Protestant poetics, c. 1550-1650: the sixteenth-century transformation of Latin verse and its impact on English poetry

 

The lively debate about English prosody, focused in particular upon the decorum of rhyme and the role of quantitative metrics, is a well-known feature of late Elizabethan literary criticism. But the intense interest in form and metre at this period, which culminates in the metrical variety and pronounced innovation of the Sidney Psalter and, ultimately, in the achievement of Herbert’s Temple, sits within, and emerges from, a geographically wider and chronologically precedent Latin phenomenon. Although it has gone unremarked in modern scholarship, the range of available forms and metres for Latin verse underwent very rapid change in the second half of the sixteenth century, leading to an explosion in the possibilities especially for Latin lyric. This paper, drawing extensively upon both printed and manuscript sources, will offer an overview of this revolution in Latin poetics, while also suggesting some of the most important points of contact between formal developments in English and in Latin verse. Works mentioned or discussed are likely to include those of Walter Haddon, Abraham Fraunce, Philip and Mary Sidney, George Herbert, Richard Crashaw and Abraham Cowley.