Lydgate's Metrical Inventiveness and His Debt to Chaucer

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Parergon, Volume 18, Number 1, July 2000, pp. 227-249 (Article)

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For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/pgn/summary/v018/18.1.duffell.html

Access provided by Boston College (25 Aug 2015 19:59 GMT) Lydgate's Metrical Inventiveness and his Debt to Chaucer

Martin J. Duffell

Most modem critics and editors of John Lydgate's work feel it necessary to address the problem of his reputation as a versifier: why did his contemporaries rate him so highly when twentieth-century writers regard him, at best, as idiosyncratic and, at worst, as incompetent? Thus, for example, Saintsbury dismissed him as 'a doggerel poet with an insensitive ear' and Hammond demonstrated that Lydgate's roughness was due, not to ignorant copyists, but to an ignorant poet; 'The study of Lydgate's mentality,' she concluded, 'may not be worth the student's candle.' In the last sixty years a number of writers, from Pyle to Hascall, have made important contributions to our understanding of Lydgate's metrics, but have not succeeded in making us admire his versification. Yet he was the most prolific and admired versifier in England during his own lifetime and for a century after his death.

1 George Saintsbury, A History of English Prosody from the Twelfth Century to the Present Day, Y.From the Origins to Spenser (London and New York: Macmillan, 1906), p. 223; Eleanor Prescott Hammond, English Verse between Chaucer and Surrey (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1927), p.l 52. 2 See Fitzroy Pyle, 'The Pedigree of Lydgate's Heroic Line', Hermathena, 50 (1937), 26-59; Dudley L. Hascall, 'The Prosody of John Lydgate', Language and Style, 3 (1970), 122-46. 228 Martin J. Duffell

Adverse criticism of Lydgate's versification usually focuses on the difference between Lydgate's verse and that of Chaucer. English readers between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries saw little difference between the versification of the two poets, because it did not occur to them to pronounce word-final schwa in the works of either. But in 1863 Child hypothesised that Chaucer intended word-final schwa to be pronounced before a following consonant and argued that, as a result, his lines are both regularly decasyllabic and iambic. For more than a century after the publication of Child's paper his hypothesis was hotly debated. The large number of textual variations in the many surviving witnesses of the Canterbury Tales made this a fertile ground for disagreement and, in particular, Southworth argued vigorously for an alternative hypothesis of Chaucer's metre ('verses of cadence'). The majority of modem scholars, however, have supported Child's view, and the detailed computer analysis of the Hengwrt manuscript of the Canterbury Tales by Barber and Barber has now established conclusively that Chaucer must have counted some word- final schwas as syllables. Providing certain types of word-final schwa are counted (and Barber and Barber analyse which ones), Chaucer's long-line metre becomes both decasyllabic and iambic, and he has a clear claim to having been the firstpoe t in Europe to employ what the English call the iambic pentameter.

3 F. J. Child, 'Observations on the Language of Chaucer [...] Based on Wright's Edition of the Canterbury Tales', Memoirs of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, n.s. 8, 9 (1863), 445-502, 25-314. 4 James G. Southworth, Verses of Cadence (Oxford: Blackwell, 1954; repr. St Clair Shores MI: Scholarly Press, 1980). 5 Charles Barber and Nicolas Barber, 'The Versification of The Canterbury Tales: A Computer-based Statistical Study', Leeds Studies in English, 21, 22 (1990-91), 57- 84 and 81-103. 6 For a history of the fhen-)decasyllable in Europe see Martin J. Duffell, "The Romance (Hen)decasyllable: An Exercise in Comparative Metrics' (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of London, 1991) and 'Chaucer, Gower, and the History of the Hendecasyllable', in English Historical Metrics, ed. by C. B. McCully and J. J. Anderson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 210-18. Lydgate's Metrical Inventiveness and his Debt to Chaucer 229

Pearsall argues that Chaucer's and Lydgate's treatments of word-final schwa were similar, as were their long-line verse designs. If both of these points were valid, almost all of Lydgate's lines could be made decasyllabic and/or iambic by adding selected word-final schwas to their syllable count, as almost all of Chaucer's can. But this is clearly not the case, and there are two possible explanations: the first is that the two poets had the same metrical intention (i.e., verse design), but that Lydgate's incompetence as a versifier resulted in the difference between his lines and Chaucer's. The second explanation is that Lydgate had a different verse design, and the aim of the present article is to support the latter explanation with detailed analysis.

7 See Derek Pearsall, John Lydgate (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), pp. 61- 62. Modern metrists prefer the more precise term 'verse design' to the word 'metre' to describe the abstract pattern that the poet has in his head (his template) plus the rules he observes in making linguistic material correspond to it (correspondence rules) in actual lines (verse instances). The constituents of a template are termed 'positions', and the linguistic material in verse instances that corresponds to positions in the template is usually syllables and their properties, such as duration or stress. For metrical purposes syllables may be divided into monosyllables and the syllables of polysyllabic words. Monosyllables may be further divided into lexical and grammatical, and the syllables of polysyllabic words into those that are more prominent in delivery than their neighbours (strong) and those that are not (weak). Linguistic approaches to metrics attempt to identity the rules that govern how many and which types of syllable may correspond to each position (see, for example, Kristin Hanson, 'Prosodic Constituents of Poetic Meter', Proceedings of the West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, 13 (1995), 62-77; Kristin Hanson and Paul Kiparsky, 'A Parametric Theory of Poetic Meter', Language, 72 (1996), 287-335). 8 All quotations from Lydgate in this article are taken from two samples of his verse that I have analysed into their component syllables for statistical purposes. The first sample is the short-line poem A Mumming at London (henceforth Mumming London), composed in 1427, and here taken from 77ie Minor Poems of John Lydgate, v.The Lydgate Canon and Religious Poems, ed. by H. N. MacCracken, EETS ES 107 (1911); the second is a passage selected at random from The Life of Our Lady (henceforth Our Lady), which was probably composed in 1434; see John Norton-Smith, John Lydgate: Poems (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966). Since the first poem has just 342 lines, the sample passage from the second is the same length (ii. 519-860); references follow Norton Smith's renumbering of these lines (1-342). 230 Martin J. Duffell

LYDGATE'S LONG-LINE AND SHORT-LINE VERSE DESIGNS Two of the most important modern contributions to the subject of Lydgate's metrics were those of Pyle and Lewis. Pyle pointed out that Lydgate's long lines, unlike Chaucer's, have a fixedcaesura , a mandatory mid-line word break after the fourth or fifthsyllabl e in the line (i.e., after 4M/F). Lewis also saw Lydgate's long line as being divided into two distinct parts; he called it the 'heroic line' and argued that each of its hemistichs contains not less than two and not more than three beats. Lewis regarded the proportion and position of two- and three- beat hemistichs as being unregulated, but Pyle shows that in 97 5% of lines a two-beat hemistich precedes a three-beat one. Because this figure is so close to 100%, we can be reasonably certain that Lydgate's long-line template contains a caesura and in this way is unlike his short-line template. The latter has four strong positions, but no mandatory word-break: the syllables in the second and third strong positions may thus be in the same word, as in the following line:

(1) Hir pompe, hir sur-quy-dye, hir pryde (Mumming London 121)

According to Pyle's calculations, 2 5% of Lydgate's long lines are exceptions to the caesura norm: the syllables in the second and third strong positions form part

9 See Pyle, 'Pedigree'; C. S. Lewis, "The Fifteenth-Century Heroic Line', Essays and Studies, 24 (1938), 28-41. 10 Pyle, 'Pedigree', p. 30. French metrists denote the syllable count of a line or hemistich by an arabic numeral for the number of syllables up to and including the final (phrasal) stress plus the letter F (for feminin), if it is followed by an unaccented syllable, or M (for masculin), if it is not. The French conventions are employed in the present article both for this and for the names of metres; a line of 10M/F is thus a decasyllabic 11 Lewis, 'Fifteenth-Century Heroic', pp. 32-36. Beats and offbeats are the equivalent in traditional English metrics of the terms strong and weak positions in linguistic metrics (see Derek Attridge, The Rhythms of English Poetry, English Language Series, 14 (London: Longman, 1982), pp. 3-55). 12 My hypothesis is that Lydgate's short-line template contains eight positions, of which four are weak and four strong; and that his long-line template contains ten, of which five are weak and five strong. In my quotations syllables in strong positions are italicised. The correspondence rules of the English iambic pentameter allow first-foot inversion: the first prominent syllable in the verse instance may occur in the weak position 1, instead of the strong position 2. In my English quotations first-foot inversion is indicated by italicisation of the first(prominent ) syllable. For quotations from verse in other languages, see the footnotes below. Lydgate's Metrical Inventiveness and his Debt to Chaucer 231 of the same word, so that the mid-line word break occurs after 6M/F syllables. Our Lady 45 is typical of these exceptional lines:

(2a) And hathe no che-xy-shyng but the sonne shene.

There is, however, an alternative scansion of this line. Lydgate may have intended syncope to apply to the word 'cheryshing', making it two syllables, in the way that 'every' is usually two syllables in both Chaucer and Lydgate. I would also argue that the final schwa of 'sonne' should be syllabified (see the analysis of word-final schwa in Lydgate, below). The correct scansion of this line is therefore as follows:

(2b) And hathe no chery-shmg but the son-ne shene.

Delivered this way, this line is a great deal more aesthetically pleasing to ears that are used to Chaucer's rhythms than 2a. More importantly, it joins the overwhelming majority of the poem's lines in having a mid-line word break between the syllables in the second and third strong positions. The other examples of words in the sample of Our Lady that may be argued to occupy both the second and third strong positions in the line are 'yvory' (94), 'med(d)elyng' (165 and 170), and 'axeltre' (241). The first two of these can be reduced by a likely syncope to two syllables, and the third may have been regarded by the poet as two separate words for metrical purposes. Just as there is a satisfactory alternative explanation for Lydgate's long lines that appear to contain three beats/strong positions in the first hemistich, so there is for those of his lines that appear to have only two in the second. MacCracken says that he cannot be sure whether Lydgate mixes four-beat lines with five-beat ones, but there is a very simple test of this. Many of Lydgate's four-beat lines have a second hemistich which cannot possibly contain more than two beats: for example, 'withouten glose' (Mumming London 10), 'sodeyne shoures' (121), and 'avysement' (151). Many also have a firsthemistic h of 4F syllables followed by a second hemistich of just three syllables to the last stress: for example, 'in Fortune' (Mumming London 3), 'harmonye' (22), and 'ful of grace' (27). If Lydgate mixed four-beat lines in his five-beatverse , it would surely include some examples of both these types of second hemistich. But there are

13 MacCracken, Minor Poems, p. vm. 232 Martin J. Duffell no such lines in Our Lady nor, to my knowledge, in any five-beat poem by Lydgate.'4 There are, however, two lines in my sample of Our Lady with second hemistichs of only four syllables:'myght yet vnclose' (30) and 'raught vnto hevyn' (91). Since, as argued, these must contain three beats, Lydgate's correspondence rules must allow void weak positions (marked [V] below), and Our Lady 30 should thus be scanned as in instance (3), which has voids in both positions 5 and 7:

(3) That ne-uer man [V] myght [V] yet vn-close.

It should be noted, however, that even if Lydgate had occasionally included a four-beat line, for the sake of variety, in his five-beatverse , he would have had a precedent: four-beat lines may be found mixed with five-beat ones in fourteenth- century English alliterative metre, where some hemistichs have a third, subsidiary, prominence peak, while others do not. Although Lewis is correct in seeing Lydgate's long lines as compounded of two separate units, he does not state that the firsto f these normally contains two beats and the second three. Other statements and arguments in his article also deserve to be challenged. For example, he says that Lydgate's short lines are 'good enough octosyllabics', but argues that his long lines are not decasyllables at all. To test the validity of Lewis's view that Lydgate's metres are of two entirely different types, I have compared the syllable count and rhythm of the two samples, one in each metre, and the results are shown in Appendices

