from Interpretation and Performance: Essays for Alan Gaylord, ed.
Susan F. Yager and Elise E. Morse-Gagné (Provo, UT: The Chaucer
Studio Press, 2013)
Performing Lydgate’s Broken-Backed Meter
Maura NolaN
Alan Gaylord taught me that reading Chaucer’s poetry well means reading it
aloud. In his many years of teaching, in his famous workshops at Kalamazoo,
and in his published scholarship, he has repeatedly shown that the analysis of
Chaucer cannot be complete without an account of oral performance. It was
to his work on Chaucer’s prosody that I turned when I set out to reconsider
Lydgate’s meter in the Prologue to the Siege of Thebes, a short prelude to the
Theban story in which Lydgate imagines himself joining Chaucer’s pilgrimage
on its way home from Canterbury. The analysis of Lydgate’s meter has vexed
literary scholars since the early twentieth century because his verse seems unmetrical in comparison with that of Chaucer. Even as the latter was being
praised by early editors as the inventor of the iambic pentameter line, his most
fervent admirer was often dismissed as an incompetent metrist, incapable of
emulating his “maistere Chaucere’s” regular rhythm.1 The habit of comparing
Lydgate unfavorably to his predecessor is exacerbated by the fact that Chaucer’s poetry has been repeatedly edited over the past two centuries with an ideal
notion of iambic pentameter as a model, while Lydgate’s verse has received
ascribed to editorial neglect. Certain irregular features of Lydgate’s verse are
so prevalent that they demand an explanation: the seeming profusion of extra
syllables, the prevalence of headless lines, and especially the frequent appearance of the “broken-backed” or “Lydgate” line (in which two stressed syllables
appear in sequence at the caesura, lacking an unstressed syllable to separate
them) all combine to produce the effect of metrical disorder.
But a closer look at Lydgate’s use of the broken-backed line suggests
a more fruitful approach to his meter overall, one that treats it as a problem
suggested that what seems like incompetence may instead be a comprehenThe Serpent of Division by John Lydgate the Monk of Bury, ed. Henry Noble MacCracken (London: H. Frowde, 1911), 65. For a brief summary of negative responses
to Lydgate’s meter, see Martin Duffell, “Lydgate’s Metrical Inventiveness and his Debt
to Chaucer,” Parergon n. s. 18.1 (2000): 227-49, at 227-28.
1
141
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sible response to language change and to the English metrical tradition, thus
placing Lydgate within a larger narrative of linguistic development.2 At the
same time, Lydgate’s choice of the broken-backed line is not solely produced
by factors external to his verse. In the Prologue to the Siege of Thebes, these
lines are distinctively associated with the character of the Host and with a spewords, Lydgate self-consciously chooses the broken-backed line because it has
aesthetic value to him; far from being a defective version of an ideal line, it is
itself a literary form that makes meaning in a distinctive way. As a result, the
enterprise in the Prologue, but it also encourages readers to rethink the place
of meter within his work overall, as a formal device that he uses with deliberaThe starting place for any discussion of Lydgate’s meter is its relationship to
Chaucer’s iambic pentameter line. Tradition has it that Lydgate did not fully
understand Chaucer’s verse and therefore produced a far inferior version of
iambic pentameter, hampered by his inability to grasp the proper relationship
between stressed and unstressed syllables in the line as a whole. But recent
work on Lydgate’s meter has elucidated various reasons for the seeming unmetschwa), his inability to read Italian (and thus to imitate the endacasyllabo line
Multiple generations of scholars have sought to explain Lydgate’s meter by
locating it within the larger history of English metrics or by examining changes in spo-
Performing Lydgate’s Broken-Backed Meter
143
favored by Italian poets, which lacked a caesura), and his turn to earlier English
verse forms (which were not syllabically regular and frequently contained extra
unstressed syllables).3 In light of these historical factors, it has become clear
that Lydgate’s metrical choices were much more self-conscious and deliberate
than has been recognized in the past. I argue that Lydgate’s use of the brokenbacked line in the Prologue to the Siege of Thebes is part of a deliberate effort
ter that conforms to the dramatic expectations that Lydgate articulates in the
Troy Book and in his mummings and disguisings. The broken-backed line thus
emerges as an aesthetic choice that reveals the intimate link between the notion
of performance and Lydgate’s construction of literary character.
