Gascoigne and Trissino: Vernacular Metre and Accentual Feet

Abstract

In 1575 George Gascoigne broke with tradition, by attempting to describe the English verse line neither as a Romance accumulation of syllables nor as a classically ordered disposition of longs and shorts but as a grid of prominent and non-prominent accents. I will discuss elsewhere Gascoigne’s peculiar achievement in repurposing the terminology of Greco-Roman speech accent for the analysis of metrical stress, and its implications. My purpose here is simply to note that Gascoigne may not have been travelling quite alone.