EVANS Chaucerian Rhyme-Breaking.pdf

Ruth Evans DRAFT UNPUBLISHED PAPER [email protected] Presentation at NCS 2016 Session 10F: Seminar: Meters and Stanza-Forms: The Favorite and the Forgotten Thread: Literary Forms Chaucerian Rhyme-Breaking I will be talking today about a metrical feature of Chaucer’s poetry that is relatively neglected. My topic is rhyming couplets in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, specifically, his use of a practice known as rhyme-breaking. I argue that this is an aspect of Chaucer’s formal technique that deserves much greater attention, and that in borrowing the technique from twelfth-century poets Chaucer’s innovation was to exploit it for the purposes of irony. The term rhyme-breaking has its origins in nineteenth-century German prosody (it’s a calque of German “Reimbrechung” or “Reimpaarbrechung”), but it also has a counterpart in the slightly later French term “la brisure du couplet.”1 Both “Reimbrechung” and “la brisure du I would like to thank Valerie Allen, Megan Gilge, Stephen Knight, Evelyn Meyer, and Eric Weiskott. 1 The Duden dictionary has no entry for Reimbrechung or Reimpaarbrechung, but a Google search for Reimbrechung shows that the term begins to be recorded in or around 1870, and is still being used by German critics today. The German Wikipedia entry for Brechung (Verslehre) has the following definition: “Bei der ReimpaarBrechung gehört der erste Vers eines Reimpaars zur gleichen syntaktischen Einheit wie der vorhergehende Vers und der zweite Vers zur syntaktischen Einheit des folgenden Verses. [The first line of a couplet in a rhyme-couplet breaking belongs to the same syntactic unit as the previous line [i.e., the second line of the previous couplet] and the second line [of a couplet] is part of the syntactic unit of the following line [i.e., of the next couplet]” (translation mine). The online Universal-Lexikon defines Reimbrechung as: “syntaktische Trennung der in einem Reimpaar verbundenen Verse (aa), während die syntaktisch verbundenenVerse verschiedenen Reimpaaren angehören (im Unterschied zur Reimbindung, bei der die den gleichen Reimtragenden Verse auch syntaktisch zusammengehören, was über längere Strecken monoton wirkt). Seit der Mittedes 12. Jahrhunderts drang in der deutschen Dichtung die Reimbrechung auf Kosten der Reimbindung immermehr vor; meisterhaft beherrschten sie Gottfried von Strassburg und Konrad von Würzburg. Der TerminusReimbrechung ist im Anschluss an die von Wolfram von Eschenbach im »Parzival« gebrauchte Wendung »rîme. . . samnen unde brechen« geprägt worden, in der »rîm« die alte Bedeutung »Vers« hat.” The term “brisure du couplet” (breaking the couplet) seems to have originated with Jean Frappier, “La Brisure du couplet dans Érec et Énide,” Romania 86 (1965): 1-21, who took his cue from a much earlier, admired article by Paul Meyer on the couplet in medieval French, Spanish, and Italian literature: “Le Couplet de deux vers,” Romania 13 (1894): 1-35. Meyer does not use the phrase “La brisure du couplet,” but rather talks of “couplets brisés” (see, for example, p. 13), nor – oddly – does he once refer to German verse. Alice M. Colby’s The Portrait in Twelfth-Century French Literature: An Example of the Stylistic Originality of Chrétien de Troyes (Geneva: Droz, 1965) uses the term “breaking of the couplet.” See also Joseph J. Duggan, The Romances of Chrétien de Troyes (New Haven: Yale UP, 2001), p. 284. What’s striking is how insulated from each other the German and French critical traditions appear to be – and from the Anglophone tradition. It is possible that the terms “Reimbrechung” 1 couplet” have long, if somewhat fitfully, been in the prosodic lexicon of German and French medievalists because the technique is heavily deployed in Middle High German courtly romances and twelfth-century French narrative poetry, especially in the works of Wolfram von Eschenbach and Chrétien de Troyes. It’s also heavily deployed by Chaucer. Yet rhyme-breaking is a term that is hardly used today by Anglophone prosodists, and not at all by Chaucerians, with the exception, as far as I know, of Stephen Knight.2 This is somewhat surprising, since rhymebreaking is a striking feature of Chaucer’s handling of rhyming couplets.3 and “la brisure du couplet” developed independently at around the same time in Germany and France respectively, but that would be odd, and needs further investigation. Alice Colby’s study of Chrétien, with its extensive analysis of his use of “breaking of the couplet” appeared in 1965, the same year as Frappier’s article, but neither knew the other’s work on rhyme-breaking. Colby derives her insights, like Frappier, from Meyer’s 1894 article. There is also an interesting brief history to be written about the relative lack of currency, in discussions of Middle English verse form, of terms from German prosodists. Since much of the discussion of rhyme-breaking by German medievalists concerns MHG romances, this lack of currency may be related to James Schultz’s comment that “the German tradition [of MHG texts] … has received little attention from scholars writing outside Germany” (“Introduction,” Courtly Love, the Love of Courtliness, and the History of Sexuality (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2006), p. xix). 