strong and weak stresses one can recognize certain types as in the case of alliterative verse. So Zitelmann, Der Rhythmus des fünffüssigen Jambus (Neue Jahrbücher für klass. Altertum 10 (1907), 500 ff., 545 ff.) combines a strong and a weak stress to form a "higher verse-member" and thus divides the verse of five stresses into two double bars and one single bar. According as the single bar comes before, between or after the two double bars and is independent or closely connected to one of the double bars, twelve rhythmical types result with various sub-types. Hans Reimer (Der Vers in Shakespeare's nichtdramatischen Dichtungen Bonn 1908) has treated Venus and Adonis, Lucrece and the sonnets in the same way. the verse does not end here. differently united by the use enjambement and rime-breaking (§ 192). But the variety of The verses may be of strong or weak Chaucer's heroic couplet is more varied than that of NE., since Chaucer often uses feminine endings, whilst in NE. the ending is generally masculine. The feminine ending, however, frequently occurs in NE. blank verse (§ 216 ff.). § 188. The Origin of the Heroic Verse. The heroic verse was used in the French Roland and in other Old French Chansons de Geste, e.g. Carles li reis, nostre emperere magnes, Set anz tuz pleins ad estet en Espaigne etc. Chaucer's direct models, however, were probably the ten-syllable verse of French lyrics of the four teenth century (Machault, Deschamps, Granson etc.) and the Italian endecasillabo, e.g. Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita Mi ritrovai per una selva oscura With the latter Chaucer became acquainted on his first Italian journey (1372), or perhaps earlier in the works of Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio. Chaucer's verse has in common with the Italian endecasillabo the free treatment of the caesura, which in French was fixed (§ 191). But we can also look on Chaucer's heroic verse "not as a mere imitation of some French or Italian model, but a development of his verse with four beats", cp. Bischoff, Über zweisilbige Senkung und epische Zäsur bei Chaucer, Königsberg 1897. An argument for this view is the fact that all the liberties of the four-beat verse are found in Chaucer's heroic verse; even the anacrusis is sometimes wanting, which is never the case in the French and Italian verse. Bischoff's view is shared by Lewis, The Foreign Sources of Modern English Versification, p. 98 f. § 189. The rhythmical Structure of Chaucer's Heroic Verse. Chaucer's heroic verse has five beats, separated by unstressed syllables. The first beat (with a few exceptions) is preceded by an anacrusis, and the verse may end with an unstressed syllable. Thus the scheme is ××××××××××(×). NOTE. Freudenberger has shown that the auftakt may be absent in Chaucer's heroic verse, Über das Fehlen des Auftaktes in Chaucers heroischem Verse (Erlangen 1889) e.g.: Twenty bokes clad in blak or reed C. T. A. 294. Al bysmotered with his habergeoun 76 etc. The beats differ in degree (§ 188), but since they are separated by unstressed syllables, they retain their independence. There is no longer, as in OE. and ME. alliterative verse, a subordination of a weak beat to a strong beat, nor are two beats combined to form a foot of two members. The five beats follow at equal intervals of time: the verse is one of five bars, therefore. Whilst in the verse with four beats (§ 122 f.), where the anacrusis is so often wanting, we let the individual foot begin with the stressed syllable: (x)xxxxxx(x), we must in the heroic verse make the feet begin with an unstressed syllable, since the anacrusis is a real part of the verse; thus the rhythm is iambic: xxxxxxxxxx(x), e.g. A clérk | ther was of Óxenford! alsó, although the word-grouping often points rather to a trochaic scansion, e.g. The | hóly | blísful | mártyr | fór to | séke, and it is questionable if Chaucer's verse can be divided into 'iambs' or 'trochees'. The Italian verse has always feminine ending and contains eleven syllables (endecasillabo); the French verse has ten syllables when the ending is masculine and eleven when feminine; to this comes a further syllable in the epic caesura (§ 191). In Chaucer's verse the number of syllables is not so consistent as in French and Italian, for it is not rare to find two consecutive unstressed syllables. On examination, however, we find that these two syllables can become one by elision or slurring, or that they are so light that they do not take more time to utter than one syllable and thus do not disturb the equal time intervals between the beats. Thus Chaucer's verse practically fulfils the requirements of the NE. heroic verse, viz. that there must be ten syllables when the ending is masculine, and eleven when feminine. In order to form a correct judgment of Chaucer's verse it is necessary to use a critical text, to know Chaucer's language, especially the value of the weak e in inflexional syllables. Ten Brink has collected the rules in his Chaucer's Sprache und Verskunst, Leipzig 1885, § 256 ff.; cp. also Kittredge, Observations on the Language of Chaucer's Troilus (Chaucer Soc., Sec. Series. 16) and O. Bischoff, Über zweisilbige Senkung und epische Zäsur bei Chaucer (Engl. Stud. 24, 353–392; 25, 339-398) and Hampel, Die Silbenmessung in Chaucer's fünftaktigem Vers. Halle 1898. Chaucer's verse, of course, seemed very irregular to Englishmen of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; they read Chaucer with their own pronunciation, where the weak e had generally become silent. Moreover they had a text, which had been much altered by scribes and Thus Dryden in the preface to his printers. Fables says: "The verse of Chaucer, I confess, is not harmonious to us; but is like the eloquence of one whom Tacitus commends, it was auribus istius temporis accommodata; they who lived with him, and some time after him, thought it musical; and it continues so even in our judgment, if compared with the numbers of Lydgate and Gower, his contemporaries; there is the rude sweetness of a Scotch tune in it, which is natural and pleasing, though not perfect. 'Tis true, I cannot go so far as he who published the last edition of him; for he would make us believe the fault is in our ears, and that there were really ten syllables in a verse where we find but nine; but this opinion is not worth confuting; 'tis so gross and obvious an error that common sense (which is a rule in everything but matters of faith and revelation) must convince the reader that equality of numbers in every verse which we call heroic, was either not known or not always practised in Chaucer's age. It were an easy matter to produce some thousands of his verses, which are lame for want of half a foot, and sometimes a whole one, and which no pronunciation can make otherwise." Tyrwhitt in his edition of the Canterbury Tales (1775) and the Chaucerian scholars of the nineteenth century have attempted to give us the original text of Chaucer's poems and have enabled us rightly to recognize the very correct structure of Chaucer's heroic Verse. $ 190. Word-stress in Chaucer's Heroic Verse. Chaucer's verse-stress, of course, agrees with the normal word and sentence stress. Monosyllabic |