This chapter explores the varying meanings and importance of form in the Canterbury Tales. Overall, the focus is on Chaucer’s understanding of form as integral to interpretation. The opening section contextualizes Chaucer’s approach to form within later medieval poetics, contrasting ideas of formal perfection and imperfection in the work of Dante and the Pearl-poet with Chaucer’s responsive and unpredictable forms. The Canterbury Tales is compared with tale-collections by Gower and Boccaccio, and with Chaucer’s other tale-collections – the ‘Monk’s Tale’ and the Legend of Good Women. The chapter explores the interplay and juxtaposition of forms both across the Tales, and within an individual tale (The Nun’s Priest’s Tale). Moving to a micro-level, it analyses one specific form – rhyme royal – by close-reading several stanzas from The Man of Law’s Tale. Finally it argues that Chaucer problematizes the conventional allegorical idea of seeing through form to reach meaning, suggesting instead that form and content cannot be divided. Meaning is inherent in Chaucer’s complex, kinetic, and, above all, multiple forms.

This chapter deals with the formal aspects of Chaucer’s verse craft. It discusses Chaucer’s mastery of rhyme and rhythm, and illustrates some of the stanza forms (rhyme royal, ballade, rondeau) that Chaucer deployed. It describes the metrical system behind both his octosyllabic lines and his pentameter lines, including the treatment of final e. Deviations from metrical norms, such as headless lines and enjambment, are discussed, but I argue that even perfectly regular iambic tetrameter and pentameter lines show variation, based on the degree to which linguistic stress approximates or modulates away from the metrical template. Particular attention is paid to Chaucer’s own comments about rhyme and the syllable count.

Thomas Hoccleve referred to Chaucer as the ‘firste fyndere of our faire langage’. The word fyndere is carefully chosen, as a modified translation of the first ‘canon’ of classical and medieval rhetoric, the ancestor of present-day English invention. Any assessment of Chaucer’s ‘poetic art’ requires us not just to identify the linguistic choices available to him, it also requires us to ask how those choices relate to his broader poetics. Chaucer’s use of ‘pronouns of power’, for example, do not only characterise particular choices from the linguistic resources of London Middle English, they are also a matter of style, a notion for which classical and medieval literary theoreticians had their own terminology, distinguishing high, middle and low styles, widely recognised as having distinct functions relating to social status and roles. It is conceivably as a metrist, however, that Chaucer’s skill as a ‘finder’ is perhaps most subtly demonstrated, as examples from his works show.