2 See Stephen Knight, The Poetry of the Canterbury Tales (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1973), p. x [sic], where he defines rhyme-breaking as “the effect created when the rhyme and the syntax do not coincide: In Lettow had he reysed and in Ruce, No Cristen man so ofte of his degree. ([Knight’s Tale] 54-5),” and discusses the contribution of rhyme-breaking to the irony in the portrait of the Prioress in the General Prologue (10). Knight also goes into the topic for a paragraph or so in Ryming Craftily: Meaning in Chaucer’s Poetry (Angus and Robertson: Sydney, 1973), pp. 131 and 190, but does not use the term “rhyme-breaking” itself: in a discussion of the technique in The Franklin’s Tale, ll. 820-28, Knight argues that the completion of the sentence in the ninth line “does not give the even rhythms we might expect because the two-line syntax units are exactly at odds with the two-line rhyme units,” contending that “[c]onsequently, the passage has a disturbing effect” (190). In a private email, Knight has told me that he does not know where he got the term rhyme-breaking from. Roger S. Loomis alludes to the practice in his review of the Middle English romance of Richard Coeur de Lion and its Anglo-Norman source, but calls it, after Karl Brunner, either “Reimbrechung” or “the split couplet” (or “split couplet”), never “rhyme-breaking”: Review of Der Mittelenglische Versroman über Richard Löwenherz, Vol. XLII, ed. Karl Brunner, Journal of English and Germanic Philology 15.3 (1916): 455-66 (458). Loomis seems to be encountering the technique for the first time: “We gather from pp. 35 f. that Dr. Brunner means by Reimbrechung a couplet where there is a sharp break in the sense after the first line (indicated usually by colon or period) and where either one line or both are closely connected by the sense with what precedes or follows the couplet” (458). The OED does not have an entry for either “rhyme-breaking” or “split couplet,” the latter being a term that today usually means something very different from rhyme-breaking, namely a “rhymed two line form with the first line in iambic pentameter and the second in iambic dimeter” (http://poetscollective.org/poetryforms/split-couplet/). 3 As Jakob Schipper observes, rhyme-breaking may, of course, also occur in other metres, for example, in four-foot iambic verses, such as in the poetry of the Earl of Surrey: A History of English Versification (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1910), p. 148. Alliterative verse has its own version of rhyme-breaking. When syntax crosses line units, the result is what the Germans call Hakenstil (as opposed toZeilenstil). It’s very common in Old English verse, where sentences or paragraphs often begin in the second half of the line (b-verse). Hakenstil is rather uncommon in Middle English alliterative verse, though, where poets prefer to vary the meter/syntax relationship through enjambment, which is less directly analogous to rhyme-breaking in rhyming verse. I thank Eric Weiskott for this reference. See also Eric Weiskott, “Alliterative Meter and the Textual Criticism of the Gawain Group,” YLS 29 (2015): 151-175. 2 The simplest definition of the term is Knight’s: “where syntax crosses rhyme units.”4 A more explanatory, though somewhat unwieldy definition is provided by the German-Austrian philologist Jakob Schipper, in his 1910 English translation of his Englische Metrik (1881–88), A History of English Versification: Another metrical licence connected with the line-end … is rhyme-breaking. This occurs chiefly in rhyming couplets, and consists in ending the sentence with the first line of the couplet, instead of continuing it (as is usually done) till the end of the second line. Thus the close connexion of the two lines of the couplet effected by the rhyme is broken up by the logical or syntactic pause occurring at the end of the first line. This is used rarely, and so to say unconsciously, by the earlier Middle English poets, but is frequently applied, and undoubtedly with artistic intention, by Chaucer and his successors.5 The technique is best understood through illustration. Schipper’s example is from the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales: A Yeman hadde he and servantz namo … At that tyme, for him liste ride so, And he was clad in cote and hood of grene. A sheef of pecok arwes, bright and kene, Stephen Knight, “Introduction,” Gamelyn, TEAMS edition: “Equally the ‘rhyme-breaking’ characteristic of Chaucer, where syntax crosses rhyme units, is almost unknown in Gamelyn, which tends to march steadily on with two and four line statements, all squarely mapped onto rhyme.” 5 Schipper, A History of English Versification, pp. 148-9. 