Well, ∧ | Juliet, I will | lie with thee to-night,
and dubiously suggests "hire" as a disyllable in:
And ⁝ hire | post-horses; | I will hence to-night.
He is aware that an alternative scansion may in some cases be correct, but does not sufficiently realise that any prosodic system is but an artificiality, formed to explain, and not dictate, the infinitely variable rhythms of poetry. His own particular system, for all its ingenuities, appears more artificial and arbitrary than the iambic. It is interesting to note that his examples are largely drawn from Shakespeare, Tennyson, Swinburne, and Shelley, all fruitful ground; while Milton and Coleridge, Campion and Keats are much less used or left alone altogether. Might not these fascinating and delusive excursions into the mysteries of rhythm be extended to certain living poets—at least to Mr. Hardy and Mr. Bridges?
Shakespeare's Versification is a larger book, in which Mr. Bayfield inquires into the validity of the early texts. His purpose is:
First to give an intelligible and consistent account of the structure and characteristic features of his dramatic verse, the essential principles of which appear to have been wholly misconceived hitherto, and secondly to show that there are many thousands of lines of it that are given in modern texts not as their author intended them to be delivered, but clipped and trimmed to a featureless uniformity that he would have abhorred.
He finds in Antony and Cleopatra the ideal of verse at which Shakespeare was always aiming, and denounces the depravity of the text as it stands—in this as in many other of the plays. The book has a cumulative, even a dramatic interest, for setting out to prove one thing, Mr. Bayfield frankly ends by proving another. With immense care and patience he has examined and compared Quartos and First Folio, and noted quite innumerable places at which the contraction and condensation of words and lines have distorted or ruined the rhythm; and he contends that if the verse is to be presented as the author meant it to be delivered, these must be expanded into their full forms. He begins by considering Shakespeare's use of the "resolved" foot—that is, a foot of more than two syllables—and discovers a constant tendency to reduce these "resolutions" by abbreviation; the result being, for example, that violent becomes vi'lent, desolate des'late, Demetrius Demetr'us, etc. He contends that from the outset Shakespeare employed resolved rhythms more freely than his contemporaries, and gradually increased the proportion with his later plays; and it is, of course, perfectly true that the growing liberation of style which in Shakespeare expresses a psychological development, is equally noticeable in later poets.
Now in comparing the Quartos with the First Folio Mr. Bayfield finds that of all the differences the most conspicuous is the elimination of resolutions, the tendency shown by the Quartos in this direction being aggravated in the Folio. The position is made clear in a Table relating to fourteen Quarto plays, which shows, e.g., that in Othello the Folio eliminates eighty-six resolutions found in the Quarto, and the latter eliminates fourteen which the Folio displays; while a third figure, 84, "enumerates cases where, guided by the whole investigations and the revelations afforded by the first two columns [figures], I believe that a resolution should be restored." His deduction is that the Folio is a metrical reactionary; if it is unsound to prefer its revision to the Quartos, it is equally unsound to rely upon the Folio for the plays not included in the Quartos. He strengthens his argument by showing that the prose (of Julius Cæsar, for instance), which has no metrical obligations, is far more immune from illicit contractions, although prose, being nearer to ordinary speech, might be expected to show very free colloquial abbreviations. We are not prepared to follow Mr. Bayfield blindly; his trochaic passions, hitched to his resolution to "resolve," do not compel unquestioning obedience; we are not convinced by a line like, "From ⁝ Syria to Lydia and to Ionia," when the received text reads:
From Syria
To Lydia and to Ionia, whilst——
and his resort to "Cross Accent" for the scansion of such lines as