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- VENUS AND ADONIS 35
dignity. Shakespeare's genius transmuted most of his ingredients and fused them into a rich and consistent work of art. But the constituent elements deserve careful attention. The choice of metre is a final testimony to the young author's readiness to accept accessible guidance. The sixain or six-lined stanza, riming ababcc, which Shakespeare adopted, was among the commonest of all forms of verse in both English and French poetry of the sixteenth century. George Gascoigne, in his *Certayne notes of Instruction concerning the making of verse or ryme in English* (1575), writes familiarly of ‘sixaines’ as the fitting vehicle ‘for shorte phantazies’. Puttenham described the ‘staffe of sixe verses’ as ‘most usual’ and ‘very pleasant to th’ eare’. The most notable example of the employment of the sixain before Shakespeare’s *Venus and Adonis* is offered by Edmund Spenser’s *Astrophel, a pastoral elegy upon the death of... Sir Philip Sidney*, which was written in 1586, and after wide circulation in manuscript was printed for the first time in 1595. The poetic lament by the Countess of Pembroke, Sidney’s sister, which is appended to Spenser’s *Astrophel*, is also in the same metre; so, too, is Spenser’s ‘Teares of the Muses’ in his *Complaints*, 1591. A longer effort in the six-line stanza is, as we have seen, the narrative poem by Thomas Lodge entitled *Scillaes Metamorphosis: Enterlaced with the unfortunate loue of Glaucus*, which appeared in 1589. Robert Greene penned numerous short poems in sixains, and Nicholas Breton published in 1592 in the six-lined stanza a long allegory together with a religious
* Cf. Puttenham’s *The Arte of English Poesie* (1589), Book ii, Chap. ii, ‘Of Proportion in Staffe.’ Puttenham also notes of ‘the staffe of sixe verses’ that it ‘also serueth for a greater complement then the inferiour staues, which maketh him more commonly to be vsed’. Chaucer twice uses the six-lined stanza with an exceptional scheme of rime, once in the Envoy to the short poem *Womanly Noblesse*, where the rimes run ababaz, and again in the Envoy to *The Clerkes Tale*, where the rimes run ababcb.
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