The Verse Forms of Middle English Romance

15世纪以前，中世纪的英国作家用诗歌写故事。中世纪英格兰的三大叙事诗流派是乔叟及其追随者的诗歌、头韵诗和韵律浪漫诗。其中最古老的《国王号角》(C1220)立即暴露了我们对中世纪英语浪漫主义诗人所写的诗句的无知。这位号角诗人的押韵范围显然比乔叟和高尔等诗人的押韵范围更广，他的韵律仍然是有争议的主题：他的诗句是以交替的三拍节奏短联句还是更像头韵诗的半行？在《号角》之后创作的一些浪漫故事也出现了类似的删节和朗读问题。13世纪后期的《特里斯特勒姆爵士》是用一首不同寻常的11行诗句写成的，有些人认为这是一种戏仿，另一些人则认为这是一种抒情。为了判断这些观点中哪一种是正确的，我们需要知道其他哪些诗歌(英语、盎格鲁-诺曼语和拉丁语)使用了这种形式。在《特里斯特勒姆爵士》中经常出现两个诗节模式，但第三个模式只在两个诗节中得到证明：这些反常的诗节是由于经文的发现还是作者的作品？这个项目通过研究中世纪英语浪漫史中获得的特殊韵律系统来解决这些问题和其他问题，并探索它们的文本和文学史，以回答他们的诗句形式对诗人、抄写者和观众意味着什么的问题。这些话题对编辑、文学评论家和语言学家的重要性，在乔叟研究领域和最近在押韵诗歌领域得到了长期的赞赏，在那里，关于诗人格律实践的新发现使编辑工作发生了革命性的变化，丰富了文学批评。令人遗憾的是，人们对诗歌形式方面的兴趣在很大程度上已经错过了中世纪的浪漫故事。由于人们对其韵律系统知之甚少，编辑们一直无法使用韵律标准来辅助考证，结果是浪漫爱情小说经常在版本中流传，给人一种误导性的印象，即只要涉及押韵、诗节形式和节奏，一切都会发生。相反，有充分的理由假设浪漫诗人有一定范围的格律可能性，并且这些格律条件是可以恢复的。费伦布拉斯爵士的亲笔签名副本(由零碎的草稿和最终版本组成)的偶然幸存为我们提供了一个难得的机会来衡量诗人允许的押韵和节奏的范围。在现存的多个副本(如霍恩和Eglamour)的浪漫故事中，经文手稿证人的不可靠证据总是被错误损坏，可以与其他证人提供的证据进行核对。这一研究计划的潜在好处是广泛的。例如，我们的出版物和韵律浪漫故事插图读物的CD和DVD录音将使现代读者能够熟悉已被遗忘的押韵和节奏的惯例；对这些惯例的了解将有助于编辑在权衡特定手稿朗读的可靠性时；我们寻求收集的关于不精确的押韵和节奏模式的数据将对语言研究发音、声音变化和音系差异的感知突显具有永久价值。

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.