Above all, as the chapter concludes, spectacles of
headlessness in the period functioned to express even as they attempted to contain the material circumstances of those "women [who] were in fact committing 'treason' against their husbands" (126, emphasis in original) and constituted authority.
Catalexis, though it can arise from inadvertence in a poet who wishes to observe the shibboleth that forbids it, (4) may also be a stylistic tool: whether or not it is consciously registered, it is experienced by the reader or listener as a gap, an absence of something expected: thus
headlessness creates a kind of initial abruptness that mirrors, for example, the suddenness of King Richard's volte-face in the first line of item 2a, or the explosive anger or exasperation of the speakers in the second two: 2.