As regards pure triple or anapæstic measures, no great advance was made until nearly the close of this present period, though a few isolated attempts can be quoted. But the principle of trisyllabic substitution was secured, once for all, by the development of blank verse, and the variation of lyric was fully maintained by the practice of a hundred poets, from the contributors, sometimes quite obscure, to the Miscellanies which came later than Tottel, through Sidney and others of the first great Elizabethan division, through Drayton and many more of the second, down to the famous group of "Caroline," "Cavalier," or "metaphysical" poets who were contemporary with Milton.
Blank verse.
And first of blank verse.
Before Shakespeare.
The earliest examples of this great metre in Surrey were, naturally enough, very exact in syllabic length and somewhat monotonous in arrangement and effect. Deprived of the warning bell of rhyme, and having nothing but the structure of the verse itself to rely upon, the poet was almost inevitably tempted to make very sure of that structure by moulding it singly, and ensuring a distinct stop at the close. This rather aggravates than relieves itself in the satiric blank verse of Gascoigne (The Steel Glass) and the dramatic blank verse of Sackville and Norton (Gorboduc); while when the immediate predecessors of Shakespeare, called the University Wits (Marlowe, Peele, Greene, and the rest), took up the vehicle for general theatrical practice, they never completely got clear of the same fashion—which Shakespeare himself adopted in his earliest attempts. Admiration, just in itself, for Marlowe has made some try to discover in him, and perhaps also in Peele (where there is really a little more of it), the trisyllabic substitution, the variation of pause, and the overrunning of sense and rhythm from line to line, which are necessary to break up this "single-mouldedness." But, except as to a very few passages where actual passion melts the ice, they deceive themselves. In the couplet (v. inf.) Marlowe did arrive at enjambment; in blank verse, hardly ever. The beauty of such verse as his in the more majestic, as Peele's in the sweeter kind, can hardly be exaggerated, but neither has yet got complete command of all means of achieving beauty.
The three chief means which they, on the whole, missed, and over which Shakespeare (profiting by their advance as far as they made it) gradually gained the mastery, have been indicated as the overrunning of the line, the variation of the pause, and, above all, the employment of trisyllabic feet. We can see Shakespeare step by step attaining these, as well as the more doubtful and dangerous redundant syllable, which in his last stage he rather abused, and which Beaumont and Fletcher and later dramatists were to abuse still more. All these means, but especially the three first (for redundance is compatible with single-mouldedness), break up the single-moulded line, and substitute for it (except in cases where it is specially wanted) the verse-clauses and verse-paragraphs, which it is the glory of Shakespeare to have perfected.
In him,
In his certainly earliest plays—The Comedy of Errors, Titus Andronicus, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Love's Labour's Lost to some extent—single-mouldedness still appears strongly. But there are exceptions even in them; and these exceptions gradually pervade, mellow, and diversify the prosodic composition, till it attains the perfect accomplishment of As You Like It and Hamlet. Yet a fifth peculiarity and innovation—the lengthening and shortening of lines—though it may have originally been a mere easement or liberty, and is often much abused by other dramatists, becomes in Shakespeare's hands a fresh instrument of concerted music—the frequent regular Alexandrines relieving the decasyllable by direct contrast, and fragments being generally (v. sup.) so arranged as to give genuine fractions of the normal scansion itself.
and after him in drama.
Practically all the secrets and all the accomplishments shown—perhaps all the accomplishments possible—at this period are to be found in Shakespeare. The differences of the other dramatists are rather rhetorical than strictly prosodic; and the efforts sometimes made to construct special prosodies for them are mostly lost labour. Beaumont and Fletcher (who seem, from uncertain but pretty strong evidence, to have actually collaborated with Shakespeare in the Two Noble Kinsmen) develop his latest mood—that where, as in Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest, there is much redundance.[81] They carried it much further than he did, and undoubtedly too far; though the great poetical power which both possessed saved them. On the other hand, Ben Jonson, all whose tastes were classical (i.e. in favour of restriction and order), adopted a rather hard and limited, though rhetorically fine, fashion of blank verse. On the others it would be unprofitable to enlarge much here. Massinger is perhaps interesting as working with the most obviously literary eye on his predecessors—a tendency which is continued in Shirley. But in the latter there is some, if not much, of a special degeneration which by Shirley's own later days had nearly destroyed dramatic blank verse itself, and which was only arrested by the substitution for it of the "heroic" couplet, as used in the plays called by the same name.