Ants Oras

[1] Oras was born in Tallinn and studied at the University of Tartu, graduating with a Master of Philosophy degree in 1923.

Oras fled to Sweden in 1943 during World War II and the German occupation of Estonia, then to England in 1949, then on to the United States where he settled in Gainesville, Florida.

Oras investigated pause patterns in English Renaissance dramatic blank verse, based on the hypothesis that a pause in iambic pentameter fell on one of nine possible positions (after the first syllable, after the second syllable, etc.)

He counted three types of pauses: those indicated by commas in the first extant printed edition; pauses indicated by punctuation other than commas; and the breaks caused by splitting a line between two speakers.

These pause patterns, when used to put the works of Early Modern dramatists in chronological order, correlate well with other indicators and are generally accepted as valid and reliable by most textual scholars.