14 I am indebted to Rosamund Allen, not only for clarifying a number of difficult points about the syllabification of Lydgate's language, but also for searching the Troy Book for examples of second hemistichs that have the same structure as those from Mumming London quoted here. See John Lydgate: Troy Book, ed. by Robert R. Edwards, TEAMS in association with the University of Rochester (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, West Michigan University, 1998). 15 Lewis compares Lydgate's hemistichs to ones that 'hover (a misleading term) between two and three stresses' (see Lewis, 'Fifteenth-Century Heroic', p. 33). A (polysyllabic) weak position in either hemistich of fourteenth-century alliterative verse may contain a syllable with a (subsidiary) measure of stress, so that the hemistich has three rather than two prominence peaks. In Lydgate's long-line metre, on the other hand, only second hemistichs may contain a third peak - because only their template contains three strong positions. 16 Ibid., p. 28. 17 Ibid., pp. 29-39. Lydgate's Metrical Inventiveness and his Debt to Chaucer 233

18 A and B. The terms used to describe line and hemistich length are borrowed from the game of golf, which has short and convenient words for a target number [par), one below it (birdie), one above it (bogey), two below it (eagle), and two above it (double bogey). I have used these terms to describe different types of long line in Lydgate in preference to the letters of the alphabet firstpropose d by 19 Schick, because the golf terms are equally applicable to Lydgate's short-line verse, and thus save using as labels even more letters of the alphabet (all of which would have to be checked repeatedly by the reader). Appendices A and B demonstrate that Lydgate's shorter line is built on exactly the same principles as his longer one. His shorter line varies in both syllable count and rhythm as does his longer line; the two metres are very similar indeed. The major differences between Lydgate's shorter line and his longer one are that (a) the four-beat line has no caesura, whereas the five beats are always divided into two-and-three by a mid-line word boundary; (b) more of the five- beat lines contain a word-final schwa - which is to be expected, since they are longer and thus have 28% more chance of containing one; (c) hypermetric five- beat lines are rarer than hypermetric four-beat ones. Appendices A and B show that only three-fifths of Lydgate's octosyllables seem to have eight syllables, the same proportion as that of his decasyllables having ten. This puts in doubt whether Lewis is justified in describing either metre by its syllable count, but the consistency in the construction of the two types of line is strong evidence that syllabic irregularity in both of Lydgate's metres is the result, not of incompetence, but of the poet's metrical intention.

18 In Appendices A and B, figures for lines that contain no unelided word-final schwas are given under the heading 'schwa-less control'. Figures for lines that contain such schwas are given on the basis of a series of alternative assumptions. Assumption A is that all such schwas should be included in the syllable count; B is that none should be included; C is that such schwas may be included only when they correspond to the final weak position in each hemistich; D is that only those that occur between two stressed syllables should be included. Figures for the total sample are obtained by adding those for the schwa-less control to those for the favoured assumption (D). Lines and hemistichs are described in the appendices as having an iambic core if all their medial weak positions (those lying between strong positions in the same hemistich or unified line) contain exactly one syllable. 19 See Lydgate s Temple of Glas, ed. by J. Schick, EETS ES 60 (1891). 234 Martin J. Duffell

LYDGATE'S DECASYLLABLES Lydgate's long-line par is decasyllabic: almost three lines in every five of Our Lady axe decasyllables. Par lines are of five different types, four of which he could have derived from the French vers de dix as easily as from Chaucer. The following lines from The Life of Our Lady illustrate the fivetypes :

1. The line with a masculine caesura after 4M and a second hemistich of 6M/F This type of line is overwhelmingly the most common in the vers de dix of fourteenth- and fifteenth-centuryFrenc h poets, and is also very common in Chaucer.

(4) Why hast thou lost thy rea-son and thy sight (135)

2. The line with a French epic caesura after 4F and a second hemistich of 6M/F. French poets and metrists did not count the finalunaccente d syllable of either hemistich in the earliest vers de dix (from the eleventh to the thirteenth century).

(5) With sil-uex oVo-pes vp-ow the le-vesjdyre (34)

Later French poets abandoned this type of caesura; Chaucer may possibly have employed it, but we cannot be sure. He composed many lines with a first hemistich of 4F, if word-final schwa is counted, and a second hemistich of 6M/ F beginning with a consonant. He probably intended such a word-final schwa to be elided; if pronounced it would constitute an epic caesura.

3. The line with a French lyric caesura after 3F and a second hemistich of 6M/ F. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries almost all French poets employed this method of incorporating a feminine ending at the caesura, in place of the older epic convention. It is just possible that Chaucer employed lyric caesura in his long-line verse, but we cannot be sure. He sometimes uses words like 'lady' and 'beauty' in positions 3-4; they could either have been intended as lyric caesurae or they should be given the alternative pronunciations '\a-dy' and 'beau-r/, which we know were possible, because both are used as rhyme words elsewhere in Chaucer. Possible lyric caesurae are more common in Lydgate than in Chaucer, and the words involved include not only those with an alternative accentuation

20 Any deviation from strict syllable count is anathema to French metrists, but a vers de dix with lyric caesura is indistinguishable from a headless line with epic caesura, as in instance (6). Lydgate's Metrical Inventiveness and his Debt to Chaucer 235 but words that are normally paroxytonic, like '.yfar-res' (Our Lady 110), 'en-cre- seth' (Our Lady 159), and 'e-vyn' (below). Consider the following line which falls just outside the Our Lady sample:

(6) At the e-vyn who ta-keth hede ther-to (345)

This line, I believe, has a lyric caesura, but we cannot be certain, because it is possible to slur the two syllables of 'e-vyn' into a single syllable, 'ev'«', in which case the line becomes another of Lydgate's headless lines. Other words in this position may be similarly slurred in delivery, to 'Starr's' and 'en-cresW, for example. But it seems that Lydgate employed lyric caesura, because his verse design, with its fixed caesura after position 4, clearly has French antecedents, and because possible lyric caesurae in Lydgate are almost as common as lyric 21 caesurae in fourteenth-century French vers de dix. 4. The line with French elision at the caesura, producing a count of 4M + 6M/F with an elided -e between the hemistichs which disappears before a following vowel. This type is common in both French vers de dix and in Chaucer, who uses it frequently to delete schwas not required by the rhythm or syllable count. Lydgate, who probably did not count word-final schwa before an unstressed syllable, employs this type rather less.

