from the drinking song ‘Back and Side Go Bare, Go Bare’ to the artful madrigal ‘My
love in her attire doth show her wit.’
Literary history can say little about the anonymous poems which fill the popular
lyric anthologies, from Tottel’s Miscellany (1557) through A Paradise of Dainty
Devices and A Gorgeous Gallery of Gallant Inventions to England’s Helicon (1601).
These numbers are often unfolksy: ‘Thule, the period of cosmography’ and
‘Constant Penelope sends to thee, careless Ulysses’, in catchy metrical hexameters.
Ferocious linguistic schooling encouraged delight in language and in metre.
Thomas Campion
Of all song-writers, Thomas Campion (1567–1620), inventive composer and
masque-maker, wrote the best quantitative verse. His ‘Rose-cheeked Laura, come’, in
praise of an ideal woman dancing, is the classic example. In later versions of this
theme, the dancer, an emblem of Platonic harmony, sings. Campion’s Laura is
accompanied only by her own silent music (and his verbal intelligence):
Rose-cheeked Laura, come,
Sing thou smoothly with thy beauty’s
Silent music, either other
Sweetly gracing.
5 Lovely forms do flow
From concent divinely framèd: musical concord
Heav’n is music, and thy beauty’s
Birth is heavenly.
These dull notes we sing
10 Discor ds need for helps to grace them;
Only beauty purely loving
Knows no discor d,
But still moves delight,
Like clear springs renewed by flowing,
15 Ever perfect, ever in them-
Selves eternal.The matching of syllable-length to metrical stress in a trochaicpattern is broken
twice: by lines 9–10, which act out the singer’s pretended clumsiness; and by the
iamb in line 13, where ‘still’ is both ‘unmoving’ and ‘perpetually’. Another Campion
poem imitating musical effect is ‘When to her lute Corinna sings’. His ‘My sweetest
Lesbia,let us live and love’ is one of several fine contemporary versions of Catullus’s
vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus.
Prose
John Lyly
One outcome of the revived grammar schools was an art prose of a kind used by
Sidney. Its acme was Euphues(1578) by John Lyly(c.1554–1606), grandson of the
author of the standard Latin grammar. Euphues (Gk: ‘well-endowed’) ‘dwelt in
Athens,a young gentleman of great patrimony, and of so comely a personage, that it
was doubted whether he were more bound to Nature for the lineaments of his
person, or to Fortune for the increase of his possessions.’
ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 105trochee A metrical foot in
which a stressed syllable is
followed by an unstressed
syllable, as in ‘knows no
discord’.