4 3 Under his belt he bar ful thriftily … (Gen. Prol. 101-5)6 The first sentence – “clad in cote and hood of grene’ – ends with the first line of the couplet (that is, midway through the couplet), and offers not only a “logical or syntactic pause” but a respiratory one, which would have been emphasized in performance. A new sentence – or, more properly, syntactic unit – begins in the next line, and that line completes the rhyme of the couplet that the ear expects (“grene” / “kene”) but does not complete the syntactic unit, which extends beyond the couplet into the following lines. It’s not just rhyme that’s at stake; it’s also the form of the couplet itself, its apparent boundedness, which is nevertheless capable of being broken, and at stake also is the larger syntactic structure which the couplet punctuates. Our expectation is that the rhyme will clinch the couplet, and that the couplet will coincide with the end of a sentence. Rhyme-breaking violates the principle that “a change from one rhyme group to another signifies a change in subject matter.”7 There are two systems operating here – a rhyming and a syntactic – and they sometimes coincide and sometimes diverge. We might think of it as two walkers out of step with each other.8 The effects, as we’ll see, are various. Schipper’s comment about the unconscious use of the technique in Middle English poets before Chaucer begs the question, and could no doubt be argued against. But what of Chaucer’s “artistic intention”? The rhyme-breaking in the Yeoman’s portrait may not at first seem remarkable, but it draws attention to details of his dress, and may serve to make the audience 6 All quotations from Chaucer are from The Riverside Chaucer, gen. ed. Larry D Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987). 7 The classic example of this expectation is the volta in a sonnet, widely cited on the internet but without any source. 8 Might one also think of this technique in relation to medieval polyphonic music, such as isorythm and clausulae? See the New Grove Dictionary of Music: http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com.ezp.slu.edu/subscriber/article/grove/music/43718pg3?q=clausulae&search=quic k&source=omo_gmo&pos=6&_start=1#firsthit. 4 especially alert to sartorial markers of social degree. The General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales contains numerous examples of rhyme-breaking that play even more dynamically with the formal and aural effects of this simultaneous arrest and take-off. Its use is particularly insistent in the Prioress’s portrait. Here are three examples where the syntactic unit crosses the rhyme unit: And peyned hire to countrefete cheere Of court, and to ben estatlich of manere, And to be holden digne of reverence. But for to speken of hire conscience … (139-41) She wolde wepe, if that she saugh a mous Kaught in a trappe, if it were deed or bledde. Of smale houndes hadde she that she fedde … (144-6) Ful fetys was hir cloke, as I was war. Of small coral aboute hire arm she bar A peire of bedes … (157-9) The non-coincidence of the rhyme unit with the syntactic unit lends liveliness, movement, and unpredictability to the verse, and in turn draws attention to the carefully-calibrated irony of the portrait. The disrupted rhythm enacts the disjunction between, on the one hand, the pilgrim Chaucer’s naïvely appreciative assessment of the Prioress as a woman of fastidious manners who is compassionate towards small animals, and, on the other hand, the audience’s uneasy sense that 5 a female religious should not display such worldly behavior or care so much how genteel she appears to others.9 More accurately, it makes the audience question “Chaucer” the pilgrim’s approbatory judgment, making the portrait less an exercise in ironic ekphrasis or rhetorical descriptio (effictio and notatio) – which would focus our attention purely on the presentation of the stereotype of the worldly nun – than an exercise in the presentation of the narrator’s persona: on his rhetorical command of ethos, pathos, and logos, and what that reveals – or conceals – about him as a subject. Rhyme-breaking alone does not of course do that, but it considerably adds to the ironic effect. In the first example, rhyme-breaking reinforces the use of the adversative conjunction “But” to alert the audience to the irony of speaking of her inner “conscience” after the praise of her outward, courtly manners. That reversal has already been anticipated by the suggestion that her courtliness is dissembling, a performance that lacks authenticity because it is striven for and self-regarding: “peyned hire to countrefete cheere”; “[peyned hire] to be holden digne of reverence.” Rhyme-breaking, grammar, and lexis combine to produce skepticism in the audience: does the Prioress have a conscience? Should she have a conscience? In the second example, rhyme-breaking invites us to question her response to animal suffering (does a mouse caught in a trap merit weeping? in certain situations, yes, but in this context?) and the propriety of a woman religious keeping small dogs as pets. In the third example, we are invited to consider the relationship between her neat cloak (neatness of dress being a signifier of secularity) and