Makyng and Middles in Chaucer's Poetry

3 Makyng and Middles in Chaucer’s Poetry* Claire M. Waters Chaucer’s vexed relationship with endings is manifest in his poetry and thus, naturally, widely recognized by scholars.1 He leaves a substantial number of his works un-ended (which, as has been noted, is not the same as uninished) – from Anelida and Arcite to the Squire’s Tale, from House of Fame to hopas to the Legend of Good Women. Moreover, he ends some without inishing them (the Canterbury Tales), while over-ending others: Troilus has several endings, as does the Clerk’s Tale, while the Parliament of Fowls’ concluding harmony contrasts with the irresolution of its narrative.2 And the works that do not end fail to do so – or succeed in doing so – in various ways that we cannot always deinitively distinguish: ictional interruption, deliberate incompletion (to make a point; out of boredom), unintended incompletion (due to distraction or death), perhaps even manuscript loss: what happened to those missing entries from the “Book of the .xxv. [or .xix.] Ladyes,” which now has only ten? A. C. Spearing has persuasively argued that this pervasiveness of uninished poems and of “traces of plans not followed through” is characteristic not of any lack of artistic resources but of Chaucer’s “willingness to recognize and welcome the improvised and the arbitrary” and thus to approach, artistically, what Spearing, following Gary Saul Morson, calls “life as it is experienced.”3 I want here to pursue * In this essay I owe a great deal (as so many of us do) to Tony’s way of thinking about medieval texts; I am grateful to have had the chance briely to be his colleague and, by that means, to enter into his circle of conversation – a pleasure to which no mere note can do justice. hanks also to the volume editors and to Elizabeth Fowler, Cathy Sanok, and Jessica Brantley for their astute and helpful comments, and to Seeta Chaganti for sharing her expertise in reading and teaching medieval lyric; remaining thistles among the corn are my responsibility alone. 1 he most comprehensive discussion is Rosemarie McGerr, Chaucer’s Open Books: Resistance to Closure in Medieval Discourse (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998); see also, for example, William Provost, “Chaucer’s Endings,” in New Readings of Chaucer’s Poetry, ed. Robert G. Benson and Susan J. Ridyard (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2003), 91–105, Michaela Paasche Grudin, “Discourse and the Problem of Closure in the Canterbury Tales,” PMLA 107, no. 5 (1992): 1157–67, and J. A. Burrow, “Poems without Endings,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 13 (1991): 17–37. 2 As Julia Bofey notes, moreover, even the roundel that seems to, as it were, round of the poem is plagued by “textual uncertainty,” its two versions giving “the air of solutions reached after the event”: Bofey, “he Reputation and Circulation of Chaucer’s Lyrics in the Fifteenth Century,” in Writing After Chaucer: Essential Readings in Chaucer and the Fifteenth Century, ed. Daniel J. Pinti (New York: Garland, 1998), 127–44, at p. 137. 3 A. C. Spearing, Medieval Autographies: he “I” of the Text (Notre Dame, IN: University of 31 CERVONE 9781783270675 PRINT.indd 31 01/07/2016 13:44 CLAIRE M. WATERS Spearing’s skepticism about the extent to which Chaucer’s poetry can be read as “perfect fulillments of perfectly conceived plans.”4 How far the desire for such perfection can go is suggested by Lee Patterson, who, noting that un-endingness is not just characteristic but seemingly almost constitutive of Chaucer’s poetry, argues that “Chaucerian incompletions in general, whatever the eicient cause in any particular instance, are governed by some larger plan, that from a cosmic perspective even the ostentatiously incomplete is, in a sense diicult to specify but nonetheless decisive, perfect.”5 My contention here, following Spearing’s emphasis on openness and “process,” is that thinking about Chaucer’s middles might give us another way to approach the claim of any of Chaucer’s works to be perfect in the etymological sense, “thoroughly made,” per-factus.6 Here the gerund makyng that Chaucer repeatedly uses for his poetic activity and production seems to work against that claim of perfection, of being at, or past, the end and able to look back; and it describes, as Glending Olson has said, Chaucer’s present, “himself, his contemporaries, and their activity,” rather than the poetic past.7 If we think of Chaucer as one who is always still in the process of making, a view that his various incompletions seem to bear out, then perhaps we might think of him less by way of endings – resisted or otherwise – than in terms of middles. Chaucer’s “middleness,” in various senses, has been asserted before, but here I want to consider it in the context of his most characteristic verse form, rhyme royal, and its relationship to two of his most tantalizing self-characterizations: “Adam Scriveyn” and the so-called Prioress–hopas Link.8 Both depictions, I will suggest, play with the work of makyng in content as well as form and particularly display Chaucer’s sense of being in between the new and the old, of standing in Notre Dame Press, 2012), 122, 120, 115 (quoting Gary Saul Morson, Narrative and Freedom: he Shadows of Time [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994], 38). 4 Spearing, Medieval Autographies, 112. 5 Lee Patterson, “ ‘What Man Artow?’: Authorial Self-Deinition in the Tale of Sir hopas and the Tale of Melibee,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 11 (1989): 117–75, at p. 102. 6 Brian Stock observes that Bernard of Clairvaux, in his discussion of knowledge, “introduces a diference between knowledge as a static and completed act, scientia, and knowledge as a process of education or learning, sciendi modus”: “Experience, Praxis, Work and Planning in Bernard of Clairvaux: Observations on the Sermones in Cantica,” in he Cultural Context of Medieval Learning, ed. John Emery Murdoch and Edith Dudley Sylla (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1975), 219–62, at p. 233. 7 Glending Olson, “Making and Poetry in the Age of Chaucer,” Comparative Literature 31, no. 3 (1979): 272–90, at p. 274. 