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As will be seen, the identification and authentication of verse lines go far beyond the rearrangement of false verse as prose or of text set as prose into metrically lined verse. Nor is the problem of the verse more than distantly related to the irregular and impossible lines created by compositors who failed to identify the short line beginning a speech and so included it as part of the first pentameter with consequent mislining of what follows; nor to the compositorial breaking of a line which would otherwise overflow the measure or else to the trick of making two lines not for this reason but to stretch out material to fill a surplus of space left by faulty casting-off of copy, or, at the opposite, of reducing the number of lines of verse by irregularly running them together in order to conserve space.

I am not competent to address the question whether actors' delivery is affected by visual verse arrangement. Since memorization of a part is done from printed texts, my guess is that the visual connections or disconnections could conceivably affect delivery, but whether this would be retained after complete familiarity with the part is an open question, except so far as the rhetorical effects of the verse itself would certainly hold.

I do not mean verbal emendation, except as a minor spin-off, but instead an investigation aimed directly at assessing the validity of the traditional metrical arrangement of Shakespeare's short verses on the basis of established evidence to replace a tradition that on occasion is mistaken, followed by the emendation of the division of verse lines as a result of fresh information about Shakespeare's (and the time's) characteristics. To give the devil his due, Richard Flatter opened the subject in the early chapters of Shakespeare's Producing Hand (1948) but with such eccentric results owing to his prepossessions that his study, and certainly his conclusions, are substantially worthless.

At present if one wants to use an act-scene-line reference system instead of the through-line numbering (TLN), for uniformity one is forced into the only common norm, the old-fashioned Globe edition which is seriously deficient for the purpose because of its inconsistent relineation of acceptable verse as well as its curious views about verse-division. Scholars badly need a new authoritative edition to replace the Globe as the source of a superior act-scene-line reference; but this edition (would it could be in old spelling) cannot be contemplated until—among other matters—questions of divided lines are decided in a more authoritative manner than at present.

All statistics about short lines can be only approximate because of the various undecided cases whether they are independent or linked and whether verse has been properly relined to produce them.

It is a matter of opinion whether the two parts of Tamburlaine contain a single such divided line. The texts of The Massacre at Paris and Faustus have not come down to us in sufficiently trustworthy form to the original to be relied on statistically.

Metrists have not fully faced up to the problem whether such examples as this, or of stronger expletives or addresses, should be included in the line albeit hypermetrically, or else given individual-line status as in the Folio here and in WT 443 but not Cor. 1777. There is something to be said for inclusion when the evidence of other dramatists is heeded, with some reference to Marlowe. Even such short addresses as 'My Lord' may also be considered for inclusion. 1 Henry IV needs especially close study in this respect.

In theory one could reline Jaques's opening to provide an internal short line:

but the Duke's speech would require relining down to a short verse made out of 'They lacke retention' (983). Both, of course, are possible but whether authentic is certainly an open question. If one chose to scan a thirteen-syllable line (with a feminine ending) by an initial foot composed of three unstressed syllables and one stressed, a slurred sort of line could be made out of Menenius' opening; but feet of that nature need to be better understood within pentameters before they can be utilized to slide over difficulties like the present. In the Cymbeline example Imogen's short opening is preceded by a series of short lines, but it appears to be impossible to link these in any manner that would complete a pentameter with 'Great men' or to reline the speech to produce an internal short line later. Menenius' speech might, of course, start with a trochee, followed by three unstressed syllables before the next stressed, these four syllables comprising the second foot. Technically, the line could instead start with a dactyl followed by an anapest, but few would wish to scan it thus. If this is an acceptable pentameter, the compositor could not have set it as one line. However, all observed editors reproduce it as two, as in the Folio. And so with Imogen's speech, which could also be slurred, and perhaps should be one line.