(7) Or a-ny wem-me vn-to hir may-den-hede (8)

5. The line with caesura at 4F and a compensating syllable count of 5M/F in the second hemistich. This type of caesura is called a coupe italienne in French, because it was almost unknown in French vers de dix. Chaucer derived this line from Boccaccio, who, like all medieval Italian poets, employed it very frequently. Lydgate, who knew no Italian, must have derived this line from Chaucer.

(8) She was the cas-te\\ of the cris-ta\\ wall (29)

The only French decasyllables to allow this type of line are those of the Cinkante Balades of John Gower, whose verse design may have been influenced by Chaucer's experiments in English.

21 The origin of lyric caesura is musical: when vers de dix were set to music, the delivery of the word at the caesura was wrenched so as to make the fourth syllable prominent (e.g. da-me instead of da-me). 22 See Duffell, 'Chaucer, Gower and Hendecasyllable',pa.w/m. 236 Martin J. Duffell

SYLLABIC IRREGULARITY IN LYDGATE More than 40% of the lines in Our Lady are not decasyllables. Appendix B provides statistics for syllabically irregular lines, divided into six different types.

1. The birdie long line is almost always a decasyllable with the initial syllable of either the first or second hemistich missing. When it is the first, we have a 'headless line', which is unknown in French, but is employed by Chaucer (see, for example, Canterbury Tales, General Prologue, 1). Headless lines are more frequent in Lydgate than in Chaucer; an example from Our Lady is the following line:

(9) [V] Cau-seth all no won-dxe pat I sayde (174).

When the initial syllable of the second hemistich is missing, we have the 'broken- backed' line, which is very rare in Chaucer but common (and commonly castigated) in Lydgate.

(10) That ne-uex man [V] en-txe shall ne pace (55).

2. The bogey line is also of two main types; the first of these has an extra, unprominent initial syllable in either the firsto r second hemistich. There is no second hemistich in the sample with an extra initial syllable, but an example of a first hemistich with an additional initial syllable is the following line:

(11) For she is the tour w\-thou-tyn wor-des moo (26).

The second type of bogey line has an extra syllable in a medial weak position, like the following line, where the fourth weak position in the line contains two syllables; there is also an epic caesura (which is allowably decasyllabic and so does not make the line a double bogey).

(12) His ten pxe-cep-te I and byd-dyn-ges e-ueryche one (277).

3. The eagle line is usually the result of both hemistichs' lacking an initial syllable; this must be the case in (13), below, which I have scanned accordingly:

(13) [V] whan thay drynke, [V] ox-en to be white (220).

Norton Smith, however, supplies an extra syllable '[that]' after 'whan' in this line, and it is even just possible that the final schwa of 'drynke' should be syllabified (because it lies between two stressed syllables) and not elided before Lydgate's Metrical Inventiveness and his Debt to Chaucer 237 the initial vowel of 'oxen'. A second type of eagle line is produced whenever there are two void weak positions, and therefore only four syllables, in the second hemistich, as in instance (3).

4. There are no double bogey lines in my sample, if we exclude those in which one of the extra syllables is provided by an epic caesura.

5. The square line has an additional initial syllable in one hemistich balanced by a missing initial syllable in another. It is thus decasyllabic by double accident, and such lines have not been counted as par lines.

6. The lines termed other in Appendix B are either lines that are so irregular that they are likely to be the product of copying errors, or lines where the number of missing syllable(s) in one hemistich is not balanced fortuitously by the additional syllable(s) in the other.

THE SOURCES OF SYLLABIC IRREGULARITY IN ENGLISH VERSE One of the features of Lydgate's long-line versification that attracts modern criticism is the syllabic irregularity described above. But this criticism ignores the history of English metrics. In the early fifteenth century there were only two notable examples of syllabically regular long-line verse in English, those of Chaucer and Hoccleve . Chaucer's great experiment was derived from Italian poets Lydgate could not read and depended upon a feature of the language that was already archaic in the last quarter of the fourteenth century (syllabification of word-final schwa). In the fifteenth most of Chaucer's readers probably delivered his verse in the way defended in Southworth (see note 4), and it would never have occurred to them that Chaucer's lines were decasyllabic. The same would apply to Hoccleve's verse, except that it was much less widely read and is a much poorer advertisement for decasyllables than Chaucer's. Lydgate, like most English poets before him, almost certainly did not set out to compose verse that was syllabically regular. Nor did syllabically irregular English verse cease to be composed in the centuries that followed. Modern metrics offers simple

23 For analyses of Hoccleve's not-quite-iambic decasyllables see Judith A. Jefferson 'The Hoccleve Holographs and Hoccleve's Metrical Practice', in ^^fPea^l'l Editorial Problems in Later Middle English Literature, ed. by Derekpearsall (Woodbridge: Brewer, 1987); Duffell, 'Romance (Hen)decasyllable , pp. 483-88. 238 Martin J. Duffell explanations for the sources of that irregularity and describes it as a function of the correspondence rules within the poet's verse design. A major source of syllabic irregularity in both Germanic and Romance 24 verse is termed extrametricality by modem linguistics. Metrical phonologists argue that unstressed syllables at the right boundary of words (and of lines of verse) are not essential to the rhythm of the language: they are extrametrical. Thus iambic pentameters may contain either 10M or 10F syllables, and this does not affect the reader's perception of the pattern in the lines. Extrametricality is an even greater source of syllabic irregularity in two-part lines like Lydgate's long lines, because it applies to both hemistichs. Lydgate's line, like the Old French vers de dix, has 4M/F + 6M/F syllables (epic caesura), which means that the actual syllables may vary between ten and twelve, as can be seen by the equivalence of the following lines, taken from the Oxford manuscript of the Chanson de Roland:

(14) C° sent Ro-llant que la mort li est pres (2259)

(15) Sur l'her-be ver-te li quens Ro-llant se pas-met (2273)

Instance (14) has no extrametrical syllables, but (15) has one in each hemistich; the syllable after the final stress in each hemistich, according to metrical phonology, lies outside the rhythm of the lines/hemistichs: it is truly extrametrical. There are other sources of syllabic irregularity in Lydgate that have continued to be important features of English verse. Tarlinskaja makes a study of a type of verse that she demonstrates to have been very popular over a number of centuries in English, German, and Russian, and that she calls 'strict stress- meter' [sic; other writers refer to it as 'strong-stress metre']. The basic characteristic of this type of verse is that weak positions in the template may

