Shakespeare and the Arts of Language by McDonald Russ;

Author:McDonald, Russ; [McDonald, Russ;]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780198711711
Publisher: OxfordUP
Published: 2012-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

This last passage is especially useful in a discussion of prosody for at least two reasons. First, its metrical structure contrasts pointedly with the political speech considered at the beginning of this chapter. Lineal equivalence has been deliberately avoided; lines have been broken into two or more parts; ellipsis packs the line with sound; feminine endings are numerous. Second, it exemplifies the conversational, non-rhetorical, irregular verse form which Shakespeare favoured at the end of his career. The emotion is passionate, the King is issuing a command and a rebuke to an overweening prelate, and the speech manages to generate a distinctive kind of poetic force. But it is not poetic in the same way that it would have been had Shakespeare dramatized this conflict in the early 1590s.

In the early verse, strong feeling is represented by a succession of sweeping pentameter lines that come to full and powerful stops, and the sound is usually vigorous and dynamic. Shakespeare is able to educe different moods and effects from this verse style, but the rhythmic baseline exerts a constant and potentially uniform influence. At the end of the career, the poet has so substantially enlarged his means of achieving rhetorical power, as the example from Henry VIII abundantly reveals, that the range of metrical devices gives the actor much greater flexibility. The rhythmic complexity of Henry’s answer to his own rhetorical question about precedent—‘I believe not any’, coming as it does at the end of the line—suggests a kind of audacity and slyness deriving from Shakespeare’s years of experience at filling poetic containers with dramatic feeling.

The forceful challenge to the metrical foundation, which effectively diminishes the regularity and lineal equivalence heard in the earlier plays, creates a kind of paradox in relation to the other theatrical characteristics of the romances and late collaborations. The speech rhythms have become more nearly ‘natural’ or conversational, and yet the plays themselves, both the nature of the stories chosen and the dramatic presentation of them, have become more artificial and ‘unrealistic’. Shakespeare has moved, in other words, from the representational style of the tragedies to what is known as the presentational style of the romances. The late plays are exceptionally self-conscious, insisting on their artificiality and deriving much of their dramatic power from the playwright’s exploitation of their connection with myth and fairy tale. These plays seem, in other words, deliberately unreal, much less naturalistic than a play like King Lear. How is it, then, that the poetic language seems less artificial, more ‘natural’ than in the earlier works? The answer, at least in part, is that only in his use of rhythms does the poet seek to conceal evidence of artifice.

Other poetic features rush forward to stand in for the apparently ‘unpoetic’, irregular beat, suggesting a writer eager to advertise his poetic ingenuity. Extravagant alliteration, other forms of consonance and assonance, various forms of lexical and phrasal repetition help to pull words together, creating a poetic coherence that ameliorates the loss of iambic consistency.

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