THE SPENSERIAN STANZA BEFORE 17001

This attempt at a history of the Spenserian stanza and its imitations began as a study in early Romanticism. Its justification must rest upon its fulness of treatment and upon the importance of two details. No one has hitherto made more than a tentative list of users and imitators of Spenser's stanza, and no one, not even Mr. Saintsbury in his History of English Prosody, Vol. I, has noticed the metrical interest of the "Mirrour for Magistrates." Nor, though many must have come upon the passage, has anyone seemed to have been impressed with Dryden's acknowledgment of his debt to Spenser.

The peculiar characteristics of the Spenserian stanza are its linked quatrains and its final aléxandrine. Since Spenser's time, except for the Italian sonnet and the French ballade (both imported forms), the linking of quatrains has not been very popular in English verse. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, however, it was a frequent device. Chaucer used the ababbcbc in several poems, notably in the ninety-seven stanzas of his "Monkes Tale." Presumably Chaucer got it from the Old French, where it was a fairly common form, and he was followed in its use by Lydgate and others in the fifteenth century. C. Davidson notes also that the stanza was a favorite of the Coventry plays. Of Spenser's contemporaries, Samuel Daniel, in the dedication of his Tragedy of Cleopatra," makes the only use of it that I have been able to find; Spenser himself does not use it, unless we count the first eight lines of "November" in the "Shepheards Calender." Spenser's followers, as we shall see, were almost certain, in cases where they did not keep his stanza exactly, to omit the linking of the quatrains; so that that feature of the Spenserian stanza which seems to have appealed to the nineteenth century as one of its chief beauties has been most often ignored by mere imitators.

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The history of the final alexandrine is very different; its use

1 This paper presents only the general conclusions of a study which the writer hopes ultimately to publish at length, with full tables and references.

is the most certain mark of Spenserian influence, even where that influence is at second or even third hand. Although Spenser was not the first to use a stanza ending with a line longer than the rest, he certainly set the fashion, and we may confidently ascribe to his example even such stanzas as Carew's "Good Counsel to a Young Maid," where the first lines are tetrameters, and the last a pentameter.

Outside of the "Faerie Queen," Spenser uses a final alexandrine only in the last stanza of "January" in the "Shepheards Calender;" in six of the sonnets prefixed to the "Faerie Queen;" and in sonnets X and XLV of the "Amoretti." Spenser's followers, however, tried the alexandrine on all sorts of stanzas: the elegiac quatrain, the familiar ababcc, the rhyme royal, the ottava rima, and even the sonnet.

The source of Spenser's alexandrine has not yet been traced satisfactorily. Professor Skeat, in the Athenaeum,' ascribes it to Surrey's use of it with the fourteener in Tottel's "Miscellany" (1557). A fatal objection to that source, it seems to me, is that in all the uses of the "Poulter's Measure" in Tottel the alexandrine is followed by the septenary, and is not a final longer line. For a prior use of alexandrines merely Spenser did not even have to go to Tottel, as he must have been familiar with Sidney's quatorzains in alexandrines.

Guest, in his History of English Rhythms, Book IV, chapter vii, says:

In his "Lamentacyon" for the death of Henry the Seventh's Queen, written in 1503, Sir Thomas More uses the ballet-stave of seven, and often gives six accents to the last verse of the stanza. This verse always ends with the words "and lo now here she lies." It must have been often convenient to wedge this section into a verse of six accents; and as the poet's rhythm is in other respects loose, I consider the Spenser-stave owing rather to the tumbling rhythm of the period, than to any design of introducing novelty into English versification.

The poem in question consists of 12 rhyme-royal stanzas, each ending with a refrain "and lo now here I lye." In 8 of the stanzas the syllables preceding this refrain number either 4 or 5; in stanzas 6, 7, 9, and 10 the syllables number 6, as follows: "My

1 May 6, 1893, p. 574 b.

palace bylded is;" "The mother's part also;" "Thy mother never know;" "Farewell and pray for me." Sir Thomas More wrote other poems in the rhyme-royal stanza, but never elsewhere ends with an alexandrine.

