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Updated: June 27, 2025
Bartolommeo showed beautiful invention in masquerades, and was a rare master in making scenic settings for comedies. He delighted to write sonnets and other compositions in verse and prose, and in none was he better than in the ottava rima, in which manner of writing he was an author of passing good renown. He died at the age of forty, in the year 1558.
Readers of our day will generally admit that the "gouty hexameters" of the original poem, which celebrates the apotheosis of King George in heaven, are much more blasphemous than the ottava rima of the travesty, which professes to narrate the difficulties of his getting there.
The couplets and quatrains so much affected and so reluctantly abandoned by Shakespeare after the first stage of his dramatic progress are in no other play that I know of diversified by this alternate variation of sesta with ottava rima.
In commenting on their failure, an Athenaeum critic has explained the pre-established fitness of the ottava rima the first six lines of which are a dance, and the concluding couplet a "breakdown" for the mock-heroic.
Hitherto the poem has been written in ottava rima, a form which is sufficiently uncommon in our early seventeenth-century poetry to demand special notice in this case. In a prose postscript to this book Wither tells us that the title, The Shepherd's Hunting, which he seems to feel needs explanation, is due to the stationer, or, as we should say now, to the publisher.
"It is in ottava rima, a faint echo of the immortal Niccolo Correggio, composed in honour of one whose description is beyond the flight of human song." "Yet you sing of her?" "It is no better than an acknowledgment of the impossibility to sing of her. Thus " And striking a chord or two, he began, a mezza voce: "Quando sorrideran' in ciel Gli occhi tuoi ai santi "
English versions of Boyardo and Ariosto have since been translated into the rhyming couplets of Hoole, and as late as 1831 into the ottava rima stanzas of W. S. Rose. It was not, however, till April, 1880, that a full English translation of the original "Song of Roland," from MSS. written in the old langue d'oil of Northern France, was published by Kegan, Paul & Co., from the pen of Mr.
It is written in somewhat cumbrous ottava rima, and seldom shows any conspicuous power of narrative. Belonging to the same class of composition, though of a very different order of poetic merit, is Lorenzo's wonderfully graceful tale of Ambra. The grace lies in the telling, for the plot was probably already stale when Phoebus and Daphne were protagonists.
So too in the matter of metrical form, the strict terza rima of the earlier examples came to be diversified with rime sdrucciole, and by being intermingled with verses with internal rime, with ottava rima, settenarî couplets, and lyrical measures. Castiglione's representation at Urbino has been noticed previously.
Byron's "ottava rima" rhymes a b a b a b c c: "A mighty mass of brick, and smoke, and shipping, Dirty and dusky, but as wide as eye Could reach, with here and there a sail just skipping In sight, then lost amidst the forestry Of masts; a wilderness of steeples peeping On tiptoe through their sea-coal canopy; A huge, dun cupola, like a foolscap crown On a fool's head and there is London Town!"
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