Determining which of Lydgate’s lines are broken-backed is no simple
matter, however. As Derek Pearsall notes, the Chaucer that Lydgate was reading
was not the Chaucer that we read today in printed and edited volumes. As many
scholars of Chaucer’s prosody have pointed out, modern editing practices have
smoothed out Chaucer’s meter, making slight alterations to perfect the iambic
pentameter line.4 Lydgate’s poetry, in comparison, has been altered much less;
lacking a clear sense of his metrical habits, editors have emended this verse unsystematically, often failing to introduce small changes that would be automatic
The critic who has done most to elucidate Lydgate’s verse design in relation
to Chaucer, to French and Italian models, to earlier English models, and to schwa deletion is Martin Duffell. In this instance see Duffell, op. cit., especially 237-38 (for a dis3
2
heroic line found in Middle English romance and villages poetry; see Fitzroy Pyle, “The
Pedigree of Lydgate’s Heroic Line,” Hermathena 25 (1937): 26-59, who argues that when
Lydgate adopted Chaucer’s iambic decasyllabic meter, he imitated earlier English heroic
the “break-back” line), 40. In his “The Fifteenth-Century Heroic Line,” Essays and Studies 24 (1938): 28-41, C. S. Lewis similarly suggests that Chaucer’s successors, including
Lydgate, veered away from their master’s iambic decasyllabic lines by introducing a
strong medial break, thereby creating two half lines “hovering between two and three
stresses” (33). A few decades later, Dudley Hascall, in “The Prosody of John Lydgate,”
Language and Style 3 (1970): 122-46, returned to the problem of Lydgate’s meter, arguing
that “in spite of received opinion, Lydgate was capable of counting to ten; if his lines
do not scan properly, it is not because Lydgate cannot count, but because we are count-
Chaucer’s poetry, it would look and sound much more like that of Lydgate.
schwa). See also his “The Italian Line in English after Chaucer,” Language and Literature
11 (2002): 291-306, for an account of Chaucer’s use of the Italian decasyllabic line and
schwa has been done by Donka Minkova, in her The History of Final Vowels in English:
The Sound of Muting (Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1991), especially Chapter 7, “Schwa preservation in Late Middle English as a prosodic phenomenon,” 171-92.
4
For an example, see Emerson Brown, “The Joy of Chaucer’s Lydgate Lines,”
in Alan T. Gaylord, ed., Essays on the Art of Chaucer’s Verse (New York: Routledge, 2001),
267-79. Brown argues that Chaucer’s editors have been particularly averse to the broken-backed or “Lydgate lines” that appear in the manuscript copies of his poetry, and
ing a number of examples, he suggests that Chaucer’s use of the broken-backed line
backed’ lines seem like wretched verse not because their meter is intrinsically ugly but
because Lydgate uses it far too often and so mindlessly that it bears little relationship to
what he is trying to say” (275). One of the goals of this essay is to show that Lydgate’s
use of the broken back is far from mindless, and indeed bears an important relationship
to the overall import of his works.
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for Chaucer’s poetry. Add to that the poor transcription that plagues some editions and Lydgate’s meter can appear far more irregular than, in fact, it is. As
Pearsall has recently pointed out in relation to Lydgate’s Life of Our Lady,
The accepted view, which I do not believe to be mistaken, is that
[Chaucer’s] followers and led to a breakdown in the pentameter
(see the summary in Pearsall 1970: 58-63). There is no doubt that
this did happen, but one wonders whether it happened as quickly
and universally as is sometimes assumed. Hoccleve presumably
had access to good early copies of Chaucer and he writes perfect
syllabic pentameter. Lydgate, in his prime during the same years as
Hoccleve, is assumed to have been denied this access or to have
misunderstood everything that Hoccleve understood perfectly
clearly and to have erected Chaucerian variants of the pentameter,
Performing Lydgate’s Broken-Backed Meter
145
pentameter); in other situations, he insists that the “Lydgatean” character of
the lines must be maintained: “there are many lines that cannot be altered
and must be allowed to stand as they are.”8 Erdmann, as Edwards points out,
frequently emends Lydgate’s broken-backed lines, despite his commitment to
letting “Lydgatean” lines stand; Edwards’ own practice is less aggressive, more
willing to preserve lines as they appear in his base manuscript, London, British
Library, Arundel 119:
In recent years, scholars have come to recognize greater metrical
variability than before and to accept the authority of manuscript
readings over modern improvements and silent emendations. The text
as read by medieval audiences now makes as much claim on our critical
and historical imagination as the ideal work reconstructed according
to a presumed authorial intention. In the case of Lydgate, “broken
back” lines, which lacked an unstressed syllable after the caesura, have
long been regarded as evidence of his failed craftsmanship or scribal
inattention or both. Erdmann regularly corrects them in The Siege of
Thebes, but I have chosen to allow them to stand.9
begin to wonder whether this is entirely fair. It is a view based on
imperfect evidence, for, though there are texts of Lydgate in plenty,
there are very few proper editions.5
Both Erdmann and Edwards argue that broken-backed lines should be allowed
to stand (though Erdmann intervenes more than Edwards). The task of the
literary critic confronted with these lines, however, stretches beyond the editorial
Lydgate’s use of the form, a literary reason for his embrace of what seems to
Lydgate’s verse in order to achieve a smoother pentameter line. Both modern
editors of the Siege of Thebes, Axel Erdmann in his 1911 EETS edition and
6
Erdmann explains his editorial principles in some detail in volume 2 of his
edition, in which he maps out a program of emendation that charts a moderate
path through the thicket of Lydgatean lines.7
5
Derek Pearsall, “The Weak Declension of the Adjective and its Importance
in Chaucerian Metre,” in Chaucer in Perspective: Middle English Essays in Honour of Norman
Blake,
90.