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So far as I am aware, no one has hitherto commented on the forerunners of Spenser's stanza to be found in the "Mirrour for Magistrates." In the edition of 1559, "Henry VI," attributed to William Baldwin, is in forty absolutely regular stanzas, rhyming aabb. To be sure, this is not a stanza ending in an alexandrine, but it is a stanza ending in a longer line, and in a versification that cannot by any stretch be called "tumbling." Eleven other "legends" in this edition of 1559 are attributed to Baldwin, all of them in the rhyme-royal stanza, with a total of about 350 stanzas. These stanzas are also regular, not to say monotonous, in their scansion, for the variations number only five, namely, two Latin lines, one doubtful alexandrine, and two undoubted ones—all at the ends of stanzas. The regularity of the versification of these poems helps to put beyond a doubt the conclusion that the final septenary of the stanza of "Henry VI" was intentional.

In 1574 John Higgins issued an addition to the "Mirrour for Magistrates," with 16 legends, to which in 1575 he added another, "Lord Irenglas." In 1587 he republished his part, and added 24 legends (including "Burdet" in Part III). Of these 41 legends, numbering over 1,000 stanzas, 33 legends, with about 900 stanzas, have the rhyme royal rhyme-scheme. Like Baldwin, Higgins clung to the rhyme-scheme, although he varied his line-lengths and his measures. For example, in 2 short envoys the lines are all alexandrines instead of pentameters; in 2 legends he uses a perfectly regular anapestic tetrameter, one of them followed in the envoy by 3 stanzas which run ababbcc. Higgins also tried a few experiments in other stanza-forms; in 5 legends the rhymescheme is ababbccc (the rhyme royal with an added line—a rhyme-scheme sometimes used, as we shall see, by Spenser's followers); the 2 stanzas of "Laelius Hamo" rhyme ababcc; in "King Varianus" the scheme is aabbeded; in "C. C. Caligula," ababbcbcb; and in "Emperor Severus" he switches from ababccc,

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in the first 6 stanzas, to ababbccc in the remaining 17. Higgins was so obviously an experimenter in meters that it is worth while to see how far he was either systematic or consistent in carrying out his experiments.

Of the 41 legends, with their more than 1,000 stanzas, 28 items, numbering about 500 stanzas, are almost mechanically regular. In addition, 8 of the legends in the rhyme royal stanzas (about 150 stanzas) are practically regular, except that 22 stanzas end in an alexandrine, and 15 in an alexandrine couplet. There are left 8 legends in the rhyme-royal stanza, and 3 others, altogether about 400 stanzas, in which there is considerable irregularity.

Of the 309 stanzas in the 8 legends in rhyme-royal stanzas, 94 are erratic; that is to say, occasional alexandrines appear in stanzas that are pretty certainly meant to be in pentameter, or occasional pentameters in stanzas meant to be in alexandrines. Even these stanzas, however, tend pretty clearly to fall into four groups. The smallest group-of stanzas of uniform length of line-numbers 44 stanzas, of which 15 are erratic. The next group-stanzas with a long final line-numbers 65 stanzas, of which 22 are erratic. Stanzas ending in a long couplet number 92, with 22 erratic. The largest group-of stanzas which end with a shorter line or lines-numbers 102 stanzas, with 31 erratic.

The only one of these legends which is hard to scan is "Pinnar," the shortest of them, and in its envoy Higgins himself says: "Though thus unorderly his tale hee tell. . . . . No fyner fyled phrase could scape my handes." The other legends scan easily, and the lines are clearly and obviously pentameters, alexandrines, or septenaries, as the case may be. As a rule, where there might be some doubt about the scansion, Higgins has helped us out by his printing. For example, in a certain passage the -ed of the preterite and the past participle was spelled out in the sixteen cases in which it counted in the scansion; in the same passage the fact that this ending was not counted in the scansion was indicated forty-one times by -de, 'd, -t, -te, or -d. Other instances are "wandring," "enmies," "H'is," and "Thave sav'de."