8 Lee Patterson, for example, suggests that “the characteristic location of Chaucerian poetry is precisely the middle ground, the space between an atemporal beginning and a transcendent end” (Patterson, “What Man Artow?,” 128), while V. A. Kolve draws attention to “ ‘on the road’ and ‘in the middle’ ” as “theologically and imaginatively … Chaucer’s favored space” (“ ‘Man in the Middle’: Art and Religion in Chaucer’s Friar’s Tale,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 12 [1990]: 5–46, at p. 44). Barbara Nolan observes, “he pilgrim-poet [in the Canterbury Tales] deliberately places himself in the midst of the questions he poses,” and her emphasis on “questions to be solved by means of the narrative process” accords well with the kinds of middleness I am thinking of here; see Barbara Nolan, “A Poet her Was: Chaucer’s Voices in the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales,” PMLA 101, no. 2 (1986): 154–69, at p. 155. 32 CERVONE 9781783270675 PRINT.indd 32 01/07/2016 13:44 MAKYNG AND MIDDLES IN CHAUCER’S POETRY the middle. While I do not intend to recast Chaucer as a devotional writer, this middleness has echoes of the preaching and confessional discourses with which he was certainly familiar, and these can shed light on the conjunction of an end that is imagined but never reached with the process of shaping oneself (and one’s works) toward that end. Like the devotional and didactic narratives that are pervasive in late medieval literature, Chaucer’s endings repeatedly send us back to the middle. I want irst to note a key formal aspect of the rhyme-royal stanza – one intuitively and perhaps explicitly familiar to anyone who teaches Chaucer, but still worth noting – which is the several ways in which it draws attention to its middle, rather than the beginning or (especially) the end, as many other types of stanza do. It creates this emphasis in at least three ways: irst, its numerical oddness creates a middle line, the “hinge” line of the stanza, which both completes the irst rhyme pattern of the stanza, abab, and begins the second one, bbcc; second, the appearance of the b-rhyme three times in the stanza, in contrast with the a and c rhymes, which each appear twice, particularly highlights a rhyme that is entirely contained within the bounds of the stanza; and, inally, the central “bb” forms a second couplet in the stanza that potentially competes with, or at least removes the uniqueness of, the concluding couplet. In the literally odd way in which it focuses our attention on the stanza’s middle, rhyme royal diverges from many other stanza forms (though of course it is not unique in having an odd number of lines). he exact nature of Chaucer’s role in its development is unrecoverable, but it seems probable that the rhymeroyal stanza derives either from French balade form (ababbcbC, where C is the refrain) or from Italian ottava rima (abababcc, which Chaucer uses in the Monk’s Tale and elsewhere).9 he latter is perhaps more likely, in that Boccaccio’s use of ottava rima in the Teseida and Il Filostrato – both, obviously, well known to Chaucer – already provides a model for using such a stanza form for narrative poetry rather than lyric. Whatever the form’s derivation, it seems clear that Chaucer was the one who brought it into English. As with his French and Italian backgrounds more generally, then, rhyme royal shows Chaucer in his role as translator, mediator, re-maker – one who serves as a key link between earlier continental poetry and later English poetry. If rhyme royal clearly suggests Chaucer’s debts to those who came before him, it stands even more strongly for his contribution to those who came after. he form is so distinctive, and so characteristically Chaucerian, that it becomes almost the deinition of post-Chaucerian writing in the ifteenth century, particularly for Chaucer’s most devoted and explicit followers, Hoccleve and Lydgate. he stanza’s unusualness makes it extraordinarily imitable: to come after Chaucer and show oneself to do so means, to a signiicant degree, to write in rhyme royal. It is a mediatory form (as Chaucer is a mediatory poet), one that has antecedents he 9 See James Dean, “Gower, Chaucer, and Rhyme Royal,” Studies in Philology 88, no. 3 (1991): 251–75, at pp. 251–52. 33 CERVONE 9781783270675 PRINT.indd 33 01/07/2016 13:44 CLAIRE M. WATERS is deeply aware of and indebted to but that then becomes a model for those who follow – thus putting him once again in the middle. By highlighting its rhymes – the b-rhyme through repetition, the c-rhyme through its completion of the stanza – rhyme royal also makes those rhymes more available for later, recognizable borrowing. hat is, a rhymed couplet that comes in a sequence of others may be striking in itself, but is not reinforced by its stanzaic frame as rhyme-royal couplets are. Julia Bofey’s discussion of ifteenth-century echoes of Chaucer in lyric poetry shows how particular rhymes, highlighted by their rhyme-royal placement, become in themselves markers of Chaucerian imitation. In narrative terms, too, it is what we might call the Boece– Troilus axis of Chaucer’s writings, and the lyrics in this vein, that seem most emphatically to embody his “legacy” to later poets: that is, it is the courtly-philosophical Chaucer of rhyme royal, rather than the earthy, demotic Chaucer of rhymed couplets, whom ifteenth-century poets take up.10 When they want to “kis the steppes” of father Chaucer, they tend to do so in rhyme royal. Rhyme royal, then, is a “middling” stanza not only formally – in its emphasis on middles – but in literary-historical terms, as a marker of that which is old and new, looking forward and backward (as the middle b-rhyme itself does). Chaucer’s depictions of his own makyng and of himself as maker very often evoke this same in-between situation; they show him both as coming after and as going before. I turn now to the conjunction of these formal and literary-historical middles at two points where Chaucer subjects himself, in a sense, to his own creation, displaying himself and his poetic work through the lens of rhyme royal: the brief lyric “Adam Scriveyn” and the passage that links the Prioress’s Tale and the pilgrim Chaucer’s Tale of Sir