SOURCE: Hardison, O. B. “Tudor Humanism and Surrey's Translation of the Aeneid.” Studies in Philology 83, no. 3 (summer 1986): 237-60.

One of the more interesting facts about English blank verse is that it was invented. The evidence suggests that it was the result of a self-conscious effort by Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, around 1540 to create a vernacular English form equivalent to the dactylic hexameter of classical epic and parallel to unrhymed continental forms such as Italian versi sciolti.

The background of this effort has been illuminated by the excellent studies of such scholars as Jones, Mason, Hagar, and Richardson.¹ It is part of what can be called the esoteric phase of English civic humanism, in contrast to the exoteric phase. The exoteric humanists saw themselves as part of an international movement bent on restoring universal and timeless cultural values—those of antiquity—through the medium of a universal and timeless language, Latin. Conversely, the esoteric humanists recognized, at least tacitly, that the ideal of a universal culture was artificial and that their real task was to disseminate the values of classical culture in the regional and national cultures defined by vernacular languages. Translation was one obvious way to accomplish this, but the work of translation forced the translators to face up to the difference between ancient and modern languages. In the case of poetry the difference extended beyond grammar and syntax to meter and verse forms.

The unrhymed dactylic hexameter of Greek and Latin epics is quantitative rather than accentual. Claudio Tolomei wrestled with the problem of writing Italian verse according to classical rules in Versi, Et Regoli de la Nuova Poesia Toscana (1539)—and thus anticipated the efforts in England of Richard Stanyhurst and Thomas Campion, among others²—but the simpler and more appropriate solution was to discover an Italian form that fitted the nature of the Italian language and also had many of the qualities that were most impressive in the verse of Homer and Vergil. Bartolomeo Piccolomini, Luigi Alamanni, Cardinal Ippolito de Medici, and Nicolo Liburnio all experimented with using Italian blank verse—versi sciolti—for heroic effects, and they are often cited as direct influences on Surrey's experiment with blank verse.³

At this late remove there is no direct way to reconstruct Surrey's motives for deciding to use blank verse in his translation of the Aeneid. We know he considered Wyatt his master in English poetry, but we know too that his verse is considerably more modern, in the sense of being more regular, than Wyatt's.⁴ In his well-known epitaph on Wyatt, Surrey remarks that Wyatt's hand “taught what might be said in rhyme” and “reft Chaucer the glory of his wit.” Both points are apt. In spite of Wyatt's interest in domesticating sophisticated continental forms into English—especially the Petrarchan sonnet and terza rima—his verse is filled with Chaucerian reminiscences. Conversely, Surrey is conscious of the fundamental difference between his own and Chaucer's verse. This is apparent from the fact that when he invokes Chaucer, his diction and vocabulary have the quality of self-conscious imitation, as in his sonnet beginning “The soote season that bud and bloom furth brings, / With green hath clad the hill and eke the vale.” The verse here is pretty enough, but it is noticeably different from Surrey's normal style.

In contrast to Wyatt, then, Surrey appears more cosmopolitan and more conscious that he is beginning a tradition rather than renewing or carrying forward an old one. What he did share with Wyatt was a commitment to improving English by introducing new artistic forms. The object was only partly to modernize the language. It was also to make the language sufficiently expressive to be a vehicle of values typical of other, superior cultures, both ancient and modern, and thereby to elevate the quality of English culture.

In the preface to his famous Miscellany of 1557, which includes some forty of Surrey's poems, Tottel remarks, “I exhort the unlearned by reading to learn to be more skilful and to purge that swinelike grossness” of their taste in order to appreciate the models his authors offer of new and more refined kinds of expression.⁵ The point is briefly made, but it is more than the blurb of an enthusiastic publisher. It clearly echoes the belief of esoteric humanism that by improving the vernacular it will elevate the culture that uses the vernacular.

More extended versions of the same idea abound in Tudor discussion of literature. In the preface to The Art of Rhetorique (1553), for example, Thomas Wilson describes eloquence not as the expression of, but as the source of civilization. It was given by God to Adam, lost at the time of the fall, and only laboriously recovered thereafter. At one time, Wilson observes, “Menne lyved Brutishlye in open feldes, hauing neither housis to shroude them in, nor attyre to clothe their backes.” By the force of eloquence, however, they were gradually civilized: “After a certaine space thei became through nurture and good aduisement, of wilde, sober; of cruel, gentle; of foles, wise; of beastes, men. Such force hath the tongue, and such is the power of eloquence. … Neither can I see that menne could haue bene broughte by anye other meanes, to lyue together in fellowshyppe of lyfe, to mayntayne Cities, to deale trulye, and willyngelye to obeye one another.”⁶

This is clearly in the same key as Tottel's claim that his new style of poetry will purge English readers of “swinelike grossness,” and its seriousness cannot be doubted. Roger Ascham takes the same position in The Scholemaster, adding that whenever language decays, thought and civil life decay also: “Ye know not what hurt ye do to learning that care not for wordes but for matter, and so make a deuorse betwixt the tong and the hart. For marke all ages: looke vpon the whole course of both the Greeke and Latin tonge, and ye shall surelie finde that, whan apte and good wordes began to be neglected, and properties of those two tonges to be confounded, than also began ill deedes to spring, strange maners to oppresse good orders, newe and fond opinions to striue with olde and trewe doctrine … and so vertue with learning is contemned, and studie left off: of ill thoughtes cummeth peruerse iudgments, of ill deedes springeth lewde taulke.”⁷

Ascham equates the unclassical Latin of the Middle Ages with what he considered the barbarous religion and philosophy of the same period, and he carries the analysis forward to the decay, as he sees it, of literature when right versifying was replaced by the barbarous and “Gothic” practice of rhyming.⁸ The idea is thus supported, as far as Ascham is concerned, by the empirical evidence of history. To give Ascham his due, there is a striking similarity between his argument and Ernst Cassirer's twentieth-century argument that language is a symbolic form—that it shapes conscious even as it provides the content of consciousness. Ascham's solution to the problem of a language that debases consciousness, and hence culture, is imitation: “Bicause the prouidence of God hath left vs in no other tong, saue onlie in the Greke and Latin tong, the true preceptes and perfite examples of eloquence, therefore must we seeke in the Authors onlie of those two tongues the trewe Paterne of Eloquence, if in any other mother tongue we looke to attaine either perfit vtterance of it our selues or skilfull iudgement of it in others.”⁹

