VIII. Late Sixteenth Century
The Perfecting of Metre and of Poetical Diction.
This invaluable if not always very stimulating period of drill and discipline (in which Wyatt and Surrey themselves, with Sackville later, are the chief and almost the only poets who transcend experiment) passes, a little before 1580, into one of complete poetic and proportionately complete prosodic accomplishment, with Spenser and his companions and followers for non-dramatic poetry, with Peele and Marlowe preluding Shakespeare in dramatic blank verse. The greatest pioneer, one who not only explores but attains, is Spenser; and he, after presenting in the Shepherd's Calendar the most remarkable record of experiment in the history of English poetic form, proceeds to the perfect structure and exquisite diction of the Faerie Queene. He, however, hardly touches blank verse, and, after the Calendar, eschews the lighter lyric. But both these are taken up by others; and while lyric attains all but the highest possible stage of that diversity in harmony which is especially required by it, the possibilities of blank verse are more than suggested in Shakespeare's predecessors, and are, in the dramatic range, exhausted by Shakespeare himself. Outside the drama, however, and blank verse, the abiding fear of doggerel keeps back the due development of regularised substitution: verse is mostly iambic. But here also Shakespeare pierces the heart of the mystery, and the songs in his plays are as prosodically complete as his blank verse itself. There is much practice in sonnet, and, towards the end of the century, "riding rhyme" or heroic couplet, which had fallen into some disuse, is revived, chiefly for satiric or semi-satiric purposes (as by Spenser in Mother Hubberd's Tale, by Hall, Donne, and Marston in their definite satires, etc., and for "history" by Drayton).
IX. Early Seventeenth Century
The further Development of Lyric, Stanza, and Blank Verse. Insurgence and Division of the Couplet.
Between the latest years of the sixteenth and the earliest of the seventeenth century there is naturally little difference, but the total transformation is rather rapid. Blank verse no sooner attains its absolute perfection in Shakespeare than it begins to show signs of overripeness, in the great tendency to redundance which even he shares in his latest plays, and which distinguishes Beaumont and Fletcher. Stanza does not, after the similar consummateness of Spenser, show a similar formal decline; but there arises a distaste for it. Only lyric perseveres in practically full flourishing; and even exhibits a certain further quintessence of beauty, though some loss of strength. Meanwhile, the decasyllabic couplet revives in a complicated fashion. It does not yet make much recovery of drama, but is very largely practised by Drayton, is declared (at least on Drummond's authority) to be "the bravest sort of verse" by Jonson, and made, towards the end of James the First's reign, the subject of a formal critical-poetical encomium by Sir John Beaumont. But it is a house divided against itself, and it is not till the "stopped" form (in which the rhymes sharply punctuate the sense) conquers the "enjambed" (which in this sub-period is the favourite) that it attains complete popular favour.
X. Mid-Seventeenth Century
Milton.
The period, or sub-period, which may be called "mid-seventeenth century," on one side continues the developments described in the last section, and on another begins those which will be described in the next. But it contains almost the whole work of Milton, who belongs in one sense to both, in another to neither. If he had written no blank verse, he would still be of the first rank as a practical prosodist, in virtue of his stanza-forms, such as that in the "Hymn on the Nativity"; of his remarkably varied octosyllabic couplet in L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, Arcades, and Comus; of the almost unique strophes, with irregular rhyme, in Lycidas; of the Sonnets, adjusted not to the Elizabethan-English, but to the commoner Italian forms; and of the peculiar choric arrangements of Samson Agonistes. But it is undoubtedly as the introducer of blank verse for general poetic practice, and as the modulator of that verse in the directions previously described, that he stands as one of the very greatest masters of English prosody. For, on the one hand, he rescues "blanks" from the chaos into which, by the laches of the dramatists, they were falling; and, on the other, he establishes for ever (though it may sometimes be mistaken by individuals and periods) the principle of foot-equivalence and substitution in the individual line, with that of combination of several lines into a verse-paragraph.
XI. The Later Seventeenth Century
Dryden.
For the moment, however, the work of Milton produces no effect, and though Dryden, his younger contemporary, uses, with great effect, a large variety of metres, his main importance, in the general history of prosody, consists in the establishment of the stopped heroic couplet as at once the most popular and the most dignified of English metres. But he does not at once make it into the strictly decasyllabic, strictly middle-paused kind which dominates the following century. On the initiation (partly at least) of Cowley, he varies it with the Alexandrine, which he sometimes includes in a triplet, while the same extension to three similarly rhymed lines, in decasyllable only, is still more frequent. If he does not exactly introduce, he popularises and for a time maintains, the same couplet in drama, but uses it most successfully in satiric and didactic verse, of extraordinary weight and vigour, while entirely destitute of monotony. He himself and his minor but more lyrical contemporaries, Rochester, Sedley, Afra Behn, etc., continue the older Caroline tradition of song in varied measures, but it dies out. On the other hand, his practice (suggested, doubtless, by Davenant's Gondibert) of the decasyllabic quatrain, and the majestic if not fully Pindaric strophes of his Odes, supply models which serve to vary the unbroken prevalence of the couplet, and are followed by Gray and others, during the succeeding century, with exceptionally fine results.