5. By skilful variation of pauses, such as we find in Milton, Tennyson, and most of our modern writers of blank verse. Massinger's flexible and meandering sentences contain many examples of such variation.
I believe that he had another shaft in his quiver. He occasionally suppressed a short syllable at the close of the line, and more rarely in the early part, with the result that an anapaestic lilt of some effectiveness makes its appearance. An example from The Emperor of the East will make this clear.
Pulcheria. What ís thy náme?
Athenais. The forlorn Áthenáis (I., 1, 342).
If the stresses are placed as above, it is clear that there is a syllable suppressed after the word “forlorn,” a three-syllable foot in the third place, and an anapaestic lilt, “the forlorn.”
Nor is Massinger alone in this device; instances from other poets are quoted below. This theory conflicts with the dictum [pg 171] of Schmidt in his Shaksperian lexicon, that words like “forlorn,” “complete,” “supreme,” “conceal'd,” can be stressed either on the first or second syllable, the stress being on the first syllable when the stress in the following word falls on the first syllable. Presumably Schmidt would have scanned the line in question thus:
What ís thy náme? The fórlorn Áthenáis.
Schmidt's dictum, however, will not explain all the cases quoted below, and it is worth considering whether it is not a simpler solution of the problem to suppose that our Elizabethan poets combined uniformity of accent with variety in the metre, sometimes applied more than once in the same line. It is clear that lines which contain a past participle like “condemned” cannot be used for the purposes of this argument, as such words may have been scanned as two syllables or three.
The following cases will support my suggestion. The list does not profess to be a complete summary of the evidence.
1. The Emperor of the East, III., 4, 139: