Shakespeare's Blank Verse

Abstract

Abstract 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.