Lyric forms in the sonnet sequences of Barnabe Barnes [Reprint 2020 ed.] 9783111342481, 9783110991185

Table of contents :
LYRIC FORMS IN THE SONNET SEQUENCES OF BARNABE BARNES
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
I. MISCELLANEOUS LOVE LYRICS
II. LOVE SONNETS
III. DIVINE SONNETS I
IV. HYMNE
V. DIVINE SONNETS II
CONCLUSION
APPENDIX I. TABLE OF LYRIC FORMS
APPENDIX II. TABLE OF SENSE PATTERNS IN THE DIVINE SONNETS
APPENDIX III. IMAGERY AND STRUCTURE IN DIVINE SONNET V
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX

Citation preview

DE P R O P R I E T A T I B U S L I T T E R A R U M edenda curat

C. H. VAN SCHOONEVELD Indiana University

Series Practica,

18

LYRIC FORMS IN THE SONNET SEQUENCES OF BARNABE BARNES

by

P H I L I P E. BLANK, Jr. North Carolina State University

1974

MOUTON THE HAGUE • PARIS

© Copyright 1974 in The Netherlands Mouton & Co. N. V., Publishers, The Hague No part of this book may be translated or reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publishers

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER: 72-94447

Printed in Hungary

L Y R I C F O R M S I N THE SONNET S E Q U E N C E S O F BARNABE BARNES

And because loue is of all other humane affections the most puissant and passionate, and most generall to all sortes and ages of men and women, so as whether it be of the yong or old, or wise or holy, or high estate or low, none euer could truly bragge of any exemption in that case: it requireth a forme of Poesie variable, inconstant, affected, curious, and most witty of any others, whereof the ioyes were to be vttered in one sorte, the sorrowes in an other, and, by the many formes of Poesie, the many moodes and pangs of louers throughly to be discouered; the poore soules sometimes praying, beseeching, sometime honouring, auancing, praising, an other while railing, reuiling, and cursing, then sorrowing, weeping, lamenting, in the end laughing, reioysing, & solacing the beloued againe, with a thousand delicate deuises, odes, songs, elegies, ballads, sonets, and other ditties, moouing one way and another to great compassion. GEORGE PUTTENHAM The Arte of English Poesie, 1589, The First Booke, Chapter XXII

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The debts of gratitude I have incurred in preparing this study are many; it is a pleasure to acknowledge them here. My dependence on other writers is obviously extensive; those to whom I am especially grateful for factual and critical insights about Elizabethan verse, particularly that of Barnes, include Lily B. Campbell, Madeleine Hope Dodds, Mark Eccles, Maurice Evans, J. W. Lever, Carol Maddison, F. T. Prince, Janet Scott, and George N. Shuster. And Victor A. Doyno I thank for kindly giving me helpful information about the 1593 edition of Barnes's Parthenophil and Parthenophe. To others, my obligation is more personal: for valuable criticism of earlier drafts of my manuscript, I extend warm thanks to my teachers William S. Wells, O. B. Hardison, Jr., and Clifford P. Lyons; and for their encouragement I am grateful to my colleagues Larry S. Champion, William B. Toole, III, and Lodwick C. Hartley. I am indebted to a number of groups and individuals for facilitating preparation of this work: to the staffs of the Louis Round Wilson Library in Chapel Hill and of the D. H. Hill Library in Raleigh for many accommodations; to Mrs. George H.Cocolas, Miss Gloria D. Bellamy, and Mrs. James A. Hardee for typing the manuscript; to the Smith Fund Committee of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for a grant to obtain research materials; and to the Faculty Research and Professional Development Fund of North Carolina State University at Raleigh for a subvention to help meet the cost of publication. I am indebted also for publishers' kind permissions to quote excerpts from their books: to the Clarendon Press, Oxford, for excerpts from Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. G. Gregory Smith, 2 vols., 1904, and from The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. William A. Ringler, Jr., copyright @ 1962; to The Macmillan Company for an excerpt from Maurice Valency, In Praise of Love: An Introduction to the Love Poetry of the Renaissance, copyright (c) Maurice Valency 1958; and to the Princeton University Press for excerpts from Alfred Einstein, The Italian Madrigal,

8

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

trans. Alexander H. Krappe, Roger H. Sessions, and Oliver Strunk, 3 vols., copyright (c) 1941. My greatest debt of gratitude, however, is to my wife: her offering the sustenance which has made this work possible has assured me that in at least one other than Parthenophe "Nature on earth loues miracle hath made." P. E. B„ Jr.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

7

Introduction 1. Barnes's life and works 2. Thesis and method of study

11 12 31

I. Miscellaneous love lyrics 1. Eidillion 2. Elegies 3. Sestines 4. Canzons 5. Odes 6. Madrigalls

39 39 41 46 48 52 59

II. Love sonnets 1. Italian sonnets 2. English sonnets 3. Fifteen-line English sonnets 4. Italian-English sonnets 5. Nongeneric sonnets

70 73 79 83 86 87

III. Divine sonnets I

92

IV. Hymne

98

V. Divine sonnets II

106

Conclusion

116

1. Innovation, coherence, and variety 2. Wit, verisimilitude, and divine imitation

116 120

10

CONTENTS

Appendix I: Table of lyric forms

125

Appendix II: Table of sense patterns in the divine sonnets

131

Appendix III: Imagery and structure in divine sonnet V

135

Bibliography

143

Index

151

INTRODUCTION

Discerning critics have found commentary enough on many Elizabethan sonnet sequences in the sonneteers' description of their poems as "witty toys". 1 Aspects of these poems, however, merit serious inquiry. The need for a study of lyric forms in the sonnet sequences of Barnabe Barnes, for example, is readily apparent. Metrical experimentation is a hallmark of Elizabethan poetry. Barnes's Parthenophil and Parthenophe. Sonnettes, Madrigals, Elegies and Odes2 contains an "eidillion", twenty-one elegies, five sestines, three "canzons", twenty odes, and twenty-six "madrigalls", as well as one hundred and five sonnets. His A DiuineCenturie of Spirituall Sonnets3 includes one hundred sonnets and a hymn. In his construction of lyric forms in these genres, Barnes is, after Sidney and Spenser, the most experimental of the Elizabethans. A prominent feature in the sequences of Petrarch is the interspersion of an assortment of other lyrics among the sonnets.4 Other lyrics are included, too, in the collections of some sixteenth-century Italian poets and in the collections of the French poets Ronsard, de Beze, Desportes, and Vauquelin.5 But Parthenophil alone among Elizabethan sonnet sequences represents the feature

1 See, for an example of the sonneteers' view of their efforts, Robert Tofte's dedication to Laura (1597), in An English Garner: Elizabethan Sonnets, ed. Sidney Lee (Westminster, 1904), II, 353. And, for examples of the view frequently held by critics, see below, pp. 23, 71-72. 2

[(London, 1593)]. All citations are from a xerographic copy of this edition in the STC series reproduced by University Microfilms, Inc., Ann Arbor. 3 (London, 1595). All references are from a Xerox copy of this edition in the STC series of University Microfilms, Inc., Ann Arbor. 4 Lee, Elizabethan Sonnets, I, xv and n. 1, lists the poetic kinds in Petrarch's sequences: in the sequence inscribed to Laura in life, two hundred and twenty-seven sonnets, twenty-one canzoni, eight sestines, four madrigals, and five ballades; and, in the sequence to Laura after death, ninety sonnets, eight canzoni, one sestina, and oneballata. 4 Lee, Elizabethan Sonnets, I, lxxviii and n. 3, and xxiii-xxiv.

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INTRODUCTION

on the scale set forth in the collections of the continental poets.8 Previous scholarship suggests the need for further study not only of Barnes's lyric forms but of other aspects of his works and of his life as well. The scholarship includes a great number of items. Yet it contains gaps, at least occasional inaccuracies, and critical judgments which are by no means uniform.

1. BARNES'S LIFE A N D WORKS

Not much is known about Barnabe Barnes, son of the Bishop of Durham Richard Barnes, volunteer in Essex's Normandy campaign, accused poisoner of the Recorder of Berwick, and author of poems, a political tract, and a play. But such information as there is whets one's curiosity to know more.7 Information about Barnes before 1593 comes from his connections with his father, his college, and the Earl of Essex. Although his birth date is not recorded, Barnes's baptism is registered on Marchó, 1570-1, at St. Michael le Belfrey, in the city of York. At the time, his father held the bishopric at Carlisle ; seven years later he was to be advanced to the richest of sees at Durham; but until the June before the baptism Richard Barnes had been living in York as Suffragan Bishop of Nottingham and Chancellor of York Minster. On July 8,1586, Barnes matriculated at Brasenose College, Oxford. Among his friends there were the epigrammatist Thomas Bastard and the translator John Thorie. Barnes left without a degree, perhaps in August 1587 because of the death of his father, or perhaps as late as 1589, or after, when the heir-presumptive • Examples of English sequences before and after Barnes's that contain poems in a variety of genres are Soowthern's Pandora (1584), sonnets, odes, and "odelets"; Sidney's Astrophil aid Stella (1591 and 1598), sonnets and songs; Giles Fletcher the Elder's Licia (1593), sonnets, an ode, and elegies; Lodge's Phillis (1593), sonnets, eclogues, an ode, and an elegy; William Percy's Sonnets to the fairest Coelia (1594), sonnets and a madrigal ; William Alexander's Aurora (1604), sonnets, songs, and elegies ; William Drummond of Hawthornden's Poems (1616), sonnets, madrigals, sextains, and songs; and Greville's Caelica (1633), poems in various meters. See Lee, Elizabethan Sonnets, I, xlix-1, xlii n. 1, lxxxii, lxvi n. 2, and cv. ' The modern accounts, from which most of the information to be given here will be drawn, are by Mark Eccles, "Barnabe Barnes", Thomas Lodge and Other Elizabethans, ed. Charles J. Sisson (Cambridge, Mass., 1933), pp. 165-241 ; and by Madeleine Hope Dodds, "Barnabe Barnes of Durham: Author and Playwright", Archaeologia Aeliana, 4th Ser., 24 (1946), 1-59; hereafter referred to as Dodds. See also Arthur Henry Bullen, "Barnabe Barnes", DNB, ed. Sir Leslie Steven and Sir Sidney Lee (London, 1949-1950), I, 1167-1168.

INTRODUCTION

13

to the earldom of Northumberland and close friend of Barnes's youth, William Percy, became a student at Oxford. Barnes was one of a group of gentleman-volunteers who joined the expedition of Essex to Normandy in August and September 1591. At the end of the two months, Essex was recalled to England. Those in Barnes's group were personally loyal to Essex, and many of them were reduced nearly to poverty because they had had to finance themselves in France. Several, Barnes probably among them, obtained passports and followed Essex back to England. 8 Barnes's first work, the love-sonnet sequence Parthenophil and Parthenophe, was entered in the Stationers' Register on May 10, 1593. Sidney Lee believes it probable that Barnes was the rival poet to Shakespeare for the patronage of the Earl of Southampton. Lee's contention is based mostly on a few near parallels between the sonnets of the two. 9 But all that can be said with confidence is that Venus and Adonis, dedicated by Shakespeare to Southampton, followed Parthenophil by a month and that Barnes had made a bid for Southampton's favor by addressing one of the dedicatory sonnets in Parthenophil to him. Some of the poems in the sequence refer to the emotional life of Parthenophil and perhaps of Barnes: at about fourteen years Parthenophil abandoned himself to wanton pleasures (Sonnet XXXII); Laya, the earliest mistress he names (Sonnets II and IIII), turned from him to a courtier (Sonnet V); Parthenophil sought refuge with Parthenophe (Sonnet V), and soon he gave her his heart (Sonnets VI to IX) - to his subsequent misery, which Barnes abundantly records in the rest of the sequence. Parthenophil is dedicated to William Percy; in fact, Sonnets XLIIII and XLVI suggest that Parthenophe was a member of the Percy family.10 A month after Parthenophil appeared, Gabriel Harvey's Pierce's Supererogation was published. Harvey's work generated comments that comprise most of our knowledge of Barnes's reputation among his contemporaries. Thomas Nashe, Thomas Campion, and Sir John Harington commented most fully. Harvey and Barnes had met at least by August 1592, when Harvey took lodgings with the printer John Wolf, with whom Barnes was then living. After the following winter Barnes moved to quarters in Holborne. But Wolf printed Parthenophil, and Barnes was drawn into the Harvey-Nashe quarrel. Pierce's Supererogation was one work printed in the Harvey-Nashe exchange; with it appeared entreaties 8

Eccles, pp. 167-168; Dodds, pp. 2-3, 5-6, 8. A Life of Shakespeare (New York, 1909), pp. 136-138; and Elizabethan Sonnets, I, lxxv-lxxvi. 10 Eccles, pp. 167, 170-172; Dodds, pp. 10-12. 9

14

INTRODUCTION

of Harvey's friends that he publish it. Barnes's contribution was the longest: a letter to "his especiall deare friend" Harvey; and three sonnets, two of them inscribed "Nash, or the confuting Gentleman" and "Harvey, or the sweet Doctour", and signed "Parthenophil" and "Parthenophe", respectively.11 Thus Barnes became a target for invective. According to Nashe, Barnes had gained release from duty in France because of cowardice, and Barnes's military accomplishment was negatively demonstrated by his stealing "a Noble-mans Stewards chayne" at what was presumably Northumberland's installation in the Order of the Garter, on June 25,1593; at about the same time, Barnes, "with a codpisse as big as a Bolognian sawcedge,... went vp and downe Towne, and shewd himself in the Presence at Court, where he was generally laught out by the Noblemen and Ladies".12 Campion was one of Nashe's friends who, between 1593 and 1596, took up the cudgels against Barnes: he mocked Barnes's military prowess in a Latin epigram, and, probably at about the same time, he wrote three English epigrams ridiculing Barnes that were published in his Observations

in the Arte of English Poesy (1602); in the latter, Campion

described Barnes as a cuckold.13 And, as Lynus, Barnes was the apparent butt of the satirist Harington; of the many references to Lynus, Epigram 212, which alludes to some activities not elsewhere attributed to Barnes, is most outspoken: M a n y m e n maruaile Lynus doth not thriue, That had m o r e trades then any m a n aliue, A s first, a Broker, then a Petty-fogger, A Traueller, a Gamster, and a Cogger, A Coyner, a Promoter, and a Bawde, A Spy, a Practicer in euery fraude: A n d missing thrift by these lewd trades and sinister, H e takes the best, yet proues the worst, a Minister. 1 4

In his address to the reader of Parthenophil, Barnes's printer said that 11 Dodds, pp. 15-19; Eccles, p. 173. Barnes's letter and sonnets are reprinted by Sir Egerton Brydges in Archaica (London, 1815), II, 13-17; and in Restituía; or, Titles, Extracts, and Characters of Old English Books in English Literature, Revived (London, 1816), I, 326-330. 12 The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. Ronald B. McKerrow, rev. F. P. Wilson (Oxford, 1958), III, 104-105, 110, 103, 109. Also see Eccles, p. 173. 13 Thomas Campion, Works, ed. Percival Vivian (Oxford, 1909), pp. 239, 284, 344, 46, 49. The English epigrams from the Observations also appear in Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. G. Gregory Smith (London, 1904), II, 342-343, 346. See Eccles, p. 222, and Dodds, p. 20. 14 Quoted by Eccles, pp. 226-227, and see pp. 223-228.

INTRODUCTION

15

the poet would write "some more excellent worke hereafter". 15 Barnes's second work was the religious sonnet sequence A Diuine Centurie of Spirituall Sonnets, printed in 1595. It was dedicated to Tobie Matthew, Bishop of Durham, who had come to that see in 1584 as Dean, when Barnes's father was Bishop. Barnes explained in the dedication that he had written it while traveling in France in 1594.18 The only year of Barnes's life about which there is much detailed information is 1598. Of lesser importance is the presence of a commendatory poem by Barnes in John Florio's Italian-English dictionary, A World of Words, which was published that year.17 But from official records for 1598 Mark Eccles has given an account of an episode that confirms reports by Barnes's contemporaries about his character.18 The register of the Privy Council for 1597-8 reveals that Barnes fled north in the spring of 1598 to escape arrest for having attempted to poison John Browne, the Recorder of Berwick. Barnes was captured and charged before the Council. But in July he escaped again for good. Eccles believes that Barnes was guilty of the poisoning attempt: in Star Chamber testimony Barnes admitted to the principal facts and gave an unconvincing denial of the rest. On circumstantial evidence, Eccles reasons further that Barnes was acting in the crime as a tool of Rafe, Lord Eure, Browne's powerful enemy in factional strife in the Middle Marches.19 Through his researches, Eccles has found some traces of Barnes's whereabouts during the years before and after this episode. According to records of his case, Barnes had been in Brill in the Low Countries at some period between September 1595 and December 1597. A Durham Chancery record of February 1598-9 lists Barnes as resident in Durham and hence no longer fugitive from justice. And a Court of Requests shows him in Durham in 1604—5.20 The remaining works Barnes is known to have written appeared during the two years following. Foure Bookes of Offices: Enabling Priuat persons for the speciall seruice of all good Princes and Policies, dedicated to King James, was entered in the Stationers' Register on February 3, 1605-6. It describes the duties of Privy Councilor, Lord Treasurer, judge, and general. Thomas Campion, Barnes's antagonist earlier, 15

Sig. A2 r . Sig. A2 r . 17 Florio had taught the poet's eldest brother, Emmanuel Barnes, in foreign languages; Eccles, p. 169, and Dodds, p. 35. 18 Thomas Lodge and Other Elizabethans, pp. 175-211. 19 See in Eccles, especially pp. 175, 182-183, 190-191, 204, 207. 20 Eccles, pp. 180, 218, 220. And see Dodds, pp. 27-28. 16

16

INTRODUCTION

wrote one of the commendatory poems. Also in 1606 Barnes contributed a madrigal to John Ford's Fame's Memorial. Then, on Candlemas Night (February 2) 1606-7, TheDiuils Charter, or The Tragaedie of Alexander the 6, an antipapal drama, was acted before James by the King's Men ; as corrected and augmented for the reader, it was entered in the Stationers' Register on October 16, 1607.21 During the two remaining years of his life, Barnes lived in the parish of St. Mary-le-Bow, at Durham; his burial there is recorded in the parish register in December 1609.22 Of all Barnes's works, Foure Bookes of Offices has been studied least, and appraisals that have been made of it do not encourage further study. In his preface to the reader, Barnes explains the four-part division: all blessed kingdoms are ruled by the cardinal virtues, temperance, prudence, justice, and fortitude; the virtues are embodied in the treasurer, councilor, judge, and soldier, respectively. Barnes explains each office and the virtue it represents by introducing men who have occupied it. His manner is to select personal favorites and, at the same time, to declare his freedom from bias. Thus he concludes his portrait of Essex as military commander: "And so much in briefe, and so neere as I could, have I done to life, the morali qualities and perfections of that heroicall Generali, without adulation or partialitie." 23 Of interest in the second book is a passage praising the English language and mentioning the English literary figures Gower, Chaucer, Lydgate, and Sidney. His attitude in this passage toward borrowing accords with his use of foreign models for many of his lyric genres: . . . I w o u l d for our o w n e nations glorie wish, that all our countreymen w o u l d be very studious, and according to their faculties foreward and ayding, that is, to labour h o w they may copiously devise and adde words derived f r o m the Latines, f r o m the French and D u t c h languages, fitly fashioned into the true Dialect and I d e o m e of our vulgar. 2 4 21

Eccles, pp. 230-237, and Dodds, pp. 40-56. Barnes's madrigal is reprinted in The Works of John Ford, ed. William Gifford, rev. Alexander Dyce (London, 1895), I, lxxx. Other works have been ascribed to Barnes. Eccles, pp. 235-236, mentions a play in MS lost since 1807, The Battle of Hexham, and The Madcap, licensed in 1624. P. Bliss, editor of Anthony à Wood, Athenae Oxonienses (London, 1815), II, 48, says that Barnes "translated the Spanish Councell, and writ a Poem on Shore's Wife in the year 1596". And W. Davenport Adams, in The Library of Literary Criticism of English and American Authors, ed. Charles Wells Moulton (New York, 1935), I, 439-440, reports that in 1586 Barnes wrote The Praise of Musike. (At this time Barnes was only fifteen or sixteen years old.) And see below, p. 26 and n. 84. 22 Eccles, pp. 220-221, and Dodds, p. 56. 23 Quoted by Brydges, Restituta, IV, 135. 21 Quoted by Dodds, p. 42.

