Shakespeare and the Versification of English Drama, 1561–1642 by Marina Tarlinskaja (review)

Not content, apparently, with her very useful and well-documented earlier work on Shakespeare’s Verse: Iambic Pentameter and the Poet’s Idiosyncrasies (1987), Marina Tarlinskaja has spent much of the intervening years working on Shakespeare’s plays in the context of English versification for the period beginning with the first users of iambic pentameter verse in mainly English Renaissance drama up to the end of the Caroline period. Tarlinskaja describes her approach in her new book as follows: “The main aim of this book was to find out how English Renaissance playwrights used versification: why they started to compose plays in iambic pentameter, what did it add to the contents of the plays, how this verse form evolved, who were Shakespeare’s predecessors, contemporaries, and followers” (257). She is most successful in achieving her last two goals, having amassed an abundance of carefully defined analyses of iambic pentameter. She has collected them in two appendices amounting to over one hundred pages.

Tarlinskaja proclaims that she is “a linguist,” “an heir to the so-called Russian school of verse study” (11), not a literary critic, though many of her perceptions may count as much. For her, the basic iambic pentameter line has ten syllables, stressed WSWSWSWSWS, and also the variations in the lines she analyzes, such as stress patterns, run-on lines, and line endings. But strong syntactic breaks in lines, rhythmical italics, pleonastic uses of the verb do, syllabic -ed and -eth, disyllabic -ion, grammatical inversions, and what she calls proclitic and enclitic microphrases are also extremely important. Shakespeareans may disagree with some of her scansions, but at least they will see clearly how she came by them. Obviously, she says, “No principle of stressing can be applied mechanically; doubts and choices are inevitable” (15). Since no program is available, she did all her analyses by hand, an enormous job, for which we must be grateful, especially in view of the fact that she has recorded and explained all of her specific examples.

Tarlinskaja’s study offers many useful contributions, including not only better understanding of the versification of many authors both early and late but also her findings relating to attributions. In the introduction to her chapter on “early Elizabethan playwrights,” she writes, “We shall analyze three more plays that might belong to Kyd, Fair Em, King Leir and questionably, Arden of Faversham, and two more in which Kyd was a possible co-author: 1 Henry VI and Edward III” (69). For many scholars her work on attributions may be the most useful part of her book. Her work on Kyd as well as others is exemplary, especially when taken in connection with studies other than versification.

Tarkinskaja reserves special consideration for the vexed problem of attributing the authorship of Arden of Faversham. The play’s dramatic qualities, imagery, and morphology have led many, like MacDonald P. Jackson, to conclude that the play, at least in part, is by Shakespeare. But others, like Fleay, Boas, H. Dugdale Sykes, and especially Brian Vickers favor Kyd. Arthur Kinney believes that the play is coauthored by Shakespeare and another dramatist, though probably not Marlowe or Kyd (106). While Tarlinskaja’s earlier analysis made her vacillate regarding scene 8, which many had attributed to Shakespeare, she hesitatingly regarded the rest of the play as Kyd’s. But Kinney’s research made her reconsider that attribution. She first analyzed each scene separately by scanning its lines; then she grouped them into portions 1 (scenes 1–3), 2 (scenes 4–8), and 3 (scenes 9–end). Her analysis of the versification in each portion is difficult to follow, but her results seem to me plausible, if not definitive: portion 2 (scenes 4–8) shows a number of clear signs pointing to Shakespeare’s authorship, particularly if we also consider the imagery involved. For the rest of the play, Tarlinskaja cannot confidently assign anyone as...