How did Roger Ascham criticize English rhyme and Renaissance verse?

In his work The Scholemaster (1570), Roger Ascham criticized the English poetry of his time, specifically condemning the use of rhyme as "Gothic," "barbarous," and "rude".1

Ascham’s critique was rooted in a desire to align English verse with the principles of Classical Greek and Latin quantitative prosody. He argued that contemporary poets, including Henry Howard, earl of Surrey, failed to understand "perfite and trewe versifying" because they did not compose according to the rules of long and short syllables used in antiquity. Consequently, he famously disparaged the metrical structures employed by his contemporaries as "feete without joyntes".12

While Ascham’s attempt to impose Classical quantitative metrics on the English language was ultimately unsuccessful—as English poets continued to favor the more natural syllable-stress system—his arguments initiated a long-standing debate among Renaissance theorists regarding the structural principles and aesthetic nature of English verse.1