INTRODUCTION

17

Appropriately enough, the writers of accompanying verses are complimentary about Of Offices: Thomas Campion praises it; John Ford, at twenty years of age here making his first appearance as a writer, says that through it Barnes is an example for youth; and William Percy declares that Barnes is the only writer on government to join secular knowledge with divine.25 Later readers have judged Barnes's work with more restraint. It has not been reprinted.26 Sir Egerton Brydges, who, a century and a half ago, gave extracts from it (principally from the portrait of Essex), found the work not unlearned, because it consisted largely of classical citations, but the dedication to King James ."inflatedly adulatory". 27 Barnes's biographers, Mark Eccles and Madeleine Hope Dodds, give accounts of the Offices. To Eccles it is hardly noteworthy except for the praises of Essex and the exhortation about the English language; the book "is little but a long display of edifying moral sentiment". 28 Miss Dodds calls Of Offices "dull" and "a fluent outpouring of commonplaces". 29 In the introduction to his edition of The Diuils Charter, R. B. McKerrow expresses regret that he has had to leave so many difficulties unsolved;30 information about Barnes's drama is incomplete, though it has certainly provoked more scholarly interest than his book on government. The play is based on the legend that Roderigo Borgia sold his soul to the Devil in order to become Pope Alexander VI (1492-1503). Miss Dodds observes that Barnes weakens the effect of the bargain by making the cardinal pope only through bribery and having him sell his soul afterwards. 31 Alexander in the play and legend invites some cardinals to dinner and attempts to poison them with wine; Barnes makes the Devil exchange the wine so that the cardinals escape and the Pope and his son Caesar Borgia are poisoned. The Diuils Charter has been reproduced by J. S. Farmer and Jim C.

25

The other commendatory verses are by Thomas Michelborne and Robert Hasill. But the first edition is available in a xerographic reproduction from University Microfilms, Inc., Ann Arbor (STC 1468). The copy I have used is a negative microfilm prepared by the Harvard College Library. 27 Restituía, IV, 128. Brydges's extracts are in IV, 127-135. 28 Thomas Lodge and Other Elizabethans, p. 231; and see pp. 230-233. 29 P. 42; for Miss Dodds's account, see pp. 40-47. 30 The Devil's Charter (-Materialien zur Kunde des älteren Englischen Dramas, 6) (Louvain, 1904), p. xix. 26

31

P. 48.

18

INTRODUCTION

Pogue as well as by McKerrow.32 McKerrow examines the play's sources at length: Guicciardini's work on Italian history is the basis for the historical part of the drama; three earlier accounts of Alexander's life are paralleled in Barnes's version; and the Heptameron, Seu Elementa Magica (1474) of Petrus de Abano is the apparent source of the demonology.33 Eccles develops evidence that another source for part of the history is the Discorsi (iii, 6) of Machiavelli.34 Eccles and Miss Dodds give different theories about the occasions for the play's writing and court performance: Eccles suggests that Barnes wrote it because James had liked the demonology in Macbeth and wanted another play with even more of it; 35 Miss Dodds says that the play was inspired by the topicality of the Gunpowder Plot (November 5, 1605) and that James's interest in the performance lay in his belief that he had been the object of a papal poisoning plot. 36 Barnes's contemporaries do not judge the quality of his play, nor does McKerrow. Eccles sees Barnes, in the extinguishing of characters by various poisons, "compensating in literature for what was denied him in life"; for the reader, however, the play is a "crude melodrama" in which the interest lies in the characterization of a pair of villains and in "a remarkable list of London courtesans". 37 Miss Dodds observes that although it contains a brisk series of events in which fresh characters continually appear and leave, The Diuils Charter "has practically no value as literature". 38 32

For McKerrow's edition, see note 30. Farmer's edition was issued from Amersham, England, as one of the Tudor Facsimile Texts, in 1913. Pogue's edition is an unpublished 1964 Ph. D. dissertation, "The Devil's Charter-. A Critical Edition". In his entry in Dissertation Abstracts 25 (1965), 5912-5913 (Mo.), Pogue describes his edition as the first to be based on a collation of the eleven of thirteen copies of the original quarto which are not in a deteriorated condition. An extract of nearly five hundred lines is given by Alexander B. Grosart in his edition of The Poems of Barnabe Barnes, bound as No. 2 in Vol. 1 of Occasional Issues of Unique or Very Rare Books (Blackburn, Eng., 1875), pp. xxviii-xliii. 33 The Devil's Charter, pp. vi-xiii. 34 Thomas Lodge and Other Elizabethans, pp. 236-238. See also Jeanette Fellheimer, "Barnabe Barnes' Use of Geoffrey Fenton's Historie of Guicciardin", MLN 57 (1942), 358-359. 35 Thomas Lodge and Other Elizabethans, p. 233; and for Eccles's discussion of the play, pp. 233-236. 36 Pp. 47-48, 51. Miss Dodds's account of Barnes's drama is on pp. 47-56. 37 Thomas Lodge and Other Elizabethans, pp. 233-234. 38 Pp. 48-50. Connections between Barnes's play and other plays have been noted frequently: David Erskine Baker, Biographia Dramatica (London, 1782), II, 85, finds a parallel use of interlocuters, Guicciardini in Barnes's play and Gower in Shakespears's Pericles; Bullen, DNB, I, 1168, notes that commentators have found similarities between The

INTRODUCTION

19

Barnes has been of interest to literary scholars not so much as the writer of a work on government or of a play as he has as the writer of two sonnet sequences. Parthenophil and Parthenophe is rich in content and form. The early poems in the sequence describe the beginning of Parthenophil's entanglement with Parthenophe. In the last poem Parthenophil seems to gain his mistress's long witheld embraces. Between, there are a series of poems that contain narrative; for example, the poems from Sonnet CIII to Sonnet CIIII include a love vision through which Parthenophe is paid an elaborate compliment. Yet the sequence hardly presents an unbroken story line. Rather, it pictures the unrequited lover who continually suffers but who may steel himself to flatter or revile his mistress. Thus Parthenophe's beauty is celebrated in Sonnets XIX, XXVI, XLVIII, LII, LV, LXXI, Madrigall 4, and Ode 9; but, in anti-Petrarchan fashion, she is frequently not considered divine (see Sonnets XXXVI and LXVIII, and the second stanza of Canzon I), and she is sometimes considered a mere sexual object (for instance, in Sonnet LXXVI, Madrigall 26, Canzon 3, and Sestine 5). Parthenophil's lacerated feelings run from suffering (Sonnet X, Elegie VI, Ode 19), to desire (Sonnet LIII), to sorrow (Sonnet XXV), to despair (Sonnets IX, LXXX), to jealousy (Sonnet LXXXI). This gamut of emotions is conveyed by an equally wide-ranging assortment of conceits based on law (Sonnets IIII, VIII, XI, XX, Madrigall 2), the four elements (Sonnet LXXVII), clocks (Sonnet LVI), punctuation (Elegie II), phonetics (Sonnets L, LI), the signs of the zodiac (Sonnets XXXII to XLIII), and other subjects. Some of the poems are Anacreontic (for example, Sonnets LIIII, LXXV, and XCIII, Madrigall 3, the eidillion, Elegie IX and Ode 4). Mythological allusions abound (Sonnet XIX names Jove, Mercury, Minerva, Phoebus, Bacchus, Venus, and Phoebe; cf. Sonnets XXVI, XXIX, XXXII, XXXIII, LXIII, Madrigall 13). Parthenophil includes echo poems (Sonnet LXXXIX, Ode 2, Canzon 2, Sestine 4) and experiments in classical meters (Anacreontics in Ode 17, Sapphics in Ode 18, a so-called Asclepiad in Ode 21, and elegiacs in Elegie XXI). But the most striking formal sign of richness in the sequence is the many lyric genres according to which the poems are written. Demi's Charter and both The Tempest and Cymbeline; and J. E. Bakeless, The Tragicall History of Christopher Marlowe (Cambridge, Mass., 1942), I, 309, believes that Dr. Faustas slightly influenced The Diuils Charter. Other scholarly items o n the play include A . E. H. Swaen, M o o r e G. C. Smith, and R . B. McKerrow, "Notes on The Devil's Charter by Barnabe Barnes", MLR 1 ( 1 9 0 5 1906), 122-127; A . E. H. Swaen, "Notes o n The Devil's Charter", MLR 2 (1906-1907), 167; E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage (Oxford, 1923), III, 214-215.

20

INTRODUCTION

Just as the poems in Parthenophil are not ordered by a pervasive story line, so examples of the lyric types do not occur in a regularly patterned succession.39 It is clear, however, that rhetorical principles affect these arrangements. Events occur at structurally important places-for example, in the early poems; in Sestine 2, a recapitulation after a formal division in the sequence; and in the last poem. Likewise, some of the genres are arranged climactically - for instance, the poems from Sonnet CIII to Sonnet CIIII move from sonnet to madrigal to sestine; and the sequence ends with its most sustained tour de force in genre, a triple sestine. In subject and prosody, A Diuine Centurie of Spirituall Sonnets is less spectacular than Parthenophil and Parthenophe. As the earlier sequence recounts the lover's reactions to his lady, the later one describes "the seuerall passions of comforte& ghostly combates" of a man's relationship with God. Also the religious poems, like the love poems, are not in a systematic narrative order; Barnes tells the reader that they "stand in my booke confused", "an vnequall coherence of praises, penitence, and fearefull afflictions". 40 Thus the poet lauds God in Sonnets XXIII, XXV, XXX, XXXI, XXXII, XLV, LXVII, and LXXXIII but feels the pangs of sin in Sonnets XI, XVII, XIX, LV, LIX, and LXIII. Barnes's dedication to Bishop Matthew and Sonnets I and XXXIX suggest at least the occasion for the sequence: the poet's spiritual conversion and specific renunciation of the composition of "lewde laies" (Sonnet I, line 1). Also the poems have a degree of thematic coherence. Thus Sonnets II to XII are appeals to Christ in His different aspects; and Sonnets XXXIII, XLVIII, LI, LXXIII to LXXV, and LXXVII to LXXIX are directed against threats to the Church, especially the threat from Rome. Barnes's frequent method is to express a poem in terms of biblical passages related to his subject; he draws especially from the Psalms and the Book of Revelation. 41 39

Yet they are grouped or spaced with a measure of symmetry. The sequence of labelled poetic kinds inParlhenophilis as follows: S o n n e t s I - X I , Madrigalls 1-2, Sonnets XII-XIIJ, Madrigalls 3-4, Sonnets XIIII-XLIII, Madrigalls 5 - 8 , Sonnets XLIIII-LII, Madrigalls 9 - 1 2 , Sonnets LIII-LXII, Madrigalls 13-14, Sonnets LXIII-CII, Madrigalls 15-20, Sonnet CIII, Madrigalls 21-26, Sestine 1, Sonnet CIIII, Elegies I - X X I , C a n z o n I , Eidillion, Sestine 2, Odes 1-2, Canzon 2, Odes 3-11, Sestine 3, Odes 12-15, Canzon 3, Ode 16, Sestine 4, Odes 17-20, Sonnet CV, Sestine 5. The sequence is divided into three sections within each of which given genres are largely but not altogether confined: printed below Sonnet CIIII is "Finis", and before Elegie I is the title "Elegies"; after the eidillion "Finis" again appears, and the title "Odes Pastorall" is printed before Sestine 2. 40 Sig. A3 V . 11 See note 50, below.

INTRODUCTION

21

The religious sequence contains little of the obvious prosodic experimentation of the love sequence; it includes no attempts to write classical meters, and all the poems are in but two genres. There is some evidence that the divine poems, like the love poems, are ordered climactically: of seven sonnets with rhyme schemes unlike the scheme in all the other sonnets, four are among the last seven sonnets in the sequence; and the only poem not a sonnet, the more elaborate hymn, comes at the end. Parthenophil and Parthenophe has appeared in six editions. The first edition, entered in the Stationers' Register on May 10, 1593 (STC Number 1469), includes, besides the sequence, a prefatory address by the printer (John Wolf) implying the poet's desire for anonymity; Barnes's poem "Go, barstard Orphan", addressed to the sequence; six appended poems dedicated by Barnes to the Earls of Northumberland, Essex, and Southampton, the Countess of Pembroke, and the Ladies Strange and Bridget Manners; and a finding table and list of errata.42 Only one copy of the 1593 edition is known to survive. Until recently it had been for several years in the library of the Duke of Devonshire; however, it is now in the British Museum and is available in the STC series of University Microfilms.43 Parthenophil was reprinted in 1875 as part of Alexander Grosart's The Poems of Barnabe Barnes, bound as Number 2 in Volume I of Occasional Issues of Unique or Very Rare Books.11 Grosart's apparatus includes an introduction (biographical references to Barnes, criticism of the poems, accounts of Barnes's other works, and a discussion of editorial procedure), and critical notes. Grosart attempts to reproduce the poems with the original spelling and punctuation. Edward Arber next edited Parthenophil in An English Garner: Ingatherings from Our History and Literature, Volume V (1895), pages 335 to 486.45 The punctuation and spelling in the text are modernized. This text was again used in 1904, when Sidney Lee included Parthenophil in An English Garner: Elizabethan Sonnets.46 Lee added an introduction (Barnes and his poems being treated in Volume I, pages lxxv to lxxxi, and cviii), and indexes of proper names and first lines. Finally, Victor A. Doyno 42

See note 2, above. Eccles, p. 221, gives some of the history and earlier location and ownership of the copy. Barnes's name is printed after the appended dedicatory poems, but not on the title page. Also, the lower third of the title page, which would give the facts of publication, is torn away. 44 See note 32, above. 45 Published in Westminster. 46 See note 1, above. Parthenophil is in I, 165-316. 43

22

INTRODUCTION

has prepared a critical edition of Parthenophil as a dissertation for the Department of English of Indiana University.47 A Diuine Centurie of Spirituall Sonnets, printed by John Windet, was entered in the Stationers' Register on August 26, 1595 (STC Number 1467). It contains a dedicatory message to Bishop Tobie Matthew, an address to the reader, the poems, a table of first lines, and a list of errata. 48 The religious sequence was reprinted in 1815 in Volume II of Heliconia, edited by Thomas Park. 49 Park gives a three-page introduction to Barnes and his works, the poems, a finding table, and critical notes.50 The punctuation is modernized, but the original spelling (except for w's and v's) is preserved. A Diuine Centurie was published a third time as part of Alexander Grosart's The Poems of Barnabe Barnes (1875); Grosart reproduces, with some additions of his own, Park's notes in Heliconia.51 In a broad survey, scholarly books and articles dealing with Barnes's poetry may be divided into three groups. Some items contain passing references to Barnes's verse. Others, in different degrees, contribute to our knowledge of his poems. But only one study both adds to what is known about Barnes's poems and approaches comprehensiveness in its treatment. A number of references to Barnes's poetry are merely by the way. E. B. Reed in English Lyrical Poetry, 52 Mark Eccles in his biographical investigation of Barnes,53 and Tucker Brooke in A Literary History of England54 observe that Barnes wrote love and religious sonnet sequences, and they remark on the metrical richness of the first one. Enid Hamer, in The Metres of English Poetry, praises the rhythm of lines in Parthenophil Sonnet LXXXI and inaccurately says that the forms of the love sonnets as a whole represent "the pure Petrarcan". 55 Henry Burrowes Lathrop 47

See Victor A. Doyno, "An Edition of Barnes's Parthenophil and Parthenophe", DA 28 (1968), 2644-A (Ind.). To this list of editions may be added TenPoemsfrom "Parthenophil and Parthenophe", ed. Madeleine Hope Dodds (Tynemouth, 1929). 48 See note 3, above. Barnes's name appears after the dedication and after his address to the reader, but not on the title page. 49 Published in London, separately paginated. 50 In his notes, pp. 57-62, Park lists many of the biblical sources of words and phrases in Barnes's religious poems. 51 See notes 32 and 50, above. 52 (New Haven, 1912). Barnes is discussed on pp. 156-158, 159. 53 In Thomas Lodge and Other Elizabethans; see note 7, above. Eccles considers Barnes as a poet on pp. 170-171, 226, 239-241. 54 Ed. Albert C. Baugh (New York, 1948). For references to Barnes, see pp. 435 and 481. 55 (London, 1930), pp. 195-196.

