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Lydgate's Metrical Inventiveness and His Debt to Chaucer

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Lydgate's Metrical Inventiveness and His Debt to Chaucer /\GJDWH V0HWULFDO,QYHQWLYHQHVVDQGKLV'HEWWR&KDXFHU 0DUWLQ-'XIIHOO Parergon, Volume 18, Number 1, July 2000, pp. 227-249 (Article) 3XEOLVKHGE\$XVWUDOLDQDQG1HZ=HDODQG$VVRFLDWLRQRI0HGLHYDO DQG(DUO\0RGHUQ6WXGLHV ,QF DOI: 10.1353/pgn.2000.0038 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 first poet 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 fixed caesura, a mandatory mid-line word break after the fourth or fifth syllable 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.
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