The Verse Forms of Middle English Romance

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Before the fifteenth century, Middle English writers wrote stories in verse. The three broad streams of narrative verse in medieval England are the poetry of Chaucer and his followers, alliterative verse, and the metrical romances. The oldest of these, King Horn (c1220) immediately exposes our ignorance about the kind of verse the poet of Middle English romance thought they were writing. The Horn poet's rhyme range was evidently wider than that of poets such as Chaucer and Gower, and his prosody remains the subject of controversy: were his verses short couplet lines in alternating three-beat rhythm or more like the half-lines of alliterative poetry? A number of romances composed after Horn give rise to similar problems of scansion and versification. Sir Tristrem, from the later thirteenth century, was written in an unusual 11-line bob-and-wheel stanza that has seemed to some parodic and to others lyrical. To judge which of these views is the correct one, we would need to know which other poems (in English, Anglo-Norman and Latin) used the form. Two stanzaic patterns recur regularly in Sir Tristrem but a third pattern is only attested in just two stanzas: are these anomalous stanzas due to scribal invovement or are they authorial? This project addresses these and other questions by investigating the particular metrical systems that obtained in the Middle English romances, and it explores their textual and literary history to answer the question of what their verse forms meant to poets, scribes, and audiences. The importance of these topics to editors, literary critics, and philologists has long been appreciated in the field of Chaucer studies and more recently in the field of alliterative verse, where new discoveries about poets' metrical practices have revolutionized editing and enriched literary criticism. Regrettably, the renewal of interest in the formal aspects of verse has largely passed the Middle English romances by. Since little is known about their metrical systems, editors have not been able to use metrical criteria as an aid to textual criticism, with the result that romances often circulate in editions that give the misleading impression that, where rhyme, stanza form, and rhythm are concerned, everything goes. There are good reasons, on the contrary, for assuming that romance poets had a determinate range of metrical possibilities, and that these conditions of metricality are recoverable. The accidental survival of autograph copies of Sir Ferumbras (consisting of fragmentary draft and a final version) provides a rare opportunity to measure the poet's range of permissible rhymes and rhythms. In romances that are extant in multiple copies (such as Horn and Eglamour), the unreliable evidence of scribal manuscript witnesses, invariably corrupted by error, can be checked against the evidence provided by other witnesses. The potential benefits of this programme of research are wide-ranging. For example, our publications and CD and DVD recordings of illustrative readings from the metrical romances will enable modern readers to familiarize themselves with forgotten conventions of rhyme and rhythm; a knowledge of these conventions will help editors when weighing up the reliability of particular manuscript readings; and the data we seek to collect about imprecise rhymes and rhythmical patterns will be of permanent value for linguistic research into pronunciation, sound changes, and the perceptual salience of phonological distinctions.