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23

includes Barnes's eidillion in his Translations from the Classics into English from Caxton to Chapman 1477-1620.56 In his study of the canzone, Ivy L. Mumford erroneously credits Barnes with the introduction of the form into English.57 Similarly, four recent studies of Renaissance poetry are arranged according to premises that allow little more than incidental mention of Barnes's poems. Hallett Smith, in Elizabethan Poetry, shows how Elizabethan sonneteers tried to secure vitality in the Petrarchan mode; he says that he neglects discussion of the minor sequences because they are merely witty.58 Maurice Evans examines the sonnet as a genre cogently but only briefly in English Poetry in the Sixteenth Century,59 In The Elizabethan Love Sonnet, J. W. Lever, like Hallett Smith, quickly passes over the sonnets of Barnes and others because they ignore the principles of conventional verse forms and because "their attention is turned towards derivative aspects of the sonnet - the intellectual versatility and sensuous appeal of its imagery and diction-irrespective of any organic relationship between them and the ostensible theme". 60 F. T. Prince, in "The Sonnet from Wyatt to Shakespeare", discusses the changing nature of the sonnet in the hands of its different makers, but he virtually excludes the minor sonneteers from consideration because many of their poems are not in the sonnet form and because their poems are "unredeemed by social or personal distinction, [but] are so facile and artificial as to seem imbecile".61 Other books and articles, however, add to our knowledge of Barnes's poetry. The work of four nineteenth century scholars is largely responsible for the beginnings of this knowledge. To Thomas Park we owe the first appraisal of Barnes as a religious poet as well as the first editing of one of his sonnet sequences. In two entries in Censura Literaria62 Park describes Barnes's connection with William Percy and gives a survey of Barnes's works culminating in a brief analysis of the rhymes, syntax, and images of the poems in A DiuineCenturie. Alexander Grosart, in the introduction 56

(= Univ. of Wis. Stud. inLang. and Lit., 35) (Madison, 1933), pp. 156-157; cf. p. 105. "The Canzone in Sixteenth-Century English Verse with Particular Reference to Wyatt's Renderings from Petrarch's Canzoniere", English Miscellany 11 (1960), 30-31. 58 (Cambridge, Mass., 1952), p. 142. Smith mentions Barnes on pp. 162-163, 193. His discussion of sonneteers is on pp. 131-193. 59 (London, 1955) pp. 94-108; references to Barnes are on pp. 24, 95, 96, 99-100. 60 (London, 1956), p. 146; see also pp. 144-145. Lever comments on Barnes or his poems on pp. 55, 144, 145, 148, 156, and 175. 61 In Elizabethan Poetry (= Stratford-Upon-A von Stud., 2), ed. John Russell Brown and Bernard Harris (New York, 1960), p. 21. Prince's essay is on pp. 11-29. 42 Ed. Samuel Egerton Brydges (London, 1807), III, 374; and VI, 119-126. 57

24

INTRODUCTION

to his edition of Barnes's poems, declares that Parthenophil records an actual love affair, says incorrectly that Barnes in general rigidly adheres to the Petrarchan form of the sonnet throughout the love sequence, and quotes passages from it that he regards as especially felicitous.63 Reviewing Grosart's edition, Edward Dowden considers Barnes's poems as representative of the Renaissance penchant for ingenuity and fantasticality, and, to demonstrate that Parthenophil is a unified sequence, relates the autobiographical narrative he finds from poem to poem. 64 Felix E. Schelling, in the introduction to A Book of Elizabethan Lyrics, recognizes that the form of one of Barnes's canzons is conventional but believes that the other canzons are freer in construction.65 More recent investigations have emphasized subjects broached by Park, Grosart, Dowden, and Schelling: foreign influences on Barnes's poetry; the autobiographical reference in the poems, especially the love poems; the representation in the poems of conventional expressions of love and religious fervor; the nature of Barnes's metrical experiments; and the location of his poems among English examples of poetic genres. John Erskine specifies the conventional form of Barnes's canzons. 66 Sidney Lee disparagingly asserts the dependence of Barnes's love poems, in content and form, upon foreign, especially French, models; he speaks generally of Sidney's influence on the love poems and of their influence on Shakespeare's sonnets; he gives a source for the name "Parthenophe"; and he identifies the poems in the love sequence in which Barnes experimented with classical meters.67 The first and only extended appraisal of the miscellaneous lyric forms in Parthenophil is made by George Saintsbury in A History of English Prosody. Saintsbury does not analyze the forms in much detail, nor does he relate them to conventional models, but he distinguishes many of them from one another, assesses their merits and defects, and judges them to be important in establishing in English prosody the capacity for disciplined but varied meter. 68 L. E. Kastner disagrees with Lee's position that certain of Barnes's poems have French sources; showing that some French "models" are themselves translations of Italian poems, he says that the identification of an exact 63

Pp. ix-xx; see note 32, above. Academy 10 (September, 1876), 231-232. 65 (Boston, 1895), p. lviii; for other references to Barnes's genres, see pp. xvi, xxxviii, and lvii. Schelling's introduction, pp. vii-lxix, remains one of the few satisfactory accounts of the prosody of the Elizabethan lyric. 66 The Elizabethan Lyric (New York, 1903), pp. 295-296. 67 Elizabethan Sonnets, I, lxxv-lxxxi. 68 (London, 1906-1910), II, 146, 150-153. 64

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25

source for an English adaptation, especially one that is free, may be impossible.69 In a study of the development of the ode in English until 1660, Robert Shafer gives Barnes's odes place, but he judges them to be of small historical consequence.70 Janet G. Scott challenges Lee's attribution of the name "Parthenophe" to a particular source by demonstrating the frequent use of the name by the neo-Latinists.71 In disagreement with a French attribution of Lee, James Hutton assigns the source of Barnes's eidillion to the original Greek poem of which it purports to be a translation. 72 Louis B. Salomon points out instances of Barnes's portrayal of the rebellious lover.73 In a survey of the properties of the elegy as understood by Elizabethans, F. W. Weitzmann analyzes characteristics of the elegies of Barnes.74 Many examples from Parthenophil of representations in Elizabethan sonnet sequences of Alexandrian and Ovidian conceptions of love and of the use of conventional love conceits are given by Lisle Cecil John. 75 Classifying Barnes among minor Elizabethan sonneteers for whom writing a sequence was primarily a literary exercise, Lu Emily Pearson considers Barnes's themes, his uses of the echo device, and his choices of conceits.76 In one of the few analyses of A Diuine Centurie, Joseph B. Collins examines Barnes's religious poems in relation to Christian mysticism.77 George N. Shuster supplements Robert Shafer on Barnes's odes, describing two of them as being apparently based on classical models, and an unspecified number of others as attempting to imitate "the lighter French measures". 78 Madeleine Hope Dodds gives the most extensive consideration of Barnes's poems to be made since World War II. With the not altogether clear premise that the sonnet convention is broad enough for us to find his love poems true to a significant degree, she recites the story many of them tell, suggests an identity for Parthenophe among the ladies in the 69

"The Elizabethan Sonneteers and the French Poets", MLR 3 (1907-1908), 273. The English Ode to 1660 (Princeton, 1918), p. 54. 51 "The Names of the Heroines of the Elizabethan Sonnet-Sequences", RES 2 (1926), 159-160. « "The First Idyl of Moschus in Imitations to the Year 1800", AJP 49 (1928), 127. 73 The Devil Take Her: The Rebellious Lover in English Poetry (Philadelphia, 1931), pp. 219, 263, 329, 339, 342. 74 "Notes on the Elizabethan Elegie", PMLA 50 (1935), 437, 441, 443. 75 The Elizabethan Sonnet Sequences (= Col. Univ. Stud, in Engl, and Comp. Lit., 133) (New York, 1938), pp. 20-21, 61, 62, 63, 64, 6 8 , 6 9 , 7 3 , 7 7 , 8 9 , 9 7 - 9 9 , 106, 109, 120, 121, 122, 126, 127, 128, 146, 147, 148, 151, 155, 156, 160, 163, 195-200. 76 Elizabethan Love Conventions (Berkeley, 1938), pp. 112-115. 77 Christian Mysticism in the Elizabethan Age (Baltimore, 1940), pp. 137-139. 78 The English Ode from Milton to Keats (New York, 1940), p. 37. 70

26

INTRODUCTION

Percy family, and correlates the themes of some of the love poems with interests of the Earl of Northumberland. She judges that Barnes's desire to have the sequence appear anonymously shows his recognition of the scandalousness of some of the poems in contrast to those by other sonneteers. She notes also the few poems in A Diuine Centurie that have autobiographical interest. The religious sonnets she erroneously says are all in the Shakespearean form. 79 Other references of recent years are briefer. C. S. Lewis specifies some of the metrical variety in Parthenophil, especially kinds of wrenched accent in terminal words.80 Barnes's Elegie XIII is cited by John D. Reeves in a list of Tudor examples of the classical myth of Ate and the golden apple.81 James L. Potter observes that Barnes preceded Milton in the use in the sonnet of the parable of the talents.82 Lily B. Campbell usefully recapitulates information about A Diuine Centurie and, what is more important, allows us to view the sequence in relation to the range of divine poetry of which it is a part. 83 Joan Grundy raises a question as to the authorship of some poems in the 1594 edition of Constable's Diana-, the poems are more like those of Barnes than they are like Constable's other known sonnets.84 Finally, Carol Maddison compares Barnes's odes in theme and treatment, but not in form, with the neo-Latin lususpastoralis, the Italian pastoral sonnet, and poems by the troubadours, Anacreon, Horace, and Ronsard. 85 The one study that approaches comprehensiveness in its treatment of Barnes's poems is Janet Scott's Les sonnets elisabethains. Miss Scott briefly reviews Barnes's biography, gives information about the composition of Parthenophil, tells part of the story in the sequence, describes the contents of some of the Anacreontic poems, notes Barnes's earthy attitude toward love, and discusses the variety of sonnet rhyme schemes in the sequence. She judges that Barnes was attempting to renovate the conventional in Parthenophil; the attempt is evidenced possibly by the use of legal terms, and more certainly by the numerousness of the conceits, the abundance of word play, the extravagance of the images, and 79

Pp. 10-27. See note 7. English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama (Oxford, 1954), pp. 495, 478. 81 "The Judgment of Paris as a Device of Tudor Flattery", N&Q, N. S. 1 (1954), 7-11. 82 "Milton's Talent Sonnet and Barnabe Barnes", N&Q, N. S. 4 (1957), 447. 83 Divine Poetry and Drama in Sixteenth-Century England (Berkeley, 1959), pp. 136138. 84 The Poems of Henry Constable (Liverpool, 1960), pp. 51-53. See pp. 63 and 69 for other comparisons between Constable and Barnes. 86 Apollo and the Nine: A History of the Ode (Baltimore, 1960), pp. 289-290. 80

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27

the mythological illustration in the manner of the Pléiade.86 Later she comments briefly about the poems in A Diuine Centurie, giving some details about their versification.87 One of her special purposes is to re-examine the question of the sources of poems in Elizabethan sonnet sequences. She finds that specific borrowing by Barnes, especially as claimed by Lee, cannot be verified; she is unable to find any signs of translation in Parthenophil; and, for the religious sequence, though Desportes and Jamyn may have provided general inspiration, the real source is the Bible.88 In spite of this degree of comprehensiveness, Miss Scott virtually excludes from her study all of Parthenophil after the initial section of sonnets and madrigals. These bounds are kept, too, in the part of an appendix that is described as a summary of the sources and conventional themes in Parthenophil,89 In particular, besides making sentence-length observations that the influence of the Pléiade is evident in the versification of the odes, and that in forms like the sestine Barnes borrowed from the Italians, Miss Scott confines her study of the versification of Parthenophil to the sonnets.90 Appraisals of Barnes as a poet, whether by his contemporaries or by scholars since, have a lack of uniformity that is aptly described by Mark Eccles : "As a poet, Barnes has been something of a critic's tennis ball, tossed first too high, then volleyed back and forth, and now and then smashed to earth." At the extremes, Eccles cites the opinions of Dowden - "one of the most exquisite" of the Elizabethans - and of Courthope - an "idiot", who wrote nonsense.91 Here evaluations will be sampled, first, of Barnes's poetry in general, and second, of his lyric forms. Gabriel Harvey's Piercers Supererogation {1593) is fulsome in its commendation of Barnes as a poet : "Parthenophil and Parthenophe embellished . . . shall everlastingly testify what you are : go forward in maturity, as ye have begun in pregnancy.... Be thou Barnabe, the gallant poet, like Spenser... ," 9 2 Of the three living English poets Churchyard mentions by name in his Praise of Poetry, two are Spenser and Daniel and the third is Barnes : 86 Les Sonnets élisabéthains ( = Bibliothèque de la Revue de Littérature 60) (Paris, 1929), pp. 69-86. 87 Les sonnets élisabéthains, pp. 217-219. 88 Les sonnets élisabéthains, pp. 85, 77, 218-219. 89 Les sonnets élisabéthains, pp. 309-311. 90 Les sonnets élisabéthains, pp. 84, 86, 83-84. 91 Thomas Lodge and Other Elizabethans, p. 239. 92 Quoted by Brydges, Restituta, I, 323.

Comparée,

28

INTRODUCTION One Barnes that Petrarks scholler is M a y march with them in r a n k e . . . , 9 3

One estimate by Thomas Park of the poems in A Diuine Centurie is that " . . . they combine an energy of feeling, a dignity of style, an exaltation of language, and a variety of cadence, which are not frequently found united in productions of a later period". 94 To Grosart Parthenophil represents "consummate art (in a good sense)" with "the 'stuff' of genuine inspiration in well-nigh every page". 95 Thomas Bastard, George Saintsbury, Janet Scott, and Mark Eccles are more restrained. In 1598, Bastard commented in an epigram: Barneus' verse (vnlesse I doe him wrong,) Is like a cupp of sacke, heady and strong. 9 6

Barnes, in Saintsbury's view, plays many fantastic tricks, shocks the grave and precise generally, occasionally behaves himself so as to deserve his nickname of "Barnzy." But all the same, he gives us things for which, f r o m m e n of perhaps greater acts, under other influences, w e look in vain. 9 7

According to Miss Scott, Barnes is an artist by moments, a poet without much critical sense; Parthenophil is relatively original in conception, in its style and versification extremely so; in fact, Barnes in this sequence not only avoids servility but renovates the conventional; yet his religious poems, in comparison with their biblical sources, are insipid.98 Eccles's judgment is comparative: "There is no real question that among Elizabethan sonnet sequences Parthenophil stands about midway." "Anyone collecting examples of how not to write poetry would find Barnes a treasure-house...." " . . . Whoever goes to his poems resolutely prepared for the worst will often be surprised by random beauty." 99 But others regard Barnes's poetry more severely. Thomas Nashe, in Have with You to Saffron Walden (1596), calls Parthenophil "that Philis93

Quoted by Eccles, Thomas Lodge and Other Elizabethans, p. 174. Heliconia, II, on the second and third unnumbered prefatory pages to Park's edition of A Diuine Centurie. 96 The Poems of Barnabe Barnes (see note 32), pp. xv, xvi. 96 Chrestoleros, Bk. VI, No. 40, as quoted by Eccles, Thomas Lodge and Other Elizabethans, p. 219. 97 A History of Elizabethan Prosody, II, 148. 98 Les sonnets elisabethains, pp. 69, 80, 81, 219. 99 Thomas Lodge and Other Elizabethans, pp. 239, 240. 94

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tine P o e m . . . , which to compare worse than it selfe, it would plague all the wits of France, Spaine, or Italy".100 In his Observations in the Art of English Poesy (1602), Thomas Campion pictures Barnes as a teller of lies: All wonders Barnzy speakes, all grosely faind: Speake s o m e wonder once, Barnzy, speake the truth. 1 0 1

In contrast to his remarks in his edition of A Diuine Centurie, Park is largely negative in his opinion in Censura Literaria : some of the religious poems merit "respectful approval", but, on the whole, they have few of the beauties and many of the defects of Elizabethan poetry; "diversified epithets" or "concrete appellations" are substituted for figurative language; and sentences are frequently tortured into "a forced construction, which borders on the Delia Cruscan subterfuge of attracting by a glitter of words rather than thoughts". 102 To Sidney Lee, Barnes's love poems are not only derivative from foreign works, but "interminable"; though many stanzas or lines "ring with true harmony", " . . . as a whole his work is crude, and lacks restraint. He frequently sinks to meaningless doggerel, and many of his grotesque conceits are offensive".103 Lisle Cecil John's words are similar: "Barnes has occasional good lines, even an occasional good sonnet.... But the cycle as a whole is marred by hyperbole and by exaggerated, often incongruous, versions of the Petrarchan conceits."104 Lu Emily Pearson says that Barnes "has been well named the poet of one sonnet,... the justly famous 'Sweet Content'" {Parthenophil Sonnet LXVI); to read the entire sequence requires "a strict conscience".105 Finally, C. S. Lewis tepidly remarks of Barnes that "if he were our only English sonneteer we should probably praise him". 106 Critics who judge Barnes's lyric forms approvingly do not consider their intrinsic value as much as their historical significance. Lee, for example, says that "to the historian of the Elizabethan sonnet his work i s . . . o f first-rate importance". 107 Eccles judges that "of all English poets in the 1590's, Barnes is metrically the most adventurous". 108 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108

Works, III, 89; also see pp. 103-104. Smith, ed., Elizabethan Critical Essays, II, 346. Censura Literaria, VI, 123-124. Elizabethan Sonnets, I, lxxvi, lxxv. The Elizabethan Sonnet Sequences, p. 20. Elizabethan Love Conventions, p. 112. English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, p. 495. Elizabethan Sonnets, I, lxxv. Thomas Lodge and Other Elizabethans, p. 226.

