The Shakespeare-Expositor. Thomas Keightley

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СКАЧАТЬ iii. 5.

      Mr. Collier regards as a good verse,

      To yond generation you shall find.—M. for M. iv. 3.

      "Doth comfort thee in thy sleep. Live and flourish" is the usual reading in Rich. III. v. 5; mine is at least more euphonious.

      It has never to my knowledge been sufficiently noticed that Shakespeare makes occasional use of the seven-foot verse of Golding's Ovid and Phaer's Virgil, works in which it is evident he was extremely well-read. Such are the following lines:—

      For often have you writ to her, and she in modesty,

      Or else for want of idle time, could not again reply;

      Or fearing else some messenger, that might her mind discover,

      Herself hath taught her love himself to write unto her lover.—Two Gent. ii. 1.

      A cherry-lip, a bonny eye, a passing-pleasing tongue.

      Rich. III. i. 1.

      

      My visor is Philemon's roof; within the house is Jove.—

      Why then your visor should be thatch'd.—

      Speak low, if you speak love.—Much Ado, ii. 1.

      Convey the wise it call: steal! foh! a fico for the phrase!—

      Well, sirs, I am almost out at heels.—

      Why, then, let kibes ensue.—Mer. Wives, i. 3.

      As many devils entertain, and To her, boy! say I.—Ib.

      Thou art the Mars of malcontents. I follow thee, troop on.

      Ib.

      Die men like dogs; give crowns like pins; have we not Hiren here?—2 Hen. IV. ii. 4.

      Rouse up Revenge from ebon den, with fell Alecto's snake.

      Ib. v. 5.

      A damned death! Let gallows gape for dogs, let man go free.—Hen. V. iii. 6.

      These last six, we may see, all belong to Ancient Pistol. We possibly might add:

      He's ta'en, and, hark! they shout for joy.—

      Come down, behold no more.—Jul. Cæs. v. 3.

      17.

      I will now make a few general observations on the dramatic verse of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. In the first place, as observed above, we may lay it down as a general rule that their verse—I may perhaps include even that of Marston—is never rugged or inharmonious, but that when it appears to be so it is owing to the copyist or the printer, or to the fact of the manuscript having been damaged, and not unfrequently to want of skill in the reader.

      An apparent cause of imperfection in lines is the reader's ignorance of the poet's mode of pronunciation. Thus it was then the custom—one not quite lost yet—in prose as well as in verse, if two words came together, one ending, the other beginning, with an accented syllable to throw back the former accent: hence Shakespeare said, for example, "the dívine Desdemona." If critics kept this fact in mind, they would not reject Tieck's excellent emendation of "the précise Angelo" for "the prenzic Angelo" in Measure for Measure, on account of the accent, when in the very same play we have "a cómplete bosom," i. 4; "O just, but sévere law!" ii. 2; "Will bélieve this," ib.; "Our cómpell'd sins," ib. 4, &c.; we have actually "précise villains," ii. 1. How would they read

      Might córrupt minds procure knaves as corrupt

      (Hen. VIII. v. 1)?

      In fine, it must be remembered that ion, ien, and other double vowels were pronounced dissyllabically, as oceän, &c.

      Again, neither editors nor readers are in general aware that poets like Shakespeare, who were born in those parts of England where the r at the end of words or syllables has the light sound peculiar to the English language, frequently pronounce as dissyllables those monosyllables, such as fire, hour, more, where, &c., ending in r after a long vowel or diphthong, as in

      I know a bank, where the wild thyme blows.—M. N. D. ii. 1.

      Here "where" is to be pronounced nearly wheaa; for so the English really do pronounce it, though they may fancy such not to be the case. Malone, as being an Irishman, seems to have been the first to notice it. Of these monosyllables there are upwards of thirty in Shakespeare, and as many in Fletcher; while in the learned Jonson we only meet with fire, hour, our, your, wear. In my Edition, and in this work, I have marked them with a diæresis, as whëre, heär, &c. It is rather remarkable that it is almost solely to his higher characters, such as Hamlet and Coriolanus, that Shakespeare gives this pronunciation. We also find this dissyllabic pronunciation in such words as born, morn, horn, &c.

      As in French poetry the e muet in words forms a distinct syllable, ennemi, for example, being read as a trisyllable; so we find angry, entrance, children, mistress (often written misteris), country, witness, juggler, wondrous, &c., forming three, remembrance four syllables. Captain was sometimes capitain, as in French. Many of these cases, we may observe, are mere solutions of contractions, angry, for example, being simply angery contracted.

       18.

      In opposition to the commonly received theory, I will venture to lay it down as a fixed principle that the dramatic poets rarely, if ever, used short lines, except in speeches of a single line, or in the first or the last line of a speech. This will be apparent to any one who examines the pages of Jonson and Massinger, who printed their plays themselves, or those plays of Shakespeare, Fletcher, and others which are the most correctly printed. Wherever a line of less than five feet occurs, it will be found to have been produced by omission of words or by malarrangement of the text. In plays such as Timon, Troilus and Cressida, or Fletcher's Sea Voyage, of which the original copy was in bad condition, lines of this kind are of course most numerous. I may here observe that in this last-named play, the metre of which Mr. Dyce has pronounced to be "incurably defective," I have, by simple rearrangement of the text, rendered it as correct as in any other of Fletcher's plays.

      Even in this also Shakespeare took liberties in which his brethren did not venture to indulge. He began and ended not only speeches, but paragraphs of speeches, with short lines. Nay, he even made the concluding short line of one paragraph and the incipient short line of the next form a single line, thus—

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