For instance, the Globe lines the Folio, misprinted as prose, at II.vi.62-69:

The New Arden editor pieces out the Globe's irregular first line for Pompey but then becomes involved in limping rhythms and a tetrameter: Kittredge, Alexander, and New Riverside give Pompey a short independent line: This solves the metrical problem of Pompey's speech but adds two others, for according to the verse-division both Pompey's 'No, Antony, take the lot' and his later 'Then so much have I heard' are short beginning lines to speeches. In each there is something of a rhetorical shift and one would not be surprised to find either in a situation where it was required, no link being possible. But neither firmly agrees with Shakespeare's most prominent patterns for such lines, and the repetition within a short space is disturbing; hence an arrangement that would remove them would be more desirable than not. It has not been sufficiently observed that editors have created more problems for themselves than solutions by following the usual Globe tendency to link the short closing line of a speech with a short following line, at the expense of then producing a short unlinked opening line of varying degrees of attractiveness. On the contrary, statistics demonstrate the overwhelming preponderance of short unlinked closing lines—a regular Shakespearean pattern—as against the comparative infrequency of short unlinked opening lines. Thus when a choice is possible, the odds greatly favor any arrangement that links an opening line but leaves a closing line undivided. Such an arrangement is possible for the passage, although it would seem that no editor has tried it: A compromise, although unnecessary, could link 'Grew fat' with 'You have heard much', leaving 'Then so much have I heard' as an opening independent short line. But, for whatever evidence it represents, the Folio punctuation of a comma after 'heard' and its completion of Pompey's main speech entirely as prose suggests that the full rearrangement is to be preferred.

Were it not for a truly necessary piece of stage-business,

would qualify as a distinct anomaly. But to distract the audience's attention from the entrance of the Ghost, Bernardo must point to the star. The audience following his extended arm will receive a suitable shock when the Ghost then seems to materialize on the stage without making a mundane entrance.

This may not be an authentic case. The Folio lines:

Since the measure would hold the 1. Messenger's speech as one line, it may be dangerous to disregard the Folio lining and join the two halves, as do the Globe and all editors, an arrangement that enforces the linking of 'Let him appeare' (which else could stand alone, justified as an independent short line by the change from command to soliloquy) if 'He stayes' were to link with 'Is there such a one'. On the other hand, some considerations make the Globe relining of the 1. Messenger's speech as a single line attractive. Although the division of the line is not enforced by a too short measure, the compositor is manifestly wasting space toward the end of this column, where the interchange occurs, as shown by the extraordinary depth of the white space surrounding the stage-direction just below at 211. Then, no apparent stage-business, change of address, or other moving cause would seem to dictate the division of the two halves of the verse. Finally, the metrics are not ideal for a divided line. The link would require 'Is there such' to be an anapest immediately after a double feminine ending in the preceding line, a considerable cluster of weak syllables, whereas a single pentameter has a two-stress first half with the first stress of the second half falling on 'Is' after a lyric caesura.

As in ''Tis certaine then for Cyprus' (Oth. 374) and 'You are sent for to the Senate' (Cor. 2987), as cited above.

Just possibly the Globe so arranged this divided verse separately because Pompey's answer to Enorbarbus seemed to join the lines more pertinently than Antony's to Pompey. If so, this is fallacious reasoning, for direct exchange need have nothing to do with whether part-lines link or not.

We cannot tell whether the Globe lined this passage by chance or under the impression that Oliver's 'Look, he recovers' was prose and hence unlinkable. Before this passage Oliver speaks verse but subsequently, according to the Globe, he then speaks prose. If this were the reason, it is erroneous. The Folio lines Oliver's next address to Rosalind (after Celia's invitation for him to take Ganymede by the arm) as verse:

Prose follows beginning with 'Ah, sirra', answered in prose by Oliver except that in 2334-35 the Folio lines as verse: Oliver's lines here are very likely prose, coming as they do after Rosalind's shift to prose, followed by Celia. But this false verse, if prose it be as we may suppose, should not affect the question of 2318-19, nor should an editor be put off by the fact that 2318 is a tetrameter. In printing Rosalind's 'I doe so I confesse it' as a short line before prose, the Folio indicates that it is intended to link with 'You lacke a mans heart.' Hence the prose does not begin until 'Ah, sirra'. This link has been ignored by editors.

