Be woe for me, more wretched than he is.

What, dost thou turn away and hide thy face?

I am no loathsome leper - look on me!

What, art thou, like the adder, waxen deaf?

Be poisonous too and kill thy forlorn queen.

(The First Part of the Contention

(2 Henry VI), 3.2.73)

‘Sentence per line’ is the simplest kind of relationship between metre and grammar - and ‘clause per line’ is not very different. Such grammatically regular lines are often seen in the Sonnets, where they convey a measured rhythmical pace:

Whilst I alone did call upon thy aid

My verse alone had all thy gentle grace,

But now my gracious numbers are decayed,

And my sick muse doth give another place.

(Sonnet 79)

The pace of reading increases when the line-breaks coincide with a major point of grammatical junction within a clause, such as between a subject and verb, verb and object, or noun and relative clause. In this next example (Henry V, 4.3.64-5), because the first line contains only the clause subject, there is a dynamic tension at the end which propels us onwards to reach the verb:

And gentlemen in England now abed

Shall think themselves accursed they were not here.

We can feel this tension if we stop our reading at the end of the first line. A subject alone is like an unresolved chord, calling out for the rest of the clause to provide semantic coherence.

Even when a sentence stretches over several lines, the relationship between metre and grammar can be regular, as we can see in this speech from the deposed king in Richard II (5.5.1-5):

I have been studying how I may compare

This prison where I live unto the world;

And for because the world is populous,

And here is not a creature but myself,

I cannot do it.

The line-endings are all major points of grammatical junction, so that each line makes a separate semantic point. By keeping the lines coherent, in this way, the meaning proceeds in a series of smooth, regular steps - very appropriate for a speech whose unique properties have been repeatedly praised: ‘No other speech in Shakespeare much resembles this one’ for its ‘quietly meditative’ tone (Frank Kermode, Shakespeare’s Language, p. 45). The effect would be totally lost if the lines did not coincide with these major units of grammar, as in this rewriting:

Today I have been studying how I may

Compare this prison where I live unto

The world . . .

Such lines no longer have a semantic coherence. Grammatical structures are begun but left unfinished: the auxiliary verb may is split off from its main verb compare; the preposition unto is split off from its noun phrase the world. That is not the metrical syntax of quiet meditation. On the other hand, it is precisely this sort of disruption which is needed when portraying a confused mind - in this case, Cloten’s (Cymbeline, 2.3.64-73):

I know her women are about her; what

If I do line one of their hands? ‘Tis gold

Which buys admittance—oft it doth—yea, and

makes

Diana’s rangers false themselves, yield up

Their deer to th’ stand o’th’ stealer; and ‘tis gold

Which makes the true man killed and saves the thief,

Nay, sometime hangs both thief and true man. What

Can it not do and undo? I will make

One of her women lawyer to me, for

I yet not understand the case myself.

Here several lines break in unexpected places (an effect partly captured by the traditional notion of caesura) - in the middle of a two-part conjunction (what |If), after an interrogative word (what), and between a conjunction and its clause (for | I) - and clauses begin at the end of lines instead of at the beginning. Cloten comments: ‘I yet not understand the case myself.’ The disruption between metre and grammar suggests as much.

The more the metre forces grammatical deviations within a line, the more difficult the line will be to understand. In this next example (Richard II, 1.1.123), three unexpected things happen at once: the direct object is placed at the front, the indirect object comes before the verb, and an adjective is coordinated after the noun. The glossed version is much clearer, but it is unmetrical: ‘Free speech and fearless I to thee allow’ [= I allow to thee free and fearless speech]. Sometimes the change in word order can catch us off-guard, as in this example from Contention (5.3.52-55), spoken by Young Clifford after seeing his dead father, and vowing revenge. Nothing, he says, will escape his wrath:

Tears virginal

Shall be to me even as the dew to fire,

And beauty that the tyrant oft reclaims

Shall to my flaming wrath be oil and flax.

A casual reading of the third line would suggest that ‘a tyrant often reclaims [i.e. tames, subdues] beauty’ - but this makes no sense. Rather, the meaning is ‘beauty, that often tames the tyrant, will act as fuel to my wrath’. Tyrant is not the grammatical subject of reclaims, but its object. Only by paying careful attention to the meaning can we work this out, and for this we need to think of the speech as a whole, and see it in its discourse context. Metre is often thought of simply as a phonetic phenomenon - an aesthetic sound effect, either heard directly or imagined when reading. In fact it is much more. Metrical choices always have grammatical, semantic, or pragmatic - as well as dramatic - consequences.

Line variations

Many special effects are achieved by departing from metrical norms - making lines longer or shorter than usual, juxtaposing different kinds of feet, or breaking lines in unexpected places. Short lines provide an important type of example. Whether these are introduced by an editorial or an authorial eye, there is always a semantic or pragmatic effect which needs to be carefully assessed. The short line, for example, is often used to mark a significant moment in a speech, especially a pointed contrast, as in this example from Othello (1.3.391-4):

The Moor is of a free and open nature,

That thinks men honest that but seem to be so,

And will as tenderly be led by th’ nose

As asses are.

Lines of five feet normally express three or four semantically specific points. In this example, the first two lines each contain four lexical items (Moor, free, open, nature; think, man, honest, seem), and the third has three (tenderly, lead, nose). By contrast, the semantic content of the fourth line is a single lexical item (ass), which now has to fill a semantic ‘space’ we normally associate with five feet. Several prosodic means are available to enable an actor to achieve this, such as slowing the tempo and rhythm of the syllables or varying the length of the final pause.