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When referring to this thesis and any accompanying data, full bibliographic details must be given, e.g. Thesis: Author (Year of Submission) "Full thesis title", University of Southampton, name of the University Faculty or School or Department, PhD Thesis, pagination. 2 University of Southampton Faculty of Humanities Shakespeare’s Defence of Verse Robert Stagg 1 vol. Doctor of Philosophy in English September 2017 3 UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHAMPTON ABSTRACT FACULTY OF HUMANITIES English Doctor of Philosophy SHAKESPEARE’S DEFENCE OF VERSE by Robert Stagg ‘I heard a fair lady sigh: “I wish someone would write a good treatise on prosody”’ (Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading (1934))1 This thesis is about Shakespeare’s prosody, and it tries to be good. The first section is composed of four chapters, each of which examines one of the four metrical traditions available to early modern writers (quantitative prosody in Chapter 1, rhyming verse in Chapter 2, syllabic prosody in Chapter 3 and accentual prosody in Chapter 4) and what Shakespeare may have brought or wrought from it. It evokes how many of the things we have valued in Shakespeare – the sophistication of onstage action (Chapter 1), the wild sequences of language (Chapter 2), the verisimilar worlds of the plays (Chapter 3), the unusually ‘deep’ characters (Chapter 4) – have origins in his handling of metre and rhythm. The second part of the thesis considers how Shakespeare uneasily binds these four prosodic inheritances, and what they gave him, into a new blank verse (Chapter 5) which frequently risks something like free verse (Chapter 6). In doing all of this, it hopes to uncover Shakespeare’s ‘defence of verse’ – the treatise he never wrote. 1 Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading (London: Faber and Faber, 1961 [1934]), p.197. 4 Contents: Acknowledgments p.5. Introduction pp.6-12. Part One: - Chapter 1: Action pp.13-43. - Chapter 2: Sequence pp.44-65. - Chapter 3: World pp.66-90. - Chapter 4: Character pp.91-103. Part Two: - Chapter 5: Blanks pp.104-123. - Chapter 6: Not Blanks pp.124-151. Bibliography pp.152-187. Illustrations: Fig. 1: ‘I Came For The Dick Jokes’, from www.imgarcade.com. Fig. 2: From George Puttenham, The Art of English Poesie (London: Richard Field, S.R. 1588). Note on Conventions: Early modern texts have been modernised, except where otherwise stated. Effects of prosodic stress (or quantity) are communicated by use of bold font; other kinds of emphasis by use of italic font. 5 Academic Thesis: Declaration Of Authorship I, Robert Stagg, declare that this thesis and the work presented in it are my own and has been generated by me as the result of my own original research. SHAKESPEARE’S DEFENCE OF VERSE I confirm that: 1. This work was done wholly or mainly while in candidature for a research degree at this University; 2. Where any part of this thesis has previously been submitted for a degree or any other qualification at this University or any other institution, this has been clearly stated; 3. Where I have consulted the published work of others, this is always clearly attributed; 4. Where I have quoted from the work of others, the source is always given. With the exception of such quotations, this thesis is entirely my own work; 5. I have acknowledged all main sources of help; 6. Where the thesis is based on work done by myself jointly with others, I have made clear exactly what was done by others and what I have contributed myself; 7. Either none of this work has been published before submission, or parts of this work have been published as: SEE ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Signed: ROBERT STAGG Date: 19/09/2017 6 Acknowledgments: I am thankful to the following people for their direct contributions to this thesis (in alphabetical order of surname): Gavin Alexander, Ros Ballaster, Joanna Beaufoy, Matthew Bevis, Nicholas Bland, John Creaser, Laura Davies, Judi Dench, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, Derek Dunne, Alice Eardley, Paul Edmondson, Eric Griffiths, Andrew Hadfield, Michael Hurley, Freya Johnston, Andy Kesson, Laurie Maguire, Will May, the late and much-missed Russ McDonald, Ian McKellen, Lucy Munro, Anthony Ossa-Richardson, Diane Purkiss, Elizabeth Scott- Baumann, the members of ‘Shakesposium’, Paul Skinner, Peter Swaab, Ann Thompson, Will Tosh, Stephen Watkins, Stanley Wells, George T. Wright; and above all, to my principal supervisor Ros King. I am grateful to staff at the following institutions, where this thesis has been written or worked upon: the Bodleian Libraries, Oxford; the British Library and the British Museum, London; Gladstone’s