hopas. “Adam Scriveyn” survives in one copy, that of the scribe John Shirley, in Trinity College, Cambridge, MS R.3.20, from the 1430s. hat is, the only material form in which we know it derives from the period, the ifteenth century, in which writing like Chaucer very often meant writing rhyme royal. Although the poem’s formal qualities have sometimes taken second place to its detective-story allure (as Alexandra Gillespie notes, in the course of producing a reading attentive to form), it is striking how efectively it exploits the middle-emphasizing qualities of rhyme royal to think through Chaucer’s place in a literary progression or sequence and to show him, too, as one who stands in the middle.11 In “Adam Scriveyn,” the medial focus of the stanza is particularly emphasized by its standing alone; this is the only rhyme-royal poem by Chaucer with a single stanza, and as such it highlights the form’s internal structure rather than its relation to what is around it. he poem reads as follows (in Gillespie’s transcription): 10 A. C. Spearing, Medieval to Renaissance in English Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 63; on Chaucer’s literary debts and successors see the chapter from which this comes, “he Chaucerian Tradition,” 59–120. See also Bofey, “Reputation and Circulation.” 11 Alexandra Gillespie, “Reading Chaucer’s Words to Adam,” Chaucer Review 42, no. 3 (2008): 269–83. 34 CERVONE 9781783270675 PRINT.indd 34 01/07/2016 13:44 MAKYNG AND MIDDLES IN CHAUCER’S POETRY Adam . scryveyne / if euer it þee byfalle Boece or Troylus / for to wryten nuwe / Vnder þy long lokkes / þowe most haue þe scalle But after my makyng / þowe wryte more truwe So oft a daye . I mot þy werk renuwe / It to . corect / and eke to rubbe and scrape / And al is thorugh . þy necglygence and rape /12 he conjunction of Chaucer’s canon, or an inluential segment of it, with the material practices of copying; the evocative name “Adam” and its resonance with ideas of newness and renewal; the contrapasso appropriateness of Adam’s imagined punishment; the troubling conclusion in “rape”: the poem manages to contain “in litel space” a number of striking elements that have drawn commentary.13 Here I want to consider the ways in which the rhyme-royal form of this poem intensiies its thematic attention to the relation of the old and the new, and to the question of what it means to come “after” another writer. he concern with newness is, of course, immediately highlighted by the stanza’s rhyme. “Adam Scriveyn” is certainly a case where the b-rhyme is not only the most repeated rhyme of the stanza but the one with the most evocative words – the words that call forth the strongest associations. (While “scalle” and “scrape” pleasingly echo each other, for example, neither word strongly calls to mind other moments in Chaucer.) “Nuwe,” “truwe,” and “renuwe” are all words that are almost overburdened with meaning in medieval culture, and “newe” and “trewe” in particular are a familiar rhyme in Chaucer. In most cases, however, newness is not a virtue in Chaucer; rhymes that involve “new” and “true” tend to cast novelty as inidelity – newness in its guise of “newefangelnesse” (as “Against Women Unconstant” calls it, line 1).14 hus the plea that Adam, copying “anew” (as I take the primary meaning of the word to be here), should “wryte more trewe” is a not-unexpected association of novelty with the potential for falsity and unreliability, even as it pleads for greater truth.15 12 Gillespie, “Reading Chaucer’s Words,” 271. Seth Lerer provides a facsimile of the manuscript page containing this lyric: Chaucer and His Readers: Imagining the Author in LateMedieval England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 135, ig. 4. 13 See, for example, John Scattergood, “he Jongleur, the Copyist, and the Printer: he Tradition of Chaucer’s ‘Wordes unto Adam, His Own Scriveyn’,” in Courtly Literature: Culture and Context, ed. Keith Busby and Erik Kooper (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1990), 499– 508; R. E. Kaske, “Clericus Adam and Chaucer’s Adam Scriveyn,” in Chaucerian Problems and Perspectives: Essays Presented to Paul E. Beichner C.S.C., ed. Edward Vasta and Zacharias P. hundy (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979), 114–18; Britt Mize, “Adam, and Chaucer’s Words unto Him,” Chaucer Review 35, no. 4 (2001): 351–77; Carolyn Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 3–10. 14 On the complexity of Chaucer’s relationship to newefangelnesse, however, and its productive as well as troubling aspects, see Patricia Clare Ingham, he Medieval New: Ambivalence in an Age of Innovation (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 117–32; as she notes, “the vernacular innovations of language and verse” – among which we might include rhyme royal itself – were “produced by way of a culture of artistic copying” (6). 15 his is Chaucer’s sole use of the word “renuwe”; the closest he comes elsewhere is 35 CERVONE 9781783270675 PRINT.indd 35 01/07/2016 13:44 CLAIRE M. WATERS Because of its concern for what new copies and retellings might do to a text, “Adam Scriveyn” is often discussed in connection with Troilus, 5.1786–98, “Go, litel bok”; the latter’s concern with “mismetering” and “miswriting,” and the fact that Troilus is one of the very poems mentioned in “Adam Scriveyn,” strongly link the two. Both Ralph Hanna and A. C. Spearing, considering this conjunction, note the appeal to preserve the author’s “ipsissima verba,” to retain a ixed and inished version of the text. As Spearing observes, Chaucer’s “syntactically complex style,” often particularly exploited in his rhyme-royal works, served, among other things, to help hold the form of his words; and the pattern of the stanza, especially the repetition of the b-rhyme, could also serve this end.16 Before we take this desire for ixity straightforwardly in “Adam Scriveyn,” however, it is worth remembering that elsewhere the question of preserving someone’s ipsissima verba becomes the subject of some of Chaucer’s slipperiest and most characteristic authorial self-presentations. he reproach to Adam, for instance, also recalls the General Prologue’s account of Chaucer’s own productive activity: For this