Historical Manual of English Prosody

by George Saintsbury

and others.

But these principles had been illustrated by others during the lifetime of the two,[90] after fashions which even the most summary account of English prosody cannot leave unnoticed; and these fashions, with some general phenomena of this double lifetime, not always specially noticeable in Shakespeare and Milton themselves, must be indicated. The performances of these two "primates"—the one in the English, the other in the Italian form of the sonnet—make it unnecessary to say more of that form, though it was very largely practised in the last decade of the sixteenth century, and beyond all doubt helped much to discipline verse generally. And the same is true of the octosyllabic couplet, which, however, was very beautifully practised by the Jacobean poets Browne, Wither, and others. But more must be said of the stanza, of the decasyllabic couplet, the fortunes of which in this time were most momentous (and which, as it happens, was only occasionally practised by Shakespeare,[91] scarcely at all by Milton[92]), and of the various forms, so far as their multiplicity does not forbid, of lyric.

The novelty, splendour, and apparent difficulty of the Spenserian seem to have imposed on contemporaries to such an extent as to prevent them from copying it in typical form at all; while many years passed before it was attempted in slightly altered forms.[93] The favourite stanza in the later years of Elizabeth was the octave, chiefly in the Italian form, which was very largely written by Drayton, by Daniel, and many others, including Edward Fairfax in his very influential translation of Tasso. Rhyme-royal fell especially out of favour, though Milton used it in his early days, and Sir Francis Kynaston wrote a long poem in it as late as 1648. The decasyllabic quatrain, alternately rhymed, was used by Davies and others. Yet not merely Ben Jonson (v. inf.) but Drayton himself expressed weariness of the stanza generally, and this undoubtedly grew, though it continued to be used. The new favourite was the decasyllabic couplet.

The "heroic" couplet.

It has been said that this couplet, despite its splendid success, and the abundance of varied model for it in Chaucer, was not much used (and never used well save perhaps in The Friars of Berwick) by his successors. It acquired, however, without any clearly traceable cause, a considerable hold on the early drama; and, when it was ejected from this, it revenged itself by turning the stanza out to a large extent in non-dramatic verse. Drayton, in the passage referred to, speaks of the attraction of "the gemell," i.e. "the twinned line," and practised it not a little. Jonson, we are told, thought couplets (made in a fashion the specification of which is unfortunately not clear) "the bravest sort of verses." He did not, however, write them very largely; but Drayton did. And while Marlowe set a magnificent example in Hero and Leander, and others employed the measure independently, the same sort of influence in its favour, which was noticed formerly as exercised in Chaucer's case by the final couplets of rhyme-royal, was beyond all question now exercised afresh by those of the fashionable ottava. In fact, the already-mentioned Tasso of Edward Fairfax (1600) is one of the recognised originals of a particular form—the stopped or self-ended couplet. This the octave, like the English sonnet, which doubtless had influence too, especially encourages. Drayton and others wrote as Chaucer, we saw, had written, almost indifferently in both kinds, at least so that neither has marked and dominant character. But Marlowe, in striking contrast to his blank-verse practice, decidedly preferred, and practised exquisitely, the opposite or "enjambed" variety.

Enjambed

By degrees, however, there grew up in the seventeenth century what has been perhaps not incorrectly described as a "battle of the couplets"—certain poets definitely employing one form, others the other; while in at least one case[94] the preference is distinctly and combatively avowed. As a sect, clearly marked, the enjambers or disciples of Marlowe are the older. Their most distinguished representatives are, in the earlier part or first quarter of the century, William Browne, George Wither—who in the piece called Alresford Pool produced one of the most beautiful separate examples of the kind,—a rather mysterious person named John Chalkhill, to whom Izaak Walton was godfather and usher; in the second and at the beginning of the third, the dramatist Shakerley Marmion and William Chamberlayne. The latter's poem of Pharonnida[95] is the longest example of the style, and in flashes and short passages the most poetical of all; but it also exhibits the defects of that style most flagrantly. These defects come from the fact that the poet—allowed to neglect his rhyme as a warning bell of termination of something, and to use it as a mere accompaniment—allows his clauses and sentences to run into a sometimes quite bewildering prolixity, and very frequently neglects even that modified restriction of the line itself to some distinct form and outline which both good blank verse and this form of couplet equally require. The result, assisted by the ugly fancy of the time for apostrophated elisions, sometimes comes near to the contemporary degradation of blank verse itself which has been mentioned.

and stopped.

There can be no reasonable doubt that these excesses and defects stimulated attention to the stopped form of the couplet; and as little that this attention was, though not unmixedly, decidedly beneficial to English verse. It was becoming, and had soon become, desirable, not merely that such things as this excessive enjambment in couplet and as the degeneration of blank verse should be corrected, but that the valuable and indeed inestimable assertion of the right to trisyllabic substitution which blank verse had once more brought out, and which was prompting the use once more of purely or mainly trisyllabic measures, should be met, and for a time at any rate restrained, by the counter-assertion of the necessity of rhythmical smoothness and regularity. The language—though there is no reason to believe that the general pronunciation of Shakespeare's time was so different from ours as some have thought—was still going through changes of accent and the like; and, as yet, general notions on prosody were rare, for the most part very ignorant of the actual history of English poetry, and as a rule badly expressed. In these circumstances it is not surprising that the form—even the music—of the stopped and as nearly as possible normal decasyllabic couplet should appeal to many. The accepted growth of it is marked traditionally by the names of Fairfax, Sandys, and, above all, Waller, from whom Dryden (not to be noticed in detail till the next chapter) derived his pattern. But the clearest notion both of the principles and of the attraction of the form is to be obtained from the lines of Sir John Beaumont, quoted and discussed elsewhere.

For the present, however, the stopped couplet—even as such, and in comparison with its rival—was struggling not so much for mastery as for recognition, and Ben Jonson's idea of its being (if he really thought so) "the bravest of all" was nowhere near general acceptance. In particular, the production of lyric between Spenser's time and the Restoration—if not even considerably later—was immense in quantity, almost unique in variety, and never surpassed in poetical merit, though until late in the period it mostly, except in Shakespeare and a few others, confined itself to dissyllabic feet.[96]