6
Lydgate’s Siege of Thebes: Part I – the Text, ed. Axel Erdmann, EETS 108 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1911); John Lydgate, The Siege of Thebes, ed.
Robert Edwards, TEAMS Middle English Texts Series (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute
Publications, 2001).
7
Lydgate’s Siege of Thebes: Part II, ed. Axel Erdmann and Eilert Ekwall, EETS
level of the poetic line. When readers listen to the sound of “Lydgate lines,” the
broken back – which seems like little more than a stumbling block – emerges
from the silence of the printed page as a viable aesthetic technique. On the one
hand, there is no denying that the broken back disrupts the smooth unfolding of
the line in speech and that a line composed of successive iambs is easier to say.
On the other hand, when content is added to metrical form, and when Lydgate’s
stylistic and aesthetic goals are taken into account, it becomes possible to see
why he might have deployed broken-backed meter rather than the smoother
iambic pentameter he imitated from Chaucer. Paying attention to the aurality
Ibid., 33.
Edwards, op. cit., 15. Edwards does emend the text at a number of junctures,
8
9
the meter seems to require it; although he differs from Erdmann, neither hesitates to
emend Lydgate’s lines under certain conditions.
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of Lydgate’s verse highlights its performative qualities and forces the reader to
recognize that Lydgate understood his poetry in a fundamentally dramatic way.
He strategically uses meter in the Prologue as part of his characterization of
the Host, whose speech is dominated by the seemingly awkward and stumbling
broken back. This focus on the Host points the way to a new understanding of
the Prologue to the Siege of Thebes, as part of a series of dramatic experiments
in which Lydgate sought to link Chaucerian poetics with medieval spectacle.
“Performance” is a notion that is central to Alan Gaylord’s work on
Chaucer’s prosody. It is often neglected by critics, possibly because it seems
so subjective; as we are often reminded, no one really knows what Chaucer
sounded like. But in the work of scholars like Gaylord, we are also reminded
that Chaucer’s poetry is designed to be performed, to be read aloud before a
listening audience. This reminder highlights the many dramatic elements of
Chaucer’s verse: its dialogues, apostrophes, and speeches, not to mention the
conceit of oral storytelling that governs his most well-known work. It is this
conceit that Lydgate exploits when he sets out to supplement the Knight’s Tale
with his history of Thebes. Lydgate’s prologue re-creates the drama of the
Canterbury Tales, from its setting to its characters, imagery, and discursive style.
Various Chaucerian techniques are copied, including the insertion of the author
into the mise en scène as a character with a story to tell. Like Chaucer, Lydgate
presents himself as the object of the Host’s ridicule, subject to the authority
best sentence and moost solaas.”10 By foregrounding the Host in this way,
Lydgate creates the impression that the Prologue is dominated by the spoken
word rather than by third-person narration or description, and this impression
provides the key to understanding the purpose of the Prologue as a whole,
particularly in relation to Lydgate’s larger poetic and dramatic goals.
Those goals are intimately bound up with the aesthetic category of
Performing Lydgate’s Broken-Backed Meter
147
reader to consider “what he should be hearing” by forcing him to consider
what the lines sound like when performed aloud. Paying attention to Lydgate’s
so many lines are susceptible to more than one scansion, especially given the
edition or manuscript is just one variable that can alter the meter in a given
line of verse. Indeed, it is impossible to achieve a resolution to the problem
of Lydgate’s meter, if what is being sought is a hard-and-fast set of rules by
which to analyze his verse. Instead, I suggest that considering Lydgate’s poetry
in light of its performative character – as verse designed to be read aloud – is
an alternate way of accounting for the irregularity of his verse, one that opens
up new possibilities for understanding a text like the Prologue in relation to
both form and content. Its chief advantage is that it does not assume that
such lines are failures or mistakes; instead, this approach takes seriously the
reasons. A useful point of departure is an analysis of the Prologue in relation
to the categories that Pearsall sets out (iambic pentameter lines; headless lines;
broken-backed lines), which reveals the proportion of regular to irregular meter
in the text:
Iambic pentameter:
95 lines13
Headless:
43 lines
Broken-backed:
33 lines
[4-stress:
5 lines]14
These categorizations are subject to variation and interpretation, of course;
part of the speaker in order to produce the dramatic effect for which Lydgate
of performance that readers can elucidate the relationship between meter
Ibid.
This category includes lines that begin with a trochaic inversion and as a
result include two unstressed syllables in a row (to be differentiated from the headless
line, in which an unstressed syllable is missing at the beginning of the line). Pearsall’s
division of Lydgate’s lines into these categories revises the work of Josef Schick, who
12
Gaylord: reading Middle English verse aloud. Meter forms the foundation of
this kind of performative reading; it is the aspect of poetry that structures what
Gaylord calls “the life of the verse as it is perceived in time and motion.”11
for helping the reader imagine, not what he is reading, but what he should
be hearing.”12 In the case of Lydgate’s Prologue, the verse itself urges the
Larry D. Benson, gen. ed., The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd ed. (Boston: Houghton
10
Gaylord, op. cit., 126.
