Book of the Æneid by the unfortunate Lord Surrey, who was executed in 1547; it was first employed in dramatic writing by Thomas Sackville (afterwards Lord Buckhurst and Earl of Dorset) in his Gorboduc (or Ferrez and Porrex), produced in 1561; and, although not much used in poetical compositions of any other kind, either translated or original, till Milton brought it into reputation by his Paradise Lost in the latter part of the following century, it had come to be the established or customary verse for both tragedy and comedy before Shakespeare began to write for the stage. Our only legitimate English Blank verse is that commonly called the Heroic, consisting normally in a succession of five feet of two syllables each, with the pressure of the voice, or accent, on the latter of the two, or, in other words, on the second, fourth, sixth, eighth, and tenth syllables of each line. After the tenth syllable, an unaccented syllable, or even two, may be added without any prosodical effect. The rhythm is completed with the tenth syllable, and what follows is only as it were a slight reverberation or echo. But this general statement is subject to certain important modifications : 1. In any of the feet an accent on the first syllable may be substituted for one on the second, providing it be not done in two adjoining feet. This transference of the accent is more unusual in certain of the feet than in others—most of all in the fifth, next to that in the second ;—but is not in any foot a violation of the law of the verse, or what is properly to be called a licence. 2. It is a universal law of English verse, that any D syllable whatever, falling in the place of the accent either immediately before or immediately after a foot of which one of the syllables is truly accented, will be accounted to be accented for the purposes of the verse. The-my of enemy, for instance, or the in- of intercept, is always so accounted in heroic verse, in virtue of the true accent upon en- and upon -cept; but in dactylic or anapæstic verse, these syllables, although pronounced precisely in the same manner, are always held to be unaccented, the law of those kinds of verse not requiring another accent within the distance at which the -my stands removed from the en-, or the in- from the -cept. This, in so far as regards the heroic line, is equivalent to saying that every alternate foot may be without a really accented syllable in it at all. Or the line might be defined as consisting, not of five feet of two syllables each, with one of them accented, but of two and a half feet, each of four syllables, with at least one of the four accented; the half foot, which need not have an accent, occurring sometimes in the middle of the line, sometimes at the end. Practically, the effect is, that, anywhere in the line, except only at the beginning, we may have a sequence of three syllables (none of them being superfluous) without any accent; and that there is no word in the language (such as Horace was plagued with in Latin) quod versu dicere non est,-none, whether proper name or whatever else, which the verse does not readily admit. 3. It is by no means necessary (though it is commonly stated to be so) that the syllables alternating with the accented ones should be unaccented. Any or all of them may be accented also. 4. Further, in any of the places which may be occupied by an unaccented syllable it is scarcely an irregularity to introduce two or even more such unaccented syllables. The effect may be compared to the prolongation or dispersion of a note in music by what is called a shake. Of course, such a construction of verse is to be resorted to sparingly and only upon special grounds or occasions ; employed habitually, or very frequently, it crowds and cumbers the rhythm, and gives it a quivering and feeble character. But it can nowhere be said to be illegitimate, although, in ordinary circumstances, it may have a less agreeable effect in some places of the line than in others. These four modifications of its normal structure are what, along with the artistic distribution of the pauses and cadences, principally give its variety, freedom, and life to our Heroic verse. They are what the intermixture of dactyls and spondees is to the Greek or Latin Hexameter. They are none of them of the nature of what is properly denominated a poetic licence, which is not a modification but a violation of the rule, permissible only upon rare occasions, and altogether anarchical and destructive when too frequently committed. The first three of our four modifications are taken advantage of habitually and incessantly by every writer of verse in the language ; and the fourth, to a greater or less extent, at least by nearly all our blank verse poets. So much cannot be said for another form of verse (if it is to be so called) which has also been supposed to be found in Shakespeare; that, namely, in which a line, evidently perfect both at the beginning and the end, wants a syllable in the middle. Such, for in stance, is the well-known line in Measure for Measure, iï. 2, as it stands in the First Folio,— “ Than the soft myrtle ; But man, proud man.” This, it will be observed, is different from a merely truncated line of nine syllables, or one where the defect consists in the want, of either the first or the last syllable; the defect of the present line would not be cured by any addition to either the beginning or the end; the syllable that is wanting is in the middle. The line is not a hemistich (by which we mean any portion of a verse perfect so far as it extends, whether it be the commencing or concluding portion), but something which professes to be a complete verse. It may be described as being exactly the opposite of the kind of verse arising under the last of the four modifying principles or canons stated above; as that is characterized by superfluity of syllabication elsewhere than in the first or last foot, so this is by syllabic deficiency similarly defined. The existing text of the Plays presents us with a considerable number of verses of this description. Is the text in all such cases to be accounted corrupt? I confess myself strongly inclined to think that it probably is. The only other solution of the difficulty that has been offered is, that we have a substitute for the omitted syllable in a pause by which the reading of the line is to be broken. This notion appears to have received the sanction of Coleridge. But I cannot think that he had fully considered the matter. It is certain that in no verse of Coleridge's own does any mere pause ever perform the function which would thus be assigned to it. Nor is any such principle recognized in any other English verse, modern or ancient, of which we have a text that can be absolutely relied upon. It is needless to observe that both in Shakespeare and in all our other writers of verse we have abundance of lines broken by pauses of all lengths without any such effect being thereby produced as is here assumed. If the pause be really equivalent to a syllable, how happens it that it is not so in every case ? But that it should be so in any case is a doctrine to which I should have the greatest difficulty in reconciling myself. How is it possible by any length of pause to bring anything like rhythm out of the above quoted words, “Than the soft myrtle. But man, proud man?” If this be verse, there is nothing that may not be so designated. What mainly gives its character to the English Heroic line is its being poised upon the tenth syllable. It is by this, as well as by the number of feet, that its rhythm or musical flow is distinguished, for instance, from that of what is called the Alexandrine, or line of twelve syllables, the characteristic of which is that the pressure is the sixth and the twelfth. Without this twelve syllables will no more make an Alexandrine than they will a common Heroic line. There are in fact many Heroic lines consisting of twelve syllables, but still, nevertheless, resting upon the tenth. It follows that generally in this kind of verse the tenth syllable will be strongly accented. That is the normal form of the line. When there is rhyme, the consonance is always in the tenth syllable. As, however, in dancing (which is a kind of visible verse,-the poetry of motion, as it has been called), or in archi |
