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STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER that the meter in which most, if not all, medieval readers read Piers Plowman seems to have been "scribal." Shillingsburg hopes that his book "pulls together practical information and illuminates some arguments that have developed in isolation from one another" (p. 8), and thisheaccomplishesvery well; he also, however, makes medievalists aware of how much practical information and how many arguments they need still to acquire. TIM WILLIAM MACHAN Marquette University A. V C. SCHMIDT. The Clerkly Maker: Langland's Poetic Art. Cambridge and Wolfeboro, N.H.: D. S. Brewer, 1987. Pp. viii, 158. $42.00. ;£27.50. This is not the book most of us were expecting from Schmidt: something of a blockbuster on the scholastic background to Langland's poem seemed to be on the horizon. What we have is a short but packed book on the poetry of Piers Plowman, specifically on versification, diction, and wordplay. It is the first time the subject has been addressed in a book-length study, many readers of Langland having tended to regard his poem as being in verse by accident, so to speak, or to be poetic only in sporadic inspirational mo­ ments. For Schmidt, Langland is a subtle, witty, and intellectually stren­ uous poet, who wrote primarily, though not exclusively, for a clerical audience, one that would appreciate his learning and Latinity. He had thought deeply about his profession as a poet, distanced himself with some care from less serious kinds of writers, and found a way of establishing a firm alliance between the religious thinker and the poet, the clerk and the "maker." The chapter on versification, "Versify ing Fair," occupies nearly half the book (pp. 21-80), and more is promised on the subject in the future. Schmidt repeats from his edition of the B text the analysis of Langland's alliterative lines into ten variants distributed among three types: these include five-stave lines as well as lines where alliteration does not link the two half lines. He disagrees with much in the earlier argument of Kane and Donaldson (Kane's later argument for "modulation" between alliteration and stress is somewhat different) concerning the throwing of alliteration, 288 REVIEWS and with it stress, onto small and normally unstressed words.Rather, the stress pattern "is generally that ofordinary speech" (p. 36). He has a name ("mute staves") for those unstressed syllables that carry alliteration but considers that other lines with apparently poor alliteration can be restored to health ifthe use of"liaisonal"staves (with alliteration picked up from the end ofthe precedingword and attached to the stressed syllable) is properly recognized. The rest ofthe chapter deals with enjambment, with the translinear and running alliteration that often accompanies it, with contrapuntal allitera­ tion (e.g., aabab), pararhyme and rhyme. Particular emphasis is placed on enjambment, which Schmidt shows to be one of Langland's favorite devices, and a key way ofimparting conversational naturalness rather than rhetorical formality to his verse. There is some fine-spun analysis here, though some signs ofstrain too in the endeavor to communicate metrical effects in words: translinear assonance has "the insistence of a drum" (p. 46), the parts of a sentence separated by the line end are "locked in suspension like the opposed streams ofa tidal river" (p. 47), a line "rumbles like a stone being rolled away" (p.75; it refers, not unexpectedly, to the Harrowing ofHell), rhyme and assonance leave an admonition "echoing eerily in our ears as if down a long vaulted cavern" (p. 76). But one recognizes the problem, and there is nothing pretentious about the lan­ guage, rather a patent and touching sincerity, and the kind ofconviction that anyone has to have who is talking about meter. The chapter called "Formally Enditing" examines the use ofLatin quota­ tions, showing that even those that are commonly thought of as "ap­ pended" are integrated in often quite a subtle manner into the sense ofthe English in which they are embedded. The macaronic use ofLatin is also carefully thought out and witty. The final chapter, "Reding in Retoryk," concentrates on the pun, a form ofwordplay that creates a special alertness to the workings oflanguage, and that...

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