Such, then, is the context of Tudor efforts to improve the English language by translation, by reform of prose style, and by domestication of new poetic forms. In this larger scheme, heroic poetry is both especially important and especially challenging. Heroic poetry was regarded by almost every critic of the sixteenth century as the noblest kind of poetry. It was about noble characters, and it provided a vision of nobility that could animate and elevate an entire nation. Homer had done this for the Greeks and Vergil for the Romans; presumably vernacular poets could, if they could only find the right words, do the same for modern cultures. Spenser clearly expresses this aim in the “Letter to Raleigh” that explains (or purports to explain) The Faerie Queen: “The generall end therefore of all the booke is to fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline.”¹⁰ Another, equally powerful expression of the idea is found in Sidney's Defense of Poetry: “By what conceit can a tongue be directed to speak euill of that which draweth with it no lesse Champions than Achilles, Cyrus, Aeneas, Turnus, Tideus, and Rinaldo? who doth not onely teach and moue to truth, but teacheth and mooueth to the most high and excellent truth; who maketh magnanimity and iustice shine throughout all misty fearfulnes and foggy desires. … For as the image of each action styrreth and instructeth the mind, so the loftie image of such Worthies most inflameth the mind with desire to be worthy, and informes with counsel how to be worthy.”¹¹ Heroic poetry, in other words, is not only a civilizing force, it is the most powerful civilizing force that language offers. Milton said it best when he remarked in The Reason of Church Government that the object of heroic poetry is “to imbreed and cherish in a great people the seeds of virtue and public civility.”¹²

The problem of discovering a form which is complementary to the heroic vision therefore seemed especially urgent to those moved by the ideals of esoteric humanism. The solution was twofold—translation and imitation in original compositions. Surrey took the first route. As we know, however, there was no English verse form available to him remotely comparable to Vergil's dactylic hexameter. Even if one grants that there are moments of heroic elevation in Chaucer's Knight's Tale, the changes that had occurred in the English language during the fifteenth century made it impossible for Surrey to reproduce Chaucer's effects. In fact, he probably could understand them only imperfectly. Beyond Chaucer, he had two possible models: Caxton's prose Eneydos (1490), which is translated from the French and would have appeared to Surrey both clumsy and false to the original; and Gavin Douglas's translation of the Aeneid into decasyllabic couplets, completed in 1513.

It is clear that Surrey drew on Douglas. How much he drew is unclear. Henry Lathrop concludes that he owes Douglas “nothing fundamental or inspiring. Douglas is diffuse, Surrey is terse; Douglas is familiar, Surrey dignified; Douglas is clumsy, Surrey aims at elegance.”¹³ On the other hand, Florence Ridley, a more recent student of the subject, concludes that Surrey's debt was deep and continuous.¹⁴ Perhaps the best answer is that Surrey consulted Douglas as one might consult a Loeb translation today to check the quality of his own work and to pick up any ideas Douglas might have to offer.

The difference between Douglas and Surrey—and it is an absolutely crucial difference—is that Surrey saw Vergil in terms of style as well as content. He had heard the music of Vergil's hexameters, and he understood how it was created. His achievement is that he invented a new kind of English verse capable of expressing, if not exactly the same music, at least a music of comparable elevation and richness. Roger Ascham believed that the heroic vision could not be expressed in English until an English quantitative verse form had been invented. We know today that Ascham was mistaken and that in seeking an equivalent rather than a duplicate verse form, Surrey was right.

II

Until the twentieth century Surrey's translation of Books II and IV of the Aeneid was known chiefly in Tottel's edition of 1557. Tottel's edition is apparently the source of a few scattered references to Surrey's Aeneid in the sixteenth century,¹⁵ but the translation had been so completely forgotten by the middle of the seventeenth century that when Milton refers to his use of blank verse for Paradise Lost, he boasts that it is “an example set, the first in English, of ancient liberty recover'd to Heroic Poem from the troublesome and modern bondage of Riming.”¹⁶

Today two versions of Surrey's Aeneid are widely available that are independent of Tottel. Both are of Book IV alone. The most familiar of the two versions is that preserved in Hargrave manuscript 205, which dates from the 1560s. This version is reprinted parallel to Tottel's version in the edition (rev. 1928) of Surrey's poems by F. M. Padelford.¹⁷

The less familiar version is an edition published around 1554 by the printer John Day for William Owen, who was “orator” for Surrey's son, Thomas, Duke of Norfolk. Owen tells us in his preface that the text is based on a manuscript “in the authors owne hande” which has been collated by Owen with two other manuscripts, so that it is “both to the latyn most agreeable, and also best standing with the dignity of that kynde of myter.”¹⁸

“The dignity of that kynde of myter” apparently means “the dignity of heroic meter.” Owen is claiming that Surrey's blank verse is the appropriate English equivalent to ancient heroic verse—that is, dactylic hexameter. The term “dignity” may seem a little feeble to the modern reader. It is, however, nothing more than a translation of a common Latin epithet, illustrated, for example, in a comment by Badius Ascensius on epic in his popular edition of the Ars poetica: “Et primo loquitur [Horatius] de heroico carmine quod et dignitate et aequitate primum esse constat.”¹⁹

The remark about dignity is supplemented by a comment that reveals much about the state of experimentation in English prosody in the 1550s. The title page of the Day-Owen edition announces that Vergil has been “translated into English and drawne into a straunge metre … worthy to be embraced.” In other words, Surrey's blank verse was considered “straunge” at least by Owen, his editor, but also worthy of imitation. One's natural instinct is to think, “How odd that Owen should consider blank verse ‘strange’.” Even though no blank verse had been published by the year 1554, decasyllabic lines, usually joined in couplets or rime royal, had been standard for English narrative poetry since Chaucer and were also commonplace in the early Tudor period. Derek Attridge discusses this problem in Well-Weighed Syllables and attributes the word “straunge” to the fact that English readers, trained on classical prosodic rules, lacked a vocabulary for discussing (perhaps even for thinking about) their native accentual verse.²⁰

Attridge offers ample justification for this position. As I will suggest later in more detail, however, it is probably not the meter per se that made Surrey's translation seem “straunge,” but the syntactical strategies developed by Surrey in conjunction with the meter.²¹ At any rate, the Owen text survives today in a single copy which is preserved at the Carl Pforzheimer Library in New York. It was reprinted by Professor Herbert Hartman in a limited edition in 1933, and it is to this reprint that I will refer in subsequent comments.²²

None of the three surviving versions of Surrey's translation is completely trustworthy. Tottel's is the least so. As Henry Lathrop remarks, “All of the early verse printed by Tottel was carefully edited to smooth out metrical irregularities, to correct syntax, and to improve expression according to the taste of the day.”²³ Comparison of the three surviving versions shows that Tottel frequently altered syntax, repunctuated, substituted modern for what seemed to him archaic words, and reduced the occurrence of run-over lines by heavy end punctuation and other devices. We are dealing here with the mentality of a pedant rather than a creative artist. It is the same mentality we encounter in George Gascoigne's Certain Notes of Instruction.

