Contents; Preface; 1 The Iambic Pentameter Line; 2 Chaucer and Wyatt: Early Expressive Pentameters; 3 The Sixteenth-Century Line: Pattern and Variation; 4 Flexibility and Ease in Four Older Poets; 5 An Art of Small Differences: Shakespeare's Sonnets; 6 The Verse of Shakespeare's Theater; 7 Prose and Other Diversions; 8 Short and Shared Lines; 9 Long Lines; 10 Shakespeare's Syllabic Ambiguity: More Than Meets the Ear; 11 Lines with Extra Syllables; 12 Lines with Omitted Syllables; 13 Trochees; 14 The Play of Phrase and Line; 15 Shakespeare's Metrical Technique in Dramatic Passages
16 What Else Shakespeare's Meter Reveals17 Some Metrically Expressive Features in Donne and Milton; 18 Conclusion: Verse as Speech, Theater, Text, Tradition, Illusion; Appendix A: Percentage Distribution of Prose in Shakespeare's Plays; Appendix B: Main Types of Deviant Lines in Shakespeare's Plays; Appendix C: Short and Shared Lines; Notes; Main Works Cited or Consulted; Index
