son's Poetical Rhapsody, and the poems, entitled madrigals, by Sidney, Barnes, Alexander, Drummond, and some others, exhibits some eighty or more examples approximating the madrigal forms given by Dr. Schipper, scarcely a score representing the actual Italian arrangement of rimes, and but one, and that not one of this number, preserving the hendecasyllabics of the original metre throughout.1 As results, we find (1) the range of the madrigal extended from six verses to fifteen, and even sixteen, whilst Barnes, who wrote twenty-six poems in this form, has madrigals of nineteen, twenty-seven, and even one of forty-two lines, although his average range is from ten to sixteen; (2) the metre is constantly varied, for the most part independently of the rimes, with verses of differing lengths, preferably lines of five accents and of three; (3) considerable freedom is displayed in the arrangement of the rimes of the tercets; and (4) there is an endeavor, especially among writers of madrigals to be set to music, to preserve the effect of Italian iambics by means of a preference for feminine rimes.

The majority of these madrigals on Italian models occur in the earlier collections of Byrd, Morley, and Dowland, and in the Musica Transalpina, which purports to be a mere translation. In these collections, and far more frequently in later ones, are found a large number of short poems otherwise constructed as to rime, and yet exhibiting the characteristics of the madrigal, and often so entitled. Some of these display other Italian verse forms, e.g., a quatrain followed by one or by two couplets, a single or double quatrain, or a short succession of couplets, all of these varieties of the Rispetto and other Italian folk-verse. To what extent these simple forms are merely due to prevailing English metrical influences, it is, of course, impossible to say. In several

1 Cf. Musa Madrigalesca, p. 88, which exhibits abb, cdd, a truncated form omitting the concluding couplet.

instances of metrical variation from Dr. Schipper's Italian madrigal forms, Oliphant gives the original, and the English shows a close metrical reproduction. This proves, what we know from other sources, that the English writers were only following in the madrigal, as in other forms, the greater freedom which Italian verse had assumed among their contemporaries of the latter half of the sixteenth century.

I quote the following madrigal from Canzonets, or little short Songs to three voices, newly published, by Thomas Morley, 1593. It preserves a usual Italian form, except for the variation of metre:

Say, gentle nymphs, that tread these mountains,
Whilst sweetly you sit playing,
Saw you my Daphne straying

Along your crystal fountains?

If that you chance to meet her,
Kiss her and kindly greet her;

Then these sweet garlands take her,

And say from me, I never will forsake her.1

Here is another illustrating a form consisting only of tercets. It appears prefixed to Morley's Ballets to Five Voices, and is signed M. M. D., which has been thought to stand for Master Michael Drayton :

Such was old Orpheus' cunning,

That senseless things drew near him

And herds of beasts to hear him.

The stock, the stone, the ox, the ass, came running.

Morley! but this enchanting

To thee, to be the music god, is wanting;

1 Musa Madrigalesca, p. 79.

And yet thou needst not fear him ;

Draw thou the shepherds still, and bonny lasses,

And envy him not stocks, stones, oxen, asses.1

Eventually the freer forms superseded those more closely imitating the Italian, until verses termed madrigals became indistinguishable from other short poems. Drummond, following the earlier work of his friend, Sir William Alexander, attempted a revival of the madrigal as of the sonnet. The madrigals of Drummond range from five to fifteen verses, and are composed, for the most part, on the general system of tercets, followed by a concluding couplet; they are very irregular in rime arrangement, and confined almost entirely to a free alternation of verses of five accents and of three, and to masculine rimes. It is hardly necessary to state that the madrigal was commonly set to music.3

2

The terzine is a continuous measure of five accents riming aba, bcb, cdc, etc., introduced into English by Wyatt and Surrey. It is a narrative rather than a lyric measure, and is rare in Elizabethan poetry, although used by Sidney, Daniel, Jonson, and Drummond, for eclogues, occasional verse, and once in a somewhat lyrical song by the first.* Sidney, followed by Spenser, Barnes, Alexander, Drummond,

1 Percy Society Publications, XIII, 21; the same volume contains three madrigals of Watson's, one of them in ottava rima, another in couplets. Watson appears to have left other poems in this form; these I have been unable to see. For further illustrations of the madrigal in its various English forms see pp. 83, 90, 112, 127, 132, 133, 155, 161, 179–81, and 193. The epigrammatic nature of the form is nicely preserved in Jonson's Hour Glass, p. 193, and in the madrigal from Greaves' Songs, p. 132.

