakespeare's Metrical Technique in Dramatic Passages
I6 What Else Shakespeare's Meter Reveals
I7 Some Metrically Expressive Features in Donne and Milton
I8 Conclusion: Verse as Speech, Theater, Text, Tradition, Illusion
Appendix A: Percentage Distribution of Prose
in Shakespeare's Plays
Appendix B: Main Types of Deviant Lines
in Shakespeare's Plays
Appendix C: Short and Shared Lines
Notes
Main Works Cited or Consulted
Index