the rosary (a signifier of religious devotion) that she wears on her arm. The rhythmic disjunction – the non-match between syntactic and rhyme units – echoes and enacts the disjunction between 9 My understanding of irony in the portrait of course owes a great deal to previous critics, for example, Jill Mann, Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1973), pp. 128-136. My point is not that rhymebreaking questions previous interpretations, but rather that it reinforces or extends them. 6 the secular values she espouses and the religious values she purports to live by. It also invites us to consider the reliability of our moral judgments of others: how we should judge the Prioress? Is Chaucer the pilgrim right in his assessment of her character? Are we judging her – or judging “Chaucer”? or both? Some further examples in the General Prologue cross the boundaries between the portraits, for example, where the Yeoman’s portrait ends and the Prioress’s begins: A forster was he, soothly, as I gesse. Ther was also a Nonne, a Prioresse, … (117-8) Or the boundary between the Monk’s and the Friar’s portraits: His palfrey was as broun as is a berye. A Frere there was, a wantowne and a mery, … (207-8) These instances pick up on a familiar late medieval use of rhyme-breaking – found in Chrétien de Troyes, for example – to demarcate boundaries of sections within long narrative description. They also suggest both the connections and the differences between the pilgrims, separated by syntax, but closely united by, and within, the rhyming couplet. The tension created by the lack of synchronization of the two systems – syntax and rhyme – also, in Kristin Cole’s words, “keeps the ear entertained.”10 The uneven rhythm pulling against the neatness of the rhyming couplet See Kristin Lynn Cole’s discussion of tension within metre: “Chaucer’s Metrical Landscape,” in Chaucer’s Poetry: Words, Authority, and Ethics, ed. Clíodhna Carney and Frances McCormack (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2013), pp. 92-106 (p. 106). 10 7 creates pleasure. Both rhyme and syntax depend on metonymy, as a principle of linking or combining elements in a chain (as opposed to metaphor, which depends on selection or substitution), to bind signifiers together.11 Chaucer uniquely and playfully exploits the tension between these two metonymic structures. Rhyme-breaking is also frequent in the individual tales. For example: “Spek, sweete bryd, I noot nat where thou art.” This Nicholas anon leet fle a fart … (Miller’s Tale, 1.3805-06) and Wommen may go saufly up and doun. In every bussh or under every tree Ther is noon oother incubus but he, And he ne wol doon hem but dishonor. And so bifel that this kyng Arthour … (The Wife of Bath’s Tale III, 798-882) I’m thinking of Roman Jakobson’s distinction between metaphor and metonymy as two poles of language, one an axis of combination (linear) and one an axis of selection (referential): see Roman Jakobson, “The Metaphoric and Metonymic Poles” (1956), in Metaphor and Metonymy in Comparison and Contrast (revised ed.), eds. René Dirven and Ralf Pörings (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2002), pp. 41–48. But I’m also thinking of Jacques Lacan’s understanding of these terms in relation to the unconscious: metaphor functions to suppress (condensation), while metonymy functions to combine (displacement). 11 8 The former example from the Miller’s Tale uses the breaking of the couplet to serve, in Duggan’s words, as “the passage between individual events in a sequence of actions,”12 but it does far more than this: it puts in place the boundary between syntactic units, sharply dividing the characters’ purposes (what Absolon is about is markedly different from what Nicholas and Alison are about – and this discrepancy is comic), and it also, through rhyme, juxtaposes lofty courtly expression with broken air, deflating the former, at the expense of Absolon, and elevating the power of the latter, again at the expense of Absolon, as a means of delivering poetic justice. Rhyme-breaking is not an innovation of Chaucer’s mature period as a writer. He uses it almost from the start of his career, and in other metrical forms, for example, in quasi-octosyllabic couplets (more properly, 4-stress lines) in the early poem The Book of the Duchess: For sorwful ymagynacioun Ys alway hooly in my mynde. And wel ye woot, agaynes kynde … (14-16) Our first mater is good to kepe. So whan I saw I might not slepe … (43-4) Here the see-sawing rhythms of rhyme-breaking contribute to the sense of dis-ease and restlessness that the insomniac narrator experiences at the beginning of the poem. Rhymebreaking is also found in the House of Fame, another poem in octosyllabic/4-stress couplets, 12 Duggan, The Romances of Chrétien de Troyes, p. 284. 