Quick, dispatch, and send the head to Angelo. IV. 3. 88.
This last example is also an instance of another practice, by modern judgement a license, viz. making a line end with two unaccented ‘extrametrical’ syllables.
Two very effective lines together, commencing similarly to the last, are in the same Play:
Take him hence; to the rack with him! We’ll touse you
Joint by joint, but we will know his purpose. V. 1. 309, 310.
Another irregularity is a single strong syllable commencing a line complete without it. This might often be printed in a line by itself. For example:
Ay,
And we’re betrothed: nay more, our marriage-hour—
Two Gentlemen of Verona, II. 4, 175.
Another irregularity is the insertion of syllables in the middle of lines. The dramatic verse is doubtless descended from the Old English decasyllables of Chaucer, and that his verse was divided actually into two sections is evinced by the punctuation of some MSS. The licenses accorded to the beginnings and endings of the whole verse were also allowed, with some modification, to the end and beginnings of these sections, and accordingly, in early poetry, many verses will appear to a modern reader to have a syllable too many or too few in the part where his ear teaches him to place a cæsura. Exactly similarly, but more sparingly, syllables are omitted or inserted at the central pause of Shakespeare’s verse, especially when this pause is not merely metrical, but is in the place of a stop of greater or less duration; and most freely when the line in question is broken by the dialogue.