The Chaucer Review

The Chaucer Review 38.4 (2004) 383-400

From Decasyllable to Pentameter:
Gower's Contribution to English Metrics

Martin J. Duffell and Dominique Billy
Queen Mary, University of London
London, England
(m.j.duffell@qmul.ac.uk)
and
Université de Nantes
Nantes, France
(domby@wanadoo.fr)

After more than a century of often acrimonious debate, most metrists now accept the hypothesis of F. J. Child that in Chaucer's verse word-final schwa before a consonant regularly counts as a syllable, just as e-atone does in Old French and e-muet does in Modern French verse.¹ The decisive contribution to that debate was made just over ten years ago by Nicholas Barber and Charles Barber; their massive computer exercise proved that the number of syllables per line in the Hengwrt MS of the Canterbury Tales correlates very closely with the number of such word-final schwas.² They also showed that Chaucer's long-line meter is basically decasyllabic, and other studies based on large line samples have shown that, when word-final schwas are so counted, Chaucer's verse is predominantly iambic, with fewer than 4 percent of lines having strong syllables in odd-numbered positions other than the first.³ These two findings were brought together four years ago in Chaucer Review to argue that Chaucer invented the iambic pentameter, and that he did so by making key modifications to the meter of Boccaccio's Filostrato, a copy of which he brought back from his second journey to Italy in 1378.⁴

Chaucer's iambic pentameter faced an uncertain future, because its regular syllable count and accentual pattern were disguised by key changes in the English language of the following century: in particular, the French stressing of many loan words became obsolete, and word-final schwa, which had long been threatened, finally succumbed.⁵ Although fifteenth-century Scottish poets (whose dialect had shed such schwas a century earlier) employed Chaucer's meter, English poets from Lydgate to Sidney abandoned or misinterpreted Chaucer's model and experimented with various alternatives. As a result, the iambic pentameter was finally established as the canonical English long-line meter only after 1580.⁶

The twentieth-century debate on whether Chaucer's long line was the first iambic pentameter largely ignored a crucial piece of evidence: the [End Page 383] verse of John Gower (b. ?1330, d. 1408). Chaucer and Gower were close friends, certainly during the period 1377-90, critical to the development of English iambic verse, and probably for much longer.⁷ Chaucer was already close enough to Gower in 1378 to make him one of his attorneys on his departure for Italy, and in 1385 he dedicated the fruit of that visit, Troilus and Criseyde, to his friend, a compliment Gower repaid in 1390 by his dedication of the Confessio Amantis.⁸ The two poets were clearly very close in both ambition and location (although Chaucer lived across the river in Aldgate, he opens the Canterbury Tales at an inn in Gower's Southwark). The circumstantial evidence argues that the very similar experiments they were conducting in versification during this period were not unconnected.

Gower divided his vast poetic output between three languages. Throughout his life he composed quantitative Latin verse; his most important Latin poem, the Vox clamantis, was composed in elegiac couplets between 1377 and 1381. By writing in Latin, Gower was playing safe; his Italian contemporaries, Petrarch and Boccaccio, did likewise, reserving the vulgar tongue for scurrilous stories and romantic trifles. Gower's other early choice of language for composition was Anglo-Norman, the French dialect of the English middle classes; his longest French poem, the Mirour de l'omme, was completed in 1376. Since Anglo-Norman and the other dialects were mutually intelligible, French, too, was a compara-tively safe bet for future fame. For almost three hundred years after the Norman Conquest French had been the official language of England, and it became possible to plead in English in the courts only in 1363. In the 1370s much...