Verse drama is any drama written significantly in verse (that is: with line endings) to be performed by an actor before an audience. Although verse drama does not need to be primarily in verse to be considered verse drama, significant portions of the play should be in verse to qualify. Verse drama is primarily spoken, and therefore libretti or books of musicals with song lyrics also written in verse are not considered verse drama. Verse drama may also include portions which are formatted into paragraphs (prose).
For a very long period, verse drama was the dominant form of drama in Europe (and was also important in non-European cultures). Greek tragedy and Racine's plays are written in verse, as is almost all of William Shakespeare's, Ben Jonson's and John Fletcher's drama, and other works like Goethe's Faust and Henrik Ibsen's early plays. In most of Europe, verse drama has remained a prominent art form; while at least popularly, it has been tied almost exclusively to Shakespeare in the English tradition. In the English language, verse drama has continued to the present day.
History Dramatic verse occurs in a dramatic work, such as a play, composed with line breaks, rather than formatted in paragraph. These lines often, although not always, are written in a poetic style or with heightened speech ("poetic drama"). Similarly, these lines often, although not always, possess some form of meter (e.g., iambic pentameter, dactylic hexameter, etc.).
Greek and Roman Colometry The tradition of dramatic verse in the West may be traced back to the invention of colometry as introduced by Aristophanes of Byzantium at the Library of Alexandria in the third century BCE. Since ancient languages across the globe were typically written in scriptio continua, the Alexandrian school sought to improve reading comprehension by the introduction not only of proto-punctuation, but also by placing intentional line breaks, known as per cola et commata (collectively: colometry). These line breaks would be placed for one of three primary reasons: sense, such as breaking at the end of a sentence or a clause; pause; or to mark meter.
Scribes preserved the Alexandrian school's colometry, thus leading to contemporary publications of Greek drama duplicating what is, effectively, editorial and not authorial line break. This editorial insertion of line break also led to presumptions regarding performance of verse plays. As M. L. West writes:Until Aristophanes of Byzantium (or whoever it was) taught copyists to divide [lines] in dimeters, [scribes] were unaware that anapestic passages were composed on this principle [e.g., colometrics], or they attached no importance to it. We have no evidence for the existence of any doctrine on the subject before the change takes place.
[...Wilamowitz's] predecessors had taken anapestic dimeters and monometers simply as observed realities. Several of them supposed that the monometer must have occupied the same time as the dimeter, being delivered at half the speed of accompanied by a sizeable pause [...] For Wilamowitz, on the other hand, the fact that anapests are written in dimeters in books was a fact about books and not about anapests.Colometry, as well as Aristophanes' punctuation system, fell in and out of use during the rise of the Roman Empire. The division of paragraphs into lines of what we now recognize as verse—either metered or free—was gatekept by the wealthy and educated.Cicero, for example, one of Rome’s most famous public speakers, told his rapt audiences that the end of a sentence “ought to be determined not by the speaker’s pausing for breath, or by a stroke interposed by a copyist, but by the constraint of the rhythm”.Around 410 CE, St. Jerome repopularized colometry with the distribution of his Vulgate Bible. Jerome numbered these Biblical 'verses' in accordance with the Greek custom of stichometry, or counting of lines. Many of these verses were divided for sense and breath, rather than meter, and continue into contemporary publications.
Medieval Anglophone Drama and Rhyming Plays Medieval Anglophone dramas, which were dominated by morality, miracle, and mystery plays, as well as court masques, were written entirely in rhyming verse. Typically, plays were composed of rhyming couplets, such as the earliest extant Anglophone play, Interludium de clerico et puella. Other rhyme schemes were occasionally used, such as quatrains with an ABAB or ABCB pattern. Certain playwrights were known for their original rhyme schemes, including the Wakefield Master, who wrote The Second Shepherd's Play, or John Skelton who wrote in a variety of rhyme schemes with short lines known as 'skeltonics'.
Rhyming drama remained the uncontested norm at least from c. 1300 CE until the latter half of the sixteenth century. In 1570, Roger Ascham's The Scholemaster was published posthumously. One section in particular, 'Criticism of recent English verse' railed vehemently against the custom of English rhyme. Since there had been an influx of Greek and Roman texts, particularly Virgil, Horace, Cicero and others into England at this time, Ascham wished:[...] that we Englishmen likewise would acknowledge and vnderstand rightfully our rude beggerly ryming, brought first into Italie by Gothes and Hunnes, when all good verses and all good learning to, were destroyed by them [...]
But now, when men know the difference, and haue the examples, both of the best, and of the worst, surelie, to follow rather the Gothes in Rhyming, than the Greekes in trew versifying, were euen to eate ackornes with swyne, when we may freely eate wheate bread emonges men.This movement against English rhyme coincided with the interest in establishing a type of Anglophone scansion or prosody: that is, translating ideas of iambs and other metrical patterns from the Greco-Roman long-short qualitative meter to the Anglophone strong-soft syllabic-accentual meter. George Gascoigne and Sir Philip Sydney were instrumental in arguing for Anglophone meter, which might be used to displace and refine what was perceived as passé English rhyme.
