1. Inventories of Short and Long Syllables. 2. Inventory of Optional Elisions. 3. Comparative Scansions.
OPTIONAL ELISIONS (EMENDING SYLLABLE COMBINATIONS MATCHING PERMISSIBLE FOOT SUBSTITUTIONS)
‘Let’s’ emends a short-long iambic pair (‘let’ is short by lack of position).
‘We’ll’ emends a short-long iambic or long-long spondaic pair, depending on the phrasal strength of ‘we’. Dobson records both a stressed form with /iː/ and an unstressed form with a short vowel (1968: 461), though Campion considers the word always short (1602: 42).
‘He’s’ emends a short-long iambic or long-long spondaic pair, depending on the phrasal strength of ‘he’. Like ‘me’, ‘he’ had a strong, long form and a weak, short form (Dobson 1968: 454), though Campion considers it always short 1602: 42).
‘Ev’ry’ emends a short-short-short tribrachic trio. Word-final Present English /iː/ was often pronounced short (Dobson 1968: 842, 845).
'Admir'd' emends a long-short trochaic pair or a long-long spondaic pair, depending on whether the ‘e’ was dropped from ‘-ed’, as was optional in the language as a whole (Dobson 1968: 885).
‘Th'ar' for 'they are’ emends a short-long iambic pair. According to Dobson, there was a weak form of 'they' with a monophthong, which was transcribed 'the' in our period, as in 'the'love' for 'they love' (1968: 316) and later as 'a' for /ɛː/ (1968:458-9). This suggests susceptibility to reduction to schwa /ə/. Unstressed vowels were often deleted when they occurred before other vowels in phrasal groups; Dobson cites ‘t’ ‘to’ and d’ ‘do’ before vowels, and ð’ ‘the’ before vowels, h, and w' (1968: 878).