For the onely . . . one legge: A crucial passage on the difficulty of adapting classical prosody to English verse. Greek and Latin prosody is a system that organizes syllable quantity, ‘length’, into patterns, the prosodic length of a word’s syllables—the measure of the Number being determined by a set of rules based on the spelling, derivation, grammatical inflection, and ancient pronunciation of the word as well as its position in a sequence of words. Whereas speech-stress and syllable length are only loosely related from the standpoint of classical prosody, several early English quantitative poets, Spenser included, seemed to regard stressed syllables in English as the likely candidates for treatment as metrically long. (This confusion of stress and quantity is still with us, leading us to speak of stressed syllables as ‘long’.)
According to the rules of Latin prosody, a syllable preceding the juncture of ‘n’ and ‘t’ should be long, but Spenser’s ear tells him that the second syllable of Carpenter is unstressed, hence his reference to the unstressed syllable as used shorte in speache. (Unfortunately, Spenser, Harvey, and many of their contemporaries use the same terms, short and long, to describe differences of both quantity and stress, hence the description of an unstressed syllable as ‘shorte in speache.’) This clash—that a syllable ‘short in speach’ should be ‘long in Verse’—is roughly what Spenser refers to when he speaks of the Accente as comming shorte of that it should.
Spenser adduces Heauen as a problem similar to Carpenter. The entire word is used—i.e., usually pronounced—shorte as one sillable (hence its frequent spelling as ‘heav’n’ or ‘heau’n’). But Spenser apparently regards the spelling as dictating, in verse, a peculiarly lengthened monosyllabic scansion. (‘Diastole’ can have many meanings in classical prosody, but Spenser apparently adduces it here as the term for the irregular use of a short syllable as if it were metrically long.) He may be suggesting that the orthography dictates a disyllabic scansion—this is evidently how Harvey understands him (3.517-37)—although his own practice at 4.90 suggests that he regards ‘heauenlie’ as disyllabic. (Harvey objects at 5.64, insisting that, spelled thus, the word should be regarded as a trisyllable.) Spenser laments that, in the case of both Carpenter and Heauen, a reader attempting to adapt her pronunciation to the claims of prosodic rule must distort a word’s customary pronunciation—an unstressed second syllable in the case of Carpenter; a single, short syllable in the case of Heauen—by means of an unnatural stress or lengthening. Spenser registers the fact that the unnatural adjustment in each case is slightly different by adopting different similes to describe them—‘like a lame Gosling and like a lame Dogge’.
But it . . . Use: It seemed to Harvey, as it has to many subsequent interpreters of this letter, that Spenser was here arguing that the adjustment of accente to number was to be achieved by cultivating the habit (‘custome’) of pronouncing rough English words in such a way as to subdue normal accent and to bring out prosodic quantity, hence Harvey’s outraged response: you shal never have my subscription or consent (though you should charge me wyth the authoritie of five hundreth Maister Drants,) to make your Carpēnter, our Carpĕnter, an inche longer, or bigger, than God and his Englishe people have made him (3.448-452). (It is not clear whether Harvey supposed Spenser to be proposing that his countrymen and women should pronounce English verses in classical metres according to unnatural rules, that they should undertake a wholesale reform of English speech, or that they should simply accept a prosodic rule that clashed with ‘native’ quantity.) But Harvey may be partly misunderstanding Spenser. In his next sentence, Spenser proposes, in tones of national pride that match Harvey’s, that his countrymen and women measure our Accentes, by the sounde, reserving the Quantitie to the Verse: that is, Spenser seems to be proposing a custom of reading English verse—measuring accents—according to the patterns of standard English pronunciation of prose, with the patterning implicit in quantitative English prosody to be regarded as no more than implicit, and not to be pronounced.
