Page:Goethe and Schiller's Xenions (IA goetheschillersx00goetiala).pdf/38

 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