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Chaucer's Invention of the Iambic Pentameter Author(S): Martin J "The Craft so Long to Lerne": Chaucer's Invention of the Iambic Pentameter Author(s): Martin J. Duffell Source: The Chaucer Review, Vol. 34, No. 3 (2000), pp. 269-288 Published by: Penn State University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25096094 Accessed: 25-08-2015 18:58 UTC Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/ info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Penn State University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Chaucer Review. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 136.167.36.226 on Tue, 25 Aug 2015 18:58:16 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions "THE CRAFT SO LONG TO LERNE": CHAUCER'S INVENTION OF THE IAMBICPENTAMETER byMartin J. Duffell In recent two branches of and statistical years mathematics, computation analysis, have helped settle some bitter and long-running disputes in the area of Chaucer's metrics. First a statistical Gasparov developed technique, probability modelling, that compared accentual configurations in verse with those found in prose, and thereby established that the Italian endecasill abo should be classified as intermediate between syllabic and stress-syllabic.1 so Since Chaucer borrowed much from Boccaccio, this clearly has impli on cations the typology of the English poet's long-line metre. Then the computer-based analysis of Barber and Barber established beyond doubt that Chaucer's long-line is decasyllabic and that some word-final schwas count as syllables (however archaic that may have sounded at the end of the fourteenth century) .2My own contribution to this statistical work was to apply the principle of probability modelling to Chaucer's long-line this a conclusion on was as as verse; produced accentuation that clear that of Barber and Barber on count: unlike syllable Chaucer, any previous poet before him, in any language, avoided placing prominent syllables in odd numbered positions in the line (except the first). In other words, he invented the metre we call the iambic pentameter.5 The iambic pentameter can be defined simply and economically in terms of the of Hanson and Its has ten parameters Kiparsky.4 template positions we and is right-strong; if denote weak and strong positions by the binary digits 0 and 7, respectively, the iambic pentameter is: 0 1 01 01 01 01. Its rules are as follows: the maximum size of a correspondence position is one syllable,5 although the final strong position in the line may also con tain an extrametrical no weak unprominent syllable;6 position in the line, other than the initial contain a one, may prominent syllable.7 Prominence in this metre is defined as "having a lexically determined greater stress than either of its in the terms of Hanson and "weak neighbours"; or, Kiparsky, posi tions are constrained from the of containing strong syllables polysyllabic words."8 THE CHAUCER REVIEW, Vol. 34, No. 3, 2000. Copyright ? 2000 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA This content downloaded from 136.167.36.226 on Tue, 25 Aug 2015 18:58:16 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 270 THE CHAUCERREVIEW It of be no that Chaucer to should, course, surprise decided compose his mature in content of his verse works decasyllables; the makes it clear that Chaucer knew well both French and Italian decasyllabic poems. The remarkable fact is that Chaucer composed decasyllables such as no one previously had written (iambic pentameters), and it is important to trace the source of his innovation. The article aims to do this a present by qual itative analysis of decasyllable types, as defined by the interaction of met rical and grammatical structures within the line: caesurae (the traditional term) or the boundaries of cola (the term now used by Unguis ticians) .9But, before I wish to some conducting my analysis, recapitulate important points in the history of both the decasyllable and Chaucer's poetic apprenticeship (the "craft so long to lerne" of my title). The earliest surviving decasyllables in a modern Romance language are found in the French Vie de Saint Alexis and the Occitan Boecis, and both date from the first quarter of the eleventh century.10 The corre vers spondence rules of this early de dix made it equivalent to two inde pendent shorter lines: they prohibited the same word from supplying the syllables in positions 4 and 5, and stipulated that both positions 4 and 10 must a also contain an extrametrical contain stressed syllable (and may syllable). The shorthand used by