Lydgate's Metrical Inventiveness and his Debt to Chaucer

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 H a m m o n d 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 Present Day, Y.From the Origins to Spenser (London and New York: Macmillan, 19 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 oftextual 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 ofthe Hengwrt manuscript of the Canterbury Tales by Barber and Barber has now established conclusively that Chaucer must have counted some wordfinal 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 thefirstpoet 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 ofthe American Academy ofArts 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), 5784 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. 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. Ifboth of these points were valid, almost all ofLydgate'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: thefirstis...