Description
Book SynopsisOriginally published in 1989. In Prosody and Purpose in the English Renaissance the eminent scholar O. B. Hardison Jr. sets out to recover the special kinds of music inherent in English Renaissance poetry. The book begins with a thorough and wide-ranging survey of the development of prosodic theory from the ancient ars metrica tradition to the sixteenth century, with special emphasis on such issues as the relation of verse form and genre, the relation of syntax to prosody, and the role of language reform in shaping Renaissance prosody. The second part of the book considers the impact of prosodic traditions on specific literary works and verse forms, among them Surrey's Aeneid, Heywood's translation of Seneca's Thyestes, Sackville and Norton's Gorboduc, and the dramatic and epic verse of Marlowe, Shakespeare, Spenser, and Milton. Throughout, Hardison examines not only how poets crafted their verse but why. He explores authorial purposes ranging from technical attempts to match sound and
Trade ReviewTwo large points that emerge are the importance of 'construction' and, perhaps more surprisingly, 'the dominance of syllabic concepts of prosody.' Hardison concludes that the English verse of this period 'is best understood in terms of this tradition.' He has written a learned, interesting, and civilized book.
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Studies in English LiteratureTable of ContentsPreface
Part I. Contexts
Chapter 1. Prosody and Purpose
Chapter 2. Ars Metrica
Chapter 3. Rude and Beggerly Ryming: The Romance Tradition
Chapter 4. A Question of Language: Italy and the Shaping of Renaissance Prosodic Theory
Chapter 5. Notes of Instruction
Part II. Performances
Chapter 6. A Straunge Metre Worthy To Be Embraced
Chapter 7. Jasper Heywood's Fourteeners
Chapter 8. Gorboduc and Dramatic Blank Verse, with a Note on Comedy
Chapter 9. Heroic Experiments
Chapter 10. Speech and Verse in Later Elizabethan Drama
Chapter 11. True Musical Delight
Notes
Index