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INTRODUCTION

And George Shuster describes Parthenophil as "of great interest to students of prosody". 109 George Saintsbury's chief finding is his estimate of the historical importance of Barnes's lyric forms. But his assessment is more detailed than that of other critics: "Allured by the false analogy of his Italian models", Barnes committed his great prosodic fault - a prodigality of double rhymes with no preceding trisyllabic feet: yet he occasionally freed himself from the fault to achieve, especially in some of the madrigals, sestines, canzons, and odes, "charming", "pretty", or "inspiriting" effects; in sum, Barnes "saw, whether consciously or not does not matter, what these artificial forms could do for English poetry; and he tried to do it with them. And it was a thing right proper to be done; and he did not wholly fail to do it". 110 Other scholars regard Barnes's attempts in lyric forms as unsuccessful or as indicative of a failure to grasp the principles of fixed forms. John Erskine says of Parthenophil: "The so-called madrigals, odes, and elegies scattered through the series are nothing but irregular rime-forms and cannot be generalized."111 Though Miss Scott believes the versification in the love sequence to be most original, she holds it to be a clear sign of Barnes's lack of artistic sense, especially in the eccentricity of the rhyme schemes of the first fifty-three sonnets; yet, in her opinion, these combinations of rhymes set Barnes apart in the history of the sonnet. His use of rhymes in the religious sonnets, she finds, is "tres savante", representing remarkable progress over that in Parthenophil.112 To Shuster, Barnes's odes, despite their interest to students of prosody, show Barnes "to have entertained a fondness for foreign labels" and reveal his "indifference to formalistic matters". 113 Lever includes Barnes among the minor sonneteers who "seldom show any real grasp of the formal virtues of the sonnet"; Parthenophil "contains fifteen-line sonnets and a medley of amorphous rhyme-schemes... ",114 In Carol Maddison's view, "Barnes's odes . . . introduce little that is new into the English lyric tradition but a label".115 Finally, F. T. Prince, like Erskine, casts doubt on the correctness of Barnes's very designations of his lyric genres: Barnes "writes many so-called sonnets of fifteen lines, in addition to a mass of so-called madrigals, elegies, canzons, and odes... ". U 6 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116

The English Ode from Milton to Keats, p. 36. A History of Elizabethan Prosody, II, 151-152. The Elizabethan Lyric, p. 144. Les sonnets elisabethains, pp. 80, 83-84, 219. The English Ode from Milton to Keats, p. 37. The Elizabethan Love Sonnet, pp. 145-146. Apollo and the Nine, p. 290. Elizabethan Poetry, p. 21.

INTRODUCTION

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2. THESIS A N D METHOD OF S T U D Y

Items about Barnes's life and works are numerous, but they include enough gaps, inaccuracies, and critical disagreements to invite further study. More study of the several lyric forms in Barnes's sonnet sequences is especially in order: Barnes's use of the forms constitutes much of his distinctiveness as a poet; they mark him as an Elizabethan metrical experimentalist surpassed only by Spenser and Sidney; Barnes alone among Elizabethans includes the forms in great variety and number to set forth an assortment of lyrics in a sonnet sequence on the model of Petrarch and other continental masters; and, as the foregoing survey indicates, deficiencies in previous scholarship about the forms are particularly evident. Saintsbury's comments about the miscellaneous lyrics and Miss Scott's analysis of the rhyme schemes in both sequences give useful information; but this information, together with the other scattered observations, does not represent comprehensive and detailed knowledge of the forms. Among inaccuracies in the scholarship are the descriptions of Barnes's sonnet kinds by Grosart, Mrs. Hamer, and Miss Dodds. Unsound, too, are the views of Erskine, Lever, and Shuster that various forms are irregular or amorphous, or that they reveal an indifference to form. In this book, a study will be made of the conventionality and structure of the lyric forms, as they represent their genres,117 in the sonnet sequences of Barnabe Barnes. A writer's attaching a genre label to a poem is evidence of his conception of its form in the setting forth of the genre; therefore, the poems in Barnes's sequences with such labels will be included in this study, but the few without labels, the prefatory "Go barstard Orphan" and the six appended dedicatory poems in Parthenophil, will not. This study will endeavor chiefly to demonstrate that the lyric forms in Barnes's sonnet sequences are not amorphous, irregular, or even just servilely imitative, but that they make fresh use of conventional models and that they are diversely patterned in structure. Part of the study will be given to the identification of conventional models for each lyric form and, for the sonnets, to Barnes's adaptation of his models. Modern views of imitation as plagiarism and of innovation as originality represent a false antithesis in the Renaissance theory of composition. For Elizabethans imitation and convention were "the pre117

For example, the form of repeated cross-rhymed quatrains with a final couplet as it represents the genre of the elegy, or forms of the quatorzain as they represent the sonnet.

32

INTRODUCTION

requisites of all serious creative activity", 118 and innovation was the "individual adaptation, reinterpretation, and, if possible, improvement of the best which each writer could find in the literature of his own and earlier days". 119 Thus all composition was imitative, and a distinction was made not between innovation and imitation but between fresh and sterile use of models.120 Freshness, then, is an Elizabethan criterion of excellence which can be applied in evaluating the use in a lyric form of a conventional model. In addition, knowledge of the traditional principles of a form enables one to make the discovery of coherence according to these principles in an example of the form. And the ability to discriminate between examples based on different formal principles leads to the discovery of variety in form among poems. The rest of the study of each lyric form will consist of structural analysis. The analysis will not be of metrical and other effects within lines, except occasionally and subsidiarily. Instead, analysis will be made of interrelationships of structural patterns that can organize a whole stanza or an entire lyric such as a sonnet. The patterns are established by line lengths or numbers of stresses in lines, by rhyme schemes, by punctuation marks, and by units of sense or logic. Before this method of structural analysis is further explained, however, some previous instances of the use of similar critical methods may be cited. The examples of J. V. Cunningham, Samuel R. Levin, and Arnold Stein are notable.121 Cunningham demonstrates that the structure of Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress" and other poems is syllogistic. Levin illustrates a linguistic theory for the structural examination of poems by an analysis of Shakespeare's Sonnet 30. And Stein analyzes the stanza of one of Donne's lyrics to indicate "the high degree of skill with which he relates his thoughts and his rhythms and his syntax to the form of the stanza - in order to achieve something like full reciprocity in the movement of a whole unit". 122 Other books and articles give impressive evidence of concern with these and related methods of analysis.123 118

Lever, The Elizabethan Love Sonnet, p. 55. Harold O. White, Plagiarism and Imitation During the English Renaissance (Cambridge, Mass., 1935), p. 119. 120 D. G. Rees, "Italian and Italianate Poetry", Elizabethan Poetry, pp. 53-54, points out that though Elizabethan poets like Sidney might profess scorn of imitation, they used models copiously. 121 Tradition and Poetic Structure (Denver, 1960), pp. 25-39; Linguistic Structures in Poetry (The Hague, 1962), pp. 51-58; John Donne's Lyrics (Minneapolis, 1962), pp. 213-216. 122 John Donne's Lyrics, p. 214. 123 Two books of reprinted articles and sections of books which substantially represent 119

INTRODUCTION

33

The vitality of Elizabethans for such concepts of structure in poems is shown by Puttenham's devoting much of the second book of The Arte of English Poesie (1589) to them. ".. .All things stand by proportion, a n d . . . without it nothing could stand to be good or beautiful", Puttenham begins.124 One of the proportions he finds in poems he describes in Chapter III, "Of Proportion in Measure"; this proportion "is but the quantitie of a verse" or line length.125 Another he explains in Chapter VI, "Of Proportion in Concord, Called Symphonie or Rime": . . . We make in th'ends of our verses a certaine tunable sound: which anon after with another verse reasonably distant we accord together in the last fall or cadence, the eare taking pleasure to heare the like tune reported and to feel his returne. 1 2 6

the range of these studies, the first from the perspective of the literary critic, the second mostly from the perspective of the linguist, are Discussions of Poetry; Form and Structure, ed. Francis Murphy (Boston, 1964), and Essays on the Language of Literature, ed. Seymour Chatman and Samuel R. Levin (Boston, 1967). The purpose of Stanley R. Greenfield's "Grammar and Meaning in Poetry", PMLA 82 (1967), 377-387, is "to bridge the gap between stylisticians and critics" (p. 387). An important index of these and other current interests in elements of poetry is Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Alex Preminger, Frank J. Warnke, and O. B. Hardison, Jr. (Princeton, 1965); e.g., D. I. Masson's entry "Sound in Poetry", pp. 784-790, a comprehensive review with an appended bibliography of varieties and functions of sound in poetry, bears on aspects of my study, particularly in Chapters III-V. An investigation which anticipates more recent studies is Katharine M. Wilson, Sound and Meaning in English Poetry (London, 1930), especially in sections such as her analysis of the connection between music, or sound, and meaning in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, pp. 299-345. Stephen Booth, in An Essay on Shakespeare's Sonnets (New Haven, 1969), makes the most extensive use of structural analysis like mine (Booth states his purpose on p. xi: "I have tried to demonstrate that a Shakespeare sonnet is organized in a multitude of coexistent and conflicting patterns — formal, logical, idealogical, syntactic, rhythmic, and phonetic."); because this book appeared after mine was written, I have been unable to apply a number of its revealing critical techniques to my analysis of Barnes. Similar prosodic analyses, the latter two made from my general perspective, include Mary Ellen Rickey, Rhyme and Meaning in Richard Crashaw (Lexington, 1961); Robert L. Montgomery, Jr., Symmetry and Sense: The Poetry of Sir Philip Sidney (Austin, 1961); N. E. Collinge, The Structure of Horace's Odes (London, 1962), especially Chapter III, "Contrast-Technique 2: Thought-Structure within the Odes", and its appendix, pp. 56-127; and Alicia Ostriker, "Song and Speech in the Metrics of George Herbert", PMLA 80 (1965), 62-68, in which Mrs. Ostriker observes that the Elizabethan lyric, under "the prosodic influence of musical forms imported from France and Italy", paid "considerable attention . . . to the correspondence between meter and meaning" and cultivated "complexity and variety, strictness of form, and concurrence of sound with sense" (p. 62). In Smith, ed., Elizabethan Critical Essays, II, 67. 125 Essays, II, 70. Chapter III is on pp. 70-73. 126 Essays, II, 80. Chapter VI is on pp. 80-81.

34

INTRODUCTION

The proportions of measure and concord, joined in a stanza or lyric, make a third one, which Puttenham describes in Chapter XI, "Of Proportion by Situation": This proportion consisteth in placing of euery verse in a staffe or ditty by such reasonable distaunces as may best serue the eare for delight, and also to shew the Poets art and variety of Musick. And the proportion is double: one by marshalling the meetres, and limiting their distaunces, hauing regard to the rime or concorde how they go and returne; another by placing euery verse, hauing a regard to his measure and quantitie onely, and not to his concorde, as to set one short meetre to three long, or foure short and two long, or a short measure and a long, or of diuers lengthes with relation one to another which maner of Situation, euen without respect of the rime, doth alter the nature of the Poesie, and make it either lighter or grauer, or more merry, or mournfull, and many wayes passionate to the eare and hart of the hearer, seeming for this point that our maker by his measures and concordes of sundry proportions doth counterfaitthe harmonicall tunes of the vocall and instrumentan Musickes. 127 That Puttenham envisioned as structural patterns the proportions that are combined in a stanza or lyric is shown by his diagrams of these proportions in Chapter XI. 1 2 8 Implicit, too, is Puttenham's belief in coherence and variety as criteria of poetic excellence. The principles according to which punctation marks were used in the Renaissance are a matter of controversy. Partly because printers were cavalier about such details, the inference of any set of principles has been made difficult. Edward Hubler voices what is perhaps the prevalently held opinion of the principles: "The Elizabethan system of punctuation was rhetorical rather than grammatical as ours is, and it was often used to indicate rhythms and emphases, but it allowed freedoms confusing to modern r e a d e r s . . . . " 1 2 9 When a printer's vagaries d o not obscure a 127

Essays, II, 88. Chapter XI is on pp. 88-95. Essays, II, 89-92, 94. Puttenham, in Essays, II, 94, refers to his diagrams as "ocular examples". 129 Shakespeare's Songs and Poems (New York, 1959), p. viii. Puttenham, in The Arte of English Poesie, Essays, II, 78-79, observes that some inconsistencies occurred because Elizabethan poets did not agree in applying punctuation marks for emphasis: "So may you see that the vse of these pawses or distinctions is not generally with the vulgar Poet as it is with the Prose writer, because the Poetes cheife Musicke lying in his rime or concorde to heare the Simphonie, he maketh all the hast he can to be at the end of his verse, and delights not in many stayes by the way. . .. Much more might be sayd for the vse of your three pauses, comma, colon, & periode, for perchance it be not all a matter to vse many commas and few, nor colons likewise, or long or short periodes for it is diuersly vsed by diuers good writers." But the problem of explaining instances generally has been difficult enough to make the principles of Renaissance punctuation a subject of continuing debate. Percy Simpson, in Shakespearian Punctua128

INTRODUCTION

35

text, one may expect Renaissance rhetoric and modern grammar to agree frequently in the determination of given marks of punctuation. But the principles Hubler explains may occasionally be seen in an Elizabethan poem to indicate a significant structural pattern which departs from that prescribed in the poem by modern concepts of punctuation and syntax. Samuel Daniel's remarks on the sonnet imply that Renaissance poets and critics were aware of the relation between the dimensions of form and content in a stanza or lyric. The sonnet he describes as "a iust forme, neither too long for the shortest proiect, nor too short for the longest, being but onely imployed for a present passion"; in it one sees m u c h e x c e l l e n c e ordred in a small r o o m e , or little gallantly disposed a n d m a d e to fill v p a space o f like capacitie, in such sort that the o n e w o u l d n o t a p p e a r e s o beautifull in a larger circuite, n o r the other d o well in a l e s s e . . . . T h e s e limited proportions and rests o f stanzes . . . are all o f that h a p p i n e s b o t h for the disposition o f the matter, the apt planting the sentence where it m a y best stand to hit, the certaine close o f delight with the full b o d i e o f a iust period well c a r r i e d . . . , 1 3 0

As modern critics have shown, Renaissance poets were even more particularly aware of the relationship between form and content in the traditional types of the sonnet: necessary to the genre is a regularly patterned sequence of units of classifiable kinds of sense that is matched to a regularly patterned sequence of units made by the rhyme scheme. Thus it is possible to generalize about the Italian sonnet, " . . . It might be said that the octave presents the narrative, states the proposition or raises a question; the sestet drives home the narrative by making an abstract comment, applies the proposition, or solves the problem." 131 That the structural units of sense and rhyme in the sonnet can be disproportionate and so unmatched seems not to have been considered by Elizabethan tion (Oxford, 1911), proposed that the punctuation in sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury books represents not merely the vagaries of printers, but also the application of rhythmical or rhetorical, instead of logical, principles. In "A Medieval Survival in Elizabethan Punctuation", in Studies in the English Renaissance Drama, ed. Josephine W. Bennett, Oscar Cargill, and Vernon Hall, Jr. (New York, 1959), pp. 1-15, Albert C. Baugh summarizes previous theories and advances one of his own. In addition to Simpson he names A. W. Pollard, Sidney Lee, Raymond Macdonald Alden, Charles C. Fries, and Walter J. Ong as participants in the controversy. Baugh's own position is that some otherwise unexplainable end-of-the-line punctuation marks are a survival of the medieval practice of using such marks to separate lines of verse. 130 A Defence of Ryme (1603), in Essays, II, 366. 131 William Flint Thrall and Addison Hibbard, A Handbook to Literature (New York, 1936), p. 418; and see below, pp. 74, 79-80.

36

INTRODUCTION

critics; yet there are instances among Renaissance sonnets of this disproportion. 132 These sequences of rhyme and sense units in the sonnet, as well as the comments of Daniel, indicate that Elizabethan poets were conscious of such structural relationships, whether prescribed or not, in the composition of lyric forms generally. The choice and arrangement of these patterns determine to a significant degree the coherence and variety in a stanza or lyric. The structural patterns established by line lengths or the number of stresses in lines, by rhyme schemes, by punctuation marks, and by units of sense or logic will be analyzed, then, in each of the lyric forms in Barnes's sonnet sequences.133 The structural analyses are designed to reveal the degree of coherence and variety in each form, and of variety among the forms, as the analyses of conventionality are designed partly to do. Also the structural analyses of the forms of the sonnets are to be made in an effort to determine the freshness of Barnes's use, in comparison with that of his English predecessors, of the traditional structural elements and relationships of the sonnet. It is the combination of rhyme and sense patterns which occurs most frequently in all the lyrics and which is fundamental in sonnets. The combination maybe distinguished in Parthenophil Sonnet XXXIII: N e x t w h e n the boundlesse furie of m y sunne Began in higher Climates to take fier, A n d with it somewhat kindled m y desier, T h e n least I should haue w h o l y bene vndonne (For n o w mine age had thrise seuen winters ronne) With studies, and with labours did I tyer Mine itching fancies, which did still aspier: Then f r o m those obiectes (which their force begonne Through wandring furie to possesse mine hart) Mine eyes there vaine seducers I did fixe On Pallas, and o n Mars, home, and in field, A n d armed strongly least m y better part T o milder obiectes should it selfe immixe, I vow'd I neuer w o u l d to bewtie yeeld. 132

See below, pp. 75-76. Claes Schaar, An Elizabethan Sonnet Problem: Shakespeare's "Sonnets", Daniel's "Delia", and Their Literary Background^ Lund Studies in English, 28) (Lund, I960), discusses the logical and syntactical structures of sonnets in England, France, and Italy during the Renaissance, in relation to Renaissance and classical principles of rhetoric, on pp. 27-56. Though he is not concerned with the relation of these structures to rhyme schemes, Schaar regularly alludes to their connections. For some analysis of sonnet rhyme structure, see pp. 146-148. 1M So, too, will patterns sometimes delineated by devices of rhyme and rhetoric; see below, pp. 94-97, 103-105, Chapter V.

INTRODUCTION

37

The rhyme pattern of this poem includes the conventional strophic units of the Italian sonnet, an octave of two enclosed quatrains, and a sestet of two tercets. The pattern may be designated here, as it will be in analyses to follow, by the rhyme scheme in spaced groups of letters abba-abba—cde-cde or by numerals 8(4-4)-6(3-3). Though indications of a sense or logical pattern are given by syntax and often by punctuation, the reader, as Levin and Stein imply, ultimately determines this pattern in a subjective judgment. 134 In Sonnet XXXIII the sense pattern may be indicated abb-aabb-acde-cde or 3-4-4-3. Other patterns in Barnes's poems will be similarly noted. Line length or stress patterns will be indicated in his lyric forms with lines of varying lengths. Because of the difficulties in detecting independent punctuation patterns that are structurally significant, such patterns will be observed not systematically but by the way, when they occur in meaningful relation to other patterns in a lyric form. The patterns will be regularly designated by numerals or letters or both. Also, the patterns and their relationships will be analyzed in more detail in representative examples of poems in various lyric forms. To elucidate the other indications of their structures, such detailed analysis of the miscellaneous forms will be made frequently. 135 But analysis will be given of examples of each of Barnes's sonnet types: the relationship of the sense pattern to the rhyme pattern is intrinsic to the fourteen-line sonnet form in a way that it is not to the miscellaneous forms; and comprehension of Barnes's various manipulations of this relationship depends on the study of representative poems. In the analyses, will signify any midline division in the numerical indication of a pattern. Often, a stanza or lyric will be referred to as "strophic" or "nonstrophic". For purposes of this study, a strophic form has rhymes in a pattern divisible into sections like those of a sonnet; a nonstrophic form has rhymes that are not divisible into sections, whether as in a sestina stanza or as in free verse. So that Barnes's formal intentions may be understood as far as possible, the texts of his sonnet sequences to be used in this study are xerographic copies of the first editions. 136 Modifications in the transcription of these texts include not capitalizing letters in some words, not retaining the italicization of 134

Levin, Linguistic Structures in Poetry, pp. 25-28, discusses the necessity of considering semantically equivalent forms as extralinguistic. Stein, John Donne's Lyrics, p. 215, remarks that it is "difficult to mark the exact divisions of imaginative logic". 135 For example, on pp. 39-41, 44-46, 51, 56-59, 68, 103-105. 136 See above, p. 11 and notes 2 and 3.

