This fellow pecks up wit, as pigeons peas,
And utters it again when God doth please.
He is wit's pedlar, and retails his wares
At wakes, and wassails, meetings, markets, fairs;
And we that sell by gross, the Lord doth know,
Have not the grace to grace it with such show.
This gallant pins the wenches on his sleeve.
Had he been Adam, he had tempted Eve.
He can carve too, and lisp: why, this is he
That kiss'd his hand away in courtesy;
This is the ape of form, monsieur the nice,
That, when he plays at tables, chides the dice
In honorable terms: nay, he can sing
A mean most meanly, and, in ushering,
Mend him who can: the ladies call him sweet;
The stairs, as he treads on them, kiss his feet.
(Shakspere: Love's Labor's Lost, V. ii. 315-330. ab. 1590.)
The use of rimed couplets in Shakspere's dramas is especially characteristic of his earlier work. In this play, Love's Labor's Lost, Dowden says, "there are about two rhymed lines to every one of blank verse" (Shakspere Primer, p. 44). In the late plays, on the other hand, rime disappears almost altogether. It will be observed that while Shakspere's heroic verse is usually fairly regular, with not very many run-on lines, it yet differs in quality from that of satires. The dramatic use moulds it into different cadences, and the single couplet is, perhaps, less noticeably the unit of the verse.
Shepherd, I pray thee stay. Where hast thou been?
Or whither goest thou? Here be woods as green
As any; air likewise as fresh and sweet
As where smooth Zephyrus plays on the fleet
Face of the curled streams; with flowers as many
As the young spring gives, and as choice as any;
Here be all new delights, cool streams and wells,
Arbors o'ergrown with woodbines, caves, and dells;
Choose where thou wilt, whilst I sit by and sing,
Or gather rushes, to make many a ring
For thy long fingers; tell thee tales of love,—
How the pale Phoebe, hunting in a grove,
First saw the boy Endymion, from whose eyes
She took eternal fire that never dies;
How she conveyed him softly in a sleep,
His temples bound with poppy, to the steep
Head of old Latmus, where she stoops each night,
Gilding the mountain with her brother's light,
To kiss her sweetest.
(Fletcher: The Faithful Shepherdess, I. iii. ab. 1610.)
Fletcher uses the couplet in this drama with a freedom hardly found elsewhere until the time of Keats; see the remark of Symonds, quoted p. [210], below.
If Rome so great, and in her wisest age,
Fear'd not to boast the glories of her stage,
As skilful Roscius, and grave Æsop, men,
Yet crown'd with honors, as with riches, then;
Who had no less a trumpet of their name
Than Cicero, whose every breath was fame:
How can so great example die in me,
That, Allen, I should pause to publish thee?
Who both their graces in thyself hast more
Outstript, than they did all that went before:
And present worth in all dost so contract,
As others speak, but only thou dost act.
Wear this renown. 'Tis just, that who did give
So many poets life, by one should live.
(Ben Jonson: Epigram LXXXIX, to Edward Allen. 1616.)
Jonson is thought by some to have been the founder of the classical school of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which made the heroic couplet peculiarly its own. See on this subject an article by Prof. F. E. Schelling, "Ben Jonson and the Classical School," in the Publications of the Modern Language Association, n. s. vol. vi. p. 221. Professor Schelling finds in Jonson's verse all the characteristics of the later couplet of Waller and Dryden: end-stopped lines and couplets, a preference for medial cesura, and an antithetical structure of the verse. "No better specimen of Jonson's antithetical manner could be found," he says further, than the Epigram here quoted. So far as this antithetical quality of Jonson's verse is concerned, Professor Schelling's view cannot be questioned; but that Jonson shows any singular preference for end-stopped lines and couplets may be seriously questioned.