The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare

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caesura, epic

caesura, epic
(feminine). Within an iambic pentameter line, epic caesura is a phrasal break preceded by an extra unstressed syllable. Older (mainly 15th-century) poets used this pattern as a standard variation, but most 16th-century poets avoided it. Shakespeare, too, avoids it in his poems but uses it fairly frequently in his middle and later plays, evidently to vary and complicate the metrical design:

Stealing and giv | ing odour. | Enough, no more
(Twelfth Night, 1.1.7)

George T. Wright

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