A Guide to Chaucer’s Meter by Arthur Wayne Glowka (review)

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER "theatricality" proves such a useful way of characterizing contemporary critical concerns that it often leaves Chaucer's time behind. Ganim spends more time speaking about how Chaucer invented a future audience than in describing the dynamics of fourteenth-century theatricality. Such a stance privileges our role as critics-Chaucer is writing for us, after all-encourag­ ing us to indulge the faults we once found in the New Criticism. What I miss most in Ganim's book is thick description of Chaucer's theatrical context. It is true that "Chaucer's borrowing alternately depends on the power ofpopular discourse and distances him from it" (p. 16), but something complementaryoccurred in such mock sermons as "The Prose of the Ass," when popular culture drew power from elite discourse and simultaneously distanced itself from it. It is true that the Clerk's Envoy inverts an inversion (p. 90), using the tools of popular culture to mock popular notions, but such later "middle-class" authors ofpopular drama as Hans Folz do the same thing. If endlessly elaborated against a simplified version of his context, Chaucer's art grows deceptively complex, while medieval theatrical culture-particularly popular theatrical culture- be­ comes simple fodder for Chaucer's rich imagination, devolving into the ultimate carnivalpazllasse. Ganim begins his book, appropriately, with Kittredge's invention ofthe dramatic metaphor-a moment which marked the founding of a critical industry as well as the beginning ofthe end ofthe nineteenth-century view ofChaucer as court reporter ofEnglish history. Since Kittredge pushed the center of Chaucer studies across the line separating "life" from "art," explorations of Chaucer's relation to broader literary traditions have often warred with or discarded studies ofa historically situated Chaucer. Ganim's remarkable book offers us some complex and exciting ways ofhaving both Chaucers at once, in beneficial balance. Though it underplays popular culture's role in the poet's context, Chaucerian Theatricality is the most illuminatingstatementsinceKittredgeon what isdramaticabout Chaucer. CARL LINDAHL University of Houston ARTHUR WAYNE GLOWKA. A Guide to Chaucer's Meter. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1991. Pp. viii, 96. $12.75 paper. As Arthur Wayne Glowka's title suggests, this guide concentrates on the "organizing form" ofpoetry, not itsperformance. It presents a technique of 140 REVIEWS "foot-scansion" that does not intend to offer something new: "This book dusts off the traditional account ofChaucer's verse and presents it within the context ofmodern polemics about meter." It is intended as a "supple­ mental text for use in courses on Chaucer or English prosody," and gener­ ally addresses the student as a bright beginner: "Most people... with a little work can learn how to scan poetry" (p. 1). It is important to be clear about what beginners are to be taught to do, for the usefulness ofthis guide must stand or fall on the usefulness ofthe scanning technique it teaches. Its aim is to determine metricality: "Our job as prosodists is to discover the pattern the poet had in mind and to see how he followed the pattern. We can also make suggestions about how the poem should be read, but our primary concern is to find out what the pattern is and how the words form it" (p. 21). As it turns out, "how the poem should be read" would concern itselfwith performative aspects oflines, taking into account expressive, or "rhetorical," variation. In his final chapter Glowka does tip his hat to such concerns, but they are not the ones his scanning will serve. He makes virtually no suggestions about how the poem should be read. Instead, using the traditional terms ofGreek and Roman prosody, he will seek to determine how the poet obeys-or occasionally disobeys-the rules of"iambic pentameter." He will parse poetic lines metrically. Thus it is perfectly within his logic to scan lines 19-20 of The General Prologue, after step-by-step, foot-by-foot discussion, like this: x I I x / I x / I x 11 x / Bifil that in that seson on a day x l[X /I x 11x /Ix / In Southwerk at the Tabard as I lay; for he has wanted to show that there are...