Campion's Art of English Poesie and Middleton's Chaste Maid in Cheapside

Abstract

The study of certain metrical problems brought me recently to examine more carefully than hitherto Campion's Observations in the Art of English Poesie. In illustrating his points regarding verse writing Campion, it will be recalled, makes use of “diuerse light poems” of his own, and in Chapter vi, devoted to “English Trochaick verse,” he includes one entitled The eight Epigramme. While reading this I was teased by the impression of having heard the scandal there related somewhere else in one of the dramas of the time, but it was not until I had canvassed a large number of Elizabethan plots that the christening scene in A Chaste Maid in Cheapide came to mind.