This is unfortunate, because Tottel's version is the one that is most frequently reprinted. It is a misleading version, and it has helped to create the widespread impression that Surrey's blank verse is “primitive” or “wooden” or “mechanical”—a commendable first effort but unworthy to stand beside later achievements in the form. Tucker Brooke, for example, remarks that “a generation passed before this meter was fully domesticated into England”;²⁴ and C. S. Lewis, ever prepared to justify his description of the early English Renaissance as a “drab age,” calls Surrey's verse “too severe, too cold … it is Vergil in corsets.”²⁵ Florence Ridley adds, “If one thinks in terms of the resounding majesty of Marlowe, the flexibility of Shakespeare, or the close-textured, effortless movement of Milton, Surrey seems amateurish, awkward, even monotonous.”²⁶

Are these conclusions valid? To answer that question one needs to examine Surrey's translation in detail, and since it is impossible to examine the whole work in detail, I offer here an examination of a twenty-line passage that is particularly instructive. It comes at the end of Book IV and describes the final agonizing moments of Dido's death on her funeral pyre. This passage has always been recognized as one of the finest passages in the Latin original. It therefore must have posed a special challenge to its translator.

Before we move to the translation, it will be useful to note a few characteristics of the Latin original.²⁷ Vergil devotes 13 lines to the description. Since Surrey translates them in 20 lines, one might conclude that he expands the original, as did his predecessor in Vergil translation, Gavin Douglas. If anything, the reverse is true. Discounting elisions, Virgil's 13 lines of dactylic hexameter have 200 syllables, whereas Surrey's 20 lines of iambic pentameter have perhaps 210. The numbers point to an important feature of Surrey's translation. It neither expands nor contracts. Instead, it is extraordinarily faithful to the literal sense of the original as well as to the artistic devices through which that literal sense is presented.

Having said this, we need to carry the comparison of English and Latin one step further. Vergil's Latin consists of five units, or periods, each of which has its own highly organized internal structure of sense and sound. Vergil's devices are natural to Latin. Being an inflected language, Latin can deal with word order very freely. They are, however, unnatural in English, which, being uninflected, depends heavily on word order. They include extended participal constructions, inversions of several types, interruptions, and parentheses—in short, all of the devices that we call “Latinate” when they are used aggressively by an English author.

By contrast, artistic English before Surrey is generally loose in structure, paratactic, and hospitable to romance language constructions and words. The first 18 lines of Chaucer's General Prologue provide a good case in point. Examples closer to Surrey include Malory's Morte Darthur and Caxton's Eneydos—both in prose—and Gavin Douglas's translation of the Aeneid into Scots decasyllabic couplets. These works tend to follow standard subject-verb-object word order. The poetry tends to be metrically regular, with syntactical stress complementing metrical stress. In couplets, the poetic unit tends to be the line or the couplet, and there is little enjambment beyond the couplet. The chief use of inversion is to allow lines to end with rhyme words.

When sentences are extended for several lines—as, for example, in Chaucer's General Prologue—they tend to be enlarged by addition, with phrases and clauses linked in series by repeated subordinating or coordinating conjunctions and emphasized by parallelism. In the aureate rhetoric popular in late medieval Latin, such strategies are common. Their appearance in English vernacular writing of the same period is therefore probably the result of medieval Latin style as well as the character of Middle English.

That Surrey's translation is a marked departure from this tradition has often been recognized by those who have written on his Aeneid. Emrys Jones aptly summarizes the effect of Surrey's strategies: “His aim was to reproduce, as clearly as was consistent with the idiom of an uninflected language, the disposition of sense-masses and the figures of speech of the Latin. … The structural unit in Surrey's unrhymed verse is not the line … but the phrase or the clause.”²⁸

As Jones suggests, the syntax of Surrey's Aeneid is Latinate. The translation regularly uses interruption, inversion, and parenthesis. Combined with enjambment, these devices create units different from, and often larger than, the pentameter line. The meter is generally, but by no means always, regular, and there are striking instances of metrical substitution that appear to be inserted for explicitly artistic reasons. Still more important from the point of view of the sound of the verse, all of the devices just mentioned combine to produce a consistent play, or counterpoint, of metrical accent against syntactical—or speech—accent.²⁹

In the scansions given below, I have generally followed Jones's suggestive lead. In several instances, a regular metrical scansion is directly followed by an irregular scansion reflecting speech accent as defined by phrase and clause. Often the decision as to which scansion is closest to Surrey's intention must be based on aesthetic criteria which are at least partly subjective. Thus there will be occasions when the reader will be able to suggest alternate (and perhaps better) scansions. This is an intrinsic characteristic of prosodic analysis, and I hope that in such cases the reader will, while differing, grant the possibility of the scansion suggested here. In several cases, however, the criteria are objective. The fact that these cases consistently point to irregular scansion based on speech accent strengthens the case for irregular scansion as a conscious and centrally important feature of Surrey's heroic style.

With these all-too-brief remarks as preamble, let us now turn to the passage from Surrey as it appears in the Day-Owen text:

Almyghty Juno hauyng ruthe by thys (Unit 1)
Of her long paynes, and eke her lyngryng death,
From heauen she sent the Goddesse Iris downe,
The thrallyng spiryte and ioynted lymmes to loose.
For that neyther by lot of desteny, (Unit 2)
Nor yet by naturall death she peryshed:
But wretchedly before her fatal daye,
And kyndled with a sodayne rage of flame:
Proserpyne had not yet from her head berefte
The golden heare: nor iudged her to hell.
The dewye Iris thus wyth golden wynges, (Unit 3)
A thousand hues shewyng agaynst the sunne,
Amyd the skyes then dyd she flye adowne:
On Didos heade, where as she gan alyght, (Unit 4)
Thys heare (quoth she) to Pluto consecrate.
Commanded I bereue, and eke thy spiryte unloose
From thys body: and when she had thus sayd, (Unit 5)
With her right hand she cut the heare in twayne:
And therewyth al the naturall heate gan quenche,
And into wynde the lyfe foorthwyth resolue.