24 See Richard Hogg and Christopher B. McCully, Metrical Phonology: A Course Book (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 106-23; Bruce Hayes, Metrical Stress Theory: Principles and Case Studies (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995), pp. 56-60. 25 See La Chanson de Roland, publiee d'apres le manuscrit d'Oxford: edition definitive, ed by Joseph Bedier (Paris: L'Edition d'Art H. Piazza, 1937). The template of the vers de dix has only two strong positions, marked here by italic typeface. 26 Marina Tarlinskaja, Strict Stress-Meter in English Poetry Compared with German and Russian (Calgary: Calgary University Press, 1993). Lydgate's Metrical Inventiveness and his Debt to Chaucer 239 correspond in individual verse instances to zero, one, or two syllables. Tarlinskaja's work is evidence that Lydgate is not unique in composing verse with a small variation in weak-position size and, of course, in fourteenth-century alliterative verse as many as four syllables may correspond to a weak position. Because Lydgate had no Italian, Chaucer's is the only verse that the younger poet would have known where weak positions generally contain one syllable; and even in Chaucer there are exceptions. Those exceptions were mostly line- initial, and in them Chaucer was observing a rhythmic principle that has parallels both in music and in the stress-syllabic verse composed in more recent centuries. In music rhythmic units, or bars, are always held to begin with the first beat (strong position) and musical rhythms are indifferent to anacrusis, the presence or absence of one or two notes before the firstbea t in the firstbar . The same phenomenon (we might term it extramusicality) can be seen in English verse of almost every century, and can be illustrated here with three lines from Robert Browning's Abt Vogler (1,7, and 26):

(16) Would that the struc-tuxe brave the wa-ni-fold mu-s\c I build

(17) Should rush in-to sight at once, as he named the in-e/fa-ble name

(18) And the e-mu-lous hea-ven yearned down, made ef-foxt to reach the earth.

Instance (16) has no extramusical syllables in the first hemistich, and one in the second; (17) has one in the first, and two in the second; (18) has two in the first, and one in the second. It is obvious from these examples that Browning's verse

27 For the fourteenth-century alliterative line see 77ie Poems of the Pearl Manuscript: Pearl', 'Cleanness', 'Patience', 'Sir Gawain and the Green Knight', 2nd edn, ed. by Malcolm Andrew and Ronald Waldron (Exeter: University of Exeter, 1987), p. 47; for more recent theories see 77ie Wars of Alexander, ed. by Hoyt N. Duggan and Thorlac Turville-Petre, EETS ss 10 (1989), pp. xvii-xxiv; Thomas Cable, The English Alliterative Tradition (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991); and essays by Duggan, Kennedy, and Putter and Stokes in this volume. 28 For an example of anacrusis in music see Rudiments and Theory of Music (London: Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music, 1958) p. 34. 29 See Browning: Poetical Works 1833-1864, ed. by Ian Jack, Oxford Paperbacks 355 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975). 240 Martin J. Duffell design allows zero, one, or two syllables before the first strong position of each hemistich and is indifferent to this amount of variation. It should also be noted that the finalwea k position in the second hemistich of (18) contains not two syllables , but one. This last feature of (18) may be a lapse into strict-stress metre; I would regard it, nevertheless, as evidence that much modern English verse allows variation in the size of weak positions.

THE SYLLABIFICATION OF WORD-FINAL SCHWA IN LYDGATE Another point made by Lewis that deserves to be challenged is his denial that the desyllabification of word-final schwa, which took place between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, may be in any way responsible for the problem modem readers have with Lydgate's metrics. Lewis reasoned that a disciple who understood that Chaucer's line was decasyllabic and iambic, when schwa is pronounced, would have been able to reproduce those two qualities in verse in which schwa were deleted. But history shows that this is an unreasonable expectation. Firstly, schwa deletion occurred in French about a century later than in English, but no French poet has ever tried to adjust the lines of French syllabic verse for the effects of vowel deletion. To this day French poets count the schwas that are not there. Secondly, in the twentieth century, there has occurred an even more interesting parallel with the changes in Middle English. Peninsular Portuguese has been losing all extrametrical final vowels and the finalwritte n vowels, -a, -e, and -o, are no longer pronounced in normal speech (although Brazilians still pronounce them). This is a more interesting parallel to the deletion of word-final schwa in Middle English because Portuguese, like English and unlike French, is a language with strong word stress, and also one in which stress- timing predominates. No Portuguese poet has done what Lewis argued was to be expected in the event of schwa loss: that is, employ the same metres, but with final vowels excluded from the count. Instead Portuguese poets have adopted

30 Lewis, 'Fifteenth-Century Heroic', p. 28. 31 For a discussion of stress-timing see Hans J. Giegerich, 'On Stress-Timing in English Phonology', Lingua, 51 (1980), 187-221; Peter Roach, 'On the Distinction between "Stress-timed" and "Syllable-timed" Languages', in Linguistic Controversies: Essays in Honour of F. R. Palmer, ed. by David Crystal (London: Edward Arnold, 1984), pp. 73-79; R. T. Ohrle, 'Temporal Structure in Verse Design', in Phonetics and Phonology, i: Rhythm and Meter, ed. by Paul Kiparsky and Gilbert Youmans (San Diego: Academic Press, 1989), pp. 87-119. Lydgate's Metrical Inventiveness and his Debt to Chaucer 241