ye knowen also wel as I, Whoso shal telle a tale after a man, He moot reherce as neigh as evere he kan Everich a word, if it be in his charge, Al speke he nevere so rudeliche and large, Or ellis he moot telle his tale untrewe, Or feine thing or inde wordes newe. (Canterbury Tales, 1.730–36) We have here a familiar joke on the Chaucerian corpus, since Chaucer was constantly telling tales “after” others in both senses and “ind[ing] wordes newe” for them. But the model he proposes here is the one he seems to want Adam to follow: “everich a word” must be as exact as possible, or else one will be subject to the twinned perils of novelty and falsity, “newe” and “untrewe.” he General Prologue passage, that is, draws our attention to what Chaucer shares with Adam as well as to what separates them, casting the (alleged) reporter’s role in terms very like those of the scribe. Both follow the “making” of another, trying – or claiming to try – to be “trewe” but inevitably (or, for both poet and scribe, perhaps deliberately) falling short. Chaucer’s “renew[ing]” of Adam’s work, then, puts him in a strange double relationship to his own texts, as one whose ability to “renewe” claims implicitly to be a return even as it is new, making the makyng more like itself. Insofar as “newe” has, both elsewhere in Chaucer and here, such problematic connotations of straying, re-newing seems to contain within itself the seeds of “reno(u)velen” – which appears, intriguingly, in Melibee (lines 1845, 1846), the Parson’s Tale (10.1027), and Boece (3, prosa 11, 123). Here and throughout, I cite the Canterbury Tales from Geofrey Chaucer, he Canterbury Tales, ed. Jill Mann (London: Penguin, 2005); the Boece citation is from he Riverside Chaucer, gen. ed. Larry D. Benson, 3rd ed. (Boston: Houghton Milin, 1987). 16 Spearing, Medieval to Renaissance, 34; Ralph Hanna III, Pursuing History: Middle English Manuscripts and heir Texts (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 175. 36 CERVONE 9781783270675 PRINT.indd 36 01/07/2016 13:44 MAKYNG AND MIDDLES IN CHAUCER’S POETRY its own failure. But it is a failure only if we see ixity as the goal. One oddity of “Adam Scriveyn” is that even as it seems to yearn for and aim toward a perfect, unmoving transmission, it acknowledges not only the impossibility of that ideal (since scribes will make errors or, as recent work more often sees them, interventions) but also its refusal to move forward: if one repeats, crow-like, only the exact words one hears, nothing ever gets made. By imagining himself following Adam following “after” him, Chaucer reminds us of the way in which their “making new” is similar; as Matthew Fisher notes, “A new manuscript copy of an old poem can be new writing, but so too is a new poem on an old subject.” Fisher suggests that despite this similarity, “Chaucer de-authorizes Adam Scriveyn’s work, and thus narrows the discourse of what constitutes authorship” – but the recurrence of words that Chaucer uses here to characterize Adam, and elsewhere to characterize himself (“after”; “newe”; “[un]trewe”), works against a strict divide between Adam and Chaucer, tending rather to make them alike.17 If we separate Adam’s coming “after” Chaucer from Chaucer’s coming “after” those he imitated or (supposedly) quoted, we perform a separation of scribal activity from authorial that, as recent work including Fisher’s has argued, may relect our own short-sightedness. I want to suggest, that is, that Chaucer would have been aware of the irony of his own attempt to enforce exact replication of another’s words. he mirroring of Adam’s work and Chaucer’s is evident not just in the poem’s themes but in its structure. As Alexandra Gillespie astutely notes, the rhyme scheme here “forces us to the midpoint,” a midpoint that she sees as “the word that stands for what Adam should have been, ‘truwe’ ” – that is, the middle of the three b-rhymes.18 “Forcing us to the midpoint” aptly conveys one efect of rhyme royal. But the poem has another midpoint as well: the middle of the middle line, which is, metrically, the word “makyng.” Chaucer’s poetic activity, that is, lies literally at the center of “Adam Scriveyn,” and is neatly encased by one instance of the poem’s alternation of pronouns: “my” and “thowe.” he whole middle phrase, in fact, encapsulates the problem of “Adam Scriveyn”: “after my makyng . thow write” – a phrase that is a sentence in itself, particularly if one takes the punctus that follows “makyng” in the manuscript as a pause: “after my making, you write.” While “making” and “writing” are by no means the same thing, “Adam Scriveyn” imagines their practitioners engaged in a kind of endless pursuit of one another, Chaucer becoming a scribe himself as he follows after Adam, renewing his work. he proximity of the completed “makyng” and the future writing also tends to reinvest makyng with some of its verbal force; it suggests not only “according to my (existing) making” but “after my (activity of) making.”19 17 Matthew Fisher, Scribal Authorship and the Writing of History in Medieval England (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2012), 31–32, 31. See also Gillespie, “Reading Chaucer’s Words,” 269, on the similarities between Adam and Chaucer. 18 Gillespie, “Reading Chaucer’s Words,” 278. 19 On the relation between the various imaginative and material activities involved in making things – particularly literary works and buildings – see Margaret Hallissy, “Writing a Building: Chaucer’s Knowledge of the Construction Industry and the Language of the Knight’s Tale,” Chaucer Review 32, no. 3 (1998): 239–59. 