2 Cf. pp. 179–81, 206.

3 An excellent work on the bibliography of English Song Books is the Bibliotheca Madrigaliana, by E. F. Rimbault, 1847. See, also, Oliphant's A Short Account of Madrigals, London, 1836, and an article in the British and Foreign Review for 1845.

4 Grosart's Sidney, III, 50.

and others, also employs the highly artificial sestine in its various modifications, for an explanation of the structure of which I must refer the reader to Dr. Schipper.1

:

2

The canzon, which in the hands of Petrarch had consisted of a highly organized lyrical form extending from five to ten stanzas of from nine to twenty verses, each with an added commiato or envoy, was rarely practiced by the English poets of this age. Barnabe Barnes affords the best specimens, notably in his Canzon III, the rimes of which exactly reproduce the arrangement of those of the second Canzone of Petrarch O aspettata in ciel, beata e bella; although Barnes uses only decasyllabic or hendecasyllabic verses, whilst Petrarch employs here, as customarily, a metre occasionally varied with shorter verses. Barnes' canzon is made up of seven stanzas of fifteen verses, the rimes of which are arranged upon this system: abcbac, cdeedef df; the two parts forming what is technically known as the fronte and the sirima, followed by a commiato or conclusion, which reproduces the rime arrangement of the sirima. The other canzons of Barnes, and those of Sir William Alexander,3 are freer in construction; and other similar long stanzaic structures shade off into irregular odes, epithalamia or other stanzas, losing entirely any sense of an original, Italian, classical, or English. The term thus came to be loosely employed, as may be seen by reference to Bolton's two stanzas on p. 109, or Greene's canzone in common metre. As to the diminutive canzonet, the term is of

1 Engl. Metr., II, 902 seq.; for examples see Barnes' Parthenophil and Parthenope, Arber's English Garner, V, 406–479 passim; also Sidney's Arcadia, Grosart's Poems of Sidney, III, 48, and II, 197 and 202, where still greater metrical refinements are practiced in the double sestine and "a Crown of Dizaines and Pendent."

2 Italian canzone, originally a song unaccompanied. 8 Aurora, 1604, ed. 1870, pp. 1, 28.

4 Poems of Greene, ed. Bell, p. 61.

infrequent use in English poetry, and seems to have been employed much, as in Provençal and Italian, to denote any short lyric, generally not exceeding a single stanza. Drayton uses the term for a poem of three stanzas of double quatrains,1 and elsewhere for a quatorzain.2

3

So much has been written, wisely and unwisely, on the sonnet, that some excuse must be offered for here repeating the particulars of an often repeated tale. For minuter matters I must refer the reader to Leigh Hunt's charming essay, prefixed to his Book of the Sonnet, to Schipper, as above, and to the many excellent discussions of this fertile theme elsewhere; some repetition cannot be avoided. Mr. Waddington very properly objects to the customary terms "Italian sonnet," or "Petrarchan sonnet," applied to a certain type, as other types were nearly as popular and quite as Italian, whilst the type in question "was written by Guittone many years before Petrarch adopted it as his model." Even more objectionable than these mere inaccuracies are the opprobrious epithets frequently applied to those English quatorzains which depart from the various Italian types, the more especially that even among those English sonnets which most minutely observe the number and arrangement of the Petrarchan rimes, there are few which do not violate other rules of the Italian sonnet as strict, if not so obvious.

The term, sonnet, is very elastic as employed by Elizabethan writers; and it was commonly used, as originally in Italy, to signify a short lyric of almost any form, or as a sort of generic term including the canzon, madrigal, ode,

1 See p. 196 below.

2 Idea, Son. Ixi, ed. 1605.

3 See also L. Biadene, Morfologia del Sonetto nei secoli XIII e XIV, in Monaci's Studj di Filologia Romanza, IV, 1–234.

4 English Sonnets by Living Writers, p. 201.