Thursday, June 13, 2013

What is blank verse? Where is it used in Romeo and Juliet?

Blank verse is defined as unrhymed iambic pentameter. It should not be confused with "free verse" which means verse with no regular metrical pattern. As notes above, most of Romeo and Juliet is written in blank verse. 


English verse fuses two different metrical traditions, a primarily syllabic French tradition and an accentual Anglo-Saxon one. In syllabic verse, one simply counts the syllables in a line and follows a regular pattern of line lengths. Accentual verse, on the other hand, is concerned with the number of stressed syllables in a line, and allows the poet to vary the number of unstressed syllables. English verse combines these two traditions to form "accentual-syllabic" verse in which one pays attention both to the number of syllables in a line and the relative positions of stressed and unstressed syllables.


The smallest unit of patterning in a poetic line is known as a foot. A iamb is a foot consisting of an unstressed followed by a stressed syllable. Critics describe lines in terms of the type of foot that predominates and the number of times the foot is repeated in a line. Since blank verse lines consist of five iambic feet, the lines are called "iambic pentameter." You should note, though that this doesn't mean that every single foot is an iamb, just that the majority of feet are iambic.


An example of blank verse (with stressed syllables marked in boldface) in Romeo and Juliet is:



I drew to part them: in the instant came


The fiery Tybalt, with his sword prepared,


Which, as he breathed defiance to my ears,


He swung about his head and cut the winds,


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