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INTRODUCTION

all the words in many poems, and not using long s. Also, some printing errors are corrected, but, in the footnotes or text following them, the faulty original is reproduced or described. In the transcription of titles of Barnes's works, words originally in all-capital letters or initial capital letters are recapitalized according to modern principles, but initial small letters are kept. Barnes's lyric forms will be discussed in the order required by the development of information in the study rather than in the order of their appearance in the sonnet sequences.

I

MISCELLANEOUS LOVE LYRICS

1. EIDILLION

The forms of earlier paraphrases of Moschus' first idyll1 and of earlier Renaissance poems in the genre of the idyll do not offer a precedent for the form of Barnes's "The First Eidillion of moschus describing Loue".2 Certain French versions of Moschus' idyll have been put forward as influences upon Barnes's poem. Versions by Clément Marot3 and Jean-Antoine de Baïf 4 are in couplets. One by Amadys Jamyn5 is a sonnet. 6 A Renaissance genre of the idyll appears to be almost unde1

Printed with a translation by J. M. Edmonds in The Greek Bucolic Poets (The Loeb Ciassical Library) (London, 1929), pp. 422-425. 2 In Parthenophil and Parthenophe. Sonnettes, Madrigals, Elegies and Odes [(London, 1593)]; all citations are to a xerographic copy of this edition in the STC series of University Microfilms, Inc., Ann Arbor. 3 Oeuvres complètes, ed. Pierre Jannet (Paris, 1884), II, 82, and III, 143. 4 Euvres en rime, ed. Ch. Marty-Laveaux (Paris, 1881-90), II, 276-278. 6 Oeuvres poétiques, ed. Charles Brunet (Paris, 1879), p. 124. 6 Sidney Lee, ed., An English Garner: Elizabethan Sonnets (Westminster, 1904), I, lxxviii, thinks that Barnes owes more to Marot and de Baïf than to Moschus, but Janet Scott, Les sonnets élisabéthains ( = Bibliothèque de la Revue de Littérature Comparée, 60) (Paris, 1929), p. 74, n. 3, believes that Barnes is especially indebted to Jamyn. Surveys of the great number of versions of Moschus' first idyll have been made by James Hutton, "The First Idyl of Moschus in Imitations to the Year 1800", AJP 49 (1928), 105-136, and by Joseph G. Fucilla, "Additions to 'The First Idyl of Moschus in Imitations to the Year 1800' ", AJP 50 (1929), 190-193, and "Materials for the History of a Popular Classical Theme", CIP 26 (1931), 135-152. Hutton, p. 127, finds only two slight deviations from Moschus in Barnes's version ("Thou shalt not onely kisse, but as guest stay", in line 6; and "as any waspe he stingeth", in line 13); he concludes that Barnes wrote directly from the Greek original. The versions by French poets substantially confirm his judgment. Jamyn's sonnet, XC, entitled "D'un baiser", is too short even to contain the story. Marot uses Moschus'idyll in two poems, "D'Amour fugitif, Invention de Marot" and "D'Amour fugitif, de Lucien" ; in the former the story becomes a vehicle for anti-Catholic commentary, and in the latter the story, though told for its own sake, contains several departures from Moschus. De Baïf's poem, "À Madamoiselle Victoire", reproduces Moschus' poem as faithfully as Barnes does, but in the midst of a larger narrative framework, and without Barnes's deviations from

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fined and unexemplified. Perhaps the only Elizabethan examples before Barnes's are the anonymous Six Idyllia out of Theocritus (1588).7 They are in couplets occasionally varied with alternately rhymed quatrains. Nor does Warner Forrest Patterson, in his comprehensive study and anthology of Middle and Renaissance French poetic genres, Three Centuries of French Poetic Theory, give an example of the idyll or information that the genre was even recognized in France. 8 Barnes's poem has three stanzas. Each of the first two is fifteen lines long, in the metrical scheme a^b^c^b^a^c^c^d^e^e^d^e^f^d^f^. The third stanza has twelve lines, in the metrical scheme of the opening twelve lines of the other stanzas. The rhymes in these stanzas are not completely unconventional in sequence; yet the stanzas are nonstrophic in that the rhymes are not arranged so that the stanzas subdivide symmetrically. The sense patterns of the stanzas are governed by the progress of the narrative in translation, in which Venus appeals for the return of her son Cupid. In the broadest terms, Venus proclaims her loss of Cupid and offers a reward for his return in lines 1 to 6 of the first stanza; she describes the marks by which he can be recognized from line 7 of the first stanza to line 2 of the third; and she warns Cupid's finder to take precautions in lines 3 to 12 of the third stanza. It is possible to analyze these components further within the context of each stanza, the number of lines in each part being indicated by numerals. In the first stanza, the six-line unit containing Venus's proclamation may be said to include the identification of Venus and the subject of her dialogue (1), her announcement of her loss and of the reward to Cupid's finder of kisses (H) or of "more beside" (2); the remaining nine lines in the stanza give identifying marks of Cupid-his complexion (1), eyes (1), and sugared speech covering a false heart (5). Stanza two deals further with Cupid's features - his head and face (1), his hands (3), his exposed body in contrast to his closed mind (2), and his elusiveness in relation to his use of

the original. This suggests that Barnes may have consulted de Bai'f, but that he did not do so without knowing the bounds of Moschus' Greek. 7 Reprinted in An English Garner: Some Longer Elizabethan Poems, ed. A. H. Bullen (Westminster, 1903), pp. 123-146. For information about the false attribution of these poems to Sir Edward Dyer, see Ralph M. Sargent, At the Court of Queen Elizabeth: The Life and Lyrics of Sir Edward Dyer (London, 1935), p. 220. 8 (=University of Michigan Publications of Language and Literature, 14 and 15) (Ann Arbor, 1935). Patterson reports, I, 62, that Scaliger equated the idyll with the eclogue; but the eclogue is not Barnes's model. Nor is the idyll to be confused with the short rustic song called the idillie, of which Patterson, in II, 367-370, gives examples by Jean Vauquelin de la Fresnaye.

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41

his bow and arrows (9, which divides further into units according to his location). The third stanza consists of the end of the description of Cupid (2), and of the precautions one must take to insure Cupid's return when he has been found (10); in these ten lines the finder is directed generally to bind and bring Cupid back (2) and then is warned against Cupid's tears (1), laughter (1), kisses (2), and offer of his weapons (4). The sense patterns of the three stanzas, then, are 6(l-5[lf-lf-2])-9(2-7[l-l-5]), 1-3-2-9(2-2^-4^), and 2-10(2-8 [1-1 -2-4]). Thus the rhyme scheme of the eidillion does not readily fall into symmetrical parts; and, similarly, the sense pattern is irregular in that, first, the three major parts of the narrative are unequal in length and are interconnected at points not between but within stanzas, second, the patterns of the stanzas are not uniform, and third, the subdivisions of the patterns in the stanzas do not systematically translate the rhymes into symmetrical clusters - the sense pattern of the third stanza, according to rhyme letters, being, for example, ab cb—a-c-cd-eede. Yet it may be concluded that the elements in this lyric form are combined to their mutual enhancement. The disproportionate sequence of the translated narrative makes impossible a symmetrical or uniform sense pattern. Furthermore, the irregularity of the narrative makes appropriate a rhyme pattern that does not form symmetrical clusters either by itself or in relation to the sense pattern. In sum, the elements of the form make a virtue of necessity: the asymmetry of the narrative is matched by that in the patterns of rhyme and sense to become a mark of symmetry joining the elements into a whole.9 2. ELEGIES

The elegy in classical writing is distinguishable less by its subject than by its use of the elegiac distich - a line of dactylic hexameter followed by one of pentameter. Elizabethans included as elegies all poems which the ancients set to elegiac meter; to this extent Elizabethans defined the elegy as did the ancients.10 But the Elizabethan elegy, in contrast to the ® In the text of Edward Arber, as reprinted in Sidney Lee's edition of Parthenophil in Elizabethan Sonnets, I, 268-269, the first two lines of Stanza 3 are detached from the rest of the stanza and appended to Stanza 2. The effect is to undo the consistency of the irregularity in the presentation of the sense pattern in relation to the rhyme pattern and the consistency of the rhyme scheme of the third stanza with that of the first two stanzas. 10 F. W. Weitzmann, in "Notes on the Elizabethan Elegie", PMLA 50 (1935), 435-443, discusses the several meanings the genre held for Elizabethans.

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classical elegy, is not distinguishable by its stanza form because the distich resisted naturalization in the vernacular and no single equivalent was accepted in its stead. In the opinion of French poets such as Du Bellay, Ronsard, and La Fresnaye, who exercised a strong influence upon Elizabethans, the elegy might employ the decasyllabic vers commuti, the Alexandrine, or a syllabic equivalent of the distich ; in French practice these lines were also put in couplets.11 Some of the Elizabethan critics discussed the form of the elegy. George Puttenham described the elegy as an ancient genre in "a limping Pentameter after a lusty Exameter".12 A few years later Thomas Campion explained the "English Elegiack" as a "licentiate Iambick" followed by "two vnited Dimiters". 13 But, in reply to Campion, Samuel Daniel said that it was "no other then our old accustomed measure of five feet" perhaps a bit irregular in scansion.14 Of the few English examples of poems called elegies through the time of Parthenophil and Parthenophe, some reflect one or more of these critical opinions, and some do not. The lines of all the poems are iambic pentameters. Marlowe's All Ovid's Elegies (evidently composed before 1587)15 are in couplets. Chidiock Tichborne's "Elegy, written with his own hand in the Tower before his execution", which appeared in Verses of Praise and Joy upon Her Majesty's Preservation (1586),16 has stanzas which rhyme ababcc. The 1590 version of Sidney's Arcadia contains Philisides' "Elegiackes" to Mira; they represent an attempt to compose in English, with a system of quantitatively long and short syllables, the alternate hexameters and pentameters of the Latin distich.17 Spenser's 11 Patterson, Poetic Theory, 1,854-855, II, 397, n. 1. For an account of the influence of D u Bellay and Ronsard on Spenser and, thence, on other Elizabethans, see Alfred W. Satterthwaite, Spenser, Ronsard, and Du Bellay: A Renaissance Comparison (Princeton, 1960). Satterthwaite gives an understandable explanation of the difficulties of adapting classical meters into French (p. 43) and English (p. 54), and he describes at some length Elizabethans' attempts to use classical verse forms (pp. 52-65). 12 The Arte of English Poesie (1589), in Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. G. Gregory Smith (London, 1904), II, 51. 13 Observations in the Art of English Poesie (1602), in Essays, II, 344. 14 A Defence of Ryme (71603), in Essays, II, 377. 15 The Works of Christopher Marlowe, ed. C. F. Tucker Brooke (Oxford, 1910), pp. 553-627. Brooke, p. 554, attributes the poems to Marlowe's student days, which were over, C. S. Lewis indicates in English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama (Oxford, 1954), p. 485, n. 1, in 1587, when Marlowe received the M . A. degree. 16 The poem is reprinted in J. William Hebel and Hoyt H . Hudson, eds., Poetry of the English Renaissance, 1509-1660 (New York, 1929), pp. 196-197. 17 In The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. William A. Ringler, Jr. (Oxford, 1962), pp. 122-124. Sidney wrote other poems in the f o r m : o n e , given by Ringler on pp. 29-30,

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Daphnaida (1591)18 contains a repeated variation upon the rhyme royal, ababcbc. There are three elegies in Giles Fletcher the Elder's Licia (1593),19 two of them in stanzas like those of Tichborne's poem, and the third in cross-rhymed quatrains followed by a couplet. And Thomas Lodge's Phillis (1593)20 has an elegy with rhymes like those of Fletcher's third poem. According to earlier precept and practice in France and England, Barnes might versify an elegy in two ways: as in both countries, by various imitations of the distich in the vernacular, perhaps, as always in France and sometimes in England, with couplets; or, as in England only, by substitution for the distich of cross-rhymed quatrains or another short stanza form, generally with iambic pentameter lines.21 Barnes composed elegies in both ways. Elegie XXI, like Sidney's experiments, imitates the elegiac distich more closely than do the French poems: it has thirty-four rhymeless lines in irregular alternate heptameters and hexameters. His other poems in the genre have iambic pentameter lines. Elegies III, VIII, XV, XVIII, XIX, and XX, which vary in length from twenty-two to thirty lines, have cross-rhymed quatrains and final couplets. Elegie V is arranged in three rhyme royal stanzas. The rest of the elegies, however, while adhering partly to structural principles of the classical distich, are not born of French or English edicts or models: Elegies I, II, IIII, VI, VII, IX, X, XI, XII, XIII, XIIII, XVI, and XVII (IIII and XVI by virtue of minor departures from the quatrain-couplet arrangement) are in single nonstrophic stanzas, twenty to fifty-nine lines long. The rhyme scheme of Elegie I is typical: ababcdebcdedffgfghfghiig.22 in the 1593 edition of the Arcadia; and two others, in Ringler's edition on p. 143, in "Certaine Sonets", first printed in 1598 with the Arcadia. Ringler explains Sidney's experiments with quantitative verse on pp. 389-393. 18 The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, ed. J. C. Smith and E. de Selincourt (London, 1921), pp. 527-534. 19 Elizabethan Sonnets, II, 71-74. 20 Elizabethan Sonnet-Cycles, ed. Martha Foote Crow (London, 1896-1898), I, 43-45. 21 Poetic effects of the elegiac distich are, first, both linkage and separation of the lines within each distich, between successive distichs, between all hexameter lines, and between all pentameter lines; and second, uniformity, except between hexameters and pentameters, both within each distich and throughout the poem. Renaissance substitutes match the effects of the distich imperfectly: the couplet does not provide the linkage and separation within and between distichs which is given by two kinds of lines in alternation; other forms provide neither this linkage and separation nor the degree of uniformity throughout the poem that is given by the configuration of the distich. 22 Because of such irregularities, this form creates one of the effects of the distich, though not others: the rhymes link the lines to a certain degree, but their irregular sequence attenuates any distinct sense of strophic division, thus imparting much of the distich's effect of uniformity. The forms of Barnes's elegies are tabulated in Appendix I, pp. 125-126.

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For purposes of structural analysis, Barnes's strophic and nonstrophic elegies may be considered in separate groups.The patterns of rhyme and sense are appropriate to each other in that differences between strophic and nonstrophic rhyme patterns reflect corresponding differences in patterns of sense. The logical sequences of Barnes's strophic elegies lend themselves to symmetrical arrangements of the rhyme patterns. The regularity of the matched sequences is accentuated in various ways. The even tripartition of Elegie V, though it may not be immediately apparent because the three parts are not divided in the printing, is accentuated by the poem's three rhyme royal stanzas and by the rhetorically kindred and logically ordered expressions of its ideas. In the three stanzas, putatively a letter to Parthenophil from Parthenophe, the mistress draws two comparisons and a double contrast: in that he is waspish, the lover invites stinging by bees (Stanza 1); in that he is viperish, he invites stinging by viper younglings (Stanza 2); and in that he is a man, he may invite stinging by a woman - who, from the engagement, is not sickened as a man is and does not die as a bee does (Stanza 3). The quatrain pattern of Elegie XVIII is emphasized by syntax. Each quatrain concerns the paradoxical effects of one or two of the attributes of the lady: the attribute or pair of attributes work the enticement of the lover yet preserve the distance of his lady. The final couplet comments upon the quatrains: the lady's effects upon the man lack deceit to the measure that his account of them lacks ingenuity. The last stanza and the couplet (lines 17 to 22) illustrate the way in which syntax maintains the symmetry of the pattern throughout the poem: If thou canst cherish graces in thy cheeke, For men to wonder at, which thee behold: And they finde furies, when thine hart they seeke, And yet proue such, as are extreamely cold. Now as I finde, no thought to mans conceipt, Then must I sweare, to womans no deceit.

The quatrain in this passage, like each preceding quatrain, consists of a conditional «/-clause and further-subordinated elements. The couplet is an independent clause which completes the sentence begun in each of the quatrains. The regular quatrain pattern of Elegie XV is more elaborately emphasized. In Stanzas 1 to 4 the lover offers a plea for a sentence (Stanza 1)

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of life or death which will release him from despair (Stanza 2) - a plea which he reiterates (Stanza 3) and joins with the assurance that the lady's future reputation will not be lessened if she answers it (Stanzas 3 and 4). These stanzas are at once separated and linked by the repetition of words from the last line of one stanza in the first line of the succeeding stanza. Words are repeated also in other corresponding positions in the stanzas - in lines 3 and 4, 7 and 8, 11 and 12, and 15. These repetitions not only enhance the symmetrical relationship of the sections but suggest a crescendo of urgency in the expression of the lover's plea. Stanzas 5 and 6 (lines 17 to 24) of this elegy contain the paradoxical vow of the poet-lover to eternize the lady in his verse. Her beauty will be preserved not only in its inviting appearance but also in its cruel effects - at last to the exclusion of its appearance: Yet (howsoeuer thou with me shall deale) Thy bewtie shall perseuer in my verse: And thine eyes wounde, which thine hart would not heal: And my complaintes, which could not thine hart perce: And thine hard hart, thy bewties shamefull staine: And that fowle staine thine endlesse infamie: So (though thou still in recorde do remaine) The recordes reckon but thine obloquie....

