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- LUCRECE 21
Neither the individuality of style nor the substantive originality of many details in Shakespeare's poem can be questioned. But it is clear that, working on foundations laid by Ovid, he sought suggestion for his poetic edifice in Livy, and in such successors of the classical poet and historian as Chaucer and Bandello. Nor can it be lightly questioned that he absorbed sentiments and phrases from many contemporary English verse-writers with whom his muse acknowledged a sympathetic affinity.
### III
The metre of Lucrece was a favourite one in English literature long before the Elizabethan era. The seven-line stanza is more commonly used by Chaucer than any other. He seems to have borrowed it from the French poetry of his contemporary Guillaume de Machault. It is often met with in the Canterbury Tales (see *The Clerkes Tale*, *The Man of Lawes Tale*, *The Second Nonnes Tale*), as well as in *Troylus and Crisyde* and many of the shorter poems (cf. ‘The complaint to his empty purse’). It is the metre, too, of Lydgate’s monumental *Fall of Princes*. According to Elizabethan critics it was the stanza that was best adapted to serious themes. Gascoigne described it in his *Certayne Notes of Instruction concerning the making of verse or ryme in English* (1576) as ‘Rithme royall’: ‘and surely,’ he adds, ‘it is a royalle kinde of verse, seruing best for graue discourses.’ According to Puttenham, *The Arte of English Poesie*, 1589, the seven-line stanza was ‘the chief
Passions are likened best to floods and streams
The shallow murmurs but the deep are dumb,
So when affections yield discourse, it seems,
The bottom is but shallow whence it comes.
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