French metrists to describe this line is 4M/F + 6M/F.11 Other variants of the vers de dix have survived from only no slightly later that were 5M/F + 5M/F or 6M/F + 4M/F, but French an poem mixes the variants. It should be noted that extrametrical sylla ble at the caesura (4F) made the actual number of syllables (to the last stress in the line) eleven, not ten. The transformation of the two-part (4 + 6) line into a unified line (of 10) was achieved by writers of lyrics to be set to a number of is more music. Because having regular syllables impor tant to music than lexical writers of French avoided syllabic stress, lyrics lines with a word break after 4F (termed epic caesura), and instead wrenched the accentuation of words with feminine endings so that the first hemistich was 3F (lyric caesura). At the end of the twelfth century vers the primitive alexandrine (6M/F + 6M/F syllables) replaced the de as metre and narrative in French12 when dix the of major epic poems and, was the decasyllable returned to favor in the fourteenth, it the unified line of 10M/F syllables with a mandatory caesura after the fourth sylla ble (4M or 3F). This was the only type of decasyllable composed by French Chaucer's contemporaries. vers as a Provencal troubadours clearly perceived the Occitan de dix unified line of 10M/F syllables as early as the mid-twelfth century. While + the overwhelming majority of their lines were 4 6, they occasionally included a line of 6 + 4; and, while they normally employed the lyric caesura (3F + 6M/F), they occasionally gave the first hemistich 4F sylla bles and reduced the second to 5M/F (see, for example, the verse of This content downloaded from 136.167.36.226 on Tue, 25 Aug 2015 18:58:16 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions MARTINJ. DUFFELL 271 Peire Vidal).13 The last practice is so alien to French poets that French metrists call this a coupe italienne. The earliest surviving Italian endecasill abi were composed in the middle of the thirteenth century at the court of the heretic emperor Frederick II (1197-1250) in Palermo and were influenced by Provencal poets seeking refuge there from the Albigensian crusades.14 some Italian a Although early poets composed poems with fixed caesura, the most influential ones cultivated the variety allowed in the Provencal unified line of 10M/F. The caesura might fall after 4M, 4F, 6M, or 6F syllables; indeed, occasional lines have no caesura at all (that is, positions 4-8 may be occupied by a word of five syllables). This ende casillabo with no fixed caesura was employed by three poets whose work Chaucer knew well: Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), Francesco Petrarca (1304-74), and Giovanni Boccaccio (1317-75). Chaucer was highly unusual for a fourteenth-century Englishman in speaking and reading Italian. As a boy his father worked in the London wine trade, which in the middle of the fourteenth century employed many Italians, and he had Italian friends throughout his life. We also know that he was fluent in the to a sufficiently language make very close translation sections came of long of Boccaccio's Filostrato, when he to compose Troilus and Criseyde in the early 1380s.15 His Italian is likely to have been revived and improved when he travelled to Italy, perhaps as early as 1368, certainly in 1372-73, but most significandy in 1378. From this last journey he brought back copies of Boccaccio's Filostrato and Teseida, and Pearsall argues that Boccaccio provided the inspiration for the art flowering of Chaucer's poetic in the latter's middle age.16 Only one of a Chaucer's long-line poems, the ABC, imitated from French poem (dated 1331) by Guillaume de Deguileville, has been proposed to ante date Chaucer's 1372 Italian visit. But Pearsall points out that this early dating depends entirely on Thomas Speght, who edited the 1602 edition of Chaucer's and who wished to works, emphasize the connection between Chaucer and the House of Lancaster.17 Pearsall, himself, pro a poses date in the late 1370s for the ABC, and this is supported by my structural analysis (see below). The other model that has been proposed for Chaucer's longer line is French: the vers de dix, from which the Italian endecasillabowas derived.18 The evidence in favor of this model is, however, almost all circumstan tial, and not structural, as I shall demonstrate in this article. Chaucer was a courtier with royal patrons and the language of the royal court was French (it had been the official language of the country for two-and-half centuries after the Norman as conquest).
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