This famous passage, and its arrangement, may well represent merely another example of the Globe's strong (and unwarranted) propensity for linking the closing line of a speech with a succeeding short one when an option exists. Instead, the odds favor the closing short as a complete verse.

'His Mother and his wife,' can just be fitted into the Folio measure with 2912; hence no bibliographical evidence supports viewing the opening short line as a compositorial device. There is a sufficient even though a not very marked break.

Not only the frequency suggests this relationship in a division of a pentameter but also the positions. The short-line ending of one speech followed by the unlinked short-line beginning of the next is uncommon in Shakespeare although a few legitimate examples have been cited above that exhibit special characteristics justifying their existence.

A History of English Versification (1910), p. 137.

How far contractions can be counted on to be authoritative (especially in a play like Measure for Measure where the scribe Ralph Crane intervenes between the holograph and the printing shop) is sometimes moot. For example:

These part lines must be linked: the only question is if 'for't' is authentic then in the first the caesura substitutes for a stressed and in the second for an unstressed syllable. As another instance, in MM 2448 the line may be a tetrameter with a feminine ending, or else a pentameter if one expands 'to't'. In Antony and Cleopatra 1241-43 the expansion of 'ther's' to 'there is' seems required, and in fact may be encouraged by its occurrence in a line that completely fills the measure (the division being editorial), so that the contraction may be compositorial:

For instance, see TGV 2043-62 for short prose interchanges within a pattern of verse speeches.

That is, metrically this divided line may be read either as one with a double feminine ending and the caesura substituting for an unstressed syllable, or else with an epic caesura dividing an anapest (if this is possible); yet in either case a limping effect is produced when 'her' is both unstressed and stressed in the same phrase within the same line. The stress is on the same words if the lines are independent.

If one had any reason to defend the Globe lining one could point out (what would have been hidden from the Globe editors) that the page is very tightly set, an indication of problems with cast-off copy, and that the compositor could have saved a line by joining the two halves of Antony's speech. But a possibility is not a probability, of course. That this could have occurred does not prove that it did.

In another passage from Macbeth the meter seems to indicate the following division

and the fact that 610 is an exit line aids the belief that 609-610 should not be linked, the first half starting with an anapest.

It would be ridiculous to suggest that Shakespeare wrote these short lines, or linked them in his mind, according to any predetermined pattern. But changing habits within the flow of blank verse, as well as various quite unassessable rhetorical or other considerations might dictate to him in any specific case one sense of linking as against another. Except for some matters such as the general avoidance of an unlinked short opening line to a speech and sometimes a special treatment of exit lines, Shakespeare's sense of the verse-division might well differ according to no after-the-event discernible pattern, although it is true that certain divisions were more habitual with him than others. Unfortunately, such observable tendencies do not seem to be of a specific enough nature to solve the problem of an utterly ambiguous situation such as Macbeth 1003-5 or MM 2333-36 above, where the basic question is whether to link the first short independent line with the short preceding ending or the second short separate line. We can only assume that in such cases at the moment of writing Shakespeare had an opinion which lines he thought went together. At least the evidence of Ben Jonson's plays indicates that linking was entirely conscious, for Jonson would insist on printing the two halves of a divided verse on the same line, a practice in which he was followed by Massinger.

How little what might be called the sense or content of the lines may affect the division is seen in such a typical case as Macbeth I.iii.127-147 (238-262) in which Macbeth's soliloquy links several times with Banquo's comments, yet neither of them hears the other. See also Mac. 1013-15 above.

Schipper, p. 231, allows the caesura to substitute for a whole foot so that a normal tetrameter may be considered to be a pentameter. This reasoning is difficult to follow once one admits that Shakespeare for a special purpose (usually for an abrupt termination of some line of thought or address) does write internal lines of less than five feet within a pentameter passage. That is, if the verse is regularly iambic so that the caesura comes after the second iamb, the distinction vanishes between a tetrameter and an assumed pentameter with suppression of a foot. If, instead, the caesura suppresses the arsis, the pattern is quite different since the unstressed iambic syllable of a lyric caesura is present in the first half, and only one syllable (the stressed) that follows has been suppressed. Moreover, Schipper's examples are suspect: JC V.iii.32 merely ends a speech with a normal tetrameter and to try to stretch it to a pentameter would be absurd. Mac. I.ii.7 is an illegitimate example since it merely suppresses the arsis and not a whole foot.