11
13
does identify the three major types of lines found in Lydgate’s body of work. See Josef
Schick, ed., Lydgate’s Temple of Glas, EETS e.s. 60 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co, 1891), lvii-lix; Derek Pearsall, John Lydgate
of Virginia, 1970), 60-61.
14
Pearsall does not include four-stress lines in his list of types, but there are
occasional such lines in Lydgate’s verse, as I have noted.
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and content in Lydgate’s verse – particularly, as I will show, in the case of the
Prologue’s Host and his reliance on the broken back.
Indeed, the key to understanding Lydgate’s meter in the Prologue to
the Siege of Thebes lies in recognizing his acute sense of the dramatic possibilities
inherent in writing verse. Even more than Chaucer, Lydgate was alive to the
visual and aural aspects of poetry; scholars have long recognized his habit
of exploring what Pearsall has called “the borderland of word and picture”
by writing poems to illustrate tapestries, wall paintings, sugar sculptures
and pageants.15
performance; as I have argued elsewhere, his mummings and disguisings bring
Chaucerian style to dramatic life.16 His theatrical poetry reveals his strong interest
in the potential of verse to ventriloquize the human voice for an audience, as
well as his fascination with the notion of character, both literary and dramatic.
Lydgate’s gaze, as ever, focuses on Chaucer as the originator of a poetic style
in which characters can be constructed by coupling distinctive voices with
carefully drawn human images, including details of dress, ornament, habit,
gesture, and body. Perhaps the most famous of Lydgate’s dramatic renditions
of Chaucerian character may be found in his Disguising at Hertford, in which he
creates a dialogue between men and women by imitating the voices of the Wife
of Bath, the Clerk, and the Host.17 Although the characters in this disguising do
person to respond to the complaints of their husbands, Lydgate clearly sought
to bring Chaucer’s pilgrims to the stage. His reading of the Canterbury Tales is
essentially dramatic; Chaucer’s characters spoke to him in theatrical terms that
he sought to replicate and expand in works like the Disguising at Hertford and the
Siege of Thebes.
The dramatic mode does not dominate Lydgate’s oeuvre, however, for
even in his performance pieces, he does not consistently vivify characters and
endow them with distinctive voices. Works like the Troy Book, the body of
the Siege of Thebes, the Life of Our Lady, and the Fall of Princes contain many
long passages of description, apostrophe, set speeches (which tend to use
a universalized authoritative voice), and narrative, as well as the inevitable
moralizations and commentary that pepper Lydgate’s writing. Nonetheless, it is
Pearsall, John Lydgate, 179.
Maura Nolan, John Lydgate and the Making of Public Culture (Cambridge:
15
16
Claire Sponsler, ed., John Lydgate: Mummings and Entertainments, TEAMS Middle English Texts Series (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2010), 15-21; see
also Maura Nolan, John Lydgate, 154-72.
17
Performing Lydgate’s Broken-Backed Meter
149
possible to discern a minor mode within Lydgate’s body of work – what might
be called a sub-style – in which theatricality comes to the fore as he constructs
characters that combine appearance and voice in the Chaucerian manner. This
minor mode or sub-style produces some of Lydgate’s most memorable writing;
it is the only mode in which he might be said to experiment rather than to
imitate.
of course the theatricality of the Canterbury Tales has long been recognized.
Lydgate adapts that theatricality to the kinds of performance with which he
is familiar – mumming and disguising – and the result is the stylized staging
of the Disguising at Hertford. But he also deploys this dramatic mode elsewhere,
most notably in the Prologue to the Siege of Thebes, where he literally inserts
himself into the theater of the Canterbury Tales. Because Lydgate imagines
his characters – some of whom are also Chaucer’s characters – as actors who
perform the lines of poetry he writes for them, his use of meter becomes
central to understanding his dramatic sub-style. In the case of the Prologue,
developing a distinctive voice for his reanimation of Chaucer’s Host.
Before discussing the Prologue’s depiction of the Host, however, it
within poetry as a way of placing Lydgate’s metrical practice within a larger
framework. Many of the discussions of Lydgate’s meter have focused intently
his verse. As I note above, these efforts can be useful as a way to build a picture
of Lydgate’s metrical habits, but categorizing lines of his verse can be only a
preliminary step in analyzing how sound and stress intersect with meaning in
and the fundamental nature of the poetic line. Gaylord’s suggestion that critics
must consider “the life of the verse as it is perceived in time and motion”
in order to fully grasp Chaucer’s creative enterprise provides a useful starting
point because it acknowledges that poetry exists in particular times and places,
and that it is voiced and perceived by the human body. Meter, as Derek Attridge
argues, is inherent in speech; the voice is produced by the body, which creates
rhythm:
What is distinctive about poetry is its exploitation of the fact that
spoken language moves, and that its movements – which are always
movements of meaning and emotion at the same time as movement
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of sound – achieve a varied onward momentum by setting up
always happens
echoing and anticipating each other, and poetry aims at a precision
that makes every word count as something experienced meaningfully
through the body at the same time as it is understood by the mind.
The engine that drives this sonorous and meaningful activity
is rhythm: the continuous motion that pushes spoken language forward,
in more or less regular waves, as the musculature of the speech organs
tightens and relaxes, as energy pulsates through the words we speak and
hear, as the brain marshals multiple stimuli into ordered patterns. To
understand and enjoy poetry means responding to, and participating
in, its rhythm – not as one of a number of features that make up the
poetic experience, but as the heart of that experience.18
If rhythm lies at the heart of the poetic experience – and rhythm comes
from the embodied quality of speech – then poetic meter is essential to the
development of character. Creating the illusion that a living person is speaking
within the poetic framework of a work like the Prologue to the Siege of Thebes
requires manipulating the rhythms of speech, so that the individuality of a
given character rings out as the poem is performed. That manipulation takes
the form of poetic meter, as Attridge explains:
Meter is an organizing principle which turns the general tendency
toward regularity and rhythm into a strictly-patterned regularity that
is not opposed to rhythm but is a way of organizing rhythm.19
Meter thus makes explicit what is implicit in human speech, its natural tendency
is authenticated by its meter, the device used by poets to imitate the rhythms
inherent in everyday speech. At the same time, of course, literary characters
are larger than life and their metered speech always exceeds ordinary rhythmic
conversation. That speech further plays a crucial role in differentiating one
their characters to produce an individuality that accords with the details of
clothing and appearance unique to each speaker. Chaucer famously manipulates
the varied professional discourses of his pilgrims to associate each character
18
Derek Attridge, Poetic Rhythm: An Introduction
versity Press, 1995), 1.
19
Ibid., 7-8.
-
Performing Lydgate’s Broken-Backed Meter
151
with a style of speaking. He does so, however, not by having the individual
characters speak in their professional jargons, but by relying on the Host, who
repeatedly adopts the professional vocabulary of the pilgrims as he calls on
them to tell tales. The Host is a kind of master character who holds all of the
linguistic keys to the pilgrimage; sometimes his mimicry succeeds (as in the
introduction to the Man of Law’s Tale) and sometimes it fails (as when he tries
to jolly the Parson into telling “a fable anon, for cokkes bones!” [X.29]), but his
authority is never in doubt. As the one character who can speak the languages
of all of the pilgrims, the Host controls the discursive environment and thus
the tale-telling game.
It should be no surprise, then, that Lydgate chooses the Host as the
one Chaucerian character he brings to life in his version of a Canterbury tale.
The Host’s rough and ready treatment of Lydgate-the-pilgrim performs the
relationship that Lydgate postulates between himself and Chaucer, that of
servant and master. The theatrics performed by Lydgate’s Host are a crude
version of the subtler drama of authorial submission that Lydgate the poet
enacts early in the Prologue, when he praises Chaucer as the “Floure of poetes
The Chaucer portrayed in these lines is an elite poet who has mastered the high
style, whose verse represents the apotheosis of English poetry. But the Chaucer
of the high style, the Prologue resorts to low comedy, to the discourse of the
Miller, the Reeve, and the Cook, as a way of staging the entrance of Lydgate the
pilgrim and poet. In turning to Chaucer’s comic register, Lydgate establishes
a division between two kinds of poetics, one high and one low, both imitated
from the Canterbury Tales. This division corresponds to the distinction between
the extradiegetic frame for the Prologue and the diegetic drama that Lydgate
stages with the Host and Lydgate-the-pilgrim as main characters. Outside that
drama, the poet Lydgate indulges in a typical paean of praise for Chaucer,
which establishes the governing hierarchy at work in the Prologue: Chaucer
is elevated, Lydgate is made humble. Within the diegesis, the Host takes the
place of Chaucer, using Chaucerian low comedy to expose Lydgate to ridicule
by instructing him about digestive remedies and the proper way to handle
intestinal gas:
Yif nede be, spare not to blowe!
To holde wynde, be myn opynyoun,
Wil engendre collik passioun
And make men to greven on her roppys,
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Maura Nolan
This vision of Lydgate as a gassy, overfed, repressed monk being urged to
abandon social propriety by the boisterous Host is a humiliating one. Even so,
it enables Lydgate to appropriate not only the language of the Host, but also
multiple images and phrases from the Canterbury Tales as a whole. His reference
to “croppys” and list of home remedies for stomach ailments recalls Pertelote’s
ministrations to Chaunticleer; the Host’s reference to “wynde” gestures to the
farts in the Miller’s Tale and the Summoner’s Tale; when the Host promises to be
Lydgate’s “orloger” (122), he evokes the comparison of Chauntecleer’s crowing
to the “abbey orlogge” (VII.2854). These are only a few of the intertextual
connections between Lydgate’s Prologue and the Canterbury Tales, but they
show how Lydgate maintains his claim to authority even as he stages his own
humiliation. Just as Chaucer appropriates the professional languages of his
pilgrims, so too does Lydgate appropriate and rewrite Chaucer’s work. Indeed,
most of the Host’s speech is designed to convince a seemingly reluctant Lydgate
to tell his tale; it repeatedly urges the monk to contribute to the Canterbury
Tales and implicitly claims that Lydgate is Chaucer’s equal in tale-telling. The
Prologue thus operates doubly, as an assertion both that Lydgate is Chaucer’s
creation (one of the pilgrims) and that Lydgate’s Canterbury tale is a muchdesired answer to Chaucer’s great poem.
ambivalent relationship to the authority of his main source. His attitude to
Chaucer combines anxiety and awe: anxiety that he cannot live up to the
standards set by Chaucer, coupled with genuine admiration for his predecessor’s
skill. The Prologue stages this relationship, in which Lydgate compares himself
whose speech is both a tissue of allusions to the Canterbury Tales and a tour de
force of Lydgate’s broken-backed style. Almost half the lines in the Prologue (72
of 176) are devoted to the Host’s speeches, making him by far the dominant
speaker in the text; the only other character who speaks is Lydgate-the-pilgrim,
for three lines. The Host’s extensive speeches introduce a crucial link between
the narrator, in passages that focus on physical appearance (for Lydgate) and
poetic achievement (for Chaucer). The description of the Host, in contrast, is
extremely brief:
The same tyme her governour, the Host,
Stonding in halle ful of wynde and bost,
Performing Lydgate’s Broken-Backed Meter
153
Lich to a man wonder sterne and fers. (79-81)
Lydgate’s portrayal of the Host renders him larger than life; he is an
uncompromising authority who conscripts Lydgate into the tale-telling game
with the sheer force of his personality. He strongly resembles his Canterbury
Tales predecessor in both physicality and affect; as Chaucer tells us, his Host
of manhood him lakkede right naught” (I.753, 755, 756). Despite these
physical details, however, what most distinguishes the Host from any other
Canterbury
Tales suggest, Lydgate’s Host is a ventriloquist as well as a master of pastiche.
At the same time, he is also a character within Lydgate’s mini-narrative about
the origins of the Siege of Thebes – and his status as a character demands the
kind of internal consistency that his dependence on a source text threatens to
undermine. Of course, the Host is not a character in the novelistic sense, not
a representation of a person endowed with interiority and subjectivity. Instead,
Lydgate’s Host is a character at the level of discourse, a means of organizing a
in a particular human body. That is why Lydgate describes him as “Lich to a
man wonder sterne and fers” (81); the comparative conjunction like captures
the sense which the Host is a simulacrum of a human being, a literary device
masquerading as an embodied person. Lydgate makes no attempt to conceal
physical details or by exploiting the kinds of literary tricks that Chaucer uses to
create the illusion of interiority and depth in characters like the Pardoner and
the Wife of Bath. His Host shows no signs of emotional attachment or inner
and a private inner self. Instead, the Host functions much like the poet and
actors Lydgate famously describes in the Troy Book when he gives an account
of classical tragedy:
Al þis was tolde and rad of the poete.
And whil þat he in þe pulpit stood,
With dedly face al devoide of blood,
Singinge his dites, with muses al to-rent,
Amydde þe theatre schrowdid in a tent,
Þer cam out men gastful of her cheris,
Pleying by signes in þe peoples si t,
Þat þe poete songon hath on hi t;
So þat þer was no maner discordaunce
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Atwen his dites and her contenaunce.20
The dramaturgy imagined here by Lydgate is simple: a poet reads his
verses aloud, while a chorus of players enacts the emotions aroused by the text.
The bodies of poet and actors become expressive media for the work of art.
as a kind of interface between the diegetic world of the tragedy and the material world of its audience. In his own mummings, Lydgate clearly envisaged a
poursyvant or herald – reading his verses aloud while various
tableaux were enacted; as the headnote to “Bycorne and Chychevache” reads,
“there shal stonde an ymage in poete-wyse seying thees thre balades.”21 In this
model, words and performance are separately imagined, so that acting works
as a kind of illustration rather than as a directly mimetic representation of hurole in the Prologue to the Siege of Thebes by demonstrating that the relationship
between the character of the Host and the words he speaks is closely related to
ary being with interiority, the kind of character so often described in histories
of subjectivity and its literary portrayal. Instead, he acts as a nodal point for the
performance of a mode of discourse that is allusive, citational, and fragmentary, comprising bits and pieces of its Chaucerian source and remaking them to
serve the poet’s purpose.
I have already shown how the allusiveness of the Host’s language functions as a simultaneous gesture of respect for Chaucer and a challenge to Chaucer’s imagined world. What makes the Host’s speech more than a pastiche of
allusions and citations and opens up the possibility of a new kind of literary
character is its metrical distinctiveness. In the Prologue to the Siege of Thebes,
Troy Book, 2: 860-72, 896-916. See John Lydgate, Troy Book, 4 vols., ed.
Henry Bergen, EETS e.s., nos. 97, 103, 106, 126 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench and
Trübner, 1906, 1908, 1910, 1935).
21
The manuscript headnotes for Lydgate’s mummings, written by John Shir20
shal stonde an ymage in poete-wyse seying thees thre balades”; for “The Legend
“Nowe here nexst folowyng ys made a balade by Lydegate, sente by a poursyvant to
the Shirreves of London”; (for the “Mumming for the Goldsmiths of London”: “And
mynge... brought and presented unto the Mayre by an heraude cleped Fortune”; for the
balade by Daun Iohan, brought by a poursuyvaunt in wyse of mommers desguysed.”
See Sponsler, John Lydgate: Mummings and Entertainments, 11, 42, 52, 60, 63.
Performing Lydgate’s Broken-Backed Meter
155
Lydgate’s broken-backed line comes into focus as the determining feature of
the Host’s performance as a character. In total, there are 33 broken-backed
lines in the Prologue; 22 of these appear in the Host’s speeches. Put another
of the lines are broken-backed.22 Here are all the Host’s broken-backed lines,
with stress indicated by bold type and the “broken back” underlined. Italicized
phrases could be read as broken-backed or not, as will be discussed below:
Besechinge you that ye wil me telle
First youre name, and of what contré Withoute mor, shortly that ye be That loke so pale, al devoyde of blood. (86-89)
Thogh ye be soul, beth right glad and light,
Preiying you soupe with us tonyght,
And ye shal han made at youre devis. (97-99)
To ben a monk, sclender is youre koyse! (102)
Or late fed in a feynt pasture.
Lift up youre hed, be glad, tak no sorowe!*
And ye shal hom ride with us tomorowe. (104-106)
Yif nede be, spar(e) not to blowe! (112)*
But toward nyght, ete some fenel rede. (117)*
And lik as I pouer have and myght,
I charge yow rise not at mydnyght. (119-120)*
I wol mysilf be youre orloger. (122)
22
It should be noted that these numbers are approximate, because some lines
can be scanned in multiple ways. I have sought throughout to be consistent in scansion
between the Host’s lines and the rest of the Prologue for purposes of comparison;
since the gap between the number of broken-backed lines in the Host’s speech and in
the remainder of the Prologue is so large, the existence of ambiguities in scansion does
not alter the fact that the Host’s speech contains many more broken-backed lines than
the rest of the Prologue. Other scholars have also calculated the number of brokenbacked lines in Lydgate’s poetry, using various texts as exemplars; for example, Fitzroy
Siege of Thebes as
broken-backed, while Dudley Hascall (“Prosody,” 129) analyzed 1000 lines from the
Troy Book and the Fall of Princes
backed.
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Maura Nolan
Thow shalt be bound to a newe lawe. (130)
Be now wel war; stody wel tonyght!*
But for al this, be of herte light. (143-44)*
Come forth, Daun John, be your Cristene name. (160)*
But prech(e) not of non holynesse. (167)*
And nodde not with thyn hevy bekke. (169)* 23
poetic failure becomes far easier when the Host’s speech is considered as a
performance in Gaylord’s sense: as a series of lines meant to be spoken aloud
by an actor or presenter. The broken back in the middle of the line sharply
divides it in two, demanding of the speaker that he come to a full stop and
begin the line again with a stressed syllable. Reading the Host’s lines aloud
in this way demonstrates how effective such a division can be in imbuing a
speaker with authority; each half-line stands on its own in a series of staccato
units of speech that stop and start decisively. These stops and starts ensure
that stressed syllables dominate the aural texture of the Host’s lines, explosively
punctuating his speech rather than marching smoothly in the regulated ups and
downs of successive iambs.
Lydgate chooses the broken-backed line in order to exploit this
particular aesthetic effect for two reasons, both of which point to the centrality
of performance to his understanding of poetics and his place in literary history.
First, he marries form and content by linking the broken-backed line to the
overwhelmingly imperative mood of the Host’s speech. Of the 22 brokenbacked lines spoken by the Host, nine contain imperative verbs, indicated
Italics indicate points at which a line can be scanned with a broken back or
23
did Erdmann in his edition. Line 167 is fairly uncontroversial, since “preche” is attested
by two manuscripts: Oxford, Bodley MS 776 and London, British Museum Additional
18632. Both MSS are contemporaneous with Lydgate (dated between 1430-1440), and
Erdmann describes Bodley 778 as “a very good MS” (See Erdmann and Ekwall, The
Siege of Thebes, 36, 43). In the case of line 112, Erdmann emends “spar” to “spare,” but
ant of the singular imperative form in Middle English – and because the line is nearly
impossible to scan without it – I think Erdmann’s emendation is correct. An example
Summoner’s Tale
(III.1763), which reads in part, “spare it nat at al”; both Hengwrt and Ellesmere record
“spare” in this line. See John Plummer, ed., A Variorum Edition of the Works of Geoffrey
Chaucer, Volume II: The Canterbury Tales, Part Seven: The Summoner’s Tale
versity of Oklahoma Press, 1995). For the imperative form, see Tauno F. Mustanoja, A
Performing Lydgate’s Broken-Backed Meter
157
above by an asterisk. Just as a drill sergeant “barks” orders – a metaphor that
captures the short, sharp insistence of military commands – the Host speaks
in aggressive half-lines designed to emphasize his discursive power.24 Lydgate’s
use of the broken-backed line forces the reader to acknowledge the dominance
of the half-line as the Host’s unit of speech; the doubled stress at midline
forces the reader or speaker to hear or perform the lines in a particular way
Host’s voice makes itself heard as a distinctive and individual style within the
structure of poetic expectation created by Lydgate’s imitation of Chaucer.
That distinctiveness points the way to Lydgate’s second reason for
choosing the broken-backed line: its relationship to performance and its
inherently dramatic form. The Host’s style is authoritative, imbued with force
and vigor; above all, it demands to be performed. Phillipa Hardman has
described this mode as Lydgate’s “concise style,” which uses regular syntax
and “characteristically appears in dialogue, where it serves to give a dramatic
immediacy to the exchange.”25 That “dramatic immediacy” is clearly evident
in the Host’s speech; his imperatives make sense only when they are spoken
as half-line expressions of verbal aggression, demarcated from one another
by the clash of stresses at the center of the line. One of the most crucial
points that Hardman makes in her analysis is that reading Lydgate’s poetry in
that the inherent punctuation of metrical verse... is perfectly adequate for
reader to deliver the text intelligibly to a listening audience.”26 In other words,
meter functions as a guide both to performance and to poetic content; far from
being an embellishment to the verse, it plays an essential role in orchestrating
how poems make meaning, both on the page and in the ear. In this light, the
broken-backed line shapes the meaning of Lydgate’s verse by structuring the
Host’s performance – which in turn gives the Host a distinctive mode of speech
that makes him a particular kind of dramatic character.
Middle English Syntax, Part I: Parts of Speech
ries, particularly its poetic uses, see Minkova, op. cit., esp. 171-91.
24
In “Sounding Out the Host,” Susan Yager points out a similar authoritative
tone in the spoken half-lines of Chaucer’s Host, pages xx-xx of this volume.
25
Simpson, eds., John Lydgate: Poetry, Culture, and Lancastrian England
sity of Notre Dame Press, 2006), 12-35, at 25.
26
Ibid., 26.
-
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Maura Nolan
When he endows the Host with this aural distinctiveness, Lydgate
creates the illusion of an individual voice with a particular sound and rhythm.
This aural style provides the thread that stitches together the collection of
allusions to Chaucer that make up the content of his speech, fabricating
from them the character of the Host – not as a person, but as an actor in a
masquerade. Such a character does not demand the suspension of disbelief;
its audience sparks of recognition at the accuracy of the imitation, without
human interiority fosters between character and reader, actor and spectator.
These moments of recognition lend verisimilitude to the text’s performance,
but this verisimilitude exists in tension with the two crucial features of the
and its self-conscious display of the broken-backed line. Both features draw
that it is the product of a self-aware and deliberate poetic consciousness,
but also demonstrating the literary possibilities inherent in the performative
aesthetic mode that Lydgate exploits throughout the Prologue. The status of
other dramatic works, which in turn suggests that the Prologue is a kind of
literary experiment. It is an attempt to marry the dramatic quality of Chaucer’s
Canterbury Tales, which is internal to the poetic structure of the pilgrimage,
to the kinds of dramatic performance familiar to Lydgate from court
entertainments and descriptions of classical theater. These public spectacles
depend on exteriority – on the sounds and sights of the performance – in
order to make meaning. Lydgate’s Prologue couples that exteriority, in the form
written quality
of Chaucer’s Tales, through allusion and citation, in order to test the limits of
the dramatic forms he has inherited. In so doing, he creates a poetic text that
foregrounds performance in a new way, one that demands that readers cross
the imaginative divide between the performance of individual lines of poetry
and the performance of medieval spectacles and entertainments.
As an experiment, the Prologue is necessarily unstable and uncertain;
Lydgate never fully manages to link Chaucerian poetics to medieval spectacle,
though he continues to try in texts like the Disguising at Hertford. But despite its
failure, the Prologue contains a crucial lesson for readers of Middle English, a
lesson that Alan Gaylord has been teaching for some time: paying attention to
the sounds and rhythms of Middle English verse can uncover aspects of the
Performing Lydgate’s Broken-Backed Meter
159
medieval literary tradition otherwise lost to us. Lydgate’s experiment with the
broken back may not have borne fruit, but exploring how and why it worked
serves as a potent reminder that early poetry is a marriage between sound and
sense. Without the sound, a portion of the sense inevitably is lost – in this case,
the degree to which Lydgate tested the boundaries of poetry and performance.