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- VENUS
AND
ADONIS
^y
dignity.
Shakespeare's
genius
transmuted
most
of
his
ingre-
dients 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.
GeorgeGascoigne,
in
his Certayne
notes
of
Instruction
concerning the
making
of
verse
or
ryme
in
English (if7f),
writes
familiarly
of
<sixaines'
as
the
fitting
vehicle <for
shorte
phantazies'.
Puttenham
described
the
'stafFe
of
sixe
verses'
as
<mostusual'
and
<
very pleasant
to
th'eare'.'
The
most
notable
example
of
the
employment
of
the
sixain
before
Shakespeare's
Fenus and Adonis
is
offered
by
Edmund
Spenser's
Astrophel^
a
pastoral
elegy
upon
the
death of.
.
.
Sir
Philip Sidney^
which
was written
in
ij8<^,
and
after
wide
circulation
in
manuscriptwas printed
for
the
first
time
in
15-95-.
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,
i
j-91.
A
longer
effort
in the
six-line
stanza
is, as
we
have
seen,
the
narrative
poem
by
Thomas Lodge
entitled
Scillaes
Metamor-
phosis: Enterlaced
with
the
u?
fortunate
hue
of
Glaucus,
which
appeared in
15-89.
Robert Greene penned numerous
short
poems
in
sixains,
and
Nicholas Breton published
in
15-92 in
the six-lined stanza a
long allegory together with
a religious^
Cf.
Puttcnham's
The Arte
of English
Voesie
{\<^%^\
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 aba
baa, and again
in
the
Envoy
to
The
Clerkes Tale^
where
the
rimes
run
ababcb.
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