{"id":"01KG8B56XAJWAB9AJSA7KZVZC9","cid":"bafkreie5szr67hkrlmph6alg3tn55d755q5m556s2rlzssrw5htd4kbmlq","type":"file","properties":{"cid":"bafkreihwkozp5be6aodzelizdxl523ifwkecjvaqg2vcfzyvrcxiiszm24","content_type":"image/jpeg","filename":"02_venus_and_adonis_1905_facsimile_page_0157.jpg","height":2400,"key":"pdf-page-1769806643971-zv0ho15oa8","label":"02_venus_and_adonis_1905_facsimile_page_0157.jpg","page_number":157,"pdf_type":"born_digital","size":520719,"text":"LUCRECE 21\nNeither the individuality of style nor the substantive\noriginality of many details in Shakespeare^s poem can be\nquestioned. But it is clear that, working on foundations\nlaid by Ovid, he sought suggestion for his poetic edifice\nin Livy, and in such successors of the classical poet and\nhistorian as Chaucer and Bandello. Nor can it be lightly\nquestioned that he absorbed sentiments and phrases from\nmany contemporary English verse-writers with whom his muse\nacknowledged a sympathetic affinity.\nIll\nThe metre of Lucrece was a favourite one in Enelish The metre\nliterature long before the Elizabethan era. The seven-line ° ^«<^''^'^^^-\nstanza is more commonly used by Chaucer than any other. He\nseems to have borrowed it from the French poetry of his\ncontemporary Guillaume de Machault. It is often met with in\nthe Canterbury Tales (see T^he Clerkes Tale^ The Man of Larves\nTale^ The Second ISlonnes Tale)^ as well as in Troylus and Crisyde\nand many of the shorter poems (cf. ' The complaint to his\nempty purse '). It is the metre, too, of Lydgate's monumental\nFall of Princes. According to Elizabethan critics it was the\nstanza that was best adapted to serious themes. Gascoigne\ndescribed it in his Certayne Notes of Instruction concerning the\nmaking of verse or ryme in English (if7