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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
The triplet, like some other literary forms, had an origin, a period of growth, a maturity, and then an end. The triplet was an offspring of the pentameter couplet, but developed in its own way at its own rate. When the couplet was loose, open, and unpolished, there was little need for further variety, and poets wrote few triplets. When the couplet became tight, closed, and highly polished, as it did with Pope, the triplet was considered a violation of the rules. It was, consequently, only in the short period just before the apex of the couplet that the triplet could flourish: the period of John Dryden.
1 There are a few poems completely in triplets, some poems in terza rima, and some triplets in such forms as tetrameter couplets and odes. Since there is little continuity or development in these forms, I have limited my study to triplets found in pentameter couplets.
2 Shannon, “Nicholas Grimald's Heroic Couplet and the Latin Elegiac Distich,” PMLA, xlv (June 1930), 542.
3 Mark Van Doren, The Poetry of John Dryden (New York, 1920) and Geoffrey Tillotson, On the Poetry of Pope (Oxford, 1938), have a few pages of commentary on those individual authors; George Saintsbury, A History of English Prosody (London, 1906), devotes some scattered pages to the triplet, but his analyses are neither thorough nor accurate. In the several studies of the origin and development of the heroic couplet, there are only a few incidental remarks on the triplet. The most important studies are these: E. C. Knowlton, “Origin of the Closed Couplet in English,” Nation, xcix (30 July 1914), 134; Felix Schelling, “Ben Jonson and the Classical School,” PMLA, xiii (1898), 221–249; John S. P. Tatlock, “Origin of the Closed Couplet in English,” Nation, xcviii (9 April 1914), 390; Ruth Wallerstein, “The Development of the Rhetoric and Meter of the Heroic Couplet,” PMLA, l (March 1935), 166–209; and Shannon, noted above.
4 Spenser wrote the February, May, and September Eclogues of The Shepheardes Calender with four stress lines in couplet form, and he has six triplets in eight-hundred lines. Mother Hubberds Tale is in pentameter couplets, but has no triplets.
5 The statement is based on my examination of some fifteen or twenty early volumes of Dryden, Lee, Otway, and Settle, dating from 1675 to 1725. The practice of bracketing triplets is one which, unfortunately (at least for a study of this sort) not all modern editors follow. The early publishers also respected their writers: they never split a couplet or triplet between two pages, another practice ignored in the efficiency of today.
6 W. K. Wimsatt, Jr, to whom I am indebted for a number of helpful suggestions on this paper, thinks that Dryden had in mind the Aledandrine of the Faerie Queene stanza, and perhaps the fact that the long line is the third of its kind in the stanza: a a b a b b c b c C. It may also be that Dryden was referring to the triplets of The Shepheardes Calender, noted above.
7 For further statistics on Dryden and others, and for the method by which the counts were made, see the appendix.
8 This last line is of further significance. In the “Dedication” to the Aeneas quoted earlier, Dryden refers to his joining of the “two licenses” of the Alexandrine and the triplet. This line appears to be the first time, in Dryden's writings and in English poetry, that the Alexandrine was combined with the triplet. This technique shows a clear development, too. There are few Alexandrines in Dryden's plays, and none in his other poetry before 1680. In The Medal, Britannia Rediviva, and The Hind and The Panther, about one-third of the triplets end with an Alexandrine.
9 Mark Van Doren, The Poetry of John Dryden (Cambridge, Eng., 1931), was the first to note this technique, and he cites a number of other examples. He also describes Dryden's “turns” in triplets, and the use of the last line to impart a “compendiousness to compliment.” Van Doren's comments (pp. 81–84) are the most sympathetic and detailed analysis of Dryden's triplets available.
10 The Correspondence of Jonathan Swift D.D., ed. F. Elrington Ball (London, 1913), v, 162. A note in Faulkner's edition of Swift's Poems (1735) echoes the statement in this letter, and was probably suggested by Swift. See Poems of Jonathan Swift, ed. Harold Williams (Oxford, 1937)., i, 139–140.
11 The Correspondence of Alexander Pope, ed. George Sherburn (Oxford, 1956), i, 24. Geoffrey Tillotson, logically enough, shares Pope's view of the triplet; in his study On the Poetry of Pope (Oxford, 1938), p. 106, he attacks Dryden's triplets: “Dryden found the heroic couplet, as he found the tetrameter, too small to turn round in and enlarged it accordingly. He frequently made it a triplet … He does not seem to have been a poet who accommodated an unruly thought to metre by revising the form it had just taken. He was usually more ready to make space for its completion in the line following … The triplet is often in Dryden a mark of slovenliness.” Some triplets of Dryden and his contemporaries are slovenly. Tillotson, however, fails to appreciate the polish achieved within the triplets, and the advantages they provide.
12 Samuel Johnson, Lives of the English Poets, ed. G. B. Hill (Oxford, 1905), i, 467–468.
