VI. Rhyme-Royal.—However much doubt there may be about the directly imitative origin of things like couplets, or even quatrains (which might, and almost certainly would, suggest themselves without pattern), the case is different with such a thing as the permutation of rhyme in a fixed order of sevens ababbcc. It may, therefore, be very likely that Chaucer took this from Guillaume de Machault, a slightly older French poet (1284?-1377), with whom he was certainly acquainted. If so, it is unlikely that Machault invented it, though he may have done so; for there is almost every possible cross-arrangement of rhymes in the enormous wealth of French and Provençal lyric from the eleventh to the fourteenth century. But it was certainly not a frequent metre before. On the other hand, Chaucer's Troilus made it the most fashionable metre in English throughout the fifteenth century for long narrative poems, and it was splendidly written by Sackville in the mid-sixteenth, but thereafter succumbed to the octave. The last considerable example of it, in the larger Elizabethan period, was the Leoline and Sydanis of Sir Francis Kynaston, a great admirer of Chaucer, who actually also translated part of Troilus into Latin rhyme-royal. But it was revived in the worthiest fashion by the late Mr. William Morris.
VII. Octave.—There are two principal eight-line stanzas of decasyllables used in English. The oldest form, employed by Chaucer, appears to have been derived from the French, as it is certainly used by Deschamps, and may have been by Machault. Here the rhymes are arranged ababbcbc. By addition of an Alexandrine this arithmetically makes the Spenserian (v. inf.). The other—later, but much more largely used—is derived from the Italian ottava rima, the rhyme order of which is abababcc. This is the kind employed by Fairfax (with great results, though rather in the direction of its final couplet than as a whole) in his translation of Tasso (1600), and (with a comic bent also directly imitated from Italian) by Frere in The Monks and the Giants, and (after him) by Byron in Beppo and Don Juan. The greatest modern serious employment of it is in Shelley's Witch of Atlas.
VIII. Spenserian.—The Spenserian stanza of nine lines—eight decasyllables and an Alexandrine, rhymed ababbcbcc—is entirely the invention of Edmund Spenser. It is false to say that it was "taken from the Italians"; for there is no such stanza in Italian, and the octave-decasyllabic part of it is rhymed differently from the Italian octave. It is irrelevant to say that it is the Chaucerian octave with an Alexandrine added; for it is exactly in the addition of the Alexandrine that the whole essence and the whole beauty of the stanza consist. It is still more irrelevant, though true, to assert that there had been a few attempts (as by More) to add an Alexandrine to other stanzas or to lengthen out their last line into one; for it is of this stanza that we are talking, and not of something else. Therefore it is sufficient to say once more that the Spenserian stanza is the invention of Edmund Spenser, and one of the greatest inventions known in prosody.
IX. Burns Metre.—This arrangement is found first in the verse of the Provençal prince, William IX. Count of Poitiers (poems about 1090).
Pus oezem de novelh florir
Pratz e vergiers reverderir
Rius e fontanas esclarrir
Auras e vens
Beu deu quas des lo joy jourir
Dou es jauzens.
He has it also in a seven-line form, with four instead of three eights to start with; while the shorter variety is repeated in Northern France, as in the beautiful song of "Bele Aeliz." It appears in one English romance, Octovian Imperator, and largely in the Miracle plays; but later seems to have been preserved only in Scotland, where Burns gave it once more world-wide vogue.
X. Other Stanzas.—Of the numerous other forms of what some improperly call "irregular verse"—what King James the Sixth (First) showed himself much more of a Solomon in calling "broken and cuttit," and adding, "quhairof new formes are daylie inventit according to the Poëtes Pleasour"—it is impossible to give an exhaustive account, or even to supply a mere list with examples of the "formes."[181] It is sufficient to say that when the new English prosody was in making there were already extensive patterns of such verse in French and Provençal poetry; that these were freely imitated and improved upon. In the present writer's larger History the passages dealing with the contents of MS. Harl. 2253, with the Vernon MS., and with the Miracle plays will be found to contain specifications of almost every form, and examples of not a few. This liberty continued in the lyrics of the Elizabethan period in the larger sense, being especially manifested in the later Elizabethan miscellanies of the time proper, and in the Caroline poets; but was discontinued in practice, and frowned upon in principle, during the eighteenth century. It was revived in the nineteenth by the great poets of the first Romantic period to some extent, but to a much greater degree by some of their "intermediate" successors, like Beddoes and Darley; while, from Tennyson and Browning onward, it has been the delight of almost every poet worthy of the name to add to the variety.
FOOTNOTES:
[162] The longest passage that my memory (assisted in this case by the kindness of my friend and colleague Professor Hardie) supplies is in Aristophanes, Eq. 911-940. And it is not insignificant that this not only becomes (and seems actually to be started by) a burlesque repetition—
[a]Α. εμου μεν ουν.]
[a]Κ. εμου μεν ουν,]