In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, David
Wilson-Okamura <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes
At 02:28 PM 8/10/2004 +1200, Simon Cauchi wrote:
Not always. Puttenham commends Phaer for translating Virgil into "English
verse Heroicall", and Phaer wrote in couplets -- but they were fourteeners,
not what Puttenham calls "the meeter of ten sillables" (which he also
considered to be heroical).
I would make a distinction between Puttenham's history of poetry (book one,
in which he tries to be generous) and his theory of poetry (books two and
three, in which he is often critical). The praise of Phaer occurs in book
one. In book two, though, which deals with prosody, Puttenham lays down a
couple of rules that Phaer does not adhere to. First, fourteen syllables is
too long: ten, as you say, is stately and heroical, and twelve is
tolerable, but not more than twelve. Second, Puttenham is disdainful of
rhyming couplets and associates them with a vulgar audience.
Perhaps couplets (associated with the older Elizabethan drama) could not
come into their own until Italian, with its stanzaic epics, had been
displaced at the Restoration by French as the standard of modern
culture. But is there anything to the point in Dryden?
What are we to make then, of that phrase "English verse Heroicall"?
Puttenham's book was published in 1589: by that time, not only had Phaer
and Twyne translated the Aeneid into rhyming fourteeners, but Golding had
done Ovid in the same meter. This may have established a precedent for
"heroic poetry." But it's not one that the critics approved of, at least in
the abstract.
And the critics would prevail: contrast the fourteeners of Chapman's
Homer with the decasyllables of his Odyssey, when the longer line seemed
just too clumsy and archaic.
Leofranc Holford-Strevens
--
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Leofranc Holford-Strevens
67 St Bernard's Road usque adeone
Oxford scire MEVM nihil est, nisi ME scire hoc sciat alter?
OX2 6EJ
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