Early Modern Drama and the Rise of Blank Verse Between 1559 and 1561, two metric forms fought for dominance within Anglophone verse drama. Translations of Seneca, such as Jasper Heywood's Troas (1559), Thyestes (1560) and Hercules Furens (1561) were written in 'fourteeners': metric lines of iambic heptameter, resulting in fourteen syllables. Heywood maintained rhyming couplets, resulting in a form very similar to ballad or common meter with an ABCB rhyme scheme. The fourteener was an attempt to duplicate the Greek and Latin dactylic hexameter, which contains seventeen to eighteen syllables. Fourteeners tend to use iambs rather than trochees, following the preference put forth by Ascham, Gascoigne, Sidney, and Spenser. As Samuel Johnson later noted, fourteeners with their consistent caesura, or pause, at the eighth syllable are particularly suited for 'our lyric measures'. Indeed, the ballad and fourteeners have remained popular among poets and lyricists for this very reason. However, for whatever reason, fourteeners did not emerge as the dominant metric language.
In 1561, The Tragedie of Gorboduc, or, Ferrex and Porrex by Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville performed before Queen Elizabeth. Although there is some question of how widely spread the play became, for the first time on the English stage what would become known as 'blank verse' was introduced. Blank verse refers to verse which does not rhyme. Since Gorboduc not only used blank verse, which would have been audible to an audience, as well as iambic pentameter, which would have been legible to a readership, the term 'blank verse' has typically been conflated to mean unrhymed lines of iambic pentameter. Given the growing dislike of English rhyme, the introduction of blank verse which seemed to hearken to the unrhymed verse of Greek drama, as it had been copied down from Aristophanes' editorial intervention.
Further innovations were introduced in the following decades. Gascoigne translated the first prose [paragraph] play, Supposes in 1566, after Ludivoco Ariosto's Italian play, I Suppositi. Since Supposes was a comedy, this likely influenced the Early Modern use of prose—that is colloquial language formatted into paragraph—for comedy rather than tragedy: as can be seen in several of Shakespeare's plays, including the bourgeoisie comedy, The Merry Wives of Windsor (1602) which is almost entirely in prose. Similarly, Ben Jonson's comedies, Epicoene, or the Silent Woman (1609) and Bartholomew Fair (1614) were written entirely in prose.
Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene (1590) popularized the Spenserian stanza: eight lines of iambic pentameter, followed by a single alexandrine in iambic hexameter. The final two lines would rhyme, thus creating a type of closing sound. This ending couplet was used extensively in Elizabethan verse dramas, especially to end a scene or punctuate a dramatic point. However, Elizabethan verse dramas tended to end on two rhyming lines of iambic pentameter, rather than writing in alexandrines. A famous ending couplet is Shakespeare's conclusion to Romeo and Juliet (1597): 'For never was a story of more woe / Than this of Juliet and her Romeo' (V.3.320-321). Although alexandrines did not become popular in Elizabethan drama, they became the standard meter for French verse drama.
One of the great champions of iambic pentmeter in blank verse was Christopher Marlowe, whose 'mighty line' made the five pulses of pentameter felt by the audience. Perhaps the most famous example of this mighty line is found in Doctor Faustus, when the titular character looks upon Helen of Troy and declares: 'Was this the face that launched a thousand ships, / And burnt the topless towers of Ilium? (1604 Quarto, 162-163).
Although rhyming poetry persisted for some time, and prose plays rose in popularity, Anglophone verse drama began to become synonymous with iambic pentameter in blank verse. Moreover, as prose began to be increasingly aligned with comedy, verse drama was similarly considered the proper milieu of the high, 'noble' or tragic.
Closet Drama and the British Commonwealth When Cromwell closed the theatres in 1642, Anglophone drama was relegated to the drawing room, to be performed privately among friends and family. This popularised closet dramas which were not necessarily meant to be performed in front of commercial audiences, but enjoyed by primarily by readers. Scholar Alfred Harbage estimated that "roughly 150 closet plays were written between 1500 and 1660." "In the eighteen years between 1642 and 1660, usually considered a wasteland of dramatic writing due to the government bans on public performance, some ninety closet plays were written, three times as many as in the four previous decades." Many of these plays were by female authors, who were also forbidden from performing on English stages, until the reopening of the theatres under Charles II.
Prior to the closing of the theatres, the Sidney Circle was a prominent group of men and women, closely associated with or influenced by Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke, the sister of Philip Sidney. The Sidney Circle produced eleven closet dramas:
Antonius (1592) by Mary Sidney; a translation of Robert Garnier's Marc-Antoine. Although the original is written in rhyming French alexandrines, Sidney renders her translation into blank verse in iambic pentameter. Cornélia (1594) by Thomas Kyd; a translation of Garnier's Cornelie. The Tragedie of Cleopatra (1594) by Samuel Daniel Octavia (1598) by Samuel Brandon Alaham and Mustapha (1603) by Fulke Greville Darius and Croesus (1604), The Alexandrean Tragedy (1605) and Julius Caesar (1607) by William Alexander