The first thing to recognize about this verse is that it has none of the predictability of Chaucer's—or Gavin Douglas's—verse. Its unit is the phrase or clause, not the line or couplet. Sometimes a clause unit corresponds neatly with a line (e.g., 1. 18), but usually the phrases and clauses are united by being imbedded in the larger grammatical structure of a periodic sentence that extends over several lines. Note also that grammatical structure is by no means rigidly framed by the line unit, a point illustrated by line 17, in which a sustained period comes to an end in mid-line (the colon). The remarkable and—I suggest unprecedented—flexibility of Surrey's blank verse is essential to reproducing Vergilian rhetoric in English. It also provides a solution to the problem of creating the sustained tone of classical dactylic hexameter, with a norm of 17 syllables to the line, in an English verse form with a norm of ten syllables per line. The flexibility also eliminates the temptation to contract each Vergilian line into a single blank verse line or expand it into a couplet.

For convenience the major units of the passage from Surrey have been indicated in the right margin. There are five of them, and they correspond exactly to the five units of the Latin original. The first unit is a periodic sentence extending over four lines. The subject of the Latin original (Iuno omnipotens—“Almyghty Iuno”) is placed first, exactly as in Vergil. It is followed by a participial phrase (“hauyng ruthe”) that occupies one and one-half lines and thus creates a considerable separation, or interruption, between the Vergilian subject (“Iuno”) and its verb (“sent”). The verb is further distanced from “Iuno” by the adverbial phrase “from heauen” (1. 3), which would follow rather than precede the verb in normal English word order.

At this point we note a departure from Vergil. In Surrey's English, “sent” is immediately preceded by a subject—“she,” referring to Juno. If “she” is the subject of the verb, “Almyghty Iuno” in line 1 cannot be Surrey's subject and must be the first two words of a long phrase emulating a Latin ablative absolute for which there is no precedent in Vergil. Why did Surrey make his sentence not less but more complicated—more Latinate one might say—than Vergil? The answer is evident. Taken at face value Surrey's sentence reads “Almyghty Iuno … she sent.” In other words, the “she” is a tautology. The motive for the tautology is obviously clarity.

The length of the interval between “Almyghty Iuno” and its verb is, as we have already remarked, considerable. It is far greater than anything that Surrey's readers would have been used to in English, and the extra subject—“she”—is evidently intended to prevent confusion. A similar strategy is used in lines 11-13 (“The dewye Iris … then dyd she flye adowne.”) The need for such an awkward stratagem helps explain why the title page of the edition refers to Surrey's meter as “strange.” The complex syntax must have made the translation seem “strange” in the sense of “unfamiliar and difficult” to English readers accustomed to stylistic traditions inherited from Middle English.

Difficult or not, the first period is extended further by another inversion in line 4. The infinitive “to loose” follows its objects in line 4 rather than preceding them. Since the infinitive phrase modifies (or, perhaps, complements) the verb “sent,” it completes the sense of the sentence and brings the period to a neat conclusion at the end of the line. We note in passing that Surrey translates Vergil's Olympo as “heauen” (1. 3). This is not significant in itself but becomes so if related to the substitution of “hell” for “Stygian Orcus” in line 10, a point discussed below.

Surrey's complex syntactical strategies create a strong rhythm that is contrapuntal rather than complementary to the rhythm of his iambic pentameter lines. The largest unit is the sentence itself, which is four lines, or forty (perhaps forty-one) syllables. Because the sentence is a period continuity must be sustained. This continuity cuts across the division of the sentence into four equal units separated by pauses encouraged by the line endings. Within the sentence there are sub-units. “Almyghty Iuno,” for example, is followed by a caesura, which is followed by two units consisting of fifteen syllables, divided themselves by a pause after the word “paynes.” The interplay of speech and metrical stress is further complicated in the second line by the fact that a reading based on syntax tends to convert a regular pentameter line into a line of four stresses balanced in pairs:

x / x / x / x / x /

Of her long paynes, and eke her lyngryng death

versus:

x x / / x x x / x /

Of her long paynes, and eke her lyngryng death

The word “spiryte” in line 4 is also interesting in this connection. Both Tottel and Hargrave give “sprite”—a one-syllable word—here. This regularizes the meter. Perhaps “spiryte” is a misprint, but the same error occurs in line 15, and in fact, elsewhere in the Day-Owen text. Perhaps the word was pronounced as one syllable in spite of the spelling. If Tottel and Hargrave took the trouble to substitute “sprite” for “spiryte”, however, the motive was most probably to iron out the meter, and this strongly suggests they regarded “spiryte” as defective—i.e., as having more syllables than the meter wants.

An argument can be made that the sense of the line is better served by the extra syllable of the Day-Owen text than the neat regularity of Tottel and Hargrave. The phrase “lyngryng death” emphasizes drawn-out torment, and the extra syllable in “spiryte” nicely resonates with that idea:

x / x / x / x / x /

The thrallyng sprite and ioynted limmes to loose

versus:

x / x / x x / x / x /

The thrallyng spiryte and ioynted limmes to loose.

Unfortunately, there is insufficient evidence to determine which scansion is right. Whatever the case, since the infinitive at the end of line 4 completes the sense of the sentence, it resolves the syntactical as well as the metrical tension of the period. As we have already noted, Surrey resorts to inversion to force the sentence to end as it does. The word “loose” obviously reinforces the sense of tension released. The technique of adjusting the syntax to permit ending both line and period on a thematic word is a favorite of Surrey's and is evident in lines 10, 13, 16, 19, and 20.

The second unit in the passage is six lines long. Its structure is obscured for the modern reader by heavy punctuation (i.e., the colons in lines 6, 8, and 10), and it is almost necessary to refer to the Latin original to be sure of what Surrey intends.

The sentence consists of a compound adverbial clause of four lines (“For that neyther … Nor yet … But wretchedly … And kyndled”) modifying the main verbs “berefte” and “iudged.” The subject of the sentence (“Proserpyne”) occurs in line 9. If we assume that the final e of “Proserpyne” is silent or elided with “had,” the line can be read as metrically regular until the fourth foot. If it is pronounced, however, the beginning of the line is irregular, and the irregularity has the effect of encouraging an extremely irregular scansion of the line as a whole:

x / x / x / x x / x /

Proserpyne had not yet from her head berefte

versus:

x / x x x / / x x / x /

Proserpyne had not yet from her head berefte

The latter (irregular) scansion calls attention to the subject and thus assists the reader—who, given the length of the introductory adverbial clause, can probably use all the help Surrey can offer at this point. Whether or not this scansion is valid, line 9 is saved from metrical isolation by the enjambment that forces the reader to continue to the object of the verb in the next line: “The golden heare.”