37 CERVONE 9781783270675 PRINT.indd 37 01/07/2016 13:44 CLAIRE M. WATERS To whatever extent Adam is “deauthorized” by the poem, then, arguably Chaucer is as well – not only by the way in which his poetry is subject to the intrusions of others, but by the way in which he, like his scribe, “hoppe[th] alwey bihynde,” trying to keep up with wayward texts. And while Chaucer’s tone toward Adam may have a “snybbyng” element, the very existence of the complaint also enshrines the scribe within Chaucer’s works; he too is now part of the literary record, subject to the vagaries of copying and transmission. Even if we suppose that Chaucer could compose a stanza of rhyme royal without breaking a sweat – which seems reasonably likely – the composition still suggests a certain attachment to the addressee of the poem, even if it is an attachment not unmixed with animus. It also makes that addressee part of an authorial corpus that, as we know, Chaucer was quite fond of reciting. Inscribing the writer of his works alongside himself in a rhyme-royal stanza, his own most distinctive form, Chaucer further highlights the poem’s “own formal nature as rime or as vers, and … [its] textuality.”20 “Adam Scriveyn” can be seen as a “self-referential artist and scribe portrait” (as the visual equivalent has been called), a iction as much as a depiction, that draws attention not to the ixed truth of the seeming historicity of the situation it depicts but to its constructed, literary character – to the fact that it is the product of makyng.21 hat is, while we need not discard the interest in transmission that the poem indicates, or the lived contexts to which it seems to refer, it makes no more sense to take “Adam Scriveyn” as a straightforward report on Chaucer’s relationship with his scribe than it does to take the General Prologue as a straightforward report on his methods of composition. In its tone of exasperated remonstrance and its implication of a long working relationship, “Adam Scriveyn” seems to anchor us, however ictively, in life as it was experienced by one irritated author. It also, however, shows a concern not just with a present moment but with the relation of past and future, a concern signaled by its density of temporal language. Here again it recalls the “Go litel bok” passage, which, as Spearing notes, places Troilus in a medial present, since “In one stanza … Chaucer relates his book to the past; in the next he relates it to the future.”22 “Adam Scriveyn” stands, similarly, between past – the makyng that 20 he quoted phrase is from Spearing, Medieval Autographies, 54, describing the dit. he recent work of Linne R. Mooney (particularly her essay “Chaucer’s Scribe,” Speculum 81, no. 1 [2006]: 97–138) and others has greatly expanded our sense of Adam’s possible historical presence, though others have questioned the identiication of Adam “Scriveyn” with Adam Pinkhurst: Jane Roberts, “On Giving Scribe B a Name and a Clutch of London Manuscripts from c. 1400,” Medium Aevum 80, no. 2 (2011): 247–70; Lawrence Warner, “Scribes, Misattributed: Hoccleve and Pinkhurst,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 37 (2015): 55–100. Even if the identiication is accepted, of course, the poem remains indebted to literary and visual conventions that shape it and indeed actively aestheticizes the historical conditions of its production by putting them in verse form and invoking the rhetorical mode of the curse. I am indebted to Cathy Sanok for her thoughts on this point. 22 Spearing, Medieval Autographies, 33. he central message of these stanzas – the urging that the “litel bok” should kiss the steps of its predecessors and the prayer that it not be miswritten or mismetered – ends in the sixth line of the second stanza, denying this account of the book’s past and futurity a neat stanzaic completion and instead moving us back into the story and 21 38 CERVONE 9781783270675 PRINT.indd 38 01/07/2016 13:44 MAKYNG AND MIDDLES IN CHAUCER’S POETRY exists, the previous copies of it – and future – the later copies that may or may not represent it truly. But rather than directing us to one or the other, it keeps our eyes on a moment of negotiation between them. If the poem can serve, and has served, as “the fulillment of that perennial human desire for origins and endings,” it nevertheless remains primarily concerned with repetition, redoing, renewing – with process, and an endless process at that.23 For us as readers, “Adam Scriveyn” is belated: it comes after nearly everything else we have of Chaucer’s. But this ending sends us back to the middle, to Boece and Troilus – not something Chaucer could have foreseen, but at the same time, something that he does foresee, insofar as the poem imagines the copying and recopying, renewing, of his works through time. “Adam Scriveyn” attunes us, then, through form as well as content, not only to Boece and Troilus themselves but to the problems of temporality, sequence, and ixity that they engage with thematically, and to the roles of poet and scribe in manifesting those problems. he hopas link draws our attention, instead, to the shaping power of rhyme royal, and in doing so it reminds us of the form’s future, its later inluence and characteristic Chaucerianness. his link, that is, does not particularly exploit the “middling” emphasis of rhyme royal; it does not make the b-rhymes or the middle lines of the stanzas thematically as well as literally central in the way that they are in “Adam Scriveyn.” It is, however, part of a sequence that precisely shows Chaucer’s very language – as imagined tale-teller – being shaped by what precedes it, in this case the Prioress’s Tale, in a way that is (as Jessica Brantley has recently noted) unique in the Tales.24 he rhyme royal of these stanzas is, in a sense, a kind of hangover from the Prioress’s Tale, whose mood Harry Bailly manages to shake of without extricating himself from its stanzaic form. his is, perhaps, not coincidental, and draws our attention to Chaucer’s use of rhyme royal in other contexts. Even as it emphasizes its own middle, rather than its end, the form involves a certain kind of internal completeness (in that each stanza is a self-contained unit), and Chaucer seems to have found it easier to bring works in this form to a close; among his rhyme-royal works, only Anelida and Arcite lacks an ending. At the same time, as Mark Lambert has suggested, Chaucer’s use of a ballad stanza for narrative purposes – whether imitated from Boccaccio or not – can create a certain sense of balance between temporary completion and onward movement: “metrically, Troilus is a poem that keeps us saying to ourselves, ‘ah no; there is more.’ ”25 If continuity in rhyme royal can be a surprise, letting us momentarily reach an end only to ind that things continue, the poet’s earlier speech: “But yet to purpos of my rather speche” – thus again working against any completion. 