Meter and Modernity in English Verse, 1350-1650

Eric Weiskott

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780812297478
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik des Mittelalters & der Frühen Neuzeit

What would English literary history look like if the unit of measure were not the political reign but the poetic tradition? The earliest poems in English were written in alliterative verse, the meter of Beowulf. Alliterative meter preceded tetrameter, which first appeared in the twelfth century, and tetrameter in turn preceded pentameter, the five-stress line that would become the dominant English verse form of modernity, though it was invented by Chaucer in the 1380s. While this chronology is accurate, Eric Weiskott argues, the traditional periodization of literature in modern scholarship distorts the meaning of meters as they appeared to early poets and readers.In Meter and Modernity in English Verse, 1350-1650, Weiskott examines the uses and misuses of these three meters as markers of literary time, "medieval" or "modern, " though all three were in concurrent use both before and after 1500. In each section of the book, he considers two of the traditions through the prism of a third element: alliterative meter and tetrameter in poems of political prophecy; alliterative meter and pentameter in William Langland's Piers Plowman and early blank verse; and tetrameter and pentameter in Chaucer, his predecessors, and his followers. Reversing the historical perspective in which scholars conventionally view these authors, Weiskott reveals Langland to be metrically precocious and Chaucer metrically nostalgic.More than a history of prosody, Weiskott's book challenges the divide between medieval and modern literature. Rejecting the premise that modernity occurred as a specifiable event, he uses metrical history to renegotiate the trajectories of English literary history and advances a narrative of sociocultural change that runs parallel to metrical change, exploring the relationship between literary practice, social placement, and historical time.

PART I

Alliterative Meter, Tetrameter, Political Prophecy

CHAPTER 1

English Political Prophecy

Coordinates of Form and History

A nineteenth-century note in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 1835, f. v^r, offers a hypothesis and a censure: “It is probable that a great part of the subjects of this volume are in the hand writing of Ashmole himself copied from printed tracts——at least, for the greater part—He was exceedingly superstitious, and beleived in phrophecies, visions, and various absurdities. Yet this man was the founder of the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford.”¹ The hypothesis is correct. Elias Ashmole (1617–92), astrologer and antiquarian, copied some of the later items in this collection of English political prophecy.² Ashmole’s belief in “absurdities” appears here as supplementary paleographical evidence: this was the sort of material he would copy. Moving beyond the logic of scribal attribution, the conjunction Yet registers a discrepancy between political prophecy and modernity. The two cohabited in the mind of Ashmole, a collector of medieval arcana and the founder of the University of Oxford’s premier scientific institution.³ Many of Ashmole’s surviving manuscripts contain political prophecies. Four are organized around the genre: Oxford, Bodleian Library, Ashmole Rolls 26 (olim Ashmole 27) (late fifteenth c.) and MSS Ashmole 337, part 5; Ashmole 1386, part 3; and Ashmole 1835 (all late sixteenth/early seventeenth c.).

With the clarity of an obiter dictum, the note in Ashmole 1835 expresses the historical stakes of political prophecy. The author of the note distances nineteenth-century modernity from an alchemical seventeenth century, just as Ashmole’s antiquarian activities ostensibly distance his modern present from the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries. Yet, in consigning political prophecy to the past, the note joins a long line of anxious literary activity surrounding the genre, extending back beyond Ashmole’s life to the centuries that the nineteenth-century notator would recognize as medieval. From 1150 to 1650, political prophecy was always dangerous, and it always belonged to the distant past. For a twenty-first-century reader, the invocation of a defunct literary genre, like the spellings beleived and phrophecies, marks the Ashmole note itself as the product of an earlier era. Political prophecy has disappeared from the literary landscape, even as a target of derision.

Was English political prophecy medieval or modern? To this question no answer can be given. The written tradition of political prophecy straddles the centuries now designated as medieval and modern. Public and governmental interest in prophecy peaked in the first half of the sixteenth century, the period of English literary history served most poorly by the medieval/modern periodization. Nor did political prophecy engender any recognizably modern literary progeny. The tradition ended with a whimper around the turn of the eighteenth century, after the political and religious upheavals that would herald modernity for later historians, but before the emergence of the modern discipline of English studies and its ideological complement, a literary canon. English political prophecy is an unmodern literary tradition, that is, a literary corpus resistant to established retrospective procedures of periodic segmentation. By forging a third way between medieval romance and the modern novel, prophecy lays bare the artificiality of the periodization that still occludes it.

In Part I, I use political prophecy to work out the historical relations between alliterative meter and tetrameter. Pentameter superseded these two poetic traditions at the cusp of modernity as conventionally defined. Alliterative meter and tetrameter therefore pose problems of historical perspective congruent with the recursive and elliptical logic of prophecy itself and with the unmodern literaryhistorical shape of the prophecy tradition. Further, political prophecy has its own metrical specificity, a fact most legible in the near-complete absence of pentameter prophecies in surviving manuscripts.

Because the genre is now unfamiliar, it is necessary to set out some coordinates of form and history before making a more intensive study of meter in relation to prophecy. This chapter summarizes the generic, metrical, linguistic, codicological, political, social, and textual dimensions of English political prophecy. This survey of the field reveals political prophecy to be a large, problematic, and underappreciated literary archive. The next chapter draws out this archive’s shape in time, and Chapters 3–5 disaggregate the prophecy tradition by meter.

