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The blank verse is the most common and best adapted form for dignified speech in both the dialogue and the monologue of the drama. We quote as a typical verse the first line of Hamlet's soliloquy:
"To be or not to be, that is the question."
The meter is a catalectic iambic trimeter and there is only one rule of importance, viz., that at the beginning and after caesuras an iambus can be replaced by a trochee . A scheme of the meter runs thus:
Or in musical script thus:
The last long syllable, sometimes even the whole last foot, is omitted or, more correctly, is replaced by a pause. We may write it thus:
This latter case, originally merely allowable, has become very frequent in English, because the English language is rich in