23 Gillespie, “Reading Chaucer’s Words,” 273. On the lure of origins see also D. Vance Smith, he Book of the Incipit: Beginnings in the Fourteenth Century (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 7–8. 24 Jessica Brantley, “Reading the Forms of Sir hopas,” Chaucer Review 47, no. 4 (2013): 416–38, at p. 436. 25 Mark Lambert, “Telling the Story in Troilus and Criseyde,” in he Cambridge Chaucer Companion, ed. Piero Boitani and Jill Mann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 78–92, at pp. 63–64. 39 CERVONE 9781783270675 PRINT.indd 39 01/07/2016 13:44 CLAIRE M. WATERS Chaucer repeatedly stages ending-and-beginning-again in the Canterbury Tales thanks to the work’s very structure. he Prioress–hopas link is a particularly striking instance of this, where the narrative comes to a solemn, meditative close and then the Host winds up the hurdy-gurdy again: even a transcendent, rhymeroyal story brings only a temporary pause. Indeed, the (modern) labeling of this passage as a “link,” rather than a “prologue,” emphasizes its mediatory status: it is not a stand-alone, self-contained prologue, like many others, but instead a way to get from one story to another – a means rather than a beginning. It is the sight, apparently the somewhat unaccustomed sight, of the narrator that breaks the hush that attends the end of the Prioress’s Tale and gets us on the way to the next tale – gets us, that is, into a new middle. In depicting the pilgrim/poet as someone mysterious, out of place, who “semeth elvissh by his contenaunce” (7.703), Harry Bailly draws attention to this igure’s liminal status as someone who exists both within and outside the poem. he use of rhyme royal here sharpens that joke, displaying Chaucer’s poetic expertise even as his persona in the poem undermines it. Harry’s question “What man artow?” could certainly have a professional implication (one that would draw our attention to the unplaceability of poets), but also echoes the fairy king’s question to Sir Orfeo when the latter appears unexpectedly in his realm.26 hat is, the question implies, as does “elvissh,” that Harry is aware without realizing it that this igure is not quite of his world, that he is one who can move between worlds. If Chaucer exists in two relations to Adam – as the one who comes before but also after him, the one who both decries and provides the model for his inidelities – he exists also in two relations to the Host, as his creator and his subject, and thus one who precedes him but must also (in the world of the poem) follow his lead. Harry’s command, “Sey now somewhat, sin oother folk han said” (7.705), speaks to both of these relations. Most obviously, it places the pilgrim in the role of one who must speak “after” others and manage his belatedness, a note that the pilgrim picks up when he apologizes for having nothing to say but “a rym I lerned longe agoon” (709): he can only repeat others’ words. But the pilgrim’s mention of “rym” also directs our attention to the rhyme royal of the Prioress–hopas Link itself, enabling a sly joke on Chaucer’s supposed paucity of literary talent, since even as he is claiming to be entirely reliant on others for his rhymes he is showing of his characteristic stanza. Finally, it points forward toward hopas itself and its wonderfully awful rhyme, one that Chaucer highlights again at the end (“it is the beste rym I kan,” 928) in a way that recalls his claim to be a copyist even as we know hopas itself is new – a response to, but not a borrowing from, any previous author and one that is, if not invented out of whole cloth, then ingeniously stitched together from scraps of tradition into something both old and new. 26 Patterson, “What Man Artow?,” reads this as a professional question; Nolan, “A Poet her Was,” explores diferent ways of understanding Chaucer’s identity as a poet in the context of the General Prologue. For the fairy king’s question, see Sir Orfeo, ed. A. J. Bliss (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), Auchinleck text, line 421. 40 CERVONE 9781783270675 PRINT.indd 40 01/07/2016 13:44 MAKYNG AND MIDDLES IN CHAUCER’S POETRY Driving home the point about his less-than-straightforward relation to sources and his poetic versatility, Chaucer turns from hopas to Melibee, where he makes another of the familiar apologies that remind us of his tricky relation to those he comes after. Here, his apology for his “diference” from a source – “thogh I nat the same wordes seye / As ye han herd, yet to yow alle I preye / Blameth me nat” (7.959–60) – alerts us to what turns out to be the extreme idelity of Melibee to its sources as well as recalling the “Blameth noght me” (1.3181) of the Miller’s Prologue. In the latter, the disclaimer of blame is made on the same grounds as in the General Prologue: “I moot reherse / Hir tales alle, be they bet or werse, / Or elles falsen som of my matere” (1.3173–75). Here again, the issues of oldness and newness, idelity and inidelity, and “coming after” that are so pervasive in “Adam Scriveyn” are made central to Chaucer’s idea of himself as a poet. And Chaucer’s idea of himself as a poet is largely coterminous with his overall self-presentation. Apart from a tendency to tubbiness, noted both by the Host and by the eagle who must carry him in the House of Fame, the thing that most consistently characterizes Chaucer is his role as a “maker,” and particularly as a maker who is intensely aware of both the origins and the destinations of his works, who is steeped in the “olde bookes” from which all new books come. his self-presentation is perhaps most striking in his Retractions, which, while by no means unique in their emphasis on literary rather than lived crimes, are particularly resonant in their placement, following the “mortiication of sinne” that completes the Parson’s Tale and the continual sense Chaucer gives in his works that he lives, as much as possible, by books alone. And this raises the question of how much Chaucer’s interest in middles was itself a novelty or a peculiarity of his own. he potentially religious implications of “newness” in “Adam Scriveyn,” particularly in light of the scribe’s evocative irst name, have often been noted; the hopas link casts the conversation between Harry and the pilgrim narrator in the lofty form of rhyme royal, while also giving the narrator a faint air of otherworldliness.27 Here it is not my intention to suggest that Chaucer has religious aims in presenting himself as between old and new in his poetry, but only to note that ends that send us back to middles are characteristic of religious as well as literary thought and writing in his time, and that here as elsewhere Chaucer may have found religious forms and ways of thinking generative even when he did not turn them to religious ends.28 If rhyme royal is a stanza that is self-contained but 27 On the ways in which Sir hopas itself, through its manuscript format, might make readers think of religious lyric and drama, see Brantley, “Reading the Forms.” 