Still another arrangement is possible although it cannot be seriously put forward:

Menenius' line would need to start with a truncated iamb, minus its first syllable.

Including the speech-prefix, Prospero's full line is too long to have fitted in the measure and needed to be broken by the compositor. Hence the Folio lining can be explained, if necessary. The case for JC 273-276 and its common editorial rearrangement is less bibliographically explicable than Temp. 427-431. The page is loosely set and any division would have been possible. On the other hand, 'That my weake words have strucke but thus much shew' is too long for the measure. Not every Folio mislining is bibliographically (or rationally) explicable, of course. If JC requires relining here, an editor may appeal to the common compositorial error of running in extra words after a short line, perhaps owing to some problems with the manuscript inscription. But the case for relining, though good is far from certain. Everything really rests on the serious difficulty of the divided hexameter in a situation in which the resulting short opening line should not represent a verse.

A difficulty here is that there is no problem with the measure, as in Prospero's line, to justify rearrangement. However, much of the mislineation in Coriolanus, which constitutes a serious editorial problem, seems to have been caused by some other factor than the width of the measure.

That is, unless 'What?' is made into a short, sharp, single line. For a similar case, see TGV 31-32, below, lined by modern editors as a divided verse.

The catchword is 'Ang. That', more likely a misreading than a sign that the continued text somehow differed from that in the manuscript as a reason for the lineation problem.

The page (sig. 2l1) is loosely set. Moreover, the measure would have held 'For Brutus sake he findes himselfe beholding' if it had been present in the manuscript (thus making of the linked line a pentameter with suppression of the arsis). In short, no physical reason exists why the compositor should not have set the arrangement that he saw in his copy.

Hexameters create a special problem because so many apparent ones may in effect be viewed as loose pentameters, as widely illustrated by E. A. Abbott, A Shakespearian Grammar (1871), §§ 493-499, who believes that true alexandrines are comparatively rare in Shakespeare. (However, many of Abbott's scansions would not be accepted today.) Lines that respond to the contraction of auxiliaries (AYL 1846), articles (Ant. 2272), some prepositions (1H6 1217), and the like (WT 1164-65) (Abbott, § 456), or lines with double feminine endings (§§ 458, 494), present no difficulty of course. But from sufficient examples of less amenable verses it may seem that Shakespeare either wrote a larger number of hexameters (if regularly scanned) than is probable or else that on occasion he was prepared to accept as a poetic foot a stressed syllable preceded by three unstressed syllables. However, even though it may scan strictly as a hexameter, when we have an epic caesura (the pause after one extra weak syllable) followed by an anapest beginning the second half, the line may pass without comment as an intended pentameter (see Mac. 2257-60 above), whether undivided as in 'Let's be Sacrificers, but not Butchers Caius' (JC 799), or else divided. (This suggested scansion may seem superior to one with a caesura preceded by two weak syllables followed by a series of trochees beginning with 'but'.) So also with a normal line but with a double feminine ending (or single with slurring) like 'Our purpose Necessary, and not Envious' (JC 811). Only slightly more troublesome is a line like 'Joyn'd with an enemy proclaim'd, and from his Coffers' (H5 797), since 'enemy' can be elided to a dissyllable or quite naturally slurred as in a sense a Jonsonian apostrophus. (Again, this scansion seems superior to a four-stress first half and a one-stress second half composed of a single foot of three unstressed and one one-stress syllables.) The above are simple examples; but how far we should go in slurring to create a pentameter from a twelve-syllable line that could be an alexandrine if regularly scanned is the really debatable question on which opinions may well differ. One may suggest that the oral slurring (or elision) of 'to be' to the single syllable 't'be' in 'That seeming to be most, which we indeed least are' (Shr. 2733) is superior to creating the anomalous foot of three unstressed and one stressed syllables from 'ing to be'. (Since this line forms a couplet with its predecessor 2732, it ought not to be a hexameter, as Abbott, p. 400, points out; nevertheless, see R2 976-977 for just such a couplet.) But a line like 'And these does she apply, for warnings and portents' (JC 1073) may be more troublesome if Abbott, p. 402. is correct that 'portents' with the stress on the second syllable represents 'the Shakespearian accent'. The choice would seem to be between slurring (or eliding) 'does she' to one syllable or accepting a final foot composed of 'ings and portents' with three unstressed syllables, unless one could slur the 'ings' ending, perhaps uncomfortably. Similarly, "Supposition, all our lives, shall be stucke full of eyes' (1H4 2790) seems to require a foot of three unstressed syllables and a stressed in 'tion, all our lives', and so do lines like 'Do somthing mingle with our yonger brown, yet ha we' (Ant. 2673), and probably 'The rest shall beare the businesse in some other fight' (Cor. 703) whether or not relined to shift the problem to 702. Similarly, no matter how lined, it is difficult without excessive slurring to scan 'Hyperion to a Satyre: so loving to my Mother' (Ham. 324) without such a foot, or 'Coy looks, with hart-sore sighes: one fading moments mirth' (TGV 34). Such occasional Fletcherian looseness in Shakespeare's undivided lines may perhaps encourage an editor to accept more linked verses than he might otherwise wish, when an anomalous short opening line of a speech can thereby be avoided. Whether the odds favor the same flexibility when the linking of single independent lines is in question either with the short concluding line of a preceding speech or with each other is moot. Even in the first category some delicate decisions would be required. For instance, in MM 744-745, 748-749, 751-752, it may be considered good evidence that three successive interchanges, if linked, would need special dispensations of one sort or another, whereas something can be said for the ability of each short beginning line to stand alone according to an acceptable Shakespearean pattern, which I personally believe is the correct lining, despite the linking of the final exchange in 754-755.

