Shakespeare and the Versification of English Drama, 1561-1642

Surveying the development and varieties of blank verse in the English playhouses, this book is a natural history of iambic pentameter in English. Marina Tarlinskaja’s statistical analysis of versification focuses on Shakespeare, but places his work in the literary context of the times. Her results offer new ways to think about the dating of plays, the attribution of anonymous texts, and how collaborators divided their task in co-authored dramas.