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A ‘Sixain’ of Four-Line Stanzas
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2018
Extract
A curious and perhaps unique use in English of the word. sixain may be observed in a book published in 1561, fourteen years before the earliest citation of the word in the OED. Among the preliminaries (sig. A4r-v) of an English translation from Henry Bullinger, A Hundred Sermons upon the Apocalips (STC 4061) is found a poem of twenty-six four-line stanzas with the heading ‘A Sixain touching the contentes of thys booke.’ As a sample I quote the first two of these stanzas and the last:
- Who list to moue his lippes,
- and hereon loke and rede:
- In thys Apocalyppes,
- these thynge shall fynde in dede.
- Type
- Research Article
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- Copyright
- Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1965
References
1 Certayne Notes of Instruction, in G. Gregory Smith ed., Elizabethan Critical Essays (Oxford, 1904), 1, 55.
2 Gregory Smith, ii, 92; cf. ii, 68.
3 Maurice Grammont, Petit Traite de Versification Francaise, 13me éd. (Paris, 1949), p. 90; É. Littré, Dictionnaire de la Langue Francaise (Paris, 1881-83), iv, 1955.
4 A Famouse Cronicle ofoure time, called Sleidanes Commentaries, … Translated out of Latin into Englishe, by Ihon Daus (London, 1560), sig. A3v. There are seven stanzas, each identical in form to those of Daus's ‘Sixain,’ headed ‘The Translator to the Boke.’
5 This we learn from a hitherto unpublished MS sketch of Daus's life, written by ‘a Scholler of his,’ Adam Winthrop, the father of John Winthrop, governor of Massachusetts. This sketch, found on the flyleaf of the Harvard copy of Daus's Bullinger, is printed in my article on Daus, ‘The First English Translator of Calvin's Institutes,’ The Gordon Review, viii (Winter 1965), forthcoming.
6 Cf. OED, s.v. sextain, where the term is used almost contemporaneously (1639 and 1658) to refer to two quite distinct verse forms, the sixain and the sestina.