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The Royal Stanza in Early English Literature

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Martin Stevens
Martin Stevens*
Affiliation:
Herbert H. Lehman College, City University of New York, New York, New York
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Abstract

The traditional history of the rhyme royal stanza in early English literature, including its earliest attribution to James I of Scotland, needs reexamination. The name was apparently first recorded by Gascoigne in 1575, and, while no evidence exists to connect it with James I, the stanza itself was used in fourteenth-century poetic contests to address real or imaginary royalty. It appears in royal entry ceremonies, as illustrated by a text surviving from York in 1486. Chaucer employed the stanza first for royal address, as in the Parlement and the Troilus, but later, in the Canterbury Tales, as a characterizing device. The word “prose,” which he uses to describe the verse of the Man of Law's Tale, has been universally misread. It actually refers here to formal stanzas of equal length, and it must be read as the first attempt to create a poetic high style in English literature.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 94 , Issue 1 , January 1979 , pp. 62 - 76
Copyright
Copyright © 1979 by The Modern Language Association of America

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References

Notes

1 C. Hugh Holman, A Handbook to Literature, 3rd ed. (Indianapolis: Odyssey, 1972), p. 455.

2 John Norton-Smith, ed., The Kingis Quair, by James i of Scotland (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971). The attribution of the poem to James I rests on the colophon of the unique MS. Bodley Arch. Selden B.24, which ascribes the poem to “Iacobus primus scotorum rex Illustrissimus.” It should be noted, however, that this scribal attribution occurs more than sixty years after the alleged composition of the poem. While it is generally assumed that the poem was written c. 1425, the manuscript is dated c. 1488. The defense of James's authorship is well summarized by Norton-Smith, who characterizes claims to the contrary as “largely of academic manufacture” (p. xix), but the question is by no means resolved. In a recent edition of the poem, A. M. Kinghom observes that, “on existing textual evidence, questions of authorship and date must remain unsettled and it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that it may not be a Scottish poem at all” (The Middle Scots Poets, York Medieval Texts [Evanston: Northwestern Univ. Press. 1970], p. 13).

3 The poem was actually discovered by Bishop Thomas Tanner before 1735 and was printed posthumously in his Bibliotheca Britannico-Hibernica in 1748. It was in the latter form that the poem came to the attention of Bishop Percy (Norton-Smith, p. xiii, n. 1).

4 Rpt. in O. B. Hardison, Jr., ed., English Literary Criticism (New York: Appleton, 1963), p. 80.

5 Ane Schorl Treatise, Conteining Some Revlis and Cautelis to Be Obseruit and Eschewit in Scottis Poesie (1585); rpt. in The Essayes of a Premise in the Divine Art of Poesie, ed. Edward Arber (London: n.p., 1870), p. 67.

6 Quoted from John H. Fisher, John Gower: Moral Philosopher and Friend of Chaucer (London: Methuen, 1965), p. 87.

7 Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Alex Preminger et al., enl. ed. (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1974), p. 115.

8 Chambers, The Medieval Stage (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1903), I, 65.

9 Chambers claims that the performers in seasonal village festivals much like the Jeu de Robin et Marion were probably drawn from a puy or a similar organization. In England these took the form, among others, of the ludi de Rege et Regina in Worcester, the various kinds of “somerking” or rex aestivalis festivals, or the “king-plays” already mentioned; see I, 172-73.

10 The first version survives in the City of York House Book as transcribed by Angelo Raine in York Civic Records, Yorkshire Archaeological Society Record Series, No. 98 (1939), i, 155-59; the second is preserved in MS. Cotton Julius B.xii, ff. 8b-21b. For a transcription of both versions, see A. H. Smith, “A York Pageant, 1486,” London Medieval Studies, 1 (1937-48), 382-98. Quotations in this article are from Raine's transcription.

11 Ebrauk is, of course, the mythic founder of York. He is mentioned by Geoffrey of Monmouth as ruling at the time of Saul for a period of thirty-nine years and of founding “a city on the farther side of the Humber, which city he called Kaerebrauc after himself, that is to say the City of Ebraucus”; see The History of the Kings of Britain, ed. and trans. Lewis Thorpe (Baltimore: Penguin, 1966), pp. 78–79. The Latin name for the city is Eboracum.

