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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA,

IRVINE

The Overheard Song: Medieval Lyric in the Mixed Genre

DISSERTATION

Submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

in English by

Ricardo Matthews

Dissertation Committee:

Professor Elizabeth Allen, Chair

Professor Rebecca Davis

Professor Julia Reinhard Lupton

Professor Alexandre Leupin

2016

© 2016 Ricardo Matthews

iii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

LIST OF FIGURES iv

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS v

CURRICULUM VITAE vi

ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS vii

INTRODUCTION: Song and Subject 1

CHAPTER 1: The Overheard Song: , The Parliament of

Fowles and the Tristan en prose 59

CHAPTER 2: Grail Songs: and the Tristan en prose 110 CHAPTER 3: Lyrical Gower and the Confessio Amantis 154 CHAPTER 4: Lyric and the Documentary Self: Charles of Orleans 211 CODA: Between Verse and ProseRomeo and Juliet 260

BIBLIOGRAPHY 282

iv

LIST OF FIGURES

Page Figure 1.1 Detail of Cambridge University Library MS Gg. 4.27, f. 490v. 65 Figure 4.1 Detail of Paris BnF MS fr 25458, p. 218. 216 Figure 4.2 Detail of Huntington Library MS. HM 111, San Marino, California, f. 41r. 222 v

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This dissertation would not exist without the valuable guidance of Professor Elizabeth Allen. Her enthusiasm for the project and her challenging insights have made me a better thinker and more precise writer. Her contributions can be found on every page. I would also like to thank Professor Alexandre Leupin whose scholarship and teaching served as the inspiration for my own work. helped me navigate through the difficulties of the profession joy. I would also like to acknowledge Professor Virginia Jackson whose encouragement has helped me to clarify my own thoughts about lyric poetry and its place in the prosimetrum. Finally, a big thanks to Mary-Jo Arn, Donka Minkova and Peter Haidu who graciously answered any and all questions. Financial support was provided by the University of California, Irvine, including a University Fellowship, the Howard Babb Memorial Fellowship and the Dorthy and Donald Strauss Endowed Dissertation Fellowship, and my very patient and encouraging wife Lynn. Moral support was provided by a wide network of family and friends, especially my mother Judy, Echo,

Maxi, Serena, Sergio and the three Davids.

vi

CURRICULUM VITAE

Ricardo Matthews

EDUCATION

1991 B.A. in French, University of California, Los Angeles

1997 M.A. in French Literature, Louisiana State University

2009 M.A. in English Literature, University of California, Irvine

2016 Ph.D in English Literature, University of California, Irvine

TEACHING

1994-1999 Graduate Teaching Assistant in French, Louisiana State University

2009-2016 Graduate Teaching Assistant in Composition and Literature, University of

California, Irvine.

FELLOWSHIPS

1995 Eliot Dow Healy Memorial Fellowship Award

2008-2009 University Fellowship

2013 Howard Babb Memorial Fellowship

2014-2015 The Dorothy and Donald Strauss Endowed Dissertation Fellowship

PUBLICATION

2016 (Revise and

Resubmit, PMLA)

vii

ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION

The Overheard Song: Medieval Lyric in the Mixed Genre By

Ricardo Matthews

Doctor of Philosophy in English

University of California, Irvine, 2016

Professor Elizabeth Allen, Chair

This dissertation examines a medieval genre that combines narration, in prose or verse, , whether as a

prosimetrum or its all verse variation, has received very little scholarly attention in English, even

though it was a very popular literary form in medieval England. Chaucer, for example, organizes his Troilus and Criseyde with a series of inserted lyrical set pieces designed to emphasize both the passions of love and its inevitable undoing. Medieval lyrics, however, have been described as playful exercises in rhetorical conventions, whose seemingly repetitive repertoire of conceits and figures point more to the rules of composition than to our Romantic conception of the poem as self-expression. And yet, within the mixed genre, narrative frames surround these singer, a fiction of the self that emanates from the song. In revisiting the problem of the medimpersonal and conventional, I argue that the mixed genre introduces a new concept of song as a locus of subjectivity within a framed ssion of a singular, emotional subject in a variety of works: , the Tristan en prose, viii

John Confessio Amantis, Charles of Orleans

English, Romeo and Juliet.

