文章基本信息

标题：Shakespeare’s Pauses, Authorship, and Early Chronology
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作者：Douglas Bruster
期刊名称：Studia Metrica et Poetica
印刷版ISSN：2346-6901
电子版ISSN：2346-691X
出版年度：2015
卷号：2
期号：2
DOI：10.12697/smp.2015.2.2.03
语种：English
出版社：University of Tartu Press
摘要：This paper explores the implications of Ants Oras’s Pause Patterns in Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama: An Experiment in Prosody (Oras 1960) for the chronology and authorship of plays in early modern England. Oras’s brief monograph has been noticed by a relatively few scholars, mainly those interested in changes to Shakespeare’s pentameter line. Recent developments in the field, however, have rendered his data newly attractive. Compiled by hand, Oras’s figures on the punctuated pauses in pentameter verse offer computational approaches a wealth of information by which writers’ stylistic profiles and changes can be measured. Oras’s data for a large number of playwrights and poets, as well as his methodology generally, may prove instrumental in constructing a portrait of the aesthetic environment for writers of pentameter verse during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in England. In particular, pause percentages may lend context to our attributions of texts of uncertain authorship. A hypothetical chronology is offered for Shakespeare’s earliest writing, including his contributions to Arden of Faversham, 1 Henry VI, and Edward III.