Shakespearean Prosody Unbound

In his study of prosody, Timothy Steele expresses an important concern about the relationship between verse form and content: "I worry that I may have appeared, in discussing the expressive potentials of form, to have recommended the view that form is or should be a reflection of content. This view is far from my sense of poetry. Form is distinguishable from content." ¹ My own sense of poetry accords with Steele's, but many critics take a diametrically opposed view. Mary Kinzie, for example, confidently declares that "Form should follow theme" and enshrines the Form Follows Theme doctrine as a key concept in her analysis of poetry. ² It may, however, be possible to analyze a formal element like meter without always turning it into a species of rhythmical onomatopoeia.

This essay attempts to demonstrate that the idea of meter as slave to meaning is untenable and that recognizing how meter can be and usually is unbound from content can facilitate a much richer appreciation of the contribution meter makes to our experience of verse. After addressing the general issue of meter's relationship to meaning, I will focus on an analysis of Shakespeare's blank verse rhythms and explore how they make the experience of his plays more complex and more engaging.

Jurij Lotman states emphatically that all the systems of sound patterning in poetic language are too inextricably linked to the content of a poem to have any independent function. Thus, he says, such sound patterns should always be treated as semiotic, as message-bearing signs. According to Lotman:

No matter how we attempt to separate sound from content, whether to exalt or denounce the author suspected of isolating the sound of poetry from its meaning—we are faced with a hopeless task. In an art form which uses language as its material (verbal art), sound cannot be separated from meaning. The musical sound of poetic speech is also a means of transmitting information, that is, transmitting content, and in this sense it cannot be set in opposition to other means of transmitting information which are characteristic of language as a semiotic system. ³

Similarly, Seymour Chatman insists that metrics

aids in esthetic evaluation to the extent that meter and meaning are mutually appropriate. Too easy assumptions of "expressive form" need close examination, but if such appropriateness exists or is even merely useful as a metaphor for something less expressible, metrical analysis qualifies as an important preoccupation of literary criticism. ⁴

Chatman assumes that a critic's one concern must be meaning and argues that critics must bring meter into the fold of semiotics and treat it as they do other linguistic phenomena. Rather than subjecting meter to "esthetic evaluation" Chatman actually wants to make it a component of hermeneutic interpretation. He implies that if meter and meaning are not "appropriate" to one another, metrics has little value for understanding literary art.

The notion that meter is a semiotic phenomenon enjoys wide acceptance and the support of many other distinguished proponents. Roman Jakobson, for instance, says, "Poetic meter . . . has so many intrinsically linguistic particularities that it is most convenient to describe it from a purely linguistic point of view," and he speaks optimistically about "the possibility of writing a grammar of the meter's interaction with the sense." ⁵ Enthusiasm for such a project is not limited to twentieth-century structuralists. Alexander Pope's famous dictum, "The Sound must seem an Eccho to the Sense," articulates "What oft was Thought, but ne'er so well Exprest" by generations of previous and subsequent students of literature. ⁶

Few critics subject such assertions as Pope's to any thoughtful analysis. Samuel Johnson, one of the few who has, declares, "This notion of representative metre, and the desire of discovering frequent adaptations of the sound to the sense, have produced, in my opinion, many wild conceits and imaginary beauties." ⁷ Even the pronouncements of a critic as distinguished as Johnson have not quieted the persistent...