9 where it is used to mark the borders between description and action, or between sections of description in a long narrative sequence: That in his face was ful broun. But as I romed up and doun … (139-40). And it is also found in the Legend of Good Women, and – interestingly – in the closing couplet of rhyme royal stanzas: … Of disespeir that Troilus was inne; But now of hope the kalendes beygynne. (Troilus and Criseyde, 2.6-7) Here the effect is to anticipate and enact, at the level of both rhyme and syntax, a narrative reversal. But it is in the General Prologue and the Canterbury Tales that Chaucer hones the technique for the purposes of irony. Conclusion Although a great deal of work has been done on the relationship between poetic form and irony, very little has been done on how this works in Chaucer, with the exception of Stephen Knight’s two studies from 1973.13 As I have argued, rhyme-breaking significantly shapes the experience of reading the Canterbury Tales. The closeness of the paired rhymes in a rhyming couplet works 13 I’m not sure about this. More research needed. 10 to bring together disparate entities, to the ear and the brain, while the syntax works to separate or individuate those entities. The resulting tension gives rise to a number of different signifying effects, depending on the context. Chaucer seems to have been innovating here, insofar as he is doing something that is distinct from twelfth-century MHG and French writers, and from the writers of later Anglo-French, and Middle English romances, such as Richard Coeur de Lion (c. 1300, probably of London provenance).14 Our analysis of what Kristin Lynn Cole calls “Chaucer’s nascent iambic pentameter”15 needs to attend to the use and effects of rhymebreaking. When I started to write this paper, I hoped to move beyond stylistics by using the work of Caroline Levine to argue for ways in which rhyme-breaking might be understood in political terms, by asking what late fourteenth-century political and social forms it corresponds to.16 I was looking for a way to connect form to the sociohistorical. Levine’s work provokes me to ask to what political circumstances Chaucer’s manipulation of rhyme-breaking corresponds. But Levine offers little for medievalists beyond very general points. Her book deals almost exclusively with prose, especially the novel, and her understanding of the relations between politics and aesthetics is too schematic to be really helpful to me: her discussion of rhythm, for example, offers tantalizing comments about the way that temporal rhythms (for example, monastic time) impose themselves as formal structures, as “repetition and difference, memory and anticipation” (53), and persist over time: she talks about the ways that “institutions preserve forms (60), although not so much about how forms preserve institutions. But the institutional patterns she discerns are insufficiently fine-grained – and insufficiently theorized – to provoke new readings of the 14 See http://www.middleenglishromance.org.uk/mer/45. Cole, “Chaucer’s Metrical Landscape,” p. 93. 16 Caroline Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton: Princeton and Oxford, 2015). 15 11 complex aesthetic structures and social situatedness of Chaucer’s poetry. Her argument that poetic rhythms impose “temporal order,” and that “rhythmic forms and political institutions both seek to control time” (74) does not do justice to the specifics of either political institutions or medieval poetry. In Chaucer’s poetry, rhyme-breaking does not impose order: quite the reverse. I think that the most important political question about Chaucerian rhyme-breaking – the question that tries to think form and politics together – concerns Chaucer’s debt to his French (and possibly German?) predecessors in the matter of rhyme-breaking. I am not arguing for a source study approach at least, not as that is conventionally understood. Rather, I take my cue from Ardis Butterfield’s argument that Chaucer’s achievements need to be set “in a wider and more detailed French context than before,’ and that “[t]his setting … better represents the multilingual literary perspective of the time than our own retrospective isolation of English.”17 And not just a literary perspective: a formal one as well. I would also argue that we need to acknowledge that rhyme-breaking is a feature of the MHG romance corpus, even if Chaucer did not directly know that corpus. By emphasizing Chaucer’s Continental French (and German) rhyme-breaking predecessors I aim to place Chaucer’s achievements within a wider linguistic and political context than that of English alone. 17 Ardis Butterfield, The Familiar Enemy: Chaucer, Language, and Nation in the Hundred Years War (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009, p. xxii. Chaucer would have been familiar with rhyme-breaking from French poetry, but did he also know the Middle High German works that use rhyme-breaking? It has been argued that there is no evidence that Chaucer “knew German, was familiar with German literature, or traveled in Germany”: Peter G. Beidler, “The Reeve’s Tale,” in Robert M. Correale and Mary Hamel, eds., Sources and Analogues of the Canterbury Tales, Vol 1 (Woodbridge: Brewer, 2002), pp. 23-74 (p. 24). But perhaps we are wrong in our assumptions that Chaucer’s immediate sources were French or Italian. 12