Again, neither editors nor readers are in general aware that poets like Shakespeare, who were born in those parts of England where the r at the end of words or syllables has the light sound peculiar to the English language, frequently pronounce as dissyllables those monosyllables, such as fire, hour, more, where, &c., ending in r after a long vowel or diphthong, as in
I know a bank, where the wild thyme blows.—M. N. D. ii. 1.
Here "where" is to be pronounced nearly wheaa; for so the English really do pronounce it, though they may fancy such not to be the case. Malone, as being an Irishman, seems to have been the first to notice it. Of these monosyllables there are upwards of thirty in Shakespeare, and as many in Fletcher; while in the learned Jonson we only meet with fire, hour, our, your, wear. In my Edition, and in this work, I have marked them with a diæresis, as whëre, heär, &c. It is rather remarkable that it is almost solely to his higher characters, such as Hamlet and Coriolanus, that Shakespeare gives this pronunciation. We also find this dissyllabic pronunciation in such words as born, morn, horn, &c.
As in French poetry the e muet in words forms a distinct syllable, ennemi, for example, being read as a trisyllable; so we find angry, entrance, children, mistress (often written misteris), country, witness, juggler, wondrous, &c., forming three, remembrance four syllables. Captain was sometimes capitain, as in French. Many of these cases, we may observe, are mere solutions of contractions, angry, for example, being simply angery contracted.
18.
In opposition to the commonly received theory, I will venture to lay it down as a fixed principle that the dramatic poets rarely, if ever, used short lines, except in speeches of a single line, or in the first or the last line of a speech. This will be apparent to any one who examines the pages of Jonson and Massinger, who printed their plays themselves, or those plays of Shakespeare, Fletcher, and others which are the most correctly printed. Wherever a line of less than five feet occurs, it will be found to have been produced by omission of words or by malarrangement of the text. In plays such as Timon, Troilus and Cressida, or Fletcher's Sea Voyage, of which the original copy was in bad condition, lines of this kind are of course most numerous. I may here observe that in this last-named play, the metre of which Mr. Dyce has pronounced to be "incurably defective," I have, by simple rearrangement of the text, rendered it as correct as in any other of Fletcher's plays.
Even in this also Shakespeare took liberties in which his brethren did not venture to indulge. He began and ended not only speeches, but paragraphs of speeches, with short lines. Nay, he even made the concluding short line of one paragraph and the incipient short line of the next form a single line, thus—
It hath the primal eldest curse upon it:
A brother's murder.—Pray can I not?—Ham. iii. 3.
Of greatest justice.—Write, write, Rinaldo.