Style Changes: Blank Verse

- Feminine Line Endings and Non-stopped Blank Verse

                 Perhaps the best way to recognize the evolution of Shakespeare’s style and progression to freer versus is by looking at His use of feminine line endings and non-stopped blank verse in his plays. The term “feminine line endings” is the “addition of an unaccented syllable at the end of a line.” A non-stopped blank verse is a verse that “runs on past the end of the line with non-stop punctuation.”  In the play The Tempest we can easily identify these two principles. As you read the stanza below notice how its one sentence. The long sentence is a perfect example of non-stop blank verse.

Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes and groves,
And ye that on the sands with printless foot
Do chase the ebbing Neptune and do fly him
When he comes back; you demi-puppets that
By moonshine do the green sour ringlets make,
Whereof the ewe not bites, and you whose pastime
Is to make midnight mushrooms, that rejoice
To hear the solemn curfew; by whose aid,
Weak masters though ye be, I have bedimm'd
The noontide sun, call'd forth the mutinous winds,
And 'twixt the green sea and the azured vault
Set roaring war: to the dread rattling thunder
Have I given fire and rifted Jove's stout oak
With his own bolt; the strong-based promontory
Have I made shake and by the spurs pluck'd up
The pine and cedar: graves at my command
Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let 'em forth
By my so potent art. But this rough magic
I here abjure, and, when I have required
Some heavenly music, which even now I do,
To work mine end upon their senses that
This airy charm is for, I'll break my staff,
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,
And deeper than did ever plummet sound
I'll drown my book.

This sentence begins with 13 lines of a dependent clause of invocation and does not reach the grammatical subject and verb until “Have given fire” (line 45). As you can see from punctuation,  most lines run on past their end into the next line. Significant pauses usually occur mid line, often semi colons. To see the contrast, watch the video of the reading from the earlier plays. The quotation listed above is also a great example of feminine line endings. In the video below, watch how difficult it is to pick out the unique lines.

 Using the strums of the guitar for each syllable just as in the earlier video demonstration, it can easily be seen that the first in the third line of the above video and quotation has the eleventh unstressed syllable known as the feminine line ending in those lines. The sixth, twelfth, and fourteenth also have the extra unstressed syllable. In the video below look at how the use of feminine line endings and non-stopped blank verse effect the scene by comparing it to the video done in the section Rhetorical Language under  “Early Life and Plays” heading.

By comparing the two examples it is easy to identify that the effect of the use of feminine line endings and non-stopped blank verse have in the plays. The difference is that you get more of a conversation without the ridged form.  The conversation yields itself to the development of the character, plot and over all flow of the play. In the play above Prospero is stating one of the most moving plays of all time but he doesn't come across pompous or glory hungry but that he is deep in thought and convicted to the final outcome. The verse structure lends itself to an overall architectonic design. (Bevington) The gradual increase of use of the non-stopped blank verse and Feminine line ending is specifically used by scholars to show the steady course of progression of Shakespeare from His early plays to later plays (among other things) because they can be quantified to demonstrate the development. (Wright) Henry VI had 10.4% run on sentences compared to other lines where The Tempest had 41.5% run on sentences. The use of feminine line endings goes from none in his first plays to 100 in The Tempest. (Bevington)