The Globe and most editors do not attempt to link any of the lines in these four examples, except for the New Arden which arbitrarily makes a divided trimeter of 'change? | The matter?'

The main reason is that no matter how the line is scanned as a pentameter, different stresses fall on the two occurrences of 'pity her'. For instance, if a line were formed with a lyric caesura after the first foot, the first 'her' would be accented but the second awkwardly stressed. On the other hand, also awkward, if the caesura comes at the end of stressed 'her' as the second iamb, and the caesura substitutes for an unstressed syllable, then 'pity her' is a feminine ending with unstressed 'her'.

Taking only the regular syllabic metrical beat, the line is an acceptable pentameter with lyric caesura and feminine ending. If the stresses are rhetorical, however, the line could be read as a hexameter unless one were to count 'How? I' as a single foot, a spondee. Despite the temptation to regard this passage as consisting of five short independent lines, the linking of 1732-33 might be encouraged by the definite link in preceding 1730-31.

Antony's pentameter can be read as an anapest and four iambs or else as a trochee, dactyl, and three iambs. Lepidus' answering pentameter has the same choice.

To end an exit or a scene with an unlinked short line is a favorite device but by no means a majority usage. In Macbeth, rather curiously if the expedient is Shakespeare's, a concluding couplet may be followed by an unlinked and unrhymed independent short line.

An analogy would be Macbeth 410-413, the divided verse correctly arranged in the Folio:

However, it should be noted that double linkage is an argument in favor of dividing a pentameter single line only in such a case as 1116-19 above or to avoid an anomalous short beginning separate line. It is an entirely inadequate reason when such double linkage does not produce full pentameters. For an example of the Globe's tinkering, see its division of the Folio pentameter 'And affecting one sole throne, without assistance' in Cor. 2930-34 above when the first half of the new verse 'Without assistance' links only with difficulty with 'I thinke not so.'

However, see footnote 11 above for a not entirely satisfactory alternative to the arguably correct Globe joining of two part-lines in Ant. 205-206 to form a single pentameter verse.