28 See for example Kellie Robertson’s discussion of how pilgrimage provides Chaucer with a way to “occupy the middle” (458) or a “third space” as he considered “the relation between work and individual identity” (451) – which is in a sense also the theme of “Adam Scriveyn” and the hopas link: Robertson, “Authorial Work,” in Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature: Middle English, ed. Paul Strohm (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 441–58. Even Kolve’s splendid “Man in the Middle,” which is closely engaged with the religious implications of the secular middle, nonetheless seems to set ends (judgment) and middle 41 CERVONE 9781783270675 PRINT.indd 41 01/07/2016 13:44 CLAIRE M. WATERS continues to move us forward, that rounds itself of with a couplet but puts its greatest weight in the middle, then Chaucer’s larger structures as well, I suggest, keep us attentive to middles (and, as in “Adam Scriveyn,” to media) even as they acknowledge the eventuality of an end, satisfactory or otherwise. In a sense, the rhyme-royal tales themselves display this function. Although it is a form that characterizes many of his earlier works, rhyme royal stays with Chaucer to the end, forming part of the internal structure of the Canterbury Tales. Complete in themselves, neatly begun and ended, these tales do not make any claim to begin or end the larger work, but simply provide one way to keep moving forward; “tales of transcendence,” in Barbara Nolan’s phrase, they nevertheless remain within the frame of the Canterbury Tales, forming part of its texture without shutting down its variety.29 he Second Nun’s Tale is of particular interest here. Perhaps the earliest of the rhyme-royal tales, if we accept the supposition that it was composed in honor of the English Benedictine Adam Easton’s appointment as cardinal priest of the church of St. Cecilia in Trastevere in the early 1380s, it becomes the last such tale in the work as a whole; originally self-contained, it takes on new meanings in light of what follows it in the Tales, engaging not so much in resistance to closure as in a process of recurrence and return that keeps us coming back to the middle.30 Indeed, the same might even be said of the Parson’s Tale: like many religious works, it directs our attention toward an end (the perfect, celestial Jerusalem) but only after spending most of its great length thinking about the “wey” that leads there and that its readers are, of necessity, still treading, or attempting to tread. And its opening theme, “Stondeth upon the weyes, and seeth and axeth of olde pathes (that is to seyn, of olde sentences) which is the goode wey, and walketh in that wey, and ye shal inde refresshing for your soules” (10.77–78) combines “olde sentences” and “refreshing” – which here surely means not only “refreshment” but “renewal” – suggesting once more the need to move back to move forward, to keep working through the middle.31 It is also worth remembering that the end of the Tales would, according to Chaucer’s original plan, have been their middle, a fact implicitly acknowledged by Lydgate when, in the Siege of Troy, he begins to write what Spearing aptly calls the Canterbury Tales’ “missing second half.”32 Even the Parson’s Tale, itting end though it is, turns out to be another middle. (the process of living) somewhat more apart from each other than Chaucer suggests they are; Kolve’s attention to artistic representation, though valuable, also tends to make both elements rather static or, as he puts it at one point, “suspend[ed]” (44). 29 Barbara Nolan, “Chaucer’s Tales of Transcendence: Rhyme Royal and Christian Prayer in the Canterbury Tales,” in Chaucer’s Religious Tales, ed. C. David Benson and Elizabeth Robertson (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1990), 21–38. 30 he possible Adam Easton connection, which most later scholars have accepted, was irst proposed by Mary Giin, Studies in Chaucer and His Audience (Quebec: Les Éditions l’Éclair, 1956), 34–38. 31 Middle English Dictionary, ed. Hans Kurath, Sherman M. Kuhn, and Robert E. Lewis (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1952–2001), “refreshen,” 2(a), 2(c). 32 Medieval to Renaissance, 67. 42 CERVONE 9781783270675 PRINT.indd 42 01/07/2016 13:44 MAKYNG AND MIDDLES IN CHAUCER’S POETRY Moreover, it leads us into the Retractions, where so many of the key terms and concerns of Chaucer’s earlier authorial self-characterizations are in evidence: implicitly, “blameth noght me”; the concern to catalogue his works that we see also in the Legend of Good Women and the Man of Law’s Tale; and the leading role of Troilus and Boece in that catalogue (the former here among the goats, the latter among the sheep). Like “Adam Scriveyn,” whose mention of Troilus and Boece puts us back into the middle of Chaucer’s authorial chronology, the Retractions return us even to what is allegedly left behind: to the Canterbury Tales so that we can puzzle out which ones “sownen into synne”; to those earlier authorial catalogues; to “many a song and many a leccherous lay,” their rhythm recalled here even as they are cast aside. he alleged focus on an end that in fact leads us back into the middle is characteristic not only of Chaucer’s poetry but of the many religious texts of the late Middle Ages that envision the moment of death: artes moriendi, otherworld visions and journeys, Marian