12 This rare and interesting connection between the mystery plays and civic pageantry establishes that the “paiaunt of the assumption of our Lady” (See MS. Cotton Julius B.xii) was borrowed for the occasion from the Weavers, who normally performed the Assumption in the York cycle. As Raine points out, the unpublished Chamberlains' Rolls of the City of York indicated an expenditure of 4s. for payment of the Weavers' pageant; see p. 159, n. 1.

13 The first stanza rhymes ababbcbc; the second ababcdddec, with lines 5, 9, and 10 having but two stresses.

14 See Robert Withington, English Pageantry: An Historical Outline (1918; rpt. New York: Benjamin Blom, 1965), i, 124-32.

15 Bergeron, English Civic Pageantry, 1558-1642 (Columbia: Univ. of South Carolina Press, 1971), p. 10.

16 See H. N. McCracken, ed., The Minor Poems of John Lydgate, Early English Text Society, OS 192 (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1934), pp. 630–48.

17 G. C. Macaulay, ed., The English Works of John Gower, Early English Text Society, extra ser. 82 (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1901); the supplication to Venus appears on pp. 446–48; the poem “In Praise of Peace” on pp. 481–92.

18 Gardner, The Life and Times of Chaucer (New York: Knopf. 1977), pp. 204–05.

19 See, for example, Joseph T. Shipley, Dictionary of World Literary Terms (Boston: Writer, 1943), p. 278.

20 J. A. W. Bennett, for example, states early in his Prologue that “even if we were to discover definite evidence of such an occasion, the discovery would illuminate this poem no more than the knowledge of any similar origin or setting,” and he maintains that such a discovery would not help “us to understand the inner force of any work of genius.” This approach, while perfectly legitimate, strikes me as curiously limited. The “inner force” of which Bennett speaks surely would gain meaning from our deeper understanding of the ceremonial occasion and the political allegory; see The Parlement of Foules: An Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon, 1957), p. 2.

21 Gardner, p. 218; the full argument is developed on pp. 217–21.

22 For an excellent colored reproduction of this frontispiece, see Alfred David, The Strumpet Muse: Art and Morals in Chaucer's Poetry (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1976), Fig. 1. I am aware of Derek Pearsall's argument that the Corpus frontispiece may simply be a presentation picture and that the association of the picture with the Court of Richard ii would not be accepted as evidence by any reputable art historian. I am not prepared to take the picture as hard evidence; yet there is good reason, even without the picture, to assume that the poem was directed to a courtly audience. For Pearsall's interesting argument, see “The Troilus Frontispiece and Chaucer's Audience,” The Yearbook of English Studies, 7 (1977), 68-74.

23 For a full description of the picture, see Aage Brusendorff, The Chaucer Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon, 1925), pp. 21–23.

24 All quotations from Chaucer are taken from F. N. Robinson, ed., The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, 2nd ed. (Boston: Houghton, 1957).

25 See p. 121. See also John Gardner's assertion: “we can virtually be certain that the original Man of Law's tale was the present Tale of Melibeus. (The Man of Law's introduction prepares us for a tale in prose but is followed, surprisingly, by a tale in verse, obviously a later insert; and the Melibeus is full of legal jargon)' (p. 288).

26 Curtius, European Literature in the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Harper 1953), pp. 149–50.

27 Ian Robinson, Chaucer's Prosody: A Study of the Middle English Verse Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1971), p. 242.

28 Robert Mannyng of Brunne's Chronicle, ed. E. F. Furnivall, Rolls Series (London, 1887), I, 85.

29 A. C. Gibbs, ed., Middle English Romances, York Medieval Texts (London: Edward Arnold, 1966), p. 25.

30 On occasion tail-rhyme stanzas and quatrains composed of interlocking rhymes include rhyme markers. These devices, however, are meant more as punctuation marks than as decoration. They belong to the same category of marking as the virgule, since they are intended to smooth the way for the oral reader, showing him the connection between rhyme words. Rhyme markers, because of their function, seem to occur most consistently in dramatic texts.

31 Francis Thynne in his Emblèmes and Epigrames refers to the rime couée of Sir Thopas as “ridinge rime”—a rather apt name for the jog trot of the “priking” hero (see OED, s.v. “Riding rhyme”).

