| Hamlet's Feminine Endings |
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The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 21.0205 Monday, 24 May 2010
[1] From: Cary Mazer <
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[2] From: Martin Mueller <
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[3] From: Justin Alexander <
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[4] From: John Briggs <
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[5] From: Peter Groves <
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[1]-----------------------------------------------------------------
>After questioning Fortinbras's Captain in IV.iiii, Hamlet's 'How Your question is precisely why, when I teach scansion to my students, I prefer to call it an "unstressed ending." I for one see no correlation between stressed and unstressed endings and masculinity or femininity.
Cary
[2]------------------------------------------------------------- 'Masculine' and 'feminine' verse endings, like 'male' and 'female' electrical plugs, depend on metaphors that shouldn't be extended from one domain to another without a lot of thought and caution. You would need a lot of carefully weighted statistical evidence before drawing any thematic conclusions from the distribution of stressed and unstressed final syllables in the blank verse lines of a given character. And any plausible argument along those lines would need to involve comparisons between the speeches of different characters in the same play or similar characters in different plays.
[3]------------------------------------------------------------- Richard Waugaman wrote:
>After questioning Fortinbras's Captain in IV.iiii, Hamlet's 'How When did the term "feminine ending" actually come into use? I've often tried to find an etymological history of the term, but I've never found one. As a result, I've always been skeptical of theories drawing a connection between verse structure and gender identification because I've never seen an Elizabethan source referring to verse structure in gender-ized terms, but I've also never studied the issue in detail.
Justin Alexander
[4]------------------------------------------------------------- Richard Waugaman wrote:
>Does anyone know of any commentary on this, with its possible I think that you ought to first carefully consider when a "feminine ending" was first called a "feminine ending". John Briggs
[5]------------------------------------------------------------- As many others will no doubt point out, the word "feminine" in "feminine ending" refers to grammatical gender, not biological or cultural gender -- specifically to the fact that feminine adjectives in French tend to have an extra final schwa that may be pronounced in metred verse (e.g. "La froid? cruaut? | de ce soleil de glace." vs "Ell? veut de ses chants | peupler l'air froid des nuits"). The point about feminine endings is that they impede the rush from one line into the next and are therefore appropriate to meditative verse:
To be, or not to be -- that is the question:
Peter Groves
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