one of two policies: they have either continued to use the traditional syllabic metres, counting the final vowels that are not there in normal speech (like the French), or they have deserted them for freeverse . Their solutions to the problem of final-vowel deletion are either (1) to cling to tradition, one that is no longer based on phonology, or (2) to seek an alternative metrical system. Lydgate was, of course, able to do both, because Chaucer's pentameter was only a recent innovation; Lydgate could revert to the traditional English system of versification that was based, not on the numerical regulation of syllables, but on that of prominence peaks (corresponding to strong positions in the verse template). The first poet to do what Lewis argues is natural was Robert Henryson, who in the late fifteenth century composed iambic pentameters in which word-final schwa 32 did not count as a syllable. Henryson, however, wrote in the Scottish dialect, where the deletion of word-final schwa was complete a hundred years earlier than in that of South Eastern England. An interval of several generations occurred between the completion of final-vowel deletion in Middle English and the composition of the firststress - syllabic verse in the new language, and the same thing appears to be happening in Portuguese. It can be hypothesised that this is more than coincidence. In both languages final-vowel deletion has produced a glut of new monosyllables, all of them former strong syllables with stress. Modern English is largely a monosyllabic language: in Paradise Lost, an example chosen for its elevated style, 76% of words (as items) and 56% of syllables are monosyllables. In a typical French text it is around 60% of words, but in a language with pronounced 33 final vowels, like Italian (or Old English), it is just over 30%. Initially, I would argue from the Portuguese experience, when final-vowel deletion is complete, the new ex-strong monosyllables cause prosodic problems to both speakers and poets. Consider the following constructs; the first is an attempt at a verso heroico in final-vowel-deletedPortuguese ; the second half of this line has the same rhythm as the English pentameter in final-schwa-deleted Middle English that

32 Robert Henryson: 'The Testament ofCresseid', ed. by Denton Fox (London: Nelson, 1968). For an analysis of Henryson's iambic pentameter see Duffell, 'The Romance (Hen)decasyllable', pp. 488-93. 33 A. C. Bradley, 'Monosyllabic Lines and Words', in Literary English since Shakespeare, ed. by G. Watson (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1970), pp. 50-64 (p. 63); Marina Tarlinskaja, English Verse: Theory and History, trans, from the Russian (The Hague: Mouton, 1976), p. 14. 242 Martin J. Duffell

follows it (the deleted vowels, placed in brackets, are excluded from the syllable 34 count of each line). (b)* Um-[a] es-to-tua de mim em corp-[o] viv-[o] ve-jo

(c)* I saugh the larg-[e] mon-[e], bright and «o-thyng/?a/e

The first construct is totally unacceptable to present-day Portuguese speakers as a valid line in this metre; at this relatively early stage of final-vowel deletion, Portuguese speakers cannot bring themselves to restress the ex-strong mono syllables, subordinating 'viv' to 'corp' and 'vejo'. Instead they prefer to do one of two things for eurhythmic reasons: they either resurrect the final vowels that have disappeared from normal speech, or they insert pauses between the ex-strong monosyllables (many people make the lip movements of a missing vowel, but do not voice it). A Portuguese reader would thus argue that (b)* is packed with too many syllables. Modern Portuguese poets who compose versos heroicos (Fernando Pessoa and Rui Namorado, for example) resurrect the deleted vowels in order to give eurhythmy to their lines. " To a reader who believed that final vowels are never pronounced in Portuguese their lines would appear to have too few syllables. This seems to be a close parallel to the Middle English situation that we find in Lydgate's verse, where many lines have too few syllables and ugly rhythms, if word-final schwa is deleted and not included in the syllable count. Minkova shows that in a number of late medieval English works eurhythmy (the prevention of clashing stresses) is the main factor in determining whether word-final schwa is syllabified in strong adjectival noun groups. Her

34 The verso heroico has a template in which the positions alternate weak/strong only from position 5 to the end of the line. I have nevertheless marked prominent syllables in positions 1-4 by italic typeface. 35 Construct (b)* is actually a line by Pessoa with the word vejo added at the end, and Uma for Numa at the beginning (see Eugenio de Andrade, ed. by Fernando de Pessoa, Poesias escolhidas, Campo da Poesia, 1 (Porto: Campo das Letras, 1995), p. 48); Rui Namorado, Sete caminhos (Coimbra: Fora do Texto, 1990). The most skilful modern Portuguese poets normally obtain the modem pronunciation of words with final-vowel deletion by eliding thefinal vowe l before a following vowel, as in 'Te-mos a-gor-[a] um-[a] outr-[a] E-der-ni-da-de' (Ibid., p. 29). This is exactly the device Chaucer seems to have used to dispose of word-final schwas that were redundant to his metre. 36 Donka Minkova, 'Adjectival Inflexion Relics and Speech Rhythm in Late Middle and Early Modem English', in Papers from the 5th International Conference on Historical Linguistics, ed. by Sylvia Adamson and others (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1990), pp. 313-36 (pp. 321-30). Lydgate's Metrical Inventiveness and his Debt to Chaucer 243

arguments are fully supported by the present analysis of Lydgate's verse. Both Appendices A and B show that the assumption that makes Lydgate's lines with word-final schwas most like his lines without them is Assumption D. Schwa counts as a syllable in Lydgate when it occurs between two stressed syllables. As a result, Lydgate composed many lines like the following (construct (c)* was obtained by adding two syllables to this line to compensate for final-schwa deletion):

(19) The lar-ge mo-ne, bryght and no-thyng pale (Our Lady 114)

It is possible that Lydgate also employed the other modem Portuguese tactic for dealing with consecutive stresses, the eurhythmic pause: the only tolerable way to deliver his broken-backed lines and lines with void weak positions is by employing such pauses. Because English speakers have had five-centuries experience, they can see that the way to obtain an iambic rhythm in construct (c)* is to make 'larg-[e]' more prominent than 'mon-[e]' (dropping the stress . 38 grid one level, as metrical phonologists term it ). But poets writing in modern

37 Each of Lydgate's two verse designs has one, and only one, template. The statistically significant differences between my figures for lines with and without mid-line final schwa can only be due to its treatment in his correspondence rules. Of the assumptions that I have tested, only D produces statistics that are consistent with both being derived from the same template. 38 For an analysis of phrasal stress see Hayes, Metrical Stress Theory, pp. 367-99. Metrical phonologists show relative stress in English as a grid in which one level represents word stress and a higher level phrasal stress. The stress of monosyllables (other than those in clitic groups, like 'to be') depends on their position in this phrasal hierarchy. Similarly, in modern English and Portuguese versification monosyllables are neutral: they may occupy either strong or weak positions. Modern Portuguese experience suggests that, for several generations after final-vowel deletion is complete in normal speech, the new (ex-strong) monosyllables so created are not labelled monosyllables in the poet's lexicon: poets like Pessoa (and Lydgate?) remain conscious of the deleted finalvowe l and avoid placing such words in weak positions in their verse. 244 Martin J. Duffell