The second half of line 10—“nor iudged her to hell”—is associated with the main clause as the second half of a compound predicate (i.e., “not berefte … nor iudged”). The colon at mid-line is therefore misleading to the modern reader. It indicates a pause and no more. Surrey's language here is interesting because it departs markedly from the Latin original. Vergil's term for the underworld is “Stygian Orcus” (Stygioque … Orco). Whether or not the phrase would have seemed poetic to a Roman of the Augustan period, it is artificial out of its Roman context. Roger Ascham and other hard-line English humanists might have fancied it, but I suspect that even in the sixteenth century it would have struck most readers as dead erudition. Surrey's substitution of “hell” is obviously right. If it makes the English translation more grim than the original, that is appropriate too. St. Augustine wrote in his Confessions (I, 13) that he wept for Dido when he was an adolescent, but that she was, after all, a debauched woman and a suicide and not worth the tears of a Christian convert, while Dante placed her in the Inferno (V, 61-2) as an example of lust along with Paolo and Francesca.

Surrey did not invent but he took full advantage of the lovely Vergilian transition in the next period away from the anguished queen to the descent of Iris, goddess of the rainbow, who receives Dido's soul and thus ends her torment. The transition is made in a unit of three and one-half lines (11-14). Note that the Day-Owen punctuation is misleading. One needs to refer to Vergil's Latin to confirm Surrey's meaning here. The phrase “On Didos heade” is part of the sentence that begins on line 11. “Where as she gan” is not part of this sentence in the Latin but is the beginning of a new sentence that extends to “thys body” in line 17.

The subject of the transition sentence (“Iris”) is separated from the verb (“flye”) by a parenthetical description of the wings of the goddess that occupies all of line 12. The effect of the parenthesis is enhanced by the substitution of a trochee for an iambus in the third foot of the line:

x / x / / x x / x /

A thousand hues shewyng agaynst the sunne

In line 13 the verb is further delayed by the inversion of the position of the adverbial phrase “Amyd the skyes.” Since the parenthesis and the inversion obscure the connection between subject and verb, we are not surprised to encounter the device of the second subject used previously in 1. 3: “The dewye Iris … then did she flye adowne” (italics mine).

The fourth unit (the speech of Iris, lines 14-17) begins with “where as she gan.” It contains two instructive ambiguities. First, in line 14 the meter calls for a light stress on “where” and a heavy on “as.” This makes the words sound like the logical connective “whereas,” and, in fact, Hargrave and several modern editions print “whereas” as a single word, producing the meaningless clause, “Whereas she began to alight.”³⁰ Although there is no equivalent for this transition passage in the Latin original, Surrey's meaning is plain enough. “As” is used in the sense of “when.” The sentence means something like “Where—when she began to alight—she said.” If this is correct, the speech stress here needs to be the opposite of the metrical stress. The caesura comes before “where,” not after it, and “where” should receive the heavy stress:

x / x / x / x / x /

On Didos heade, where as she gan alyght

versus:

x / x / / x x / x /

On Didos heade, ❙ where / as she gan alyght

The second ambiguity is more difficult, but fortunately Vergil's Latin solves the problem. In line 15 the word “consecrate” looks like an imperative. The end punctuation (i.e., the period) that follows it makes this interpretation mandatory for the reader who does not consult the original. To read the sentence in this way is to make Iris's statement a command to Dido to consecrate her hair to Pluto. Since Dido is all but dead on the pyre at this moment, the interpretation is strained. The Latin text shows that it is wrong. Vergil's Latin reads as follows: Hunc ego Diti / Sacrum iussa fero teque isto corpore solvo. The Loeb editor translates as follows: “This offering, sacred to Dis, I take as bidden.”

Hunc (“this”) refers to the offering, which is the lock of Dido's hair clipped by Iris as she releases the soul from the body. Surrey simply calls it “Thys heare.” Sacrum is an adjective meaning “sacred” in the sense of “sacred to Dis,” or Pluto. Surrey translates it as “consecrate” in the sense of “consecrated.” The word, in other words, is not an imperative but a participial adjective with the normal “-ed” removed by rhetorical “shortening” or syncope. Finally, iussa is a participle meaning “bidden” or “commanded” and fero is the main verb, meaning “I take,” or in Surrey's words, “I bereue.”

The Day-Owen punctuation of the passage is therefore erroneous. Instead of ending with a period, line 15 should have no end punctuation or at most a comma. When read with the proper meaning and punctuation, the fourth unit ceases to be confusing and becomes a rich, highly contrapuntal Latinate period. It is beautifully effective in conveying Vergil's tone, but it is—if only because of its success in imitating the Latin—unlike anything that had appeared in the English language before Surrey. I suggest that we confront here with special clarity the extraordinary complexity of Surrey's achievement—an achievement usually hidden under the bland observation that Surrey was the first English writer to use sustained blank verse.

The final unit of the passage under consideration is probably the most famous example in the Aeneid—other than sunt lacrimae rerum—of Vergil's tone of elevated melancholy. It begins with a sentence of one and one-half lines in which metrical stress plays strongly against the claims of syntax:

x / x / x /

and when she had thus sayd

versus:

x x x x / /

and when she had thus sayd

and:

x / x /

With her right hand

versus:

x x / /

With her right hand

In line 19 the metrical pattern calls for regular iambs and a normal caesura. This is acceptable if the second word in the line is the adverbial compound “therewythal.” In fact, several modern versions of Surrey's translation encourage this reading by printing “therewythal” as one word, in the sense, perhaps, of “as this was happening.” Again, however, reference to Vergil's Latin provides the correct reading. The Latin reads, omnis et una dilapsus calor, translated by the Loeb editor as “And therewith, all the warmth ebbed away.” Surrey's “therewyth” corresponds to Vergil's una, which means something like “all at once,” although, as the Loeb translation shows, “therewith” is an acceptable equivalent.³¹ Surrey's “al” is not adverbial. It means “all” in the normal English sense, and it modifies “heate,” being the exact equivalent of Vergil's omnis calor. The scansion of the line must make this plain. This means rejecting the metrically regular reading, placing a heavy stress on “al,” and shifting the caesura from just before “the” to just before “al”:

x / x / x / x x / x /

And therewythal ❙ the naturall heate gan quenche

versus:

x / / / x / x x / x /

And therewyth ❙ al the naturall heate gan quenche(32)

The final line of the passage (l. 20) is the second clause of a compound sentence. The two clauses are parallel, with the verb (“gan”) being understood in the second. The parallelism is emphasized by the repetition of the conjunction “and” at the beginning of each—rhetorical polysyndeton. The second clause is also metrically regular. The larger movement of the final unit is thus from periodic to loose structure and from metrical irregularity to metrical regularity. The effect of this unit is that of a progressive release from tension and expresses nicely, in a sense enacts, the action being described—the release of Dido from her torment. There is, however, a residue of the earlier Latinate structure. Both lines use verb-object inversion so they can end with the verb. Surrey's purpose is clearly to have both of these lines end with thematic words: “quenche” and “resolue.” The final line in Vergil, it should be noted, begins with what Surrey translates as “quenche”—dilapsus—and ends with his “resolue”—recessit. In other words, Surrey's imitation is, at this point, extraordinarily precise, although he reaches his goal by his own path.