The promise of the poet is syllogistic: an avowal to eternize her beauty (lines 17 and 18); a definition of her beauty in terms of its cruel effects (lines 19 to 22); a re-avowal to preserve her beauty in its cruelty (lines 23 and 24). Here the 4-4 rhyme pattern is deliberately violated in the 2-4-2 sense pattern. However, the irregularity of this unit gains force from a context of regularity; and thus it depends on the principle of regularity no less than do the preceding sense units which coincide with the quatrains; moreover it is organic in that it suggests the boundlessness of the lady's cruelty. Also, conjunctions and pronouns are repeated within and between lines 19 to 22 in order to delineate this four-line unit and to suggest further the greatness of the lady's cruelty by their monotonous iteration of its aspects. The promise to eternize the lady is framed, in the final couplet, by a prediction of the pity which should come when the reader surveys the poet's record - as the plea for sentence has been framed by the poet's promise of eternization. The devices used to accentuate the division into sense units of the strophic elegies in Parthenophil and Parthenophe are used also to accen-

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tuate the divisions of the nonstrophic elegies. The division of Elegie X, for example, is sharpened by the setting forth of the narrative in syntactical units. And each section but the last in Elegie XI has the formula "Was it", followed by the rest of the verb, a subordinate clause beginning "that" used as an object, and another subordinate clause beginning "where" or "when". In the nonstrophic elegies, however, the sense patterns are irregular. For example, Elegie X is divided 4 4 3-5-3-6-5-2^-2^; and XI is divided 5-6-6-3. Symmetry is the governing structural principle in Barnes's strophic elegies. But in each of Barnes's nonstrophic elegies, as in his eidillion, asymmetry is the principle which governs, individually and correlatively, the patterns of rhyme and sense.

3. SESTINES

The probable inventor of that most artificial of forms, the sestina, is the late twelfth-century troubadour Arnaut Daniel. 23 Italian poets, among them Dante, Petrarch, Firenzuola, Sannazaro, and Tasso, imitated Daniel, but without adhering to his requirements for the envoy.24 The sestina was imported into France by a lesser member of the Pléiade, Pontus de Tyard. His most important innovation is the introduction of rhyme into the form. Tyard's two sestinas are the first French examples of the form and the only ones extant from the sixteenth century. Almost as few sestinas were composed in England as in France before 1593. The August Eclogue of Spenser's The Shepheardes Calender (1579) contains a simplified sestina in lines 151—189 ;25 the sequence of terminal words in the first stanza is maintained through the poem except for the repetition of the terminal word of the last line of one stanza at the end of the first line in the succeeding stanza - ABCDEF, FABCDE, etc. 26 Sidney composed three sestinas for the Arcadia-, one is in regular form (printed in the 1593 edition), another is a double sestina (in the 1590 and 23

I a m indebted for the information in this paragraph and the next to L. E. Kastner, History of French Versification (Oxford, 1903), pp. 281-284. The invention of the sestina is discussed also by F. J. A. Davidson in "The Origin of the Sestina", MLN 25 (1910), 18-20. 24 Daniel reuses in the same sequence as terminal words in the envoy the terminal words of the second half of the last full stanza; and he reuses internally in the same sequence the terminal words of the first half of the last full stanza. 25 Poetical Works, p. 450. 26 William Webbe, in A Discourse of English Poetrie (1586), Essays, I, 276-277, speaks of Spenser's sestina as if he thinks it unique in English literature.

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1593 editions), and a third is rhymed (in the 1593 edition). 27 Thomas Lodge included a sestina, regular in form except for the sequence of terminal words in the envoy, in a Margarite of America (1596; written in 1592).28 Barnes's five sestinas (he called them "sestines") demonstrate greater metrical virtuosity than do those of his English predecessors. The metrical elements in these poems, like those in sestinas by other poets, overshadow the content. The patterns of sense are irregular and evidently are not connected to the metrical sequences. We are preoccupied, instead, by the management of the terminal words in the lines, according to which the sestina achieves its form. 29 Sestines 1, 3, 4, and 5 alike employ terminal words in an orthodox sequence in the full-length stanzas and in an unorthodox sequence in the envoy: EDB, without internal reference to A, C, or F. Sestine 1, in four-foot trochaic lines, and Sestine 3, in heptasyllabic four-foot trochaics, are single sestinas. Sestine 5, in iambic pentameters, is a triple sestina-a much severer test of ingenuity. Sestine 4 is an echo poem. Each of its lines is an irregular seven-foot iambic followed by an echo in which the penultimate syllable is stressed. This syllable varies from stanza to stanza, however; only the final, unstressed syllable functions as the terminal word, which is repeated throughout the poem. The most unusual of Barnes's sestinas is the second. The lines are iambic tetrameter. The terminal words are rhymed after the practice of Tyard. The scheme in the first stanza is aabbcc. In subsequent stanzas, though the orthodox changes in sequence are maintained in the rhymes, only the terminal word in the last line is repeated; thus the first three stanzas are arranged aabbcC, CacabB, BcbaaC. Barnes wrote more sestinas than any previous English poet. He ex27 In The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, pp. 108-110, 111-113, and 129-130. Sidney's rhymed sestina adds the complication of the rhymes to the repetition of terminal words in succeeding stanzas; the rhyme scheme of Stanza 1 is ABABCC. In his note to this poem, pp. 421-422, Ringler says that Pontus de Tyard's sestinas rhyme ABCBCA. For Ringler's account of the dates of composition and of the 1590 and 1593 first printings of the different versions of the Arcadia, see pp. 364-382. 28 Robert Greene, Menaphon, and Thomas Lodge, A Margarite of America, ed. G. B. Harrison (Oxford, 1927), pp. 126-128. The dates are given by J. W. H. Atkins in The Cambridge History of English Literature (Cambridge, Eng., 1933), III, 408. The erroneous report in an anonymous entry on the sestina in the Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (XXIV, 702) that a sestina by Edmund Gosse in 1877 is the first one in English has had currency since: see, e.g., the twenty-first printing in 1957 of Gerald Sanders, A Poetry Primer (English Pamphlet Series) (New York, 1935), p. 76. 29 The forms of Barnes's sestines are listed in Appendix I, p. 126.

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ceeded his predecessors in metrical virtuosity by composing not only regular single and triple sestinas but, in Sestine 2, a poem which is more imaginatively conceived than earlier English examples are. 4. C A N Z O N S

The canzone, like the sestina, did not enjoy a great vogue among Elizabethans. In Never too Late (1590), Robert Greene included a poem which was labelled a canzone;30 it has ten stanzas rhymed ababcc. A poem by Thomas Lodge in Rosalynde (1590) illustrates the vague status of the genre at the time; it is called "Rosador's Sonnet" before it is described as "my canzon"; 31 it, like Greene's poem, employs the ababcc-stanza which appears in Elizabethan poetry ranging from the January Eclogue of The Shepheardes Calender (1579)32 to Venus and Adonis (1593).33 But the first and only canzone in English before Barnes's canzoni to be modeled on an Italian form is by Sir Philip Sidney: "The ladd Philisides" contains seven thirteen-line stanzas, each in the metrical scheme a-Jo^aiCibiCiCzdze^d5/1/5, and a nine-line envoy inserted before the last stanza.34 There are three canzoni (called "canzons") in Parthenoph.il and Parthenophe. Canzon I has seven sixteen-line stanzas followed by a five-line envoy (attached to the preceding stanza). The feet are very irregular; to indicate their relative lengths clearly in a description of the poem's metrical arrangement, we may label lines with five or six stresses I and lines with three or four stresses s: albsbsclblasasclcsdsdse1esd1f1fl; envoy tfs6s6sc,cs. In each stanza the scheme is repeated, but individual rhymes are not duplicated. Canzon 2 has nine stanzas with seven iambic lines which, though rhymeless between themselves, individually rhyme with the corresponding lines of all other stanzas. A two-line envoy is attached to the last stanza. The metrical scheme is «56^5^5^5/5^4 in the stanzas and fsgi in the envoy. One- or two-stress echoes, which rhyme with the 30

Plays and Poems, ed. J. Churton Collins (Oxford, 1905), II, 288-289. Lodge's "Rosalynde" Being the Original of Shakespeare's "As You Like It", ed. W. W. Greg (New York, 1907), pp. 79-81. 32 Spenser, Poetical Works, pp. 421-423. 33 The Complete Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare, ed. William Allan Neilson and Charles Jarvis Hill (Boston, 1942), pp. 1332-1346. Other references in this study to the use of the Venus and Adonis stanza are on pp. 42 and 52, and in Chapter I notes 27 and 81. 34 Ringler reprints and comments on Sidney's canzone in The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, pp. 256-259, 496-497, and 570. Ringler believes that it was composed c. 1577— 1580 (p. 496). 31

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lines they follow, are added in Stanza 2 to lines c and g, in Stanza 3 to lines e, / , and g, in Stanza 4 to lines c and d, and in Stanza 9 to lines b, c, d, and e. Canzon 3 has seven fifteen-line stanzas in iambic pentameters which rhyme abcbaccdeedefdf and a nine-line envoy which rhymes abccbcdbd. As in Canzon I the whole scheme (but not individual rhymes) is repeated from stanza to stanza.35 Felix E. Schelling has noted that the stanza of Barnes's third canzone reproduces the rhymes in one by Petrarch but that his other canzoni are arranged more freely. 38 However, the metrical resemblance of Barnes's canzoni to those of Petrarch is greater than Schelling has observed. Canzon I has the same number of stanzas, each with the same rhyme scheme and each with lines of corresponding lengths, as Petrarch's Canzone IV, "Si e debile". The poems differ in structure only in the envoy: Barnes's has the rhymes and corresponding lengths of the first five of the eight lines in the envoy of Petrarch. The structure of Canzon 2 resembles that of Petrarch's Canzone III, "Verdi panni". It has one stanza less, but each one and the envoy contain the same rhymes in lines of corresponding lengths. Moreover, both poems employ rhymes in addition to those at the ends of the lines: Petrarch uses internal rhymes in the fourth and sixth lines of each stanza which link the stanzas as the end rhymes do; and Barnes uses echoes in the manner described above. The structure of Canzon 3 is similar to that of Petrarch's Canzone II, "O aspettata in ciel". Both poems are in the same number of stanzas, and the stanzas have the same rhymes. But the lines in Petrarch's poem are of varying lengths, whereas those in Barnes's poem are all pentameters.37 It is helpful to examine the metrical structure of the canzone in detail because it elucidates the forms of Barnes's odes, madrigals, and sonnets as well as those of his canzoni. The following account is based on the important analysis of the canzone by Dante in De vulgari eloquentia (1304), Book II, Chapters III to XIV. 38 35

See also the tabulation of the forms of Barnes's canzons in Appendix I, p. 126. A Book of Elizabethan Lyrics (Boston, 1895), p. lviii. 3 ' In Francesco Petrarca, Canzoniere, Trionfi, Rime varie, ed. Carlo Muscetta and Daniele Ponchiroli (=Parnasso italiano, 3) (Torino, 1958), Petrarch's canzoni are given as XXXVII (IV), pp. 52-56, X X I X (III), pp. 41-43, and XXVIII (II), pp. 36-40. 38 A Translation of the Latin Works of Dante Alighieri (London, 1934), pp. 74-115. The best description in English of the stanza, as composed in a somewhat less flexible manner by poets associated with the court of Emperor Frederick II during the period 1220-1250, is by Ernest H. Wilkins in "The Derivation of the 'Canzone'", MP 12 (1914-1915), 521-558. See also Dante Alighieri, De vulgari eloquentia, ed. Aristide Marigo (Firenze, 1938), pp. cxxv-clvi, 282-298. 36

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The canzone has several stanzas of either of two types, strophic and nonstrophic. The rest of this account will be concerned with the first type. The strophic stanza has two major parts. The point at which they are joined is called the diesis. This division takes place, however, only if either or both of the parts are further divided into two or three subparts. The subparts which occur before the diesis are called piedi, and those after the diesis are called volte. If there is no subdivision before the diesis the lines are known as the fronte; and if there is no division after the diesis the lines are called the sirma. Although the canzone may contain different numbers of lines on each side of the diesis, every subpart on one side of the diesis, piedi or volte, must contain the same number of lines; furthermore, corresponding lines of these subparts on one side of the diesis must be of the same length. Great liberty is allowed in the arrangement of rhymes in the canzone. One of the few apparent stipulations - and it has exceptions - is that each of the lines which are composed of piedi or volte should rhyme with another line on the same side of the diesis. Also it is characteristic of the canzone that the scheme, but not the individual rhymes, is identical from stanza to stanza. 39 Some details of structure are explained either inadequately or not at all by Dante, in large measure because he did not complete De vulgari eloquentia. They are discussed by modern critics, however. First, the canzone concludes with an envoy which, in strictest terms, has the form of the lines following the diesis.10 Second, the poem may be linked across the diesis by free lines called concatenazione, the first of which rhymes with the preceding line and the last of which rhymes with the following line.41 Third, the stanza may be closed by a couplet with lines of equal length which do not rhyme with any previous lines.42 According to this account, the second canzone of Barnes exemplifies the nonstrophic stanza.43 The first and third of Barnes's canzoni exemplify the strophic stanza. The simpler Canzon 3 may be said to consist of a first piede abc, a second piede bac, concatenazione cde, a first volta 39

Cf. the elaborate formula according to which Wilkins, MP 12(1914-1915), 540-541, describes the rhyme schemes of earlier stanzas. 40 John Erskine, The Elizabethan Lyric (New York, 1903), p. 295; Schelling, p. lviii. 41 Erskine, p. 295. Cf. A Translation o f . . . Dante, p. 110, and the definition of chiave as a poetical term in Fernando Palazzi, Novissimo dizionario della lingua italiana (Milano, 1955). 42 Wilkins, MP 12 (1914-1915), 547 and n. 6. 43 In this sense the sestina also is a canzone; see Charles Tomlinson, The Sonnet: Its Origin, Structure, and Place in Poetry (London, 1874), pp. 12-15.

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ede, and a second volta f d f ; and the envoy has the rhymes of the last nine lines of the regular stanza. Canzon I may be divided, with particular reference to the requirement about lengths of lines, into a first piede apsbsc{, a second piede bla%ascl, concatenazione csds, a first volta dseh a second volta esdh and a final couplet f j x \ the lines of the envoy have the same rhyme and line length schemes as those of the concatenazione, the first volta, and the first line of the second volta. The sense patterns have different bearings upon the metrical patterns in each canzone. In Canzon 2 the sense pattern 3-2-2 is used in Stanzas 6 and 7 and, except for minor enjambement, in Stanzas 1 and 3; other stanzas have different arrangements. These variations are in keeping with a metrical scheme which can hardly accommodate a regular connection with units of sense. But similar irregularities in the sense pattern of Canzon 3 cannot be quite so interpreted. Here, in a strophic poem with a relatively complex rhyme scheme, the pattern varies from stanza to stanza and seems to have little bearing on the arrangement of rhymes within stanzas; e.g., the ideas are in the sequence 3-3-4-5 in Stanza 1 and 4-6-1-4 in Stanza 2.

The sense pattern, like the rhyme scheme, is most elaborately contrived in Canzon I; but, however variable from stanza to stanza it may be, it quite consistently accords with and hence substantiates the larger divisions of the rhymes given above. Except in Stanza 7, the sense pattern observes the diesis. First, all ideas in the piedi are separate from those in the volte. And second, regardless of the way they may be used, the concatenazione leave intact the bipartite division of the stanza: they may appear as a distinct item of thought but in closer connection with the volte than the piedi (Stanzas 1 to 3); they may actually be joined to a sense unit in the volte (Stanza 5); or, reflecting their rhymes, they may be split between preceding and following units (Stanzas 4 and 6). In addition, the final couplet constitutes a separate logical unit in all stanzas. To a degree, this mutual confirmation of rhyme and thought extends to Stanza 7, where, in the sense pattern 5-6-3-2-3-2, the couplet and the envoy are set off from each other and from the preceding lines.

