Chaucer's Verse Art in its European Context.

Author/Editor
Duffell, Martin J.

Title
Chaucer's Verse Art in its European Context.

Published
Duffell, Martin J. Chaucer's Verse Art in its European Context. Tempe, AZ: ACMRS, 2018).

Review
Duffell is a metricist, seemingly a very good one, but not a student of Gower, and thus a bit out of touch with scholarship more recent than John Fisher's. He is also given to heavy dependence on "technical jargon," e.g., "four-ictic dolnik": which is to say, "a line with a fixed number of beats, and with offbeats containing between 0 and 2 syllables, with four beats" (289); one is grateful for the glossary (287-98). He sees Gower and Chaucer collaborating to reform English poetics, with Chaucer probably contributing more to Gower's development than vice-versa: "Collaboration must be expected because the directions in which each was taking versifying were remarkably similar: they regulated both AN and ME octosyllables, and they both experimented with deviant decasyllables, lines such as no French nor English had ever composed, and lines that deviated from the existing norms in parallel ways" (100). The weight Duffell places on "personalities," exacerbated by the outdatedness of relevant bibliography, (e.g.: MS Additional 59495 [olim Trentham] was given to Henry IV, the balades of the "Traitié" were "for the bride of his old age" [101]) sometimes gets in the way of his sharper analyses, but his major points--that "C[onfessio] A[mantis] qualifies as the first poem 'in strict iambic tetrameter' [Duffell's emphasis] in the English language" (111); that "it is just possible that Gower's example influenced Chaucer to make more sparing use of headless lines in S[ir[ T[hopas] and to be more tolerant of a regular iambic rhythm" (113); "it was John Gower and not Geoffrey Chaucer, who transformed the duple-time four-beat dolnik into the iambic tetrameter. Gower did this in two languages: in AN by making his octosyllables iambic, and in ME by eschewing headless lines and epic caesura" (135)--are significant, and should be noted. [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2]

Date
2018

Gower Subjects
Style, Rhetoric, and Versification
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations