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

Abstract

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

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