Previously on this blog: part 1, part 2.

Cervantes wrote satirically of a poet who had written—

“that part of the history of King Arthur of England which Archbishop Turpin left unwritten, together with the history of the quest of the Holy Grail; and all in heroic verse, part in rhymes and part in blank verse; but entirely dactylically—I mean in dactylic noun substantives, without admitting any verb whatsoever.”

In part 2 we saw that he didn’t really mean no verbs, just no line-terminal verbs; and likewise the word “dactylic” (“todo … en esdrújulos”) referred only to the line-terminal stress pattern, not to the contents of his dictionary. But what if he had meant those constraints in the most restrictive sense possible? Discarding (read: forgetting) the “part in rhymes” constraint, he might have written something like the following — which one might in dactylic substantives christen the Turpentine Comedy.