Margaret Hussey, ² the Second Shepherd's Play, and the
prologue to Gammer Gurton's Needle ( 1552) are examples.

Lanier quotes an early sixteenth century Ever and Never
Song and the old Ballad of Agincourt, the dactylic movement
of which was imitated by Drayton and later by Tennyson.
Thomas Tusser Five Hundred Points of Husbandry is
written chiefly in monotonously facile anapests. But triple
rhythm seems to have been considered appropriate for
"low" and popular themes, so that Gascoigne in 1575 wrote,
"wee are fallen into such a playne and simple manner of
writing, that there is none other foote used but one." ³
Shakespeare and other dramatists in their songs written to
already existing popular tunes, occasionally allowed an
anapestic line like,

Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly.
( Blow, Blow, Thou Winter's Wind.)

and

With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino,
( It Was a Lover and His Lass.)

but complete poems in this rhythm were not common in the
Elizabethan period, or for a long time afterward. Most of
the Elizabethan and Jacobean examples of anapestics are
songs and ballads written to very even triple measures, some
of them dance tunes. Chappell ⁴ gives the music and words
of half a dozen of these ballads that date from the end of
the sixteenth century. The more popular ones, like Pack-
ington's Pound, had new words written to them frequently.
Anapestics that rely upon tunes to help the rhythm are
likely to be rough. Some of the best are Desdemona
Willow Song; a charming parallel to it in Thomas Deloney
Gentle Craft, beginning,

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