ew way amongst us, as an old
way new revived; for, many years before Shakspeare's plays, was the
tragedy of Queen Gorboduc, in English verse, written by that famous
Lord Buckhurst, afterwards earl of Dorset, and progenitor to that
excellent person, who (as he inherits his soul and title) I wish may
inherit his good fortune[1]. But, supposing our countrymen had not
received this writing till of late; shall we oppose ourselves to the
most polished and civilised nations of Europe? Shall we, with the same
singularity, oppose the world in this, as most of us do in pronouncing
Latin? Or do we desire that the brand, which Barclay has (I hope
unjustly) laid upon the English, should still continue? _Angli suos
ac sua omnia impense mirantur; caeteras nationes despectui habent_.
All the Spanish and Italian tragedies, I have yet seen, are writ in
rhyme. For the French, I do not name them, because it is the fate of
our countrymen to admit little of theirs among us, but the basest of
their men, the extravagancies of their fashions, and the frippery of
their merchandise. Shakspeare (who, with some errors not to be avoided
in that age, had undoubtedly a larger soul of poesy than ever any of
our nation) was the first who, to shun the pains of continual rhyming,
invented[A] that kind of writing which we call blank verse, but the
French, more properly, _prose mesure_; into which the English
tongue so naturally slides, that, in writing prose, it is hardly to be
avoided. And therefore, I admire some men should perpetually stumble
in a way so easy, and, inverting the order of their words, constantly
close their lines with verbs, which, though commended sometimes in
writing Latin, yet we were whipt at Westminster if we used it twice
together. I knew some, who, if they were to write in blank verse,
_Sir, I ask your pardon_, would think it sounded more heroically
to write, _Sir, I your pardon ask_. I should judge him to have
little command of English, whom the necessity of a rhyme should force
often upon this rock; though sometimes it cannot easily be avoided;
and indeed this is the only inconvenience with which rhyme can be
charged. This is that which makes them say, rhyme is not natural; it
being only so, when the poet either makes a vicious choice of words,
or places them, for rhyme sake, so unnaturally as no man would in
ordinary speaking; but when it is so judiciously ordered, that the
first word in the verse seems to beget the second, and