Library, Hawarden; the New York Public Library, New York City; and the Shakespeare Centre, Stratford-upon-Avon. I am also grateful to the following institutions for financially supporting this thesis and related research (again, in alphabetical order): the Arts and Humanities Research Council, Gladstone’s Library, the New York Public Library, the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, the Society for Renaissance Studies, St Anne’s College, Oxford, and (last but most) the Wolfson Foundation, London for their award of a Wolfson Scholarship in the Humanities. Thanks are due to conference audiences, organisers and interlocutors at the following institutions: Chawton House, the University of Fribourg, the University of Lancaster, the University of London (Birkbeck, KCL, UCL), the University of Oxford, the University of Roehampton, The Shakespeare Institute, the University of Southampton, St Anne’s College, Oxford, and the University of York. I also thank the editors of the journals, book collections and periodicals that have published or accepted work related to this thesis, thereby contributing to its final form: Shakespeare Survey, Literature Compass, Renaissance Studies, the Times Literary Supplement, Around the Globe, Drama and Pedagogy in Medieval and Early Modern England, Reading the Road in Shakespeare’s Britain and The Edinburgh Companion to Literature and Music. I am grateful to the University of Oxford for awarding me the Charles Oldham Shakespeare Prize for earlier, formative work on Shakespeare’s prosody. Finally, to my parents – whom I have not acknowledged enough. This thesis is dedicated to them. 7 Introduction Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poetry (1595) is not a defence of verse. While he acknowledges that ‘the greatest part of poets have apparelled their poetical inventions in that numbrous kind of writing which is called verse’, Sidney regards it as an ‘ornament and no cause to poetry, since there have been many excellent poets that never versified, and now swarm many versifiers that need never answer to the name of poets’.2 Poetry is instead, for Sidney, an Aristotelian ‘imitation’ unbound by form or subject – so that Xenophon’s Cyropaedia (c.370BC) can be ‘an absolute heroical poem’ even though Xenophon ‘wrote in prose’.3 Like Sidney, the ‘freely-ranging poet’ is a traveller, taking with him ‘a great passport of poetry’ – a passport that can admit him into the prose realms of the ‘philosopher’ and ‘historiographer’.4 The poet is ‘lifted up with the vigour of his own invention’, disdaining ‘to be tied’ to any ‘subjection’, whereas the ‘versifier’ – a word which assumes a pejorative colour in the early sixteenth century (OED 2) – risks being cramped or circumscribed by his metres.5 For Sidney, this distinction between poetry and verse was something of a ‘grammarians[’] dispute’.6 Maybe it still seems so today. Yet it has informed our more modern sense of there being a prose-poetry or a poetic prose, and has formed part of the rationale for nineteenth and twentieth century free verse. The distinction between poetry and verse is older than Sidney, though not as old as he thought. It came to him from Italy. In the treatise On True Poetry (1555) Giovanni Pietro Capriano had divided poeti perfetti from versificatori bassi and metrici semplicissimi, and Lodovico Castelvetro’s commentary upon Aristotle (1570) judged that ‘the Electra of Sophocles, put into prose, would remain poetry, not change into history’.7 Sixteenth-century Italian Platonists objected to this Aristotelian distinction, arguing that ‘verse is so proper and essential to poetry that it is necessary for it, and that poetry can neither be made nor be without verse’ – in short, that ‘verse makes poetry’.8 2 Philip Sidney, The Defence of Poesy in Sir Philip Sidney: The Major Works, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p.218. 3 Ibid. 4 Sidney, Defence, pp.216, 214. 5 Sidney, Defence, pp.216, 218. 6 Sidney, Defence, p.218. 7 Giovanni Pietro Capriano, Della Vera Poetica (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1968), p.14; Lodovico Castelvetro, Poetica d’Aristotele Vulgarizzata E Sposta, 2 vols., ed. Werther Romani (Rome: Laterza, 1978), vol. 1, p.254. Translations by Timothy Steele in Missing Measures: Modern Poetry and the Revolt Against Meter (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1990), pp.139, 141. 8 Francesco Patrizi da Cherso, Della Poetica (1586), ed. Danilo Aguzzi Barbagli (Florence: Istituto Nazionale di Studi Sul Rinascimento, 1969), p.113; Lorenzo Parigiuolo, Inquiry into Poetry (1586), qtd. in Bernard Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance, 2 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), vol. 1, p.620.