Note 427b — APPENDIX (continued 2)

The word ‘sonnet’ was often irregularly used for ‘song’ or ‘poem.’ A proper sonnet in Clement Robinson’s poetical anthology, A Handefull of Pleasant Delites, 1584, is a lyric in ten four-line alternatively rhymed stanzas. Neither Barnabe Googe’s Eglogs, Epyttaphes, and Sonnettes, 1563, nor George Turbervile’s Epitaphes, Epigrams, Songs and Sonets, 1567, contains a single fourteen-lined poem. The French word ‘quatorzain’ was the term almost as frequently applied as ‘sonnet’ to the fourteen-line stanza in regular sonnet form, which alone falls within my survey. Watson is congratulated on ‘scaling the skies in lofty quatorzains’ in verses before his Passionate Centurie, 1582; cf. ‘crazed quatorzains’ in Thomas Nash’s preface to his edition of Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella, 1591; and Amours in Quatorzains on the title-page of the first edition of Drayton’s Sonnets, 1594.