1

INTRODUCTION

SONG AND SUBJECT

The world as it is represented in Middle English literature is filled with the expressive sound of music and song. In the Parliament of Fowles, for example, Scipio sees and hears in the in MaloryMorte Darthur, in the woods, besides the same source, fountain or welle, a love sick Sir Palomides, enough to want to draw his sword.1 Between the celestial sphere of music and songs heard accidently in the woods, we find open meadows, as in The Floure and the Leafe or in the Belle dame sans mercy, where a pale man dressed in black is 2 Unfo -22). In the city, Oxford to be precise, we hear a young student at night

Angelus ad virginen he

1 Larry D. Benson, ed. The Riverside Chaucer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); James W. Spisak, ed.

, 2 vols. (Berkeley: University of California, 1983).

2 D.A. Pearsall, ed. The Floure and the Leafe and the Assembly of Ladies (London: Thomas Nelson, 1962) and Dana

M. Symons, ed. Chaucerian Dream Visions and Complaints (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, 2004). 2 -7). Then the teller of this tale, the Miller, eighteen year old wife, a foppish cler-akens her husband when he sings a few couplets:

Now, deere lady, if thy wille be,

I praye yow that ye wole rewe on me-62)

The rest of his song is muffled as we move into the bedroom where the host suddenly awakens confused. We also know, by the end of the tale, the young wife will show little rewe or pity for him. And then we have the prison towers, where Palamon, one May, listens from his cell to a girl in

3 Moved by its harmony, he t

Worschippe, ye that loveris been, this May,

For of your blisse the kalendis ar begonne,

Awake for shame! that have your hevynnis wonne,

And amorously lift up your hedis all:

Thank Lufe that list you to his merci call. (232-38) The natural optimism of this song with a little song inserted inside binds two literary traditions septainsʊ form that uniquely celebrates the composition and singing of songs.4 That form is a unique

3 Linne R. Mooney and Mary-Jo Arn, eds. The Kingis Quair and Other Poems (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute,

2005).

4 -line ottava rima stanza (abababcc) for Troilus by subtracting one line from the middle,

Chaucer, was the seven-Chaucer seems to have

made the conscious decision of choosing the familiarity and septains as a traditional indicator of great love poetry for his own innovations. Daniel Poiron, 3 mixture of genres. It can take shape as a prosimetrum, with its alternating use of prose narrative and lyric inserts, or as its all verse variation: combining verse narration with lyricswhat Ardis

Sylvia Huot, ,Judith Peraino,

.5 This had a long but until recently, little noticed presence in

English literature.

1. Bringing the Mixed Genre into Focus

osophy music)(3), wrote romances that included inserted poems or songs.6 Though Boethius was not the only author to write Latin prosimetra, the idea of a text that could both write and reflect upon poetryand in the voice of a prisoner too, so evocative of the later trouvère prison amoureuse toposmade for a more immediate model to emulate than the cosmological visions of Martianus Capella, Bernard Silvestris or Alain de Lille.7 However, De planctu naturae, with its de Guillaume d (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1965), pp. 374-5, 385-87. For the rhyme royal and its modern coinage, see Martin Stevens

PMLA 94.1 (January 1979): 62-76. For a diffe

Studies in Philology 88.3 (Summer 1991): 251-75.

5 Aucassin et Nicolette Prosimetrum:

Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Narrative in Prose and Verse (Cambridge: Brewer, 1997), pp. 67-98; Sylvia Huot,

From Song to Book: The Poetics of Writing in Old French Lyric and Lyrical Narrative Poetry (Ithaca: Cornell

University, 1987) and Judith A. Peraino, Giving Voice to Love: Song and Self-Expression from the Troubadours to

Guillaume de Machaut

-dits lyrico- Poetry and Music in Medieval France: From Jean Renart to Guillaume de Machaut (CambrThe Death of the Troubadour: The Late

Medieval Resistance to the Renaissance (University of Pennsylvania, 1994), p. 59; Marisa Galvez, Songbook: How

Lyrics Became Poetry in Medieval Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2012), p. 39; and Poiron, Le poète et le

prince, p. 204.

6 H. F. Steward, E. K. Rand, S. J. Tester, eds. Boethius: Theological Tractates, The Consolation of Philosophy

(Cambridge: Harvard University, 1973).