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5. O D E S

The authors of three major books which consider the English ode believe that the twenty odes in Parthenophil and Parthenophe have little historical significance. To Robert Shafer, "the interest of all lies merely in the name Barnes gave them". 44 To George N. Shuster, Barnes "appears to have identified 'ode' with 'song'...," and his odes demonstrate an "indifference to formalistic matters". 45 And to Carol Maddison, Barnes's odes "introduce little that is new into the English lyric tradition but a label". 46 It is clear, as Shafer and Shuster have observed, that the odes of Elizabethans were inspired chiefly by those of Ronsard. 47 The influence of Ronsard is increasingly evident in the few English poems labeled as odes which were printed before 1593. In dedication to Thomas Watson's Hecatompathia (1582), one C. Downhalus composed what is apparently the first poem in English to be entitled an ode.48 The form of Downhalus's ode is that used by Watson throughout his collection: a single eighteenline stanza divided into three sections with the rhyme scheme ababccdede ffghghii. Watson explains in notes prefixed to three of his poems (which he describes as "passions") that they were written in imitation of odes by Ronsard. 49 To be sure, Ronsard used the scheme ababcc for the ode but in successive whole stanzas rather than in parts of single stanzas.50 In 1584 John Soowthern's Pandora was printed.51 The variety of lyrics in Soowthern's collection includes the first two English odes in the triadic form of Pindar. Shafer convincingly shows that in these poems Soowthern depended on odes of Ronsard for details of content and approximated Pindaric stanza patterns of Ronsard rather than imitating odes 44

The English Ode to 1660 (Princeton, 1918), p. 54. The English Ode from Milton to Keats, p. 37. 46 Apollo and the Nine: A History of the Ode (Baltimore, 1960), p. 290. The same classification of Barnes's odes is implied in the judgments of John Erskine, The Elizabethan Lyric, p. 144, and F. T. Prince, Elizabethan Poetry ( = Stratford-Upon-Avon Stud., 2) ed. John Russell Brown and Bernard Harris (New York, 1960), p. 116. 47 When the English ode began, Shuster states, p. 26, "Pierre Ronsard was its progenitor. . . " . See also p. 35 and Shafer, pp. 44-53. 48 The EKATOMÜA0IA: or Passionate Centurie of Love (= Spenser Soc. N o . 6) (Manchester, Eng., 1869), p. 12. 49 The EKA TO Mil A 0IA, pp. 41, 42, and 97. 50 See, for example, Book II, Odes V and VIII, and Book IV, Ode VI, in Pierre de Ronsard, Oeuvres completes, ed. Prosper Blanchemain (Paris, 1857-1867), II, 141-143, 147-148, and 256-257. 51 Ed. George B. Parks (Facsimile Text Soc.) (New York. 1938). 45

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of Pindar. 52 Without amplifying, Shuster describes three "odelets", also included in Pandora, as "Ronsardian Horatian odes". 53 Instead of continuing experimentation in Ronsard's imitations of Horace and Pindar, poets after Soowthern wrote odes in four-foot trochaic couplets decorated with feminine rhymes. This is the form of a lyric by Shakespeare54 and of a number of lyrics by Greene which are labeled as odes.55 Again, Ronsard had previously written several odes in the same form. 36 Although recognizing the importance of Ronsard in the development of the Elizabethan ode, critics have made only bare reference to the possibility of a connection between Ronsard's odes and those of Barnes in Parthenophil. Shuster perceives the connection in the stanza of one of Barnes's odes. Miss Maddison detects it in the content of another. 57 In fact, the three kinds of ode forms Barnes employed in Parthenophil are those Ronsard used for the majority of his odes.58 Three of Barnes's odes are in single units with couplet lines (Odes 4 and 19) or with alternately rhymed quatrains (Ode 16). Ronsard likewise wrote odes with single stanzas in couplets (for example, "À Dieu, pour la famine" and "D'un Rossignol abusé") and alternately rhymed quatrains (for example, Book III, Ode V, and Book V, Ode VII).59 Three more of Barnes's odes are based on classical meters (Ode 17 on Anacreontics, 18 on Sapphics, and 20 on Asclepiadics). Ronsard, too, professed to be writing some of his odes in imitation of Anacreon (for instance, Book IV, Odes XVI and XX) or in Sapphics (Book V, Odes XXX and XXXI). 60 The remaining fourteen odes of Barnes (Odes 1 to 3 and 5 to 15) have from 52

Shafer, pp. 46-50. Shuster, p. 30. Poems which Ronsard labeled "odelette" are in Oeuvres complètes, II, 444 and 486. 54 Love's Labour's Lost, IV, iii, 101-120, The Complete Plays andPoems, p. 71. 65 Shafer, p. 50, n. 55, lists eleven of these odes as printed in The Plays and Poems, Vol. II. 56 Several examples are cited from Blanchemain's edition by Shafer, p. 53, n. 67 and n. 68. 57 Shuster, p. 37; and Maddison, pp. 289-290. 58 Barnes's ode forms are tabulated in Appendix I, pp. 126-127. 59 Ronsard, II, 451-453, 466-469, 197-203, and 331. 60 Ronsard, pp. 273, 276-277, 376-377, 377-378. For particulars of form and diction, however, Barnes may well have depended on poems in Sidney's Arcadia. "My muse what ails this ardour" (The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, pp. 65-67), like Barnes's Ode 17, is in Anacreontics. The wording of Barnes's poem often resembles that of Sidney, notably in repeated opening lines for stanzas or sections. Thus the second stanza of Barnes's ode begins: 53

"Reueale (sweet muse) this secret, Wherein the liuely senses D o most triumph in glorie",

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three to eleven stanzas ; in the first stanza, the rhymes are in a more or less freely drawn pattern, and the lines are either the same or varying in length; the arrangement established in the first stanza is repeated (except for occasional minor departures) in each stanza following. Ronsard's use of this form is a special mark of his claim to have introduced the ode into France. 61 Thus we may compare Barnes's a^a-fciatfiifci (Ode 6, Stanzas 1 to 8 and 10) and a ^ a ^ i C n C ^ (Ode 6, Stanza 9) with Ronsard's ababccb in tetrameters ("Aux mouches à miel"), Barnes's a^b^a^b/jDnp^c-ii^ (Ode 8) and a^bnanbifi-ibiJjiCn (Ode 9) with Ronsard's tetrameter ababbcbc ("Ode non mesurée"), Barnes's odes in tetrameters rhymed abbab (Ode 11), abbaa (Ode 14, Stanzas 1 to 3), and abbab (Ode 14, Stanza 4) with Ronsard's ababb ("À Magdeleine", Stanzas 1, 3, and 5) and abaab in tetrameters ("À Magdeleine", Stanzas 2 and 4, and Book III, Ode VI), Barnes's rime couée aiaib^CiCib^ (Ode 13) with that by Ronsard, a^aib^cicibi, ("De Feu Lazare de Baïf"), and Barnes's a^a^bic^a^c^an (Ode 15, Stanzas 1 and 2) and aza^b^c^ajoid^a^ (Ode 15, Stanza 3) with Ronsard's aiaibzCsCsbzdidt, ("Au fleuve du Loire"). 62 Barnes's odes, then, are not historically insignificant. In relation to the odes of his predecessors, the odes of Barnes climax evidence of an increasing influence on the Elizabethan ode of forms used by Ronsard. Barnes's odes in couplets, which reflect a Ronsardian form, do so in company with poems by Shakespeare and Greene. But Barnes's odes in classical meters, which are also like some odes of Ronsard, are apparently the first of their kind in English. And Barnes's odes in uniform stanzas, modeled on the most distinctive kind written by Ronsard, are the first in English to appear in substantial number of the homostrophic ode, a form which was used, to name only some of Barnes's immediate successors, by Francis Davison, Drayton, Donne, and Jonson, and which became an English prosodie staple. Ronsard used the stanza of the homostrophic ode to achieve in the and a section of Sidney's poem, lines 30-33, opens: "My muse what ails this ardour T o blase my onely secretts? Wherein do only flowrish The sorry fruites of anguish Similarly comparable are Barnes's Asclepiadic Ode 20 in fourteen lines, "O sweet pittilesse eye, bewtifull, Orient", and Sidney's Asclepiadic p o e m in three fourteen-line stanzas, "O S W E E T woods the delight of solitariness!" (The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, pp. 68-69). 61 62

See Shafer, pp. 63-66, and Shuster, pp. 33-34. Ronsard, II, 419-420, 4 0 0 - 4 0 2 , 414-415, 203-206, 464-465, and 425-426.

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vernacular the formal perfection of classical metrical schemes. This perfection, he believed, was based on a connection between poetry and music. Hence, though it does not reproduce the classical schemes, Ronsard's stanza attempts to achieve a pattern which has their formal perfection and accommodates a musical setting.63 Paul Laumonier explains the rhyme scheme of the stanza: . . .Toutes les strophes d'un même système devaient être construites sur le patron de la strophe initiale. Cette strophe une fois construite ad libitum, toutes les strophes subséquentes appartenant au même système devaient être sembles, ou plutôt égale à e l l e . . . .

The governing principle is "le maximum de variété dans l'unité". 64 The formal character of the poem is determined by the rhyme scheme of the first stanza ; and the rhymes of this stanza are free. In Barnes's odes with nine-line stanzas the rhyme schemes suggest vers libre: Ode 3 has the rhymes abcdcdbaa, and Ode 5 abccbcdda. But in his odes with shorter stanzas - those most like the stanzas of Ronsard - the rhyme schemes do not suggest free verse so readily ; the nature of these rhyme sequences will become clear in a description of the various relations between rhymes and sense in each of the three kinds of ode stanzas used by Barnes. In Barnes's odes rhymes are related to sense in three ways: (1) they are used to reinforce content; (2) they are opposed to content; (3) they are not used, and their functions are performed by other structural elements. Rhymes support content most readily by having a patterned sequence. The descriptive phrase ad libitum hardly suggests that Barnes's shorter stanzaic odes (and those of Ronsard) possess such a sequence. Yet the stanzas of these odes do have strophic sequences of rhymes. In several instances the sequence reinforces the pattern of sense. Consequently, the phrase ad libitum is an inadequate, even inaccurate, description of these sequences. In most respects the rhyme schemes of Barnes's twelve odes with short stanzas conform to the rules for the canzone. Some of these stanzas may be said to have two piedi and a sirma or a fronte and two volte: ab-ab—bb (Ode 1 ; and similarly Odes 11 and 14) or aa—ba-ab (Ode 12 ; and similarly Odes 13 and 15). The rhymes of Odes 2, 6, 7, and 10 may 63

See Shuster, pp. 33-35.

64

Ronsard: poète lyrique, 2nd ed. rev. (Paris, 1923), pp. 674, 680.

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be patterned in either way; thus Ode 6 may be divided ab-ab—aab or aba—ba-ab. The remaining two poems may be said to have two piedi and two volte: ab-ab—bc-cb (Ode 8) and ab-ab—cb-bc (Ode 9). The line lengths in the stanzas of most of these odes likewise accord with Dante's prescription of equality between corresponding lines in the subparts on one side of the diesis. Odes 1, 7,10, 11, and 14 meet the requirement because all of their lines are in iambic tetrameter. Odes 2, 6, and 15 have lines of different lengths which match in corresponding positions; e.g., Stanzas 1 through 8 and 10 of Ode 6 have the division a^bi-a-ibi—a^a^. The sense pattern in some of the odes is reinforced by the canzone division of the rhymes. Thus the division 2-2-3 in Stanza 6 of Ode 6 is common to the sense pattern, the canzone rhyme pattern, and the canzone line-length pattern: Some woodbynes beare Some damaske roses The muses were A bynding poases, My goddesse gloue to herrye heere, Great Pan, comes in with flowers seare And crownes composes.

In other odes a rhyme division different from that of the canzone (according to which the rhymes considered alone can be divided) may support the pattern of ideas. Odes 11, 12, and 13 have stanzas with bipartite sense patterns; each half stanza is a unit in an extended narrative. The line lengths of Odes 12 and 13 accentuate the bipartition; thus Ode 12 has the arrangement ana ¿>3-0^0 ¿13. In Ode 8 rhyme supports reason more subtly. The sense pattern varies: it may be 5-3 in Stanzas 1 and 2, 2-3-3 in Stanza 3, 3-3-2 in Stanza 4, and 4-4 in Stanzas 5 and 6. But, whatever the pattern, lines 6 and 7 of the stanza contain ideas which are in some way extravagant. Both of the characteristics of the sense pattern, diversity of partition among stanzas and exaggeration of tone in the sixth and seventh lines, are reflected in the arrangement of the rhymes in most of the stanzas: the divisions between the rhyme units (2-2—2-2) are de-emphasized by assonances, consonances, or both, which link the terminal words in all of the lines; but this linkage is markedly less in lines 6 and 7 (an effect which is also stressed by the shorter length of these lines). For most of the stanzas verification of the arrangement would require lengthy analysis; but in Stanza 2 it is self-evident:

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There seated in that louely shade, With Lay a bewtifull, there sate A gentle shepheard, which had made Gainst euening twilight somewhat late, An arbour built in Syluane state Where in exchaunge, Their eyes did raunge Giuing each other the check-mate. 05

Rhymes are used both to support and to oppose the sense patterns of Barnes's odes in quatrains and couplets. Ode 16, in alternately rhymed tetrameter quatrains, has sense and rhyme patterns in agreement, if we except a few instances of enjambement. Ode 19 is in hexameter couplets. Units of meaning occupy from one-half to two of the relatively long lines. Thus, although the metrical scheme does not accentuate the sense pattern, it predisposes its bounds. Barnes skillfully manipulates rhymes (and other metrical elements) in Ode 4 in order variously to sustain and to counter the sequence of ideas. The poem has three sections: in the first, lines 1 to 5, the poet addresses Bacchus with flattering epithets; in the second, lines 6 to 15, he supplicates the god for wine and its benefits; and in the third, lines 16 to 22, he contemplates the result and promises to give sacrifice and praise when Bacchus has granted his request. Different relations between patterns of rhyme and sense project changing dominant emotions. In the first section the poet gives unrestrained praise, and the sense division largely accords with the couplet division.66 In the second section, lines 6 to 15, the poet's desire is unfulfilled, and the relation between rhyme and sense is notably more discordant: Fill full with thy diuinitie, These thirstie, and these emptie vaines. Thence fuming vp into my braines Exceede Apollo through thy might, And make me by thy motion light: That with alacritie I may Write pleasing Odes, and still display Parthenophe, with such high praises Whose bewtie shepheard's all amases: And by those meanes her loues obtaine 85

With, in the second line, replaces Which, in accordance with the list of printing errors on sig. V3T. " The words in the section are also given appropriate emphasis by the meter: it is trochaic, and that of the rest of the poem is iambic. Furthermore, the stress pattern of these lines is 4-3-4-4-5, whereas the rest of the lines are tetrameters.

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The sense pattern of these lines may be given by the numerals 5(2-3) -5(4[1^-2|]-1). The three-line unit in lines 8 to 10 and the two-and-ahalf-line unit in lines 12 to 14 end with two rhymed lines; and the 5-5 division between lines 10 and 11 and the 4-1 division between lines 14 and 15 are between couplets. But the two-line unit in lines 6 and 7 and the one-and-a-half-line unit in lines 11 and 12 contain no rhyme; and the 2-3 division between lines 8 and 9 and the division in line 12 are not between couplets. In the third section the poet thinks of a time of unalloyed pleasure, and sense units and rhymes again largely accord 67 . The three odes written in imitation of classic measures use other elements to perform the functions of rhymes in stanza structure. In Ode 18 the three-and-one-line metrical arrangement of the Sapphic is the substitute; in Odes 17 and 20 the pattern is created by repetitions of words and units of syntax. Ode 17 describes, in each of five sixteen-line stanzas, the ultimate gratification of the craving of one of the five senses by a feature of Parthenophe. The special functions of diction and syntax throughout the poem are typified in the second stanza, which is devoted to the sense of taste: Reueale (sweet muse) this secret, Wherein the liuely senses Do most triumph in glorie, Where some, of heauenly Nectar, The tastes cheefe comfort talk of, For pleasure, and sweet relish: Where some, coelestiall Syrroppes, And sweet Barbarian spices, For pleasauntnesse commend most: Parthenophe, my sweet Nymphe, With lippes more sweet than Nectar, Containing much more comfort, Then all coelestiall Syrroppes, And which exceedes all spices, On which, none can take surfet, Shall triumphe ouer that sence.

The stanza has three sections: the first, lines 1 to 3, asks a question; the second, lines 4 to 9, gives a customary answer to the question; and the third, lines 10 to 16, gives a response which surpasses the customary 67 The first section ends and the third section begins in the middle of couplets not to suggest an opposition of sense and rhyme as in the second section, but to link the three sections together.

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answer. The three-part division is emphasized by the virtual repetition in every stanza of the words in the question, of the reference to Parthenophe, and of the words in the last line of the second answer. Also, a set of correspondences in words and their meanings is established in every stanza between the two answers to the question; in Stanza 2, for example, the words sweet, Nectar, coelestiall Syrroppes, and spices occur before and after the word Parthenophe, helping to accent the parallelism between answers and to supply the structural integrity of the sections which, in another poem, would be given by the rhyme scheme.

6. M A D R I G A L L S

Analysis of the stanzas of Barnes's twenty-six "madrigalls" is complicated from the outset by the lack of a clear definition of the genre.68 The problem is evident in the comments of scholars. Edmund Gosse describes the madrigal as "the name of a form of verse, the exact nature of which has never been decided in English, and of a form of vocal music". 69 E. H. Fellowes observes: "Just as the form of the Tudor Madrigal cannot be 68 The definitive study of the Italian madrigal is by Alfred Einstein, The Italian Madrigal, trans. Alexander H. Krappe, Roger H. Sessions, and Oliver Strunk, 3 vols. (Princeton, 1949); see especially "The Madrigal and Poetry", I, 166-212. This supersedes Alfred Einstein, "Italian Madrigal Verse, 1500-1600", Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association 63 (1936-1937), 79-95. The authoritative study of the madrigal in England in Barnes's period is Joseph Kerman's The Elizabethan Madrigal: A Comparative Study (= American Musicological Society Studies and Documents, 4) (New York, 1962). An earlier discussion is Edmund Horace Fellowes, The English Madrigal Composers, 2d ed. (London, 1948). For the influence of the Italian madrigal on the English madrigal, and reprints of all Elizabethan madrigals known to be translated from Italian, together with the originals, see Alfredo Obertello, Madrigali italiani in Inghilterra (Milan, 1949). The connection between the madrigal and English poetry is considered by Bruce Pattison, Music and Poetry of the English Renaissance (London, 1948), pp. 89-112; Catherine Ing, Elizabethan Lyrics, pp. 107-207; and Hallett Smith, Elizabethan Poetry (Cambridge, Mass., 1952), pp. 261-274. See also Felix E. Schelling, A Book of Elizabethan Lyrics, pp. liv-lvii; John Erskine, The Elizabethan Lyric, pp. 207-243,283; Edmund Gosse, "Madrigal", Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th ed., XLI, 295; Robert Shafer, The English Ode to 1660, pp. 134-137; Germaine Bontoux, La chanson en Angleterre au temps d'Elisabeth (Oxford, 1936); French Rowe Fogle, A Critical Study of William Drummondof Hawthorndon (New York, 1952), pp. 95-119; Edward J. Dent, "Madrigal", Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 5th ed., V, 488-498; A. Lytton Sells. The Italian Influence in English Poetry (Bloomington, 1955), pp. 245-263; H . Wiley Hitchcock, "Lyricism and Italianism in the Elizabethan Madrigal", Papers of the Michigan Academy of Science, Arts, and Letters 43 (1958), 367-374; John Stevens, "The Elizabethan Madrigal: 'Perfect Marriage' or 'Uneasy Flirtation' ", Essays and Studies, N . S. 11 (London, 1958), 17-37. 69 Encyclopaedia Britannica, XVII, 295.

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defined with any exactness when examined from an exclusively musical point of view, so also the lyric to which the music was wedded was of no fixed design."70 In a more recent study, French Rowe Fogle comments: The madrigal as a poetic form is surrounded by a great deal of vagueness and uncertainty. Few critics will venture much further than to say it is a short lyric poem of irregular length, rhythm, and rhyme scheme dealing usually with amatory subject matter. 71

And this problem of definition is doubtless partly responsible when John Erskine says, with special reference to the madrigals, that the various lyric forms in Parthenophil and Parthenophe "are nothing but irregular rime-forms and cannot be generalized".72 The OED entry offers a point of departure for a clarification of the madrigal as it is represented in the forms of Barnes. The madrigal is a poetic type: "A short lyric poem of amatory character; chiefly a poem suitable for a musical setting such as is described below." Also the madrigal is a musical type: "A kind of part song for three or more voices (usually, five or six) characterized by adherence to an ecclesiastical mode, elaborate contrapuntal imitation, and the absence of instrumental accompaniment.... " 7 3 The madrigal existed in both these senses throughout the Renaissance in Italy; but at different times one and then the other sense predominated. The madrigal as a song appears to have originated in Northern Italy early in the fourteenth century. During this century the words, which were designed to be sung, were put in quite definite form. Petrarch was the foremost writer of the stanza. In the fifteenth century the term madrigal nearly dropped out of musical use: the form which had been written for a musical setting was now written for its own sake. The madrigal re-emerged as a musical type in the third decade of the sixteenth century under the aegis of Pietro Bembo, who opposed it to folk-forms of music in the collections known as frottole. Bembo described a new metrical form for the madrigal, and many lyrics were written according to it. But musical components were stressed at the expense of verbal components, so that by 1535 the word madrigal had become a musical term.... A piece of music is called a madrigal no matter whether the text upon which it is based happens 70 71 72

73

Composers, p. 148. Drummond, p. 95. The Elizabethan Lyric, p. 144.

