Shakespeare Well-Versed: A Rhyming Guide to All His Plays

From Booklist
Muirden's Rhyming History of Britain [BKL S 1 03] made brushing up on all those monarchs and PMs a romp, and now he makes absorbing the corpus of England's great dramatist more pleasant than Cliffs Notes ever did. History stuck to rhymed iambic tetrameter couplets to keep things comical throughout. For Shakespeare, however, Muirden uses several metrical forms to be differently witty about plays that vary from frothy (The Comedy of Errors, recounted in, essentially, A-B-A-B-rhyming iamb-tet quatrains) to prickly (Troilus and Cressida, the astringency of which is conjured by uneven stanzas of uneven lines that rhyme only in their final couplets). The six central Wars of the Roses plays are limned in Shakespeare's usual line, iambic pentameter, with plenty of feminine endings (and rhymes), while the plays that frame them are in jolly old iamb tets (Richard II) and even jollier iambic and dactylic trimeters (Richard III). Best, verse-wise, comes last: The Winter's Tale is abstracted in limericks. More fun than seeing many a Shakespearean production, and good prep for seeing any. Ray Olson
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