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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.
Ill
The metre of Lucrece was a favourite one in Enelish The metre
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 T^he Clerkes Tale^ The Man of Larves
Tale^ The Second ISlonnes 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 (if7<J) 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^ iJ^^, the seven-line stanza was 'the chief
Passions are likened best to floods and streams
The shalloiu murmurs hut the deep are dumb^
So when aflPections yield discourse, it seems.
The bottom is but shallow whence it comes.
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