Thomas Campion’s iambic and quantitative Sapphic: Further evidence for phonological weight in Elizabethan English quantitative and non-quantitative meters

Abstract

Fulfilling a central goal of a generation of Elizabethan English metrical theory often referred to as the ‘quantitative movement’, Thomas Campion succeeded in demonstrating the role of syllable quantity, or phonological weight, in Elizabethan iambic pentameter. Following Kristin Hanson (2001, 2006), this article parses Campion’s scansions of Early Modern English syllables, according to moraic theory, into resolved moraic trochees. The analysis demonstrates that (1) Campion distinguished between syllable weight (syllable quantity) and stress or strength (accent) in Early Modern English; (2) Campion prohibited syllabic consonants in English iambic pentameter, despite the fact that they were attested in Early Modern English as a whole; (3) in a successful adaptation of the Latin rule of ‘position’, as described by William Lily and John Colet’s Short Introduction of Grammar (1567), Campion re-syllabified coda consonants followed by vowels; and (4) Campion employed syllabic elision as a means of avoiding pyrrhic syllable combinations that resulted in non-maximal filling of long positions in a line of English iambic pentameter. His two iambic pentameters – the ‘pure’ and the ‘licentiate’ – are both accentual and quantitative meters that, in accordance with moraic theory, integrate stress and strength with syllable weight. He contrasted stress and weight in the quantitative Sapphic lyric ‘Come let us sound with melodie’ (Campion, 1601). Hanson’s (2001, 2006) reconsideration of the role of syllable quantity in Elizabethan metrical theory and Elizabethan poetry should be continued.