This would not be strange: in Ludus Literarius (1612), the schoolmaster Richard Brinsley explains that Latin verse was properly to be recited according to normal prose accent, with no effort to ‘bring out’ prosodic quantity. Brinsley also attests to the utility of a form of recitation that he refers to as ‘scanning’, in which quantitative values are exaggerated, but he regards this chiefly as an aid to memorizing verse and as a means of demonstrating alertness to the underlying metrical structure. When Spenser says that Carpenter is read long in Verse or that Heauen is stretched out with a Diastole he may especially be referring both to the underlying metrical design and to the exceptional practice of scanning aloud, which was meant to render the metre artificially prominent.
Thus, although Harvey misunderstands him, when Spenser says that the accommodation of Accente and Number, pronunciation and prosody, is to be wonne with Custome, and rough words . . . subdued with Use, he means that customary pronunciation is to win out over number. In the previous sentences, used short means ‘pronounced as short (or unaccented)’; here use seems to mean customary pronunciation.
Tetrasticon: quatrain. In this case, the quatrain is in elegiacs, alternating pairs of (quantitative) hexameters and pentameters. For the conventions governing the classical hexameter, see the Introduction. The classical pentameter is a bipartite line comprising two feet of either dactyls or spondees, a long syllable followed by a caesura, and then two dactylic feet, followed in turn by a long syllable—in effect, two half-lines containing two-and-a-half feet, and thus, in this particular sense, a pentameter. Here is a proposed scansion:
For Harvey’s effort in the same metre, see Letters 3 Encomium Lauri, and for his metrical criticism of these lines, see, 3.109-142 below.
in bed . . . togither: The tone here is hardly salacious, though the riddling character of the distich following and its concern with indulgence and over-indulgence have an insinuating effect. It was not uncommon for people to share beds, especially for those in straitened circumstances, but the evocation of verse composition in what could be an erotically charged situation might be taken as suggesting that these two witty university men have revived not only the prosody, but also the rakish homoeroticism especially associated with Greco-Roman culture. For E.K.’s censorious approval of the implied ‘pæderastice’ attachment of Hobbinol (associated with Harvey at SC Sept gl 69-70) and Colin (associated with Spenser in the same gloss), see SC Jan gl 21-37.
That which . . . for others: The apparent quantitative scansion of these hexameter lines is
At SC Maye gl 49-56, E.K. quotes, without attribution, a slightly different, but no less opaque version of the distich; both versions awkwardly translate what Cicero describes (in Tusc. Disp. 5.35.101) as his own translation of the epitaph at the tomb of Sardanapalus, the sense of which is that the speaker has enjoyed his self-indulgence—before death, in the case of Sardanapalus.
I would . . . rest.: The sentence suggests that one of Spenser’s chief goals in bringing these letters into wider circulation is to standardize English quantitative practice. By adducing the authority of Sidney and Drant, he seems to be stacking the deck against Harvey’s ‘rules and precepts’, but the sentence implies that Spenser had adopted a pragmatic approach to quantitative prosody: instead of pursuing an ideal quantitative system, he seems to be seeking consensus on a set of practicable metrical conventions among the interested parties.
While it is impossible to reconstruct the precise principles that Sidney imparted to Spenser, Sidney did write out a list of rules for ‘English measurde verses’ that are preserved in a MS of the Old Arcadia at St John’s, Cambridge that was written in 1581; see Ringler 1962: 391.
Thomas Drant, the imputed source for Sidney’s rules, was a clergyman and poet educated at St. John’s College, Cambridge. He had published translations of Greek and Latin poetry in the 1560s and at the end of that decade had become a chaplain to Bishop Grindal, to whom he would dedicate a collection of Latin poems in the late 1570s. This letter offers the only evidence that Drant had developed a set of rules for quantitative versifying in English.
The evocation of a slightly competitive environment in which disagreeing proponents of quantitative practice might be ‘overthrown’ by its opponents is intriguing, especially since no evidence survives of opposition, formal or informal, to such versifying. Like E.K.’s commentary in the Calender, such remarks might be understood as meant to stimulate interest by conferring on literary practice the glamour of mystery and controversy.