* * *

In the early twelfth century, a Monmouthshire cleric named Geoffrey published Historia regum Brittaniae. At the center of the Historia is the Prophetie Merlini, in which Merlin, at the request of the British king Vortigern, tells the future of the Saxon and British peoples (§§109–17; cited from Geoffrey of Monmouth, ed. Reeve). The Prophetie was probably composed separately from the Historia and certainly circulated independently from at least the late twelfth century. Geoffrey’s accomplishment was to weave together two strands of Welsh literary tradition. Henceforth, Merlin the prophet and Arthur the British king would travel together. The Historia and its vernacular adaptations exported both figures, recontextualized through juxtaposition, to non–Welsh-speaking audiences in Britain and on the Continent.

Geoffrey’s insertion of a prophetic set piece into historical narrative bespeaks an attitude toward history that characterizes political prophecy as a whole. In early insular culture, prophecy expressed the same truth as historiography.⁴ Prophecy was “history written in the future tense.”⁵ Merlin’s prophecies begin not with an act of imagination but with two real dragons, one white and one red. Merlin discovers them at the bottom of a pool beneath Vortigern’s tower at the end of book 6 (§108), and they begin fighting at the beginning of book 7, the Prophetie (§111). Merlin opens his exposition by identifying the dragons with the Saxons and the Britons, respectively. The symbolic world of political prophecy, in which nations are dragons and lightning bolts shoot from Scorpio’s tail (§117.298), occupies the plane of reality.

It is difficult to overstate the imposing stature of Geoffrey’s text for later writers and readers. The Prophetie has exerted a continuous influence on literary production in several languages from the twelfth century to the present. Britain knew other prophetic traditions, notably those associated with the Bible, Hildegard of Bingen, Joachim of Fiore, and Sibyl. Each of these connected the island to the European continent. However, none of these other traditions achieved the cultural and codicological density of Galfridian political prophecy in Britain. The number of individual prophetic texts in English, Anglo-Norman/French, Latin, Scots, and Welsh from the period c. 1150–1650 is very large.⁶ Except where otherwise specified, in this book prophecy refers to the Galfridian tradition.

Despite its importance in the main tradition of British historiography and its vigorous oral and manuscript circulation from the twelfth to the seventeenth century, English political prophecy has attracted relatively little modern critical attention. One could point to several reasons for the neglect. Perhaps most important is periodization. The tradition of political prophecy covers chronological territory divided between medievalists and early modernists in modern departments of English and history. Studies of prophecy typically do not traverse the English Reformation.⁷ The tradition is twice as easy to underestimate when only half of it enters a given reader’s critical consciousness. And then, prophecy tends to get lost in the larger swamp of historical and political writing.⁸ Moreover, the textual promiscuity of political prophecies baffles normal bibliographical procedures, which rely on the stability of incipits. The genre, being both nonnarrative and nonlyric, stymies modern reading habits. Prophecy collides two literary impulses, topicality and traditionality, that pertain to different kinds of modern critical analysis. In its longevity and dual orientation toward the past and the future, prophecy blurs the lines between cultural production and cultural analysis. Prophecy remains opaque to the kind of historicism that has little patience for dragons and lightning bolts. In prior studies of prophecy, large alliterative abstractions cluster around it: the people, poetry, politics, power, propaganda. These studies often succeed in describing specific connections between the prophecies and the abstractions, but sometimes at the expense of the interpretive complexity of the prophecies themselves. The reduction of political prophecy to historical facts—battles, successions, political affiliations—ironically bypasses the matrix of literary conventions that made interpretive closure so urgent and so elusive for earlier readers.

For all these reasons, English political prophecy stands as a major understudied literary archive. Most prophetic texts are still unindexed, unedited, and untitled. In what follows I locate some stations of power in the field, situating meter among other historically significant dimensions of the genre. This survey lays emphasis on the last phase of active production of political prophecies, after c. 1450, when prophecy became an available organizing principle of manuscript collections and political prophecies in English began to predominate in books produced in England. Because prophecies are linguistically, politically, socially, and textually labile, the distinction between composition and transmission is evanescent in this literary tradition. My periodization according to the production of manuscripts is a strategy for bracketing the long series of literary and textual studies that would need to underlie any generalization about the composition of prophecies.

Genre

Most immediately, political prophecy is a literary genre. The Prophetie Merlini presents its hallmark features: ascription of a prophetic utterance to an authoritative figure from the past, animal symbolism, and political topicality. Specifically, Geoffrey bequeathed to later writers a vocabulary for negotiating the relationship between ethnicity and empire. Britons and Saxons in political prophecy do not simply refer to Celtic and English polities, as can be readily inferred from the number of English political prophecies, written in England for English audiences, that imagine a final showdown in which righteous Britons triumph over malicious Saxon invaders. For example, the alliterative Ireland Prophecy (NIMEV 366.5/2834.3/3557.55) predicts that “Þese liouns bees lusked | and lased on sondir” (“these lions will be struck and bound together,” 5; quoted from Appendix D), where “liouns” refers to Saxons, from the royal coat of arms of England. Yet the same poem looks to Ireland for the victorious king (ll. 83–86), in what is likely an allusion to Richard, duke of York, Lieutenant of Ireland from 1449. Within the logic of political prophecy as historiography, there was no contradiction between anti-Saxon and pro-Yorkist propositions. The realm of vatic symbolism enabled new forms of ethnogenetic contestation: through prophecy, the English claimed Britishness. Prophetic historiography displaced antagonism between actually existing polities in Britain onto the distant past of Brutus of Troy and King Arthur. By appropriating anti-imperialist prophetic British historiography, English writers could represent themselves as the exclusive possessors of political intentions.

For the status of political prophecy as a special kind of writing, rather than an indifferent part of some larger whole—historiography, political literature, romance, or everyday life itself—one can turn to the Latin commentary that the Yorkshire friar John Erghome composed for the most amply attested fourteenth-century insular prophecy, the Latin vers...