III

Prosodic analysis is sometimes inexact and ambiguous, but it can serve a useful purpose. Applied to the conclusion of Surrey's translation of Aeneid IV, it confirms the value of the Day-Owen text in contrast to the Tottel and Hargrave versions. At the beginning, for example, Day-Owen avoids punctuation until the thought is completed. Hargrave, conversely, inserts a comma after “Iuno,” thereby cutting the subject adrift from the rest of the sentence. In lines 4 and 16, Tottel and Hargrave substitute “sprite” for “spiryte.” As we have noted, this cleans up the meter at the expense of the poetic expressiveness of line 4. It cannot be proved to be an error or a phonetic spelling, but the fact that “spiryte” is the consistent spelling in Day-Owen gives it a valid claim to being correct. Tottel and Hargrave compound their mischief in line 4 by rejecting the word “thrallyng.” Hargrave substitutes “striving,” which is modern but loses the connotation of imprisonment which is present in “thrallyng.” This represents a loss of poetic expressiveness, since Dido's spirit is clearly described as imprisoned in her body and struggling for release. She is, after all, being consumed by the flames of the funeral pyre. Tottel substitutes “throwing” for “thrallyng,” and this is simply nonsense.

Another example of poetic dilution comes two lines later where Day-Owens reads “Nor yet by naturall death she peryshed.” The Latin equivalent for “not naturall” is nec merito, meaning (in the Loeb translation) “not by a death she had earned [i.e., deserved].” Surrey found “naturall” in a gloss by Servius on this passage.³³ Dido's fate, Servius observes, was nec merito in the sense that it was a suicide rather than a death by natural causes. But “naturall” threatens to violate the iambic pattern, being three syllables where the meter wants two:

x / x / x x / x / x /

Nor yet by naturall death she peryshed

As has already been noted, Tottel is a metrical formalist. He sees extra syllables as a problem, which he eliminates here by substituting the two-syllable word “kindly.” Since “kindly” can mean “of the same family”—hence, very generally, “natural”—in the sixteenth century, the substitution may have seemed ingenious to Tottel, although it seems strained and unexpressive today. Even in the sixteenth century, however, the dominant meaning of “kindly” was “merciful,” and “kindly death” would have almost inevitably been interpreted to mean “merciful death,” which is possible in English but quite different from Vergil's meaning and also the meaning Surrey derived from Servius.

Having recognized the merits of Day-Owen, we may note briefly that even in the twenty lines here examined the text has demonstrable errors, the comma in line 14 and the period in line 15 being the most obvious. In other words, although Day-Owen is the best sixteenth-century text available, it is by no means perfect. Further study is necessary if we want to be sure of having the best text possible.

IV

To move back now to the larger issues touched on at the beginning of this essay, it is evident from Surrey's shorter poems that he was a student of classical and continental humanist poetry. Both the instruction he received from his tutor John Clerk and the lessons that he learned from the poetry of Sir Thomas Wyatt make it likely that his translation of Vergil was a conscious attempt to introduce the nobility and elevation of Vergil, as well as the story of the Aeneid, into English, and that this effort was closely related to the belief of civic humanists that a great culture is impossible without greatness in the use of language. Whatever Surrey thought about Gavin Douglas, he could not have considered Douglas a suitable guide in this effort, and, in fact, he rejected just those elements of the Douglas translation that modern critics like C. S. Lewis consider its most attractive features: its couplets, its regularity, its tendency to make syntactical stress complementary to metrical stress, its generally loose sentence structure, and its colloquial vocabulary. For this reason, the argument that Surrey's Aeneid is, as Howard Baker puts it, “Gavin Douglas' version transformed into unrhymed heroics,”³⁴ seems weak.

To accomplish his purpose Surrey had, in effect, to create a new language. This language is the equivalent in English verse of the Ciceronian style in prose. It is invented specifically to be a vehicle for English heroic style. The decision to use blank verse was merely the first of Surrey's tasks. It was perhaps the easiest of them because the decasyllabic line was already standard in English, and the argument for dropping rhyme had already been made by continental humanists in their defense of versi sciolti.

Surrey's most remarkable achievement was what he did with the unrhymed iambic pentameter line once he had selected it. Among the strategies evident even from the brief twenty-line passage considered here are the creation of syntactical units different from the iambic pentameter line, extensive and flexible use of such Latinate devices as inversion and interruption, regular counterpoint of syntactical against metrical stress, and free and expressive use of metrical substitution. All of these strategies are, in turn, combined with a willingness to objectify—again the word “enact” suggests itself—in rhythm and sound the actions being described.

George Wright believes that in Wyatt's poetry “the metrical line and the natural rhythm of the language engage each other in a continuing struggle.”³⁵ Most readers find the result highly expressive and preferable to the regularity of much later iambic verse. On the surface there may seem to be a similarity between the irregularity of Wyatt and that of Surrey's Aeneid. The verse forms are, however, quite different. As Wright demonstrates, Wyatt uses the irregular decasyllabic line patterns found by Schick in Lydgate's verse. His versification is thus a continuation of traditional English versification, no matter how unorthodox it sometimes seems.

Surrey's Aeneid verse is, conversely, something new to English, being based on imitation of Latin devices. It is in this sense illustrative of what the Elizabethans would describe as “artificial” verse, meaning verse created by the use of conscious artistic formulas. In his search for an equivalent to Vergil's unrhymed, syntactically rich quantitative hexameter Surrey moved away from the Middle English tradition. If the result can be described as “Latinate,” the artistic effect is occasionally reminiscent of the free, stress-dominated rhythm of English in its Germanic phase. Perhaps there is a level at which Latinate devices are natural rather than unnatural in English.³⁶ Whatever the roots from which the language of Surrey's Aeneid draws its nourishment, its effect is closer to Vergil than any other English translation of the Aeneid before the nineteenth century.

It remains one of the curiosities of the history of English poetry that Surrey's achievement was ignored by his successors. Perhaps Tottel is to blame. At any rate, later efforts to create heroic poetry in English in the sixteenth century use almost every form but blank verse—fourteeners, poulter's measure, decasyllabic couplets, quantitative dactylic hexameter, ottava rima, and Spenserian stanzas. Marlowe's fine blank verse translation of Book I of Lucan's Pharsalia is an exception, but it was ignored as completely as Surrey's Aeneid. There is no reason to doubt Milton's sincerity when he writes that Paradise Lost is “the first [example] in English” to use blank verse for heroic poetry, even though we know he is mistaken. It is a pity he did not know Surrey's translation because in spite of the help he received from the dramatic blank verse of Marlowe and Shakespeare, he had to make many of Surrey's discoveries about heroic blank verse all over again.

Notes

1. For recent discussion of Surrey's translation see Emrys Jones, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey: Poems (Oxford, 1963); Priscilla Bawnett, “Douglas and Surrey: Translators of Vergil,” E & S, [Essays and Studies] XXVII(1974), 52-67; David Richardson, “Humanistic Intent in Surrey's Aeneid,” ELR, VI (1976), 204-19; Alan Hagar, “British Virgil: Four Renaissance Disguises of the Laookon Passage of Book II of the Aeneid,” SEL, [Studies in English Literature] XXII(1982), 21-38. The early use of blank verse in epic and drama is traced by Howard Baker, “The Formation of the Heroic Medium,” repr. in Elizabethan Poetry: Modern Essays in Criticism, ed. Paul Alpers (New York, 1967), pp. 126-68; and by O. B. Hardison, “Blank Verse Before Milton,” SP, [Studies in Philology] LXXXI(1984), 253-74.

2. Cf. Derek Attridge, Well-Weighed Syllables (London, 1974), pp. 41-68.

3. George Saintsbury, A History of English Prosody (London, 1923), I, 315, calls it “gratuitous futility” to argue that Surrey did not derive the idea of blank verse from Italian experiments in versi sciolti but offers no specifics about his sources. F. M. Padelford, The Poems of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (Rev. ed., Seattle, 1928), p. 233, suggests Niccolo Liburnio's translation (1534) but rejects Bartolomeo Piccolomini; Edwin Cassidy, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (New York, 1938), p. 235, prefers Luigi Alamanni. See also H. A. Mason, Humanism and Poetry in the Early Tudor Period (London, 1959). Herbert Hartman, ed., The Fourth Boke of Virgill, privately printed for C. H. Pforzheimer (Purchase, N.Y., 1933), p. xxvi, argues persuasively that the translation was the product of “strictly English humanism.” He argues that parallels between Surrey and continental translations and of Douglas can frequently be shown to arise from the fact that all of them draw on the same late classical and early renaissance annotators; see below, note 29. Other scholars (e.g., Ridley, The Aeneid of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey [Berkeley, 1963], and Baker, above, note 1) believe that the chief influence on Surrey was the Scots translation of the Aeneid by Gavin Douglas. The position taken here is close to that taken by Hartman and Emrys Jones. The verse form of Surrey's Aeneid is complex and highly artistic. It is most probably based on an analysis of the Latin in relation to possible English equivalents of Vergil's effects rather than an eclectic gathering of ideas from several continental authors plus Douglas. See also below, note 26. This essay was in galleys before I had the opportunity to read Susanne Woods's excellent Natural Emphasis: English Versification from Chaucer to Dryden (San Marino, Ca., 1984). I generally agree with Dr. Woods's excellent introductory discussion of prosody and with her brief but perceptive remarks on Surrey's Aeneid (pp. 89-90).

4. George T. Wright, “Wyatt's Decasyllabic Line,” SP, LXXXII(1985), 129-56.

5. “Preface” to Tottel's Miscellany, ed. Hyder Rollins (Cambridge, Mass., 1928), I, 2.

6. The Art of Rhetorique, ed. Robert Bowers (Gainesville, Fla., 1962), pp. 10-11. This was, of course, a commonplace. The specific source is Cicero's De Inventione, I, 2. It also draws on the tradition of the Ars Poetica (11. 391-408). Its continental parallels are innumerable. Cf. Peter Ramus, Grammaire (1572): “A ceste cause fauldroit supplier aux muses Francoyses dentreprendre ce labuer, non pas pour abolir la rithms … mais affin que leur patrie fust esgallee a la Graece & a lItalie.”

7. The Scholemaster, in Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. Gregory Smith (Oxford, 1904), I, 6.

8. Ibid., I, 31-2.

9. Ibid., I, 22.

10. Spenser: Poetical Works, ed. J. C. Smith and E. de Selincourt (Oxford, 1916), p. 407.

11. An Apology for Poetry, in Smith, Elizabethan Critical Essays, I, 179.

12. The Student's Milton, ed. Frank Allen Patterson (New York, 1947), p. 525.

13. Henry Lathrop, Translations from the Classics into English from Caxton to Chapman, 1477-1620 (Madison, Wisc., 1933), p. 100.

14. Ridley, The Aeneid of Henry Howard, pp. 13-45. Alan Hagar, “British Vergil,” p. 28, suggests that Surrey's borrowings from Gavin Douglas “call to mind Virgil's odd borrowings from Ennius.” He contends that Douglas sought to translate Vergil's “fixt sentens or mater”—i.e., his content—while Surrey was interested in the Vergilian style. Cf. Priscilla Bawnett, “Douglas and Surrey,” pp. 52-67.

15. Sixteenth century references to Surrey are found in Ascham, Webbe, Meres, and Harvey. See Smith, Elizabethan Critical Essays, I, 32, 126, 283; and II, 315.

16. Milton, “The Verse,” in The Student's Milton, ed. Patterson, p. 159.

17. Above, note 3.

18. Above, note 3.

19. De Arte poetica (Paris, 1503), fol. VIIv.

20. Attridge, Syllables, pp. 94 (Ascham's problems with Surrey's blank verse), and 108-11.

21. If English critics and poets were as confused about accent as Attridge suggests, it is impossible to explain the consistency of Tottel's “improvements” of Wyatt and Surrey in his Miscellany, much less the metrical regularity of the poets of the 60s and 70s. These accomplishments are not characterized by uncertainty but by regularity so consistent and so lacking in subtlety as to be stupifying. The poets seem to have understood what they were doing and to have followed their rules with the mindless consistency of schoolboys writing an exercise.

