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fifteenth centuries. In the old Mysteries and Moralities in addition to the simpler stanzas with alternate rime, consisting of four, eight or twelve lines, the tail-rime stanza of sixteen or eight lines, the Octovian-stanza (§ 180) and the thirteen-line Towneley-stanza (§ 175) were much used. these came later Chaucer's seven-line stanza, which was much used for prologues and 'noble' rôles. Only gradually these stanzas were replaced by the heroic couplet or the septenary couplet, and it was not before the end of the sixteenth century that rime was banished from English drama.

Section III.

The Modern English Period.

$201. Development of English Prosody in the Modern English Period.

The metrical forms of NE. poetry have a direct connection with those of the ME. period. Most of the ME. verse and stanza forms were used and further developed in the NE. period. The chief form of modern English verse, the (rimed or unrimed) verse of five beats comes from the ME. period.

NE. prosody, like that of OE. and ME., depends on accent; the verse is constructed by an interchange of stressed and unstressed syllables. In NE., however, it is easier than was earlier the case to make the stressed syllables follow one another at equal periods of time-i.e. to write verse of equal bars and with a fixed number of syllables.

The attempts made in the sixteenth century to make quantity the basis of English verse accord

ing to the model of classical verse had no success; but the attempt to imitate the unrimed verse of classical metres established blank verse (§ 216 ff.).

In the sixteenth century, too, people began to examine the structure of English verse and to establish rules for poets (cp. § 8).

Each century of the NE. period has its own favourite verse or stanza form, and the same metres have at various periods been variously used. In spite of this, however, it is better to treat NE. prosody as a whole, instead of dividing it into smaller divisions.

§ 202. Influence of Linguistic Alterations on the Regularity of Modern English Verse. The development of English prosody in the NE. period was largely determined by the great alterations of the language during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. These alterations, as far as they affect the rhythm of the verse, are: 1. Words of romance origin, the accent of which in Chaucer's time was unfixed, became accented on the rootsyllable; with this is related a weakening of final syllables, which were earlier strongly stressed, and a decrease in the number of syllables in words. Chaucer could accent, and in rime had to accent: beautée, vertú, prisóun, service, Aprille, bataille, natúre, aventúre, but the modern accent is beauty, virtue, prison etc.; the endings -ïage, -ïence, -ïent, -ïoun, -ïous, which in Chaucer's time were disyl

labic, are now monosyllabic: marriage, patience, patient, condition, religion, gracious etc. 2. The unstressed e of inflexions -e, -e(n), -es, -ed became silent, except between like consonants. Thus Chaucer has words, which were disyllabic and could fill arsis and thesis or be used for feminine verse-ending, such as: rote, sonne, ende, speche, ye, smale, lene, straunge, more, slepen, seke, preye, lerne, teche, hadde, spente, fowles, strondes, londes, bokes, bathed, loked etc.; in NE., however, all these words are monosyllabic, although some are written as if they were disyllabic: root, sun, end, speech, small, lean, sleep, seek, pray, learn, teach, had, spent, fowls, strands, lands, books eye, strange, more, bathed, looked.

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It is clear that this shortening of the words must have exerted a great influence on the structure of the verse. Whilst in Chaucer's verse disyllabic thesis could be avoided only by elision, or could be weakened only by slurring two short syllables, the NE. poet has no difficulty in finding monosyllabic theses, and in arranging a regular succession of arses and theses. Since, moreover, as in Chaucer, Gower and Hoccleve, the anacrusis cannot be omitted, the number of syllables in NE. verse, like that in French and Italian verse, is fixed.

But the freedom of ME. verse the anacrusis and disyllabic thesis altogether vanished from NE. verse.

omission of

has not

This license

in NE. verse is, however, no longer a justified peculiarity of the verse, but an exception, due either to the poet's lack of skill, or to the poet's desire to achieve a particular effect. Thus, for example, Coleridge and Scott deliberately adopted the freer verse of the ME. period for their romantic narrative poems (§ 214).

§ 203. Generally Masculine Verse-ending. Since in ME. feminine rime was chiefly based on the use of the final syllables -e, e(n), -es, -ed (cp. extracts from Chaucer § 186), the loss of these final syllables has caused the NE. verse-ending, especially in rimed verse, to be generally masculine. By the alteration of the accent in words of romance origin a new group of words arose with an unstressed final syllable. But to these words, e.g. liquor, courage, sentence, silence, tempest, forest etc. there are no rimes (§ 140, note). They cannot, therefore, be used finally in rimed verse, but only in unrimed verse.

Of the first 300 couplets of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales some 170 have feminine ending, but in Byron's Corsair (Canto I) in the first 300 rimes driven: heaven occurs twice, in addition to bower: hour, shower: power, tower: hour. Feminine rime is more frequent in Shelley's Julian and Maddalo (ours: hours, towers: ours, tower: our, flowers: hours, cover: over, faces: embraces, kindled: dwindled, being: unforeseeing, repenting unrelenting, seem

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