ABSTRACT
When the comic character Holofernes makes this demand he is either showing off by using three words where one will do, or he is uncertain which word to use. He wants Nathaniel to read him some poetry and in the 1590s the word stanza, to refer to a grouping of lines, was quite new in English. But, with the sixteenth century’s attraction to Italian models, it was coming to displace the Old English word staff. The French word verse, then as now, could refer to a group of lines or a single line, or simply mean poetry in the generic sense.
