UC Irvine UC Irvine Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title The Overheard Song: Medieval Lyric in the Mixed Genre Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2cz1v5sv Author Matthews, Ricardo Publication Date 2016 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, IRVINE The Overheard Song: Medieval Lyric in the Mixed Genre DISSERTATION Submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in English by Ricardo Matthews Dissertation Committee: Professor Elizabeth Allen, Chair Professor Rebecca Davis Professor Julia Reinhard Lupton Professor Alexandre Leupin 2016 © 2016 Ricardo Matthews TABLE OF CONTENTS Page LIST OF FIGURES iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS v CURRICULUM VITAE vi ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS vii INTRODUCTION: Song and Subject 1 CHAPTER 1: The Overheard Song: Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, The Parliament of Fowles and the Tristan en prose 59 CHAPTER 2: Grail Songs: The Lover’s Mass and the Tristan en prose 110 CHAPTER 3: Lyrical Gower and the Confessio Amantis 154 CHAPTER 4: Lyric and the Documentary Self: Charles of Orleans 211 CODA: Between Verse and Prose: Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet 260 BIBLIOGRAPHY 282 iii LIST OF FIGURES Page Figure 1.1 Detail of Cambridge University Library MS Gg. 4.27, f. 490v. 65 Figure 4.1 Detail of Paris BnF MS fr 25458, p. 218. 216 Figure 4.2 Detail of Huntington Library MS. HM 111, San Marino, California, f. 41r. 222 iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This dissertation would not exist without the valuable guidance of Professor Elizabeth Allen. Her enthusiasm for the project and her challenging insights have made me a better thinker and more precise writer. Her contributions can be found on every page. I would also like to thank Professor Alexandre Leupin whose scholarship and teaching served as the inspiration for my own work. Professor Rebecca Davis’ good council helped me navigate through the difficulties of the profession while Professor Julia Lupton’s sunny disposition made working at UC Irvine a joy. I would also like to acknowledge Professor Virginia Jackson whose encouragement has helped me to clarify my own thoughts about lyric poetry and its place in the prosimetrum. Finally, a big thanks to Mary-Jo Arn, Donka Minkova and Peter Haidu who graciously answered any and all questions. Financial support was provided by the University of California, Irvine, including a University Fellowship, the Howard Babb Memorial Fellowship and the Dorthy and Donald Strauss Endowed Dissertation Fellowship, and my very patient and encouraging wife Lynn. Moral support was provided by a wide network of family and friends, especially my mother Judy, Echo, Maxi, Serena, Sergio and the three Davids. v CURRICULUM VITAE Ricardo Matthews EDUCATION 1991 B.A. in French, University of California, Los Angeles 1997 M.A. in French Literature, Louisiana State University 2009 M.A. in English Literature, University of California, Irvine 2016 Ph.D in English Literature, University of California, Irvine TEACHING 1994-1999 Graduate Teaching Assistant in French, Louisiana State University 2009-2016 Graduate Teaching Assistant in Composition and Literature, University of California, Irvine. FELLOWSHIPS 1995 Eliot Dow Healy Memorial Fellowship Award 2008-2009 University Fellowship 2013 Howard Babb Memorial Fellowship 2014-2015 The Dorothy and Donald Strauss Endowed Dissertation Fellowship PUBLICATION 2016 “Song in Reverse: The Medieval Prosimetrum and Lyric Theory” (Revise and Resubmit, PMLA) vi ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION The Overheard Song: Medieval Lyric in the Mixed Genre By Ricardo Matthews Doctor of Philosophy in English University of California, Irvine, 2016 Professor Elizabeth Allen, Chair This dissertation examines a medieval genre that combines narration, in prose or verse, with inserted lyrical poems. Although well known in France, this “mixed genre,” whether as a prosimetrum or its all verse variation, has received very little scholarly attention in English, even though it was a very popular literary form in medieval England. Chaucer, for example, organizes his Troilus and Criseyde with a series of inserted lyrical set pieces designed to emphasize both the passions of love and its inevitable undoing. Medieval lyrics, however, have been described as playful exercises in rhetorical conventions, whose seemingly repetitive repertoire of conceits and figures point more to the rules of composition than to our Romantic conception of the poem as self-expression. And yet, within the mixed genre, narrative frames surround these conventional poems, grounding them in concrete incidents, and so create a “contextual subjectivity” for the singer, a fiction of the self that emanates from the song. In revisiting the problem of the medieval “lyric I,” so often called impersonal and conventional, I argue that the mixed genre introduces a new concept of song as a locus of subjectivity within a framed performance. I am interested