Sections 1 and 2.

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to be a real madrigal, or whether it is a sonnet, an ottava or canzone stanza, a ballata, or a series of tercets.74 Among Elizabethans the madrigal was most frequently but not always regarded as it had been by the Italians earlier in the sixteenth century: as words with a variety of poetic forms in a conventional musical setting. The earliest printing of English madrigals is Nicholas Yonge's Musica Transalpina (1588).75 The volumes of William Byrd, Psalmes, Sonnets, and Songs of Sadness and Pietie (1588)76 and Songs of Sundry Natures (15 89),77 were not called madrigals; but E. H. Fellowes regards some of them as the earliest genuine English examples of the genre78 and includes all of them in his collection English Madrigal Verse. Italian Madrigals Englished (1590) was written by Thomas Watson. 79 Apparently the only other examples of English madrigals composed before Barnes's are two that appeared in Sidney's Arcadia.*0 Ryr&'s poems were the first to use a variety of English forms as lyrics and so represented what was to be the prevailing conception in England of madrigal verse.81 Watson translated his originals loosely; the rhyme schemes of his forms are seldom those of his models; yet some of his forms approximate those of sixteenthcentury Italian madrigals. Yonge attempted to produce exact English translations of Italian madrigals; the forms are frequently those of the sixteenth-century Italian stanza. Sidney's two poems also represent 11

Einstein, Madrigal, I, 119. Lyrics reprinted in An English Garner: Shorter Elizabethan Poems, ed. A. H . Bullen (Westminster, 1903), pp. 59-78; and, with their Italian originals, by Obertello, pp. 208-257. 76 Lyrics reprinted by Bullen, Shorter Elizabethan Poems, pp. 1-23;. and by E. H . Fellowes, English Madrigal Verse 1588-1632, 2d ed. (Oxford, 1950), pp. 27-49. 77 Reprinted in Shorter Elizabethan Poems, pp. 25-49; and in Verse, pp. 50-62. 78 Composers, p. 44. 79 Verse reprinted by Frederick Ives Carpenter, "Thomas Watson's 'Italian Madrigals Englished', 1590", JEGP 2 (1898-1899), 323-358; and by Obertello, with the Italian originals, pp. 261-286. 80 The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, pp. 80 and 81-82 (both from the 1593 edition only); Ringler's commentary is on p. 408. 81 Pattison, Music and Poetry, p. 87, says that metrical psalms, ababcc- and ababbccstanzas, and sonnets were included in the two volumes by Byrd. It should be observed that such scholars as Fellowes and Pattison do not decide the legitimacy of particular lyrics as English madrigals upon their poetic structure but upon their kinds of musical settings or their national origins. Thus both exclude Yonge and Watson because their lyrics are complete Italian adaptations, and Pattison excludes Byrd's earliest two volumes because the lyrics are designed for solo voice and string quartet (Fellowes, Verse, p. xvii; Pattison, pp. 67-69, 85-87, 96). The profusion of couplets, quatrains, and sonnet octaves and sestets printed in Fellowes, Verse, attests to the free conception of the poetry of the madrigal in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. 75

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the sixteenth-century Italian form; unlike the other instances of English madrigals before Barnes's, the volume in which they appeared did not suggest that they were designed to be sung. Let us recapitulate the different conceptions of the madrigal lyric during this period to understand the relation of Barnes's forms to them. In Italy during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and, briefly, in the sixteenth century, the madrigal lyric was written in one of two distinctive stanzas; in the earliest and latest of these times, the lyric was associated with music and was regarded both as a poetic form and as part of a musical type; but in the fifteenth century the lyric was written largely for itself and thus was considered principally as a poetic form. In Italy during the latter two-thirds of the sixteenth century and in England among Barnes's predecessors, the lyric included a variety of forms and, except for Sidney's examples, was considered a part of the genre only within its musical setting. Barnes composed all of his madrigals in imitation of the two Italian madrigal lyrics with distinctive forms, the old stanza used with music in the fourteenth century and usually without music in the fifteenth century, and the new stanza used with music in the sixteenth century. 82 Thus, in the use of the distinctive poetic forms only, Barnes is unlike Byrd and most later English madrigal writers. In not making what are merely translations of sixteenth-century Italian madrigal lyrics, he is unlike Watson and Yonge. And in writing madrigals in substantial number and in both of the Italian forms, he is unlike Sidney. Whether or not Barnes intended his madrigals to be put to music is unknown: certainly they did not appear in the format of Yonge, Watson, and Byrd, in which the intention was unmistakable; and, in any case, none of the madrigals, but only the first two stanzas of Barnes's Ode 13, are included in Fellowes' English Madrigal Verse in a reprinting from Thomas Weelkes's Madrigals To 3. 4. 5. & 6. voyces (1597).83 The old madrigal lyric, which was written during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, consists of one stanza in two or three tercets, optionally followed by a ritornello most often of one or two couplets. 84 The 82

The forms of Barnes's madrigals are tabulated in Appendix 1, pp. 127-128. P. 214. Otto Gombosi, "Some Musical Aspects of the English Court Masque", Journal of the American Musicological Society 1, No. 2 (Summer, 1948), 19, describes Weelkes's setting for Barnes's verse as one of only two uses in English madrigal music of a very popular ground bass family, the passamezzo; Gombosi appends the setting to his comment. 84 AccountsofthestanzaaregivenbyObertello,p.61,n. 17;Dent, Grove's Dictionary, V, 489; Einstein, Madrigal, I, 118-119; and Shafer, p. 135. 83

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rhymes of Petrarch's four madrigals are typical: I ababcbcc, II abacbcdede, III abcabcdd, IV abbacccdd.85 According to theory, the maximum number of lines in the old madrigal is thirteen. Of the twenty-six madrigals Barnes wrote, seven have fewer than thirteen lines. All seven have the rhyme scheme of the old stanza. The rhymes of Madrigall 23 duplicate those of Petrarch's Madrigale III. The rhymes of Madrigalls 5, 6, 14, and 26 and, except for the position of one rhyme, those of Madrigalls 12 and 21 are the same as the rhymes of Petrarch's Madrigale II. Pietro Bembo described the new madrigal stanza in Delia volgar lingua (finished about 1521).86 It is not bound in the number of its lines or in the arrangement of its rhymes; generally, however, "it was a short poem rarely exceeding twelve lines; its rhymes could be arranged as the poet pleased, provided that the last two lines, which generally formed some sort of pointed coda, should rhyme together... ". 87 The flexibility which these stipulations allow is evident in the rhyme schemes of several new Italian madrigals. Most, but not all, of these lyrics are short, and the rhyme schemes of the longer ones do not easily break into strophic parts: Aretino's text of one madrigal sixteen lines long rhymes abbcdcefd ghfhabb; Guarini composed a madrigal lyric twenty-six lines long, rhymed aabccbdeefdgfhhgijijkkllmm. The most famous madrigal of the period, Arcadelt's "II bianco e dolce cigno"(the text of which is probably by Alfonso d'Avalos) contains an unrhymed line: aaabccddee. The last two lines of the first lyric by the chief madrigal poet of the period, Luigi Cassola of Piacenza, rhyme but probably form part of a tercet instead of a couplet: abbacccdd,88 The nineteen of Barnes's madrigals with over ten lines exhibit many of the peculiarities of length and rhyme in these examples of the new Italian madrigal. All of Barnes's poems have the exceptional length of Aretino and Guarini's lyrics: four are fifteen lines long (4, 10, 20, and 22), eight are sixteen lines long (1 to 3, 7 to 9, 11, and 13), three are 85 In Canzoniere as LII (I), "Non al suo amanti", p. 73; LIV (II), "Perch al viso", p. 78; CVI (III), "Nova angeletto", p. 144; and CXXI (IV), "Or vedi, amor", p. 162. 8S Le prose, nelle quali si ragiona delta volgar lingua (Naples, 1714), I, 166. 87 Dent, Grove's Dictionary, V, 489. Obertello, p. 61, n. 17, explicitly distinguishes the new stanza from the old one. Cf. Pattison, pp. 92-93,96, and Einstein, Madrigal, I, 116-118, 171-172, whose descriptions are not certainly of the new madrigal form, but rather perhaps of the several other stanzas also put to music as madrigals at the same time. 88 The lyrics of the madrigals by Aretino, Arcadelt, and Cassola are reprinted by Einstein, Madrigal, I, 175, 186, and 172. Guarini's stanza is in Opere di Batlista Guarini, ed. Luigi Fasso ( = Classici italiani, 46) (Torino, 1950), pp. 460-461.

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seventeen lines long (15, 24, and 25), and the remaining four are nineteen, twenty-one, twenty-eight, and forty-two lines long (19, 18, 16, and 17). Nine of them (1 to 4, 10, 13, 16, 19, and 25) conclude with two rhymed lines. Madrigall 1 has a final couplet that, like Aretino's, returns to the beginning of the poem: ababbcddcdeffeaa. Madrigall 10 and Madrigall 18, like Arcadelt's madrigal, include an unrhymed line, 10 in the scheme abcbaccdedfeeee. Madrigall 16 has the nonstrophic rhyme scheme which is typical of Barnes's longer poems in the genre and which resembles the scheme of Guarini's long madrigal: abbacbaccdaededfefgg hijjihkk. From this examination it is evident that in prescription and in practice the sequence of rhymes in the old madrigal is relatively strict and that in the new madrigal is relatively free. This difference is evident, too, when we consider the relation of the rhymes in the old and new madrigals to the rhymes in the canzone-, the old stanza has the same rhymes as those of the canzone; the new one often has typical canzone rhymes at the beginning and the end and nonstrophic rhymes in between. The most distinctive features of the canzone rhyme scheme are opening piedi and closing volte. The rule for the beginning of the old madrigal specifies tercets but not the particular sequence of their rhymes, and the rule for the new madrigal does not specify the arrangement of beginning rhymes at all. Nevertheless, the first six lines in each of Petrarch's madrigals and in each of Barnes's poems with old madrigal schemes (with the possible exception of the irregular aba-ccb of Madrigall 21) are arranged as two three-line piedi. The same arrangement is common in new Italian madrigals: e.g., Guarini's lengthy poem has it; another of his lyrics begins aba-cbc, and an anonymous madrigal opens abc-cab.S9 Nine of Barnes's new madrigals have the arrangement: Madrigalls 2, 9, 10, 13, 15, 19, 20, 22, and 24. Several new madrigals open with piedi other than tercets. Among Italian poets ab-ba is frequently used.90 Barnes employs piedi other than tercets in a variety of sequences: in two lines, ab-ba (7, 11, 16, and 24); in four lines, abab-bcbc (4); and in five lines, ababa-acaca (3). For the old madrigal it is an option and for the new one a stipulation that the last two lines rhyme. Both when the last lines of these lyrics

89 The second and third poems are given in Einstein, Madrigal, as No. 63, III, xxiv; and No. 20, III, xv. 90 See, e.g., the following stanzas in Einstein, Madrigal: by Cassola, 1,174; by Jacapo Sannazaro, No. 23, III, xv; an anonymous madrigal, N o . 27, III, xvi.

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do rhyme and when they do not, however, their arrangement is often in volte. Thus some old stanzas close de-de: II of Petrarch and 5, 6, 14, 21, and 26 of Barnes, for example; and Barnes uses de-ed in Madrigall 12. Among new madrigals by Italians, Arcadelt's and Guarini's may be said to conclude with volte in couplets. And Madrigalls 10 and 25 by Barnes have couplet volte. The endings of six of Barnes's madrigals, 11, 15, 17, 18, 20, and 22, must be accounted irregular. But the endings of four madrigals, 7, 8, 9, and 24, may be described as two-line volte with enclosed rhymes (e.g., Madrigall 7 has fg-gf). This arrangement, although unorthodox for the new madrigal, accords with that in some of the old madrigals and with that used in the canzone. A distinguishing feature of the old, fourteenth-century madrigal lyric is the equal length of its lines ; throughout the poem they are hendecasyllabics. 91 The lines in Petrarch's madrigals are so arranged. But the lines in the madrigals of some of Petrarch's contemporaries do not always adhere to this prescription. 92 And the lines in Barnes's seven poems with old-madrigal rhyme schemes do not adhere to it either. In the new, sixteenth-century madrigal the lines are free as to length ; usually the lines are in combinations of seven, eleven, and, more rarely, five syllables. Typical variations are to be found in Arcadelt's madrigal : a ^ a n f a c ^ d i d i i e n e i i , and in an anonymous one: a^nbuCid 1 duCnC 1 eu euc-ia-jbubii.93 The lines of Barnes's lyrics with new forms have corresponding variations in stress: most lines have four or five stresses, and a few have three. Barnes's lyrics with old madrigal rhymes have the same new madrigal variations in line length 94 . 91

Einstein, Madrigal, I, 116; and Sha fer, p. 135. Obertello, p. 61, n. 17. 93 See Dent, Grove's Dictionary, V, 489. The anonymous lyric is in Einstein, Madrigal, N o . 16, III, xiv-xv. 94 Erskine, p. 283, and Shafer, pp. 135-136, incorrectly see variations in line length among poets such as Drummond, who later wrote stanzas similar to those of Barnes, as an English innovation like the development of the English from the Italian sonnet. It is appropriate to describe here the French madrigal and its possible relation to that of Barnes. During the Renaissance the madrigal was often called the épigramme in France. Of this genre, Marot was the greatest exemplar. Because Marot's shorter épigrammes are written in such forms as the sizain, huitain, and dizain, and his longer ones in couplets and alternately rhymed quatrains, however, they must be considered peripheral to the metrical tradition which has been discussed here. (See Patterson, French Poetic Theory, I, 236 and 428; II, 435, n. 2. Marot's épigrammes are printed in Oeuvres complètes, Vol. III). 92

Ronsard wrote eleven poems identified as madrigals. His editor, Prosper Blanchemain, makes a comment which distinguishes Ronsard's stanzas as much from those of Barnes as from those of the Italians: "L'autheur appelle madrigals les sonnets qui ont plus de quatorze lignes [ s i c ] . . . . La plus grand part de madrigals dans les Italiens . . . sont de

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It may be asked if these variations are structurally significant. Madrigal lines are not governed by the canzone rule of position: Petrarch's lines accord with the rule only because they are equally long; and the lines in new Italian madrigals and in Barnes's madrigals, old and new, would follow the rule only if it were not held to apply exclusively to entire poems. These variations can have two functions, however: to accentuate the pattern of rhymes; and to accentuate the pattern of meanings. Let us observe the connections among the various metrical and sense patterns in the anonymous new Italian madrigal referred to above: M a d o n n a qual certezza Haver si può maggior del m i o gran f u o c o C h e veder consumarmi a p o c o a p o c o . H a i m e n o n conoscete C h e per mirarvi fiso S o n co'l pensier da m e tanto diviso C h e transformarmi sent'in quel che sete. Lasso n o n v'accorgete C h e poscia ch'io fui pres'al vostro laccio Arross'impalidisco ard' et agghiaccio. D u n q u e se ciò vedete M a d o n n a qual certezza Haver si p u ò maggior del m i o gran f u o c o C h e veder consumarmi a p o c o a poco.

a b b c d d c c e e c a b b

1 11 11 7 1 11 11 7 11 11 7 7 11 11

The rhyme pattern of this lyric is 3-4(2-2)-4(2-2)-3; corresponding to it, the line lengths are divided 7 - 1 1 - 1 1 — 7 - 7 — 1 1 - 1 1 - 7 - 1 1 — 1 1 - 7 — 7 11-11. Two aspects of this correlation are notable: a combination of line lengths gives each part of the pattern, like the rhyme unit it accompanies, a distinctive configuration (though in some poems variations in line length may simply mark divisions between parts); the configurations are based on a flexibly conceived parallelism between related parts such that, though they may be identical (as in lines 1 to 3 and 12 to 14), they may also be proportional (as in lines 4 and 5 and 6 and 7), converse (as in lines 8 and 9 and 10 and 11), or in another similar arrangement. petits vers libre. . . . La plus part n'ont rien de commun au sonnet." (Oeuvres complètes, 1,177 n.Ronsard's madrigals are reprinted m this volume.) To the extent that Ronsard's poems (which are eleven to nineteen lines long) begin with regular piedi and close with less regular volte, they resemble Barnes's forms; but because all of the piedi are rhymed abba abba and the lines in each poem are of equal length, Ronsard's madrigals resemble Barnes's forms less than they do the form of the sonnet.

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However symmetrical the division of the various line lengths in support of the rhyme pattern may be, it is not so symmetrical a division as one in support of the sense pattern. The pattern of sense in the poem is 3-4-3-4, and the line lengths are divided accordingly 7-11-11—7-7-11 -11—7-11-11—7-7-11-11. Consequently, though a degree of symmetry exists in either division which is distinctive enough to accentuate the pattern it accompanies, we must conclude that the line lengths were designed to have the more symmetrical division by which they support the pattern of sense. 95 The principles by which line lengths are patterned are the same, whether in support of the rhyme or of the sense. The structural functions line lengths have in several of Barnes's madrigals are identical to the structural functions they have in this late Italian madrigal. 96 In two of Barnes's old madrigals the stresses (i.e., line lengths) accentuate the rhymes. Madrigall 14 has the sense pattern 4-4-2 and the rhyme and stress pattern 3-3-2-2: asbsai-CibsCf,-d3e5-dzez. Madrigall 21 has a 5-3-2 sense division and a rhyme and stress division in which the last line of each unit joined to another has four stresses: a 5ft 5a 4-c 50564-^5 -en-d5e5.

In the other five old madrigal stanzas of Barnes the stresses accentuate the sense pattern. Madrigall 23 has a rhyme pattern of 3-3-2 and stress and sense patterns of 3-2-3 (the last line of each unit which is joined to another has four stresses):