7 Prosimetrum seems to have been a twelfth-century coinage defined as a branch of poetic composition. The

prosimetrum was known in antiquity as a satira and was associated with formal disruption at the service of playful

content. According to Ziolkowsky, the Menippean 4 own connection to the amorous environment of the Roman de la rose, would also become an influential model, as Confessio Amantis. In France, prose gave way to verse in the narratives, as if to reinforce the importance of song in the late Middle Ages.8

Jean Renart, one of the mixed verse

Roman de la rose. Unlike Aucassin et Nicolette parodies the chanson de geste with alternating laisses of prose and verse more in a manner working, traveling between castles, attending feasts and, in connection to a tradition of troubadour and trouvère songs, simply because they are in love.9 Jean explains in the prologue these songs)(3), a motivation reminiscent of Marie de France and her own ambitions to remember the Breton lays.10 resulting from the mixture of one genre, romance, with another, song, for the telling of one tale,

could find only one example of the ancient term satira in the early Middle Ages but it referred exclusively to

Martianus Capella and his influence on Boethius. However, Dronke found a small fragment of the Satyricon in a

commentary by Boethius

Reichl, eds. Prosimetrum: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Narrative in Prose and Verse (Cambridge: Brewer,

1997), pp. 45-66 (qt. 51) and Peter Dronke, Verse with Prose from Petronius to Dante: The Art and Scope of the

Mixed Form (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), p. 30. For trouvère images of the prisoner and hostage

see Roger Dragonetti, La technique poétique des trouvères dans la chanson courtoise:

rhétorique médiévale (Bruges: De Tempel, 1960, rpt. Geneva: Slatkine, 1979), pp. 94-97, 107-10.

8 If prose does make an appearance in the vernacular mixed genre, it is either in response to another genre, as in the

Tristan en prose

seen in the inclusion of a sermon in The Canterbury Tales Voir Dit, Prison amoureuseLivre du duc des vrais amans and Les Douze dames de rhétorique.

9 Jean Dufournet, ed. Aucassin et Nicolette: Edition critique (Paris: Flammarion, 1984).

10 Jean Dufournet and Felix Lecoy, eds. Jean Renart: Le Roman de la rose ou de Guillaume de Dole (Paris:

n this faire noter because it seems to

imply the inclusion of music when there is no musical notation in the manuscript. However, noter, outside the

domain of music, also includes the writing or recording of things to be remembered. Jean Renart seems to be

playing with both it musical and memorial features. 5 eads therein)(19) even when the manuscript does not include musical notation. Other romances, as well as many fourteenth-century dits amoureux, use lyricsthat is, to say, short songs or poems in a variety of historic forms or genresto reclaim the central position of song in relation to narration. Though tested term, there are enough references to singing in the mixed genre to make from a lexical standpoint.11 othe preferred term since the distinction between a song and poem was not so absolute in the Middle Ages. Dante, for example, writes in the fourteenth- century De vulgari eloquentia verba in cartulis absque prolatore ithose who harmonize words call their work songs; even when such words are on the page, away from any performer, we call them songs)(2.8).12 Eustache Deschamps, in his late fourteenth-century treatise, the Art de dictier, theorized on what was already evident in practice; that songs sung and songs recited were two artfulness, musique artificiele, and the musique naturele.13 In the , Chaucer associates lays sung and lays read or listened to

11 ELH 82.2 (Summer 2015): 319-43.

12 Steven Botterill, ed. Dante: De Vulgari Eloquentia (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1996).

13 Deborah Sinnreich-Levi, ed. (East Lansing: Colleagues, 1994).

Deschamps offers practical reasons for elevating the natural. Sometimes sweet words need to be recited when

musical accompaniment is not around as, for example, in secret places or before a lady. He also says that natural

music can be heard in the reading of a book aloud to a sick person. For important discussions of the Art de dictier

Art de Dictier

Fin du Moyen Age et Renaissance: Mélange de philologie offerts à Robert Guiette (Anvers: Nederlandsche Boekhandel, 1961), pp. 49-64, reprinted in littérature médiévale (Geneva: Droz, 1986), pp. 27- Modern Language Review 59.4 (October 1964): 561-70; KeArt de DictierFrench

Studies 19.2 (April 1965): 164-Art de Dictier

Speculum 48.4 (October 1973): 714-e

Chaucer and His French Contemporaries: Natural Music in the Fourteenth Century (Toronto: 6 hem for hir -13).14 Song term to describe any short lyric with or without music when the particular form (ballade, rondeau, virelays, lay) or function (complaint, prayer) is not stated explicitly in a text.15 The art of writing short poems in the vernacular tradition then became associated with music, mostly because of its use of rhythmus, though, like grammar, vernancular poetry too borrowed from rhetoric as an art of composing words in an ornamented manner.16 For Jean

17 More importantly for this

study, Deschamps explains that music, whether artful or natur the Louange des dames but to a

University of Toronto, 1993), pp. 3-42; Elizabeth Eva Leach, Sung Birds: Music, Nature and Poetry in the Later

Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell, 2007), pp. 57-70; and Philipp Jeserich, Musica Naturalis: Speculative Music Theory

and Poetics, from Saint Augustine to the Late Middle Ages in France (Baltimore: John Hopkins, 2013).