in the form’s capacity to suggest, or even stage, the impression of a singular, emotional subject in a variety of works: Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, the Tristan en prose, vii John Gower’s Confessio Amantis, Charles of Orleans’ two books, one in French and the other English, and Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. viii INTRODUCTION SONG AND SUBJECT The world as it is represented in Middle English literature is filled with the expressive sound of music and song. In the Parliament of Fowles, for example, Scipio sees and hears in the nine spheres the “welle (…) of musik and melodye” (62), while down below, in Malory’s Morte Darthur, in the woods, besides the same source, fountain or welle, a love sick Sir Palomides, after voicing a complaint, composes “a ryme of La Beale Isoud and hym,” a song sung so “merueyllously lowde” (10.86) that Sir Tristram, as he rides by, overhears it and is angered enough to want to draw his sword.1 Between the celestial sphere of music and songs heard accidently in the woods, we find open meadows, as in The Floure and the Leafe, where a “world of ladies” (137) emerge from the surrounding grove singing, or in the Belle dame sans mercy, where a pale man dressed in black is forced outwardly to feign “gret gladnesse” (118) and sing.2 Unfortunately, we are told, “the complaynte of his moost hevynesse/ Came to his voix alwey withoute request” (121-22). In the city, Oxford to be precise, we hear a young student at night playing his harp or psaltery “So swetely that all the chambre rong;/And Angelus ad virginen he 1 Larry D. Benson, ed. The Riverside Chaucer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); James W. Spisak, ed. Caxton’s Malory: A New Edition of Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur Based on the Pierpont Morgan Copy of William Caxton’s Edition of 1485, 2 vols. (Berkeley: University of California, 1983). 2 D.A. Pearsall, ed. The Floure and the Leafe and the Assembly of Ladies (London: Thomas Nelson, 1962) and Dana M. Symons, ed. Chaucerian Dream Visions and Complaints (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, 2004). 1 song;/And after that he song the Kynges Noote” (3215-7). Then the teller of this tale, the Miller, remarks how “blessed was his myrie throte” (3218). His rival for the attentions of his host’s eighteen year old wife, a foppish clerk full of “love-longynge” (3349), accidently wakens her husband when he sings “in his voys gentil and smal” (3360) a few couplets: “Now, deere lady, if thy wille be, I praye yow that ye wole rewe on me.” (3361-62) The rest of his song is muffled as we move into the bedroom where the host suddenly awakens confused. We also know, by the end of the tale, the young wife will show little rewe or pity for him. And then we have the prison towers, where Palamon, one May, listens from his cell to a girl gathering daisies in a garden below while “as an aungel hevenysshly she soong” (1055); in another, an imprisoned Scottish king, James I, listens to a nightingale sing so loudly, that “all the gardyng and the wallis rong” (229).3 Moved by its harmony, he transcribes “the text” (231): Worschippe, ye that loveris been, this May, For of your blisse the kalendis ar begonne, And sing with us, “Away, winter, away! Cum, somer, cum, the suete sesoun and sonne!” Awake for shame! that have your hevynnis wonne, And amorously lift up your hedis all: Thank Lufe that list you to his merci call. (232-38) The natural optimism of this song with a little song inserted inside binds two literary traditions together―one French, as can be seen by nightingale’s stanza of choice, not just Chaucer’s “rhyme royal” but Machaut’s septains, and the other, English and alliterative―in a narrative form that uniquely celebrates the composition and singing of songs.4 That form is a unique 3 Linne R. Mooney and Mary-Jo Arn, eds. The Kingis Quair and Other Poems (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, 2005). 4 Though various theories of the “rhyme royal” have been argued, including an Italian thesis that suggests Chaucer adapted Boccaccio’s eight-line ottava rima stanza (abababcc) for Troilus by subtracting one line from the middle, Daniel Poiron’s tables show that the preferred stanza of Guillaume de Machaut, a poet of great influence on Chaucer, was the seven-line, decasyllabic in ababbcC; in other words, the “rhyme royal.” Chaucer seems to have made the conscious decision of choosing the familiarity and prestige of Machaut’s septains as a traditional indicator of great love poetry for his own innovations. Daniel Poiron, Le poète et le prince: L’évolution du lyrisme courtois 2 mixture of genres. It can take shape as a prosimetrum, with its alternating use of prose narrative and lyric inserts, or as its all verse variation: combining verse narration with lyrics—what Ardis Butterfield calls “verse with verse,” Sylvia Huot, “lyrical narrative poetry,” and Judith Peraino, “interpolated verse narratives.”5 This had a long but until recently, little noticed presence in English literature.