ABSTRACT
Theatre is an aural medium, and it moves forward in time. Verse was the medium for imaginative writing for thousands of years because literature was made for public recitation before the invention of printing. The type of verse that William Shakespeare used – blank verse – was introduced around 1540 in Lord Surrey's translation of Virgil's Aeneid. This chapter demonstrates some of the variations Shakespeare used to maintain or break the scansion of blank verse. "Romeo" can be two or three syllables, depending on which is needed to scan the line; the same is true of the word "Juliet" in other passages. Shakespeare gives Romeo and Juliet a shared verse line to emphasize their connection at the end of their sonnet when they first meet. Shakespeare also began to use more trochees, feminine endings, short lines, and long lines as he proceeded in his career.