miracles that play out the rescue of a sinner at the last possible moment, sermon exempla that depict an individual judgment.33 Such texts may seem to privilege endings, but it is essential to their function that they look not toward an end already known but toward an end that can still be shaped by the middle, by the present in which that end is imagined. “Shaping” itself is both a poetic and a plotting word in Chaucer, of course, one he often uses to point to the gap between where people think they are going and what actually lies ahead of them; those who feel conident of shaping the future tend to fall short (heseus in the Knight’s Tale, Nicholas in the Miller’s Tale, the rioters in the Pardoner’s Tale, and, most persistently, Pandarus), suggesting that to acknowledge uncertainty and imperfect control may be the wiser course. In the Retractions, Chaucer acknowledges that for his repentance even to exist, to bear any meaning, it must be still part of the middle, not yet quite the end, and thus still subject to failure; he prays for grace “from hennesforth unto my lives ende” to bewail his sins, and that he may attain true penitence, confession and satisfaction “in this present lif” (10.1090).34 Chaucer does not explicitly represent himself, as William Langland and Julian of Norwich do, as puzzling through a problem over time; nor does he, unlike them, have a particular Truth that he is pursuing. But he seems to share their sense that it is process and experience that are valuable, rather than an “absolutely premeditated art” that perfectly reaches the end it has always already set 33 he most signiicant innovation in this area in the late Middle Ages, the doctrine of purgatory, though not a way to stave of death, is still a deferral of the end and the creation of a middle. See Jacques Le Gof, he Birth of Purgatory, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). 34 As Carl Phelpstead puts it in his discussion of artes moriendi, “the art of dying is seen to be the art of living”: Phelpstead, “ ‘h’ende is every tales strengthe’: Contextualizing Chaucerian Perspectives on Death and Judgment,” in Chaucer and Religion, ed. Helen Phillips (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2010), 97–110, at p. 103. he role of artes moriendi in daily life and civic and household governance is richly explored in Amy Appleford, Learning to Die in London, 1380–1540 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015). 43 CERVONE 9781783270675 PRINT.indd 43 01/07/2016 13:44 CLAIRE M. WATERS for itself.35 It is surely no accident that it is Pandarus, that would-be infallible “shaper,” who declares, “th’ende is every tales strengthe” (Troilus and Criseyde, 2.260) – a declaration that both the crashing failure of his own desired end and the problematic, multiple conclusions of the poem that records that failure deinitively undo. Troilus’s repeated insistence that it is inished, that it is done, that we have experienced it and now know what lessons to draw, is deeply unconvincing; most readers have found that the end of Troilus, for all its fascinations, is not by any means its strength. Our experience of Troilus arises from our own awareness of what is coming – that is, of the end – and yet our continual distraction from it by the middle, the “proces,” that so famously takes over.36 We are accustomed to suppose that middles must be thought of in terms of endings; and for religious works perhaps this is true, even when the end is one that cannot quite be reached. But Chaucer’s poetry, even – or perhaps especially – the rhyme royal that can seem to lay claim to ixity, perfection, and transcendence, insists that the end is only as good as the middle that makes it possible; he ofers a completeness that refuses to privilege the end, a way of moving forward that draws much of its energy from the middle. “Adam Scriveyn” and the hopas link are two of the moments that most persistently tempt us to think about the “real” Chaucer and his experience – that arouse our desire for answers and deinitive frames through their showy conjunction of text and life. But by making his ends so often unsatisfactory and obscuring his origins, Chaucer productively frustrates our apparently insatiable desire for clear beginnings and beautiful completeness; he builds into the very form of his poetry the idea that the most interesting work often takes place in the middle – a lesson that, after all, medievalists should already know well. hough poetry, like life, may inevitably take place in the context of its own end, Chaucer’s works suggest that if we look to that end for answers, we are looking in the wrong place. It is not being at the end – not having the last, perfect word – but thinking of those who come before, imagining those who come after, and recognizing one’s own place in the middle that gives one something to say, and someone to whom to say it. 35 Ryan McDermott, “Practices of Satisfaction and Piers Plowman’s Dynamic Middle,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 36 (2014): 169–207, considers how Piers invites readers “to layer their interactions with it, repeatedly returning to certain structural ‘middles’ that produce the meaning of the poem more than its actual ending” (175), and has many points of contact with the present argument while also demonstrating what diferent uses two diferent poets can make of middles. Cristina Maria Cervone’s account of Piers also brings out commonalities with the Tales; as she writes, “the answer to ‘teach me the way to charity’ must be enacted in and over time, as lived human experience”; Poetics of the Incarnation: Middle English Writing and the Leap of Love (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 127. On Julian and Langland, see Barbara Newman, “Redeeming the Time: Langland, Julian, and the Art of Lifelong Revision,” Yearbook of Langland Studies 23 (2009): 1–32. 36 Spearing, Medieval Autographies, 103–25, makes a compelling case for reading Chaucer as, in efect, a poet of process. See also his account of Troilus’s “series of attempts to ind a way of ending the work”; Readings in Medieval Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 122. 44 CERVONE 9781783270675 PRINT.indd 44 01/07/2016 13:44