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. 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. >In short, I suspect there's a certain difficulty in the way your question >is phrased, and I think the difficulty probably lies in that tricky word >"synonym". Maybe I should start over and say I'm looking for early occurrences of the phrase "heroic couplet." If Randi Eldevik is right and it doesn't come in before Pope, that would be interesting. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- David Wilson-Okamura http://virgil.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] East Carolina University Virgil reception, discussion, documents, &c ----------------------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message "unsubscribe mantovano" in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
