The Even Yearbook 8 (2008)
#81
volume: 8 (2008)
author: Gyöngyi Werthmüller
title: Middle English iambic metre — intrametrical and linguistic problems
abstract: This article intends to gauge the 14th century poets Chaucer and Gower’s metre against Halle & Keyser’s (1966, 1971, 1972) metrical theory, and it means to refute a claim they make, which they derive from the metre, but which is not a metrical but a phonological assumption (concerning the suffix -inge). A crucial point of this analysis is the desire to part with the tradition that when not dealing with alliterative metre, ME metrists are usually concerned with pentameter lines (lines consisting of five feet), disregarding tetrameter lines (lines consisting of four feet). Halle & Keyser (1966, 1971, 1972) maintain that their theory does not only hold for pentametric lines, but can be extended to other iambic metres (of which in English the tetrameter is the most typical): nevertheless, they themselves fail to prove this, and they do not point out instances where the iambic pentameter may differ from other metres. In this paper, both §1 and §3 are concerned with this issue.
Cable (1998) notes the following: “Gower’s meter, like Chaucer’s, is affected by two features of late fourteenth century phonology: the optional sounding of final -e and the variable stress on a large part of the lexicon, especially those words of Romance origin” (1998: 39). After briefly revising Halle & Keyser’s theory in §1 (which serves as a basis for §2), I shall attempt to analyse, at least partly, the interaction of these two problems, but — for the time being — mainly with regard to Germanic words; §3, however, provides a very short examination of Romance words. In §4, I shall reveal two features I consider characteristic of iambic tetrameter, which have not yet gained external support, but which, in turn, may serve as support for each other.
As Cable (1998) suggests, “Comments on Gower’s prosody tend more toward the level of literary effect than the level of phonological and metrical analysis” (1998: 39). Though the present study can serve only as the beginning stage of a research, its aim is to change and remedy this situation to some extent.
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