32 have argued elsewhere that the reference to “Malkynes maydenhede” (n.30) deliberately recalls the daughter of the Reeve's Tale and that, by allowing Harry Baillie to make this allusion, Chaucer meant to void the Cook's fragment from his final sequence of tales; see “Malkyn in the Man of Law's Headlink,” Leeds Studies in English, NS 1 (1967), 1-5. For the view that Chaucer meant to retain the Cook's Tale as part of the sequence of bawdry, see David, pp. 106–07, 124.

33 There is the notable instance in which the Knight lapses and we hear the resonances of Chaucer the poet: “But of that storie list me not to write” (i.1201).

34 My discussion of the Man of Law's Tale is strongly indebted to Alfred David's brilliant interpretation, first presented as an article in PMLA, 82 (1967), 217-25, and now part of his book The Strumpet Muse, pp. 118–34. While I differ with David here and there—especially over his notion that Chaucer meant to assign a tale in prose to the Man of Law—I agree that the issue explored in the tale has to do with taste and propriety and further with the ineptitude of the Man of Law both as a storyteller and as a critic. I should also mention my indebtedness to the article by Rodney Delasanta, “And of Great Reverence: Chaucer's Man of Law,” which calls attention to the pomposity and the inaccuracy of the Man of Law as a storyteller; see Chaucer Review, 5 (1971), 288-310. Although he does not specifically include the Man of Law's Tale in the category, John Gardner recently observed—very incisively, I believe—that Chaucer “played, on occasion, with intentional bad art” (see p. 291). My discussion takes the view that the Man of Law's Tale is interesting to us not for its inherent attractiveness as a story or its philosophical and rhetorical scope but for its perfect dramatic exposition of an inept narrator who systematically disfigures what might have been a good story. Interpreted in this way, the tale becomes what Gardner calls a “clown poem.”

35 The word “thrifty” in the line “I kan right now no thrifty tale seyn” has attracted a wide variety of glosses: Baugh's and Pratt's editions interpret it as “profitable,” Donaldson's as “proper,” Robinson's as “profitable, serviceable,” or—one assumes in another context—as “provident.” Clearly, of these glosses, only Donaldson's is acceptable. The OED in citing this line glosses the word to mean “respectable, decent, becoming, proper, as it should be” (see “Thrifty,” a., def. 2b). The word is crucial to a proper understanding of the tale, and the most common gloss for it in Chaucer editions, “profitable,” makes no sense at all in the context.

36 As Donald Howard puts it so aptly, discussing the moral outpourings of the Man of Law, “Moralists, like movie censors, often object to vice depicted in a work without considering the artist's intention in depicting it …” (The Idea of the Canterbury Tales [Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1976], p. 46).

37 There is, of course, considerable formal rhetoric in the poem. A recent article makes much of the effectiveness with which the rhetorical devices bring out the pathos in the story. Since I have great difficulty taking this pathos seriously (who, for example, can keep a straight face when the Man of Law apostrophizes Donegild's messenger with “O messager, fulfild of dronkenessc / strong is thy breeth …” etc. [ii.771-72]), I am not persuaded by the argument. But the article does remind us of the contributions that rhetoric makes to Chaucer's high style; see Thomas H. Bestul, “The Man of Law's Tale and the Rhetorical Foundations of Chaucerian Pathos,” Chaucer Review, 9 (1975), 216-26.

38 David Bevington, in the headnote to his recent edition of the play, observes that “Weather is chiefly composed in rhyme royal seven-line stanzas (especially for Jupiter's speeches) and in the four-stress couplets used in Heywood's other plays.” This statement is in error; rhyme royal is not used widely in the play, and it is given exclusively to Jupiter. See Medieval Drama (Boston: Houghton, 1975), p. 991.

39 Robert Lee Ramsay, ed., Magnyfycense: A Moral Play, Early English Text Society, extra ser. 98 (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1908).

40 It was widely used by Lydgate, Hoccleve, Dunbar, Henryson, Hawes, and Barclay. For most of these writers it had lost its Chaucerian nuances, and they seem to have used it mainly because Chaucer had in his longest single-narrative poem. Lydgate, however, deserves special mention in this context. In The Temple of Glass, he restricts the use of the stanza to the dialogue sections within the dream, as the Lady, the Lover, and Venus speak. Clearly, for Lydgate at least, the stanza retained its association with royal address.