Shakespeare's Blank Verse An Alternative History

Shakespeare's Blank Verse: An Alternative History is a study both of Shakespeare's versification and of 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 methods of apprehending a writer's versification, and by reconnecting meter to the fundamental literary, dramatic, historical, and social questions that animate Shakespeare's drama.

1 - Blank Verse
2 - Not Blank Verse
3 - Rhyme
4 - Alternative histories

Robert Stagg is a Leverhulme Research Fellow at the Shakespeare Institute, Stratford-upon-Avon, and an Associate Senior Member of St Anne's College, Oxford. He also serves as a Fourth Series Fellow on the Advisory and Editorial Board of the Arden Shakespeare. His work has appeared in The Review of English Studies, Shakespeare Survey, Shakespeare, Studies in Philology, and Essays in Criticism, as well as several edited collections.