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LUCRECE
of our ancient proportions used by any rimer writing anything historical or grave poem², and he refers to Chaucer’s *Troylus and Crisyle* and Lydgate’s *Fall of Princes* by way of proof that ‘the staffe of seven verses was most usual with our ancient makers’. The rimes, he points out, were capable of seven variations. Shakespeare followed the customary scheme which Chaucer had employed (ababbcc). Puttenham found fault with those who close the stanza with an independent couplet ‘concording with no other verse that went before’, but he finally admits that the ‘double cadence in the last two verses serves the ear well enough’. The comment well applies to Shakespeare’s prosody.
Openser’s seven-line stanza.
Of English poems in the metre which were written shortly before Shakespeare penned his *Lucrece*, the most memorable is Spenser’s *Ruines of Time*, published in 1590, in which Shakespeare’s cadences seem almost precisely anticipated. The following is a good example of the stanza in Spenser’s hands:—
But Fame with golden wings aloft doth flie,
Above the reach of ruinous decay,
And with brave plumes doth beate the azure skie,
Admir’d of base-borne men from far away:
Then, who so will with vertuous deeds assay
To mount to heaven, on Pegasus must ride,
And with sweete Poets verse be glorifide.
Greene’s *A Maidens Dreame, An elegy on Sir Christopher Hatton*,
¹ Spenser employed the seven-line stanza with a different scheme of rhyming (ababcbc) in his *Daphnaida*, 1591, but in his *Hymnes*, 1596, he returned to the Shakespearean plan. Among the Elizabethan poets who used the seven-line stanza in long poems immediately after *Lucrece* were (Sir) John Davis in his *Orchestra*, 1594; Barnfield in *Complaint of Chastitie* and *Shepherds Content*, 1594; Drayton in *Mertimeriades*, 1596, and parts of *Harmonie of the Church*, 1596. At a little later date Nicholas Breton employed it constantly; cf. his *Pasquils Passe and Passeth* not, 1600; *Longing of a Blessed Heart*, 1601; *Pasquils Mad Cappe*, 1626.
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