22. Above, note 3.

23. Lathrop, English Translations, p. 98.

24. In A. C. Baugh, ed., A Literary History of England (New York, 1948), p. 334.

25. English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama (Oxford, 1954), p. 234.

26. Ridley, The Aeneid of Henry Howard, p. 32.

27. I quote here one of the several early sixteenth-century editions of Vergil with commentaries that Surrey might have read: Vergilius cum commentariis. Opera Vergiliana antea corrupta et mendosa nunc vero multorum exemplarum collatione in integrum restituta. … Venice, 1519. This edition includes commentaries by Servius, Donatus, Probus, Beroaldus, and Badius Ascensius, among others. Note the use of the colon, which resembles the use of the colon in Day-Owen. The pointing at the end of each grammatically unified line is not found in Day-Owen, except at the end of line 15, where (as observed) it is misleading.

    Tum Iuno omnipotens longum miserata dolorem.
    Difficilesque obitus: Irim demisit olympo.
    Quae luctantem animam: nexosque resolueret artus.
    Nam quia nec fato: merita nec morte peribat.
    Sed misera ante diem: subitoque accensa furore.
    Nondum illi flavum Proserpina vertice crinem
    Abstulerat: Stygioque caput damnaverat Orco.
    Ergo Iris croceis per coelum rosida pennis.
    Mille trahens uarios aduerso sole colores.
    Deuolat: et supra caput adstitit. Hunc ego Ditis
    Sacrum iussa fero: teque isto corpore soluo.
    Sic ait: ex dextra crinem secat: omnis et una
    Delapsus calor: atque in uentos uita recessit.

28. Jones, Surrey, p. xiv. Also p. xiii, where he observes that Surrey's verse, “reveals itself as part of an intricate balancing system, composed of varied yet predictably recurring patterns. It encourages in the reader a sense of mass and momentum.” The point requires further comment. In his well known study of sixteenth-century prosody John Thompson argues that English verse begins the sixteenth century as an inflexibly regular form in which meter dominates and voice stress is ignored. Later, Thompson argues, English poets learned how to create “maximum tension between the language of the poem and the abstract pattern of the meter.” [The Founding of English Meter (New York, 1961), p. 156.] In a strong rebuttal, Glenn S. Spiegel, “Perfecting English Meter: Sixteenth-Century Criticism and Practice,” JEGP, [Journal of English and Germanic Philology] LXXIX(1980), 192-209, contends that English critics and poets were always committed to close observance of meter. The case is more complex than either Thompson or Spiegel suggests. Surrey clearly employs strong counterpoint in his Aeneid. Jones is correct in emphasizing the importance to him of clause and phrase. Surrey, however, varies his practice in relation to the genre in which he is writing. This is an illustration of the general principle, inherited from the classical ars metrica, of prosodic decorum, a subject of prime importance to the humanists and poets responsible for establishing renaissance prosodic conventions. A basic contrast is between heroic poetry, which seeks elevation, and dramatic poetry, which tends to the norm of “speech.” Cf. Hardison, “Blank Verse Before Milton,” cited in note 1, and “Speaking the Speech,” SQ, [Shakespeare Quarterly] XXXIV(1983), 133-46. The study of metrical decorum as understood in relation to genres like elegy, lyric, and eclogue has hardly begun. If pursued it would greatly advance our understanding of renaissance poetry.

29. See below, note 35.

30. In Padelford's edition, Tottel gives “where as” (p. 188), and Hargrave gives “whereas” (p. 189). Rollins and Baker, The Renaissance in England (Boston, 1945), p. 519, claim to be following Day-Owen but—like several other modern editors—give “whereas.” The spacing of the type in Day-Owen is ambiguous. However, the reading given here is the one most consistent with the typography as well as the sense.

31. Padelford, “therewith al” (p. 188), and Hargrave, “therewith all” (p. 189); Rollins and Baker, The Renaissance in England, “therewithal” (p. 519). Again the Day-Owen spacing is ambiguous.

32. “Naturall” is probably three syllables, since the point of substituting “kindly” is lost if “naturall” can readily be pronounced as two syllables: “nat'ral.” See also l. 6. It has been suggested to me that al may have a light stress. I accept this possibility but prefer the scansion shown.

33. Servii grammatici qui feruntur in Ve commentarii, ed. Georg Thilo and Herman Hagen (2 vols., Leipzig, 1923), note on line IV, 696: Difficilisque obitus quia supererat vita ei, que casu, non aut fato aut natura moriebatur: ut ‘nam quia nec fato, merita nec morte peribat’, id est naturali.

34. Howard Baker, “The Formation of the Heroic Medium,” p. 139.

35. “Wyatt's Decasyllabic Line,” pp. 134-5.

36. Let us assume that what was wanted in English verse was something equivalent to Latin verse. How did Latin verse sound to a renaissance Englishman? An excellent example is provided for hexameter verse by the anonymous (but quite talented) author of The First Booke of the Preservation of King Henry VII (1599). The verse is characterized by the mediocritas of Horace's sermones and is definitely not heroic, but it is remarkably effective:

    You fine metricians, that verses skillfully compile,
    (As fine artificers hard iron do refile on an anvile)
    This verse irregular, this rustick rythmery bannish,
    Which doth abase poetry; such verse, such meter abolish,
    For lily mikle-white swannes flote on streams cleare as a crystall,
    And in a fowle mud-y lake donguehill ducks strive for an offall

    (p. 9)

    The pronunciation here would seem to be less rather than more “prosodic”; that is, very like Kunstprosa, a situation which agrees fully with Derek Attridge's conclusions that except when they were formally “scanned” by pupils, Latin verses were read with a prose inflection (pp. 37-9). Presumably the “prose” inflection was one that brought out the meaning as determined by the syntax. If so, the “reading” of Surrey's Aeneid in English according to the codes of Surrey's translation would (I believe) have been remarkably close to the scansion proposed in the present essay. This scansion is based, as has been shown, on the stress patterns of the iambic pentameter line with appropriate substitutions; but it would apparently have sounded to an Elizabethan much like a quantitative line as such a line was pronounced and hence have been considered in a sense deeper than usually recognized an “imitation” of its classical model. Whether or not there is a “deeper” four-stress pattern in Surrey's translation, reinforced on occasion by alliteration and recalling the Germanic roots of English, is a question that cannot be considered here.