Portuguese, like Lydgate writing in fifteenth-centuryEnglish , are not at ease with the reassignment of stress to a series of new (ex-strong) monosyllables. A major reason, then, why Lydgate's verse seems ugly to modern ears is his frequent employment of two tactics that avoid the reassignment of stress, both of which have been long abandoned in English: eurhythmic final vowels and eurhythmic pauses. Portuguese scholars ascribe the use of these two tactics in modem Portuguese to 'the pull of the orthography'. I prefer to call it 'the pull of the memory' - for the tactics last only as long as speakers recall that a syllable was there. Eurhythmic final vowels and pauses proved short-term solutions to the problem of how to handle the new stock of ex-strong monosyllables in Middle English. Reassigning phrasal stress to the new linguistic material was the long- term solution. There is another long-term solution to the problem of a glut of new ex-strong monosyllables: weakening word stress. This is what most writers believe happened in French. Once schwa deletion occurred, most of the syllables in French phrases were ones that were formerly stressed. But stressing everything emphasises nothing, making word stress redundant. In this situation French-speakers wisely chose to save their breath to cool their croissants, and word stress has disappeared from the modern language, leaving only the phrasal stress that we find at the end of French lines and hemistichs.

39 Although Lydgate seems to have syllabified final schwa between two stressed syllables, the correct treatment of three consecutive stresses seems to vary. In most instances the two finalschwa s seem to have been syllabified, as in (19), above, where the three words occupy five positions; more rarely both schwas seem to require deletion, so that the second stressed syllable corresponds to a weak position, as in 'bere bothe lefe' (162), where the three words occupy only three positions. This indicates that Lydgate did sometimes reassign phrasal stress to a series of new (ex- strong) monosyllables but, on the whole, he preferred the modem Portuguese solution to the problem. The use of a eurhythmic final schwa or pause, however, clearly depends on the speaker's remembering that there was once a syllable there. But it is human to forget. As a result the subordination of stressed (lexical) monosyllable to neighbouring stresses (reassignment) became the norm in English verse from the sixteenth century onwards. It is termed demotion in traditional English metrics (see Attridge, Rhythms of English Poetry, pp. 168-72). 40 See, e.g., Alfred Ewert, The French Language, 2nd edn (London: Faber and Faber, 1943), pp. 105-06; Ernst Pulgram, 'Prosodic systems: French', Lingua, 13 (1964), 125-44. Lydgate's Metrical Inventiveness and his Debt to Chaucer 245

A PARAMETRIC COMPARISON OF CHAUCER'S AND LYDGATE'S VERSE DESIGNS In order to see how much Lydgate's long-line verse design owes to Chaucer's and how much it derives fromothe r sources the parameters proposed by Hanson 41 and Kiparsky as the basic measure for all metres will be employed. The first two parameters describe the poet's template: (1) position number, and (2) orientation. The remaining three describe the poet's correspondence rules: (3) position size, (4) prominence site, and (5) prominence type. To place this comparison in perspective I shall also examine these parameters as they apply to English long-line verse before Chaucer.

(1) & (2) Both Chaucer and Lydgate had a template of five positions that was right-strong: the weak positions precede the strong. Lydgate's template, however, contained a mandatory word break preventing the syllables in second and third strong positions from being in the same word. This gave his lines only two possible caesurae: 0101-01 0 101 or 01010-10101. Traditional English long-line verse had a template with eight positions and was left-strong (hence the employment of left-strong phoneme repetition, alliteration, before right-strong, rhymelassonance). The traditional English template, like Lydgate's, had a mandatory word break between the second and third strong positions; in my notation it was: 1 0 1 0- 1 0 1 0 or 1 0 1 -0 1 0 1 0.

(3) In Chaucer's verse the maximum position size is one syllable (like that of his Italian models); in Lydgate's it is one syllable for strong positions, but zero to two for weak positions. In traditional English long-line verse, maximum position size was one for strong positions, but zero to four for weak ones.

(4) I am not as convinced as Hanson and Kiparsky that only one type of position (0 or 1) may be constrained in the verse design of the English iambic pentameter. They state that the correspondence rules of Shakespeare's pentameter constrain only weak positions, so that they may not contain the strong syllables of polysyllabic words.42 On balance, I would argue that Chaucer's correspondence rules constrain both weak and strong positions, while Lydgate's, like those of traditional English long-line verse, constrain only strong positions.

41 See note 7. 42 Hanson and Kiparsky, 'Parametric Theory , p. 246 Martin J. Duffell

(5) Since Chaucer's rules allow both unstressed (grammatical) monosyllables to appear in strong positions and stressed (lexical) ones to appear in weak, his prominence type, like Shakespeare's, is strength: the strong syllables of polysyllabic words are constrained from appearing in weak positions. But Chaucer does not employ disyllabic substitution. As a result, his strong positions are also constrained from allowing the weak syllables of polysyllabic words. Words like 'many' in Shakespeare's pentameters are argued by Hanson and Kiparsky to occupy a strong position, thus allowing strong positions to contain weak syllables. In Chaucer the words 'many a' always occupy only two positions, but it can be argued that the correct scansion of this phrase is not 'ma-ny a' but 'ma-nya', not three syllables, but two, and that therefore Chaucer's strong positions do not contain weak syllables. I thus see Chaucer's pentameter as being 'syllable-based' in Hanson and Kiparsky's terms, not 'foot-based'. Lydgate also uses monosyllables of both types in both types of position, and so his prominence type is also strength. But, since his correspondence rules allow two syllables (maximum) in a weak position, those syllables are sometimes a disyllabic word, of which one syllable must be strong. His weak positions may therefore contain strong syllables, and only his strong positions are constrained in Hanson and Kiparsky's absolute sense. The correspondence rules of traditional English long-line verse constrain unstressed syllables from appearing in strong positions; the position size of four syllables obviously allows all types of syllable to occur in its weak positions. Lydgate's verse design resembles Chaucer's in respect of (1) position number (five) and (5) prominence type (strength); it resembles that of traditional English long-line verse in respect of (4) prominence site (strong positions); and it lies half-way between those of Chaucer and traditional English long-line verse in respect of (2) orientation (it is right-strong but has a mandatory mid-line word break) and (3) position size (two syllables maximum for weak positions). This analysis supports the contention of Lewis that Lydgate's metre forms part of a

43 See Robert P. Stockwell and Donka Minkova, 'On the Partial Contact Origin of Iambic Pentameter Verse', unpubl. paper circulated in the English and Linguistics Departments of the Univ. of California, Los Angeles, 1995. The authors carry out a detailed comparison of triple time in Chaucer's earlier and later works. They argue that there is more triple time in the later verse, but conclude that it is not the result of disyllabic substitution. Lydgate's Metrical Inventiveness and his Debt to Chaucer 247

tradition that was older than Chaucer's iambic pentameter."4 Lydgate's verse design follows Chaucer in some things but reverts to older types of verse design in others.