14 For reading as listening see Joyce Coleman, Public Reading and the Reading Public in Late Medieval England

and France (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1996). 15

Schaefer, ed. The Beginnings of Standardization (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2006), pp. 61-70. For Dante,

cantio seem to refer to both song in general and a genre or form in particular, the troubadour canso or Italian

canzonis et sonitus et omnia cuiscunque modi verba cantiones we are treating

but also the ballate and sonnet and all kinds of words that are harmonized in the vernacular or Latin should be called

songs) (2.8).

16 Not only does John of Garland situate his artes

peak properly;

Rhetoric, since it teaches how to speak elegantly; and ethics, since it teaches or instills a sense of what is right), the

De institutione musica and its grouping of song and poetry together because of the use of rhythmus

seems interested in both the rhythmic and harmonic possibilities for words. Traugott Lawler, ed. The Parisiana

Poetria of John of Garland (New Haven: Yale University, 1974), pp. 2-7. However, in regards to Deschamps and

musique naturele, while Varty and Jeserich describe the difficulties and consequences of not placing poetry under

rhetoric, Dragonetti tries to reveal his originality by separating Deschamps from a Boethian tradition. Varty,

Art de DictierMusica Naturalis

treatises, see Ernst Langlois, ed. (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1902), pp. iii-iv; Douglas Kelly, The Arts of Poetry and Prose (Turnhout: Brepols, 1991), pp. 150-53.

17 Langlois, .

7 purpose we will find played out over and over again in the mixed genre, whether prosimetrum or verse, of a lover composing and singing songs for his lady, or in the case of Iseut and Toute

Belle, for her man.18

Romances like the Tristan en prose or the dits of Guillaume de Machaut repeatedly focus on singers, whether knight-poets or lovesick clerks, and stage the conditions in which a song is

Remède de

Fortune, the Roman de Fauvre and some manuscripts of the Tristan en prose, a song may also include its musical notation, while in manuscript, space is left for music to be added later. But most of the time, the song is something to be heard in the imagination or to be understood, as Deschamps points out, as melodic pleasing to thos

Book of the Duchess

-72). In either case, lyric or song, both imply a conscious form of writing in which the writer shifts out of narrative verse or prose and presents a one of a variety of historic forms, whether refrain, rondelet, lay, ballade, chant royal, rondeau or virelay.

18 Deschamps claims this natural music was equally part of song

ill

today held in several towns and cities of the countries and kingdoms of the world)(395c). But at least in the in the

thirteenth- Kar saunz le chaunt ne doit om mie appeler une resoun endite chauacoun, ne chauncoun reale

a composition a song, and no crowned royal song can be without the sweetness of sung melodies)(225). Thus

clarifying the definition of song with its traditional meaning. Henry Thomas Riley, ed. Munimenta Gildhallae

Londoniensis: Liber Albus, Liber Custumarum et Liber Horn, vol. 2, part 1 (London: Longman, 1860). 8 By the fourteenth century, English examples of the mixed-verse variation of the prosimetrum, the dits amoureux, made popular by poets such as Nicole de Margival, Guillaume de Machaut and Jean FroLegend of Good Women, for example, includes the poet singing a ballade for both the god of Love and Queen Alcestes. Unfortunately it is not well received and Love criticizes him for forgetting to include A19 The song itself is formally set apart from the narration by a fashion of the French dits. It -line, decasyllabic stanza in ababbcC with a pastiche of images derived from his disciples, Deschamps and Froissart. Finally, in the fifteenth-century, Temple of Glass , not only because it is written on the spot but perhaps because he provides new innovations in the own English ballades.20 However, unlike in English, much work has already been done on the French prosimetrum and its mixed verse variation that is useful in approaching the English tradition. Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet, for exampleVoir Dit, a narrative in versequotesdbs_dbs25.pdfusesText_31

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