I’ve been tracking the life-cycle of rhyme royal, the stanza form (rhyme-scheme ababbcc) that Chaucer developed and used in his Parliament of Fowls, Troilus and Criseyde, and some of his Canterbury Tales in the last decades of the fourteenth century. In the first half of the fifteenth century, it was the fashionable stanza form that every courtly poet wrote and every reader wanted to read.
Category Archives: verse forms
The Techne of Verse-Making: Poetry’s Termes in Middle English
Tomorrow I’m off to London to attend the Biennial London Chaucer Conference. I’m speaking on Saturday morning in a session on ‘Literary Technologies’. The title of my short paper is ‘The Techne of Verse-Making: Poetry’s Termes in Middle English’. It discusses verse-technology and verse-terminology in fourteenth and fifteenth century English poetry, looking especially at balades and lenvoys. I look at the ‘Lenvoy de Chaucer’ at the end of the Clerk‘s Tale, at Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, and at The Kingis Quair.
Continue reading The Techne of Verse-Making: Poetry’s Termes in Middle English
Temporary Lyric in Skelton’s Magnificence
As promised, another example which shows how cleverly and self-consciously late medieval dramatists exploited the familiar forms of late medieval lyrics in their drama. At the beginning of John Skelton’s early Tudor morality play, Magnificence, Liberty (i.e. the character personifying liberality or generosity) and Felicity (i.e. the character personifying prosperity and happiness) debate between themselves whether they can happily co-exist. Felicity argues that Liberty needs to submit himself to ‘Continence’, i.e. moderation, whilst Liberty argues that there can be no wealth or happiness when Liberty is constrained.
Fabricating Lyric in Middle English Drama
The relationship between religious lyric and religious drama in medieval England is a close one. Dramatic speeches of welcome and salutation (with each line beginning ‘hail…’ or ‘welcome’) are very similar in structure to surviving lyrics, often drawing on the same liturgy. Research by George C Taylor has carefully explored the overlap in form and content between lyric and drama, and Lu Emily Pearson and Richard Osberg have also drawn attention to passages within plays which can be isolated as lyrics. I’m interested not only in lyrics that you can isolate, but also moments in drama which draw on shared awareness of lyric form. Here’s a post on one example in the N-town cycle, and next week a similar example from John Skelton’s early Tudor play, Magnificence.
Good and Bad Stanzas
Some medieval English playwrights use different types of stanza for different types of characters. In the fifteenth-century morality play Mankind, the personification Mercy begins the play speaking in stanzas which are often called octaves, rhyming ababbcbc (also sometimes called eight-line ballade stanzas, or Monk’s Tale stanzas following their use by Chaucer). This stanza form is often used for moral or educational writing in later Middle English poetry. This is a good fit for Mercy’s character, as he begins the play in priestly guise, reminding the audience to persevere in good works and to avoid sin.
Making happy stanzas
My last post looked at characters sharing lines and stanzas in Middle English cycle plays. These shared lines and stanzas were sometimes ominous or implicative, showing how characters are drawn into evil or collaborate in cruelty. But joining together in the construction of a stanza can also signal joy and celebration in these plays. This post shows you some of these spectacular collaborative stanzas in Middle English drama.
The Forms of Middle English Drama
Must look at the drama, must look at the drama. That’s been running through my head and scribbled down in notebooks for as long as I have been working on this poetics project. Drama in medieval England was drama in verse, so it has the potential to be a great source for my book. But I have been very surprised by how purposeful and subtle the use of form is, especially to emphasise key moments in the action. This post (the first of several on form in medieval English drama) shows some of the effects playwrights create with stanzas and rhyme. This is perhaps very obvious to people who research and teach a lot of medieval drama, but it is new and fascinating to me.
Larks and Quails
Today is ‘Whan That Aprille Day’, a celebration of ‘oold bokes yn sondrye oold tonges’ and languages which are Old, or Middle, or Ancient, or Dead. I’d like to celebrate Charles of Valois, duke of Orleans, who wrote first in one language, French, and then another, English (and later still had his French poems translated into Latin). Charles was taken prisoner at Agincourt in 1415 and was then held captive in England for twenty-five years. During this time he translated some of his French poetry into English, and then wrote more English poetry, creating a long work (edited by Mary-Jo Arn as Fortunes Stabilnes) which combines lyric sequences and narrative sections.
How to talk about…stanzas
Troilus and Criseyde is written in rhyme royal stanzas of seven lines rhyming ababbcc. Despite the various subdivisions within the narrative (for example its proems, songs, letters, prayers, and apostrophes), Chaucer doesn’t vary the form of his stanzas as a French dit amoureux might for inset lyrics but keeps to this stanza throughout. In later Middle English, the term balade referred not only to a fixed-form lyric but also to the stanza forms generally used within such lyrics. To write in balade was to write stanzaically, most often in seven-line rhyme royal stanzas, though the term ‘rhyme royal’ was coined later during the sixteenth century.