CONCLUSION: LYDGATE'S METRICAL INTENTION The foregoing analysis and discussion establishes that Lydgate's verse design was different from Chaucer's and was more conservative. This is perhaps not surprising, since Chaucer's was so revolutionary: his verse design differs from traditional English long-line verse designs on every one of Hanson and Kiparsky's parameters. Lydgate was, of course, a more conservative man in every way than Chaucer, but there is also another factor that helped produce the difference between their verse designs. Chaucer knew and read Italian, and he was sustained . 45 in his revolutionary undertaking by the examples of Petrarch and Boccaccio. Lydgate, in contrast, had only English and French models, and French lines (as 46 Lewis notes) contain no rhythm whatsoever within the hemistich. The patterns 47 of French syllabic verse lie between hemistichs, not within them. The French vers de dix offers three main features for imitation: strict syllable count, rhythmic variability, and a fixed caesura. Lydgate borrowed only the last of these; Chaucer had borrowed the first, because he had learned from his Italian models that a regular syllable count can be combined aesthetically with accentual regularity in a language with strong word stress. Lydgate preferred to borrow the fixed caesura, partly because he had not seen what Italian poets could do without one, partly because it was also a feature of traditional English long-line verse (while syllabic regularity was to him typically French). As for accentual regularity, he made his lines predominantly iambic because he recognised that English speech is predominantly in duple time. Before condemning the imperfect iambicity of

44 Lewis, 'Fifteenth-Century Heroic', pp. 39-40. 45 Barry Windeatt points out that many lines in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde are translated stress-for-stress as well as word-for-word from Boccaccio's Filostrato (see Geoffrey Chaucer: Troilus and Criseyde, ed. by B. A. Windeatt (London: Longman, 1984)). 46 Lewis,'Fifteenth-Century Heroic', p. 38. 47 Comulier uses the term metrique svllabique indifferenciee to describe French syllabic metrics and argues that this type of verse occurs only in French and Japanese (see Benoit de Comulier, Art poetique: problemes et notions de metrique (Lyon: Presses de l'University de Lyon, 1995), pp. 111-15). 248 Martin J. Duffell

Lydgate's lines, we should remember that poets whom we rate much more highly also wrote lines that were only predominantly iambic. Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio all composed their masterpieces in iambic lines interspersed with triple-time ones, in the interests of rhythmic variety. Lydgate was thirty when Chaucer died, and it seems unlikely that he did not understand how the older poet's metre worked. The English language in the first quarter of the fifteenth century was in a state of upheaval: in the final stages of schwa deletion, shifting the phonic value of some vowels, and changing the accentuation of French-derived words such as 'beauty'. Chaucer's experiment was the only attempt at combining syllabic with accentual regularity that Lydgate knew. But Chaucer's success had depended on the syllabification of many final schwas, an archaism even in the last quarter of the fourteenth century. Lydgate, without the advantage of the modem reader's hindsight, probably regarded perfect regularity of both syllable and accent as a lost cause; as, indeed, it was until English sixteenth-century poets went again to Italian models for their metre. Lydgate, it can be argued, constructed the best verses he could with the materials at hand; his contemporaries recognised this, hence his many prestigious commissions and his fame, I would argue that it is now time for us to revise our valuation of John Lydgate as a versifier. There is a Chinese proverb: 'Lucky is the man who is bom in boring times.' Lydgate was unlucky enough to be bom in very exciting times for the English language, but his solution of how to versify in the midst of such adversity won the unstinting admiration of his contemporaries, and surely deserves ours. He can be compared to an athlete who jumps eight metres into a hundred-mile-an-hour gale; it won't gain him an Olympic record, but it should win him an enormous amount of respect from everyone who knows the event.

48 See the forthcoming study by Kristin Hanson, 'From Dante to Pinsky: A Theoretical Perspective on the History of the English Iambic Pentameter', in Rivista di Lingupslica (special issue on rhythm in language, ed. Irene Vogel), in press. Lydgate's Metrical Inventiveness and his Debt to Chaucer 249

Appendix A Metrical Analysis of Mumming at London (poem total = 342 lines; unelided schwa = 147 lines; no unelided schwa = 195 lines)

(sch wa-less) (with unelided schwa) control control % A% B% C% D% + D% Line Length par 62 27 52 57 61 62 birdie (-1) 19 2 32 27 19 19 eagle (-2) 0 0 5 3 1 1 bogey (+1) 16 50 11 12 17 17 double (+2) 2 16 1 1 1 1 other (var.) 0 4 0 0 0 0 [total variance 0 104 34 21 4 2] Rhythm iambic core 68 29 55 59 71 69

Appendix BMetrical Analysis of Life of Our Lady, II. 519-860 (sample total = 342 lines; unelided schwa = 204 lines; no unelided schwa =138 lines)

(schwa-less) (with unelided schwa) control control % A% B% C% D% + D% Line length par 59 59 34 65 56 57 birdie (-1) 36 5 47 20 31 33 eagle (-2) 3 1 4 1 2 2 bogey (+1) 1 18 1 6 2 2 double (+2) 0 1 0 0 0 0 square (-/+) 1 12 5 7 8 4 other (var.) 1 4 9 1 2 2

[total variance: 65 49 35 18 7]

Rhythm iambic core 78 50 53 60 69 73