Julius Caeser

Julius Caesar: Versification and Diction

From Julius Caesar. Ed. Henry Norman Hudson. New York: Ginn and Co., 1908.

BLANK VERSE

The characteristics of Shakespeares blank pen -- the rhymeless, iambic five-stress (decasyllabic) versify, or iambic pentameter, introduced into England by Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, intimately 1540 -- and its proportion to rhyme and to prose have been much used in recent years to determine the chronological order of the plays and the ontogeny of the poets art. In blank verse as used by Shakespeare we have really an epitome of the development of the measure in connection with the English drama. In his early plays the blank verse is often similar to that of Gorboduc, the first English tragedy. The tendency is to hold fast to the syllable-counting principle, to make the direct contrast the unit, the sentence and phrase coinciding with the phone line (end-stopped verse), and to use five perfect iambic feet to the line.



In plays of the midpoint period, such as The Merchant of Venice and As You Like It, pen between 1596 and 1600, the blank verse is more like that of shaver and Marlowe, with less monotonous regularity in the structure and an increase tendency to carry on the sense from one line to another without a syntactical or rhetorical break-dance at the end of the line (run-on verse, enjambement). Redundant syllables now break and the melody is richer and fuller. In Shakespeares later plays the blank verse breaks extraneous from all bondage to formal line limits, and the organic persistence is found in a succession of great deliberate periods.

The verse of Julius Cæsar is less monotonously regular than that of the earlier plays; it is more flexible and varied, more musical and sonorous, but it lacks the superb movement of the verse in Othello, The Winters Tale, and The Tempest. End-stopped, normally regular iambic pentameter lines often occur (as, for instance, I, i, 37, 41, 44, 62, 76), but everywhere are variations and deviations from the norm, and...If you pauperization to get a full essay, order it on our website: Ordercustompaper.com



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