A New History of English Metre.
- Author/Editor
- Duffell, Martin J.
- Title
- A New History of English Metre.
- Published
- Duffell, Martin J. A New History of English Metre. Studies in Linguistics, no. 5. (London and Leeds: Legenda, 2008). xi, 292 pp.
- Review
- Duffell rewrites traditional English metrical history with the aid of the methods and terminologies of linguistic metrics (both statistical and generative), comparative linguistics, and cognitive science, and with recurrent attention to intercultural interactions. The book's ten chapters are frequently daunting, with data and metaphors drawn from this wide and exacting variety of fields, but contextualizing cultural descriptions and the brisk summary-conclusions that punctuate the chapters are sharply written, offering a clear-cut march "from the earliest surviving examples of versifying in a Germanic language to some of the most complex and subtle modern metrical experiments" (3), along the way discussing the metrical habits of "just over ninety poets" (4) including Gower. Chapter four, "Versifying in Bilingual England" (pp. 73-95), describes and analyzes Gower's English and French metrics, set in contrast to those of Chaucer and of the so-called "Poems of Ch," and rehearsing much of what Duffell has already published about Gower and Chaucer since 1996. The volume's extensive bibliography includes six essays on Gower and/or Chaucer written by Duffell, plus two on Gower's French metrics written collaboratively with Dominique Billy (as well a number of studies by Duffell that do not pertain to Gower or Chaucer). This large body of data is compressed and made more valuable by the "evolutionary" (Duffell's recurrent term) frame of the volume, its statistical tables, and the "Index of Linguistics and Metrical Terms," much used by me as I negotiated Duffell's statistical information and data-rich discussions. The rewards are many, both specific claims (some consigned to footnotes) and more sweeping generalizations. A few examples from the notes on p. 95: "Gower anticipated French poets of the sixteenth century in ignoring contemporary speech norms and requiring an artificial delivery by his readers." As well, Gower's "archaic convention of pronouncing 'e-atone' has survived in modern French song and drama" (n.33). Further, comparing the "78% of Gower's 'vers de dix' [that] have no strong syllable in an odd-numbered position" with "70% in Boccaccio's 'endecasyllabi'," and adding another "10% of Gower's lines [in which] a strong syllable in an odd-numbered position is prevented from becoming prominent in delivery by a phrasal stress that immediately follows it," Duffell deduces that "Gower's French long line could therefore be described as 88% iambic" (n.35). In his "Conclusion" to chapter four Duffell tells us that both Chaucer and Gower "learned from Italian models how to count beats in such a way as to produce a regular number of syllables," but that "two disasters hit their enterprise": the loss of "word-final schwa" and "the defeat of the Plantagenets in the Hundred Years War, which doomed the Insular variety of French." Thus, "[o]ne of Gower's most important metrical innovations" in Insular French was "lost forever," although "his English iambic tetrameter and Chaucer's pentameter were recovered in the sixteenth century, and became the canonical metres of subsequent English verse" (92). Without saying so overtly, Duffell prefers Chaucer's variations in beat to Gower's regularity, and Chaucer's greater influence among later poets is made evident. Yet, Gower has a larger place in Duffell's linguistics-rich metrical history than in traditional ones, even without discussion of his Latin verse. [MA. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 41.1]
- Date
- 2008
- Gower Subjects
- Style, Rhetoric, and Versification
Influence and Later Allusion
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations