Reading the Forms of Sir Thopas

Abstract

Chaucer's Sir Thopas has always been read in terms of its forms: the tail-rhyme that creates the poem's laughable music, the affiliation with romance that grounds its parody in the forms we call genre. Nor are these forms of Sir Thopas inconsequential. Christopher Cannon has recently argued that it was precisely in the forms of romance that textual objects in the thirteenth century rose above the vagaries of matter and became literary essence: through King Horn, Havelok the Dane, and the other texts that Sir Thopas spoofs, “the spirit of English romance became the spirit of English literature.”1 But if Chaucer registers this apotheosis of the literary through a knowing de-materialization of his own text, Cannon's study of early Middle English literature asks us to return to the matter that grounds that spirit. Similarly, the material forms of Sir Thopas raise questions about how to understand the poem's essence—that is to say, how the tail-rhyme meter or the layout of a manuscript page might be invested with literary significance. In different ways, both New Criticism and textual materialism have made it commonplace to assert that form shapes meaning, but I am equally interested here in the ways in which it fails to do so. For the material forms of Sir Thopas, specifically its manuscript layout, bear a problematic relation to its immaterial ones, specifically verse-form and, more ambitiously, genre. Putting this text into its material context prompts questions about the posture of the reader before the manuscript and about how the material forms of texts structure their readers' experiences. Although reading practices are shaped by generic expectations, generic categories are equally shaped by readers' habits, and both are indebted to the physical forms of texts in manuscript books.The physical form of Sir Thopas—like so many other things about the poem—is a joke. Many early and important manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales, including both Ellesmere and Hengwrt, mark Geoffrey's first storytelling effort by a drastic change (not to say a “drasty” change) in the format of the page.2 Breaking from the more familiar couplets or stanzas in single columns of text, the new layout calls attention to the literary structures of tail-rhyme through an unusual spacing of verses and an elaborate system of brackets. For example, in the Ellesmere manuscript, the first two verses in the left-hand column (the a-rhyme) are linked by a bracket, which then points to the b-rhyme verses, set off in another sort of makeshift column to the right and bracketed also: one reads aa on the left, and then b on the right (Fig. 1). Halfway down the page, things become still more complex; single-stress bob lines begin to crowd awkwardly into the margin from time to time, just as they crowd awkwardly into the poem. Additional brackets indicate how these bob-lines relate to the rhymes of the more regular pattern. So, for example, the stanza where Thopas declares his love for the elf-queen reads as follows: An elf-queen wol I love, ywisFor in this world no womman is Worthy to be my make In towneAlle othere wommen I forsake,And to an elf-queene I me take By dale and eek by downe!(790–96)3FIG. 1San Marino, Huntington MS EL 26.C.9 (Ellesmere), fol. 152r. Reproduced by permission of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California. In Helen Cooper's oft-quoted words, the pattern is “reminiscent of a schedule for a tennis tournament with an inconvenient number of players.”4 Similar layouts occur in the Hengwrt manuscript and in other significant copies of the Canterbury Tales, such as Cambridge University Library MSS Gg.4.27 and Dd.4.24. Judith Tschann, in an important article published in this journal in 1985, notes eleven manuscripts (of fifty-three) with what she calls the “landmark layout” of Sir Thopas. Four more manuscripts implement this layout inconsistently. Five more make a separate column of tail-rhyme lines without marking the bob. And nine more use brackets without other formal markings.5 Such a deliberate and complex arrangement of what I will call “displayed rhymes” is found nowhere else in Chaucer's works. The choice to write Sir Thopas in this way was made by an unusually authoritative group of scribes, including Adam Pynkhurst, who has recently been identified as the scribe of both Ellesmere and Hengwrt, and the probable addressee of Chaucer's famous poem “Adam Scriveyn.”6 Most scholars agree that the choice of layout was likely Chaucer's own.7 But whether scribal or authorial, the Sir Thopas layout—which I will define as b-verses set to the right, joined to the other verses by brackets—suggests a recognition that the metrical form of tail-rhyme itself constitutes a particular feature of this poem's parody.8It is all the more surprising, then, that the ostensible targets of Chaucer's caricature—the earlier English tail-rhyme romances as collected in the Auchinleck manuscript—do not exhibit this sort of arrangement.9 For example, the opening of Bevis of Hampton (the most sustained passage from any romance to be echoed in Sir Thopas) occupies two consistent and regular columns of text, neither displaying the b-verses in any way, nor marking any rhymes with brackets.10Sir Tristrem, a romance found only in Auchinleck, is the only one other than Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (and Sir Thopas itself) to use the one-stress bob, but it does not call attention to this unusual feature of its stanza structure, indicating the beginning of each stanza with only a paraph-mark.11Guy of Warwick, also found only in Auchinleck (at least in its stanzaic form), is the romance most often echoed in Sir Thopas' language,12 but it also restricts its innovations in layout merely to marking stanzas with red and blue paraphs. Beyond these few decorative symbols, the Auchinleck manuscript does not display the formal features of its verse by visual means. However many verbal echoes can be traced in Sir Thopas, these tail-rhyme romances are not the inspiration for its physical form.13The Auchinleck tail-rhyme romances are not the only ones that might have inspired Chaucer's parody, but other significant manuscript collections provide few likely models for its layout.14 Rhiannon Purdie has catalogued the handful of romances that show an attempt at what she calls “graphic” tail-rhyme: they include three copies of Sir Isumbras, two of Bevis of Hampton, and one each of Sege of Melayne, Duke Rowland and Sir Otuell of Spayne, Sir Ferumbras, and Sir Degrevant.15 Purdie argues for the importance of these displayed tail-rhyme romances as the clear source for Chaucer's Sir Thopas. I read the evidence with a somewhat different emphasis, however, for although Purdie demonstrates that there are some prior analogues, it remains a surprise that there are so few. Moreover, the collections of romances written in the fifteenth century, closer to the date of the Chaucer manuscripts, show no consistent interest in a graphic display of tail-rhyme. In the romances of Cambridge University Library MS Ff.2.38, neither meter nor rhyme-scheme is punctuated in any way, nor are they marked in London, British Library MS Cotton Caligula A.ii (apart from paraphs at the stanzas). Of the six tail-rhyme romances in the Thornton manuscript (Lincoln Cathedral Library MS 91), such a layout can be found only in Sir Degrevant. All three of these manuscripts are perhaps descendants of manuscript anthologies Chaucer knew. Although the scattered examples create a sense that a displayed layout is not inappropriate for Middle English tail-rhyme romances, the list is neither long nor comprehensive.16 Moreover, even in these examples, the display of tail-rhyme is not persistent, since many of these scribes find the ordinatio of the page too difficult to maintain and give up quickly. More significantly, the manuscripts that contain graphic tail-rhyme invariably also contain tail-rhyme written more simply. That is, tail-rhyme itself is a feature of verse-form around which anthologies are constructed (many of these manuscripts are essentially collections of tail-rhyme romance), but the displayed layout of tail-rhyme is not. In manuscripts of the fourteenth or the fifteenth century, Middle English tail-rhyme romances do not often look like Sir Thopas. Nothing in the tradition prepares a reader for the strength and consistency of the displayed tail-rhyme in manuscripts of Chaucer's tale.Both Tschann, who suspected that a tradition of displayed tail-rhyme stands somewhere behind Sir Thopas, and Purdie, who has demonstrated that it does, ultimately conclude that the unusual Chaucerian layout simply furthers a reading of Sir Thopas's tail-rhyme as the bumptious verse-form of popular Middle English romance. Perhaps this is enough: there is no question that the tale's comedy relies on parody of this peculiarly English genre, nor that that genre is marked by the verse-form Chaucer adopts. But from the perspective of codicological form, the lines of affinity necessary to create parody are not so simply drawn. There is no question that Sir Thopas alludes to tail-rhyme romance, but there is more of a question, I think, as to what the persistent layout mimics. If we understand the layout to refer to tail-rhyme as a literary form, rather than to tail-rhyme romance as a literary genre, the possibilities for allusion become richer, and the meanings of forms more problematic. The layout suggests that the structural relationships between Sir Thopas and the tail-rhyme romances are both weaker and more complicated than has previously been assumed—or, at least, that there are other structural relations to consider as well. If the format of Sir Thopas was not a necessary part of the tradition represented by the Auchinleck tail-rhymes and their ilk, we have to ask what its other possible referents might be.So where does the complex layout of the poem come from? And what exactly is the object of its parody? Tail-rhyme is laid out graphically in medieval manuscripts apart from romance: Latin, French, Anglo-Norman, and Middle English. The variety of its potential origins, as well as the bewildering variety of its potential meanings, suggests the fundamentally labile quality of the form. Malcolm Parkes has guessed that displayed tail-rhyme probably derives ultimately from graphic structures originally meant to elucidate and reinforce the repetition of rhyming sounds in simple couplets: either end-rhymes or leonine rhymes (those that are internal to the verse).17 In an example from Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Lat. Misc. d.15, fol. 10v, of Latin verse on the history of Troy (Fig. 2), the repeating sounds at the ends of words are written only once, and the scribe asks the reader to follow squiggly lines to complete the sense of each half-verse.18 This sort of layout could emphasize repetitions of the sounds of whole words, selected syllables (as here), or even individual letters.19This sort of arrangement shares something with the Sir Thopas layout in its visual aspect: it looks similar. But it is fundamentally unconnected to the literary structures of tail-rhyme. The coincidence of physical forms implies nothing about literary form, for the sequence of meaning on the page—the ways in which the lines are read and made sense of—is completely different: these early examples are read in one column only, each line ending repetitively in the same sound, represented only once. It did happen, though, that tail-rhymes were also sometimes written to the right in medieval Latin verse, and in a context seemingly very distant from the tail-rhyme romance parodied in Sir Thopas: the performance of devotion through liturgical song. The familiar aab ccb pattern of some hymns, a probable ancestor of vernacular tail-rhyme, was sometimes written so as to display the final line, and the b-rhyme.20 A copy of the hymn Aue uirgo speciosa in Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Digby 19, fol. 74, presents three verses on one line, so that the repeating b-verse becomes the end of each.21 More ostentatiously, a copy of the hymn Mundi uolo uanitatem (Oxford, Corpus Christi College MS 232, fol. 77v) uses the Sir Thopas layout: display-brackets and a second column of complete verse lines.22 These two display layouts are juxtaposed in a telling English example in Cambridge, Trinity College MS B.14.39, fol. 28v (Fig. 3), where the Latin hymn is written in long lines: Gaude virgo mater Christi Quae per aurem concepisti, Gabriele nuntio.Gaude, virgo Deo plena Peperisti sine poena, Cum pudoris lilio.FIG. 3Cambridge, Trinity College MS B.14.39, fol. 28v. Reproduced by permission of the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge. The Middle English translation is displayed just below as graphic tail-rhyme: Glade us maiden moder milde \þurru þin heгre þu were wið childe/ Gabriel he seide it þeGlade us ful of gode þine \þam þu bere buten pine/ Wið þe lilie of chastete23 One implication of this example, and one borne out by other evidence, is that displayed tail-rhyme was especially popular in vernacular manuscripts from England, often appearing both in Anglo-Norman and in English contexts.24 A more important implication for the purposes of this study, however, is that the form has its origins in a genre and a mode of reading very distant from tail-rhyme romance: the liturgical performance of hymns.In part because of this distant inheritance, devotional vernacular lyrics apart from hymns also sometimes take on the graphic form of tail-rhyme. A fifteenth-century scroll at Yale University—New Haven, Beinecke Library MS 410—shows the lengths to which one scribe would go to incorporate (and the word is not casually chosen) a displayed tail-rhyme layout (Fig. 4). The lyric “O man unkynde” is written in the midst of a series of familiar devotional images: the Man of Sorrows and the Instruments of the Passion. When the familiar layout—two columns, with directional bracketing—requires that the words spill into the visual surround, the scribe does not scruple to break the frame and extend the textual space into the margins, leaving the artist to work with what marginal space remains.25 This poem represents the memorial imaging of Passion iconography, a variety of late-medieval devotion associated with visual display rather than exclusively with the aural experience of hymns. Nonetheless, it argues for the continued and widespread use of tail-rhyme for pious purposes in the late Middle Ages. Following the history of tail-rhyme along these lines reveals a strong and original connection with pious works, stemming probably from an origin in hymns, which ultimately generates the more familiar association with romance. Tail-rhyme was initially used to mark moments of heightened piety within narrative: prayers of supplication or thanksgiving, heroines joining nunneries. It ultimately became the vehicle for the whole of the narrative, creating a new association between form and content in which tail-rhyme would, somewhat paradoxically, represent the secular genre of romance itself.26Of course, displayed tail-rhyme goes beyond devotional material to adorn lyrics in many different registers, keeping open the question of what it ultimately means. The Sir Thopas layout can be found in a historical lyric from London, British Library MS Harley 2253 in the early fourteenth century celebrating the insurrection of the Flemish against the French,27 as well as in “What so men seyn,” a courtly complaint from the Findern anthology (Cambridge University Library MS Ff.1.6), one of six lyrics in this manuscript to display graphic tail-rhyme.28 In both of these cases, the tail-rhymes occupy a separate column to the right, and the reader has to move from left to right and back again as she navigates the verse. Navigating a similar layout in the hagiographic context of a verse life of John of Bridlington in New Haven, Yale University Beinecke Library MS 331 has proved especially difficult for modern readers; the first scholar to edit this poem failed to recognize the b-verses as part of the same text, identifying them as a separate composition.29The difficulty that scholars have sometimes had in reconstructing these poems shows how tail-rhymes like these challenge ideas of linear sequence, becoming interchangeable and easily rearrangeable units. Parkes has speculated that poems with displayed rhymes were occasionally to be read in separate columns, first the left from top to bottom, and then the right, a process that creates a different poem by reordering the verses. There is also the possibility that the tail-rhymes alone could outline the thematic movement of a text in this form; themes boiled down to the tail-rhymes would become a précis of the whole. In either case, verse laid out along these lines becomes a sort of punctuation poem, allowing for different readings on different occasions to construe the words in a variety of ways, sometimes even contradictory ones. This understanding of such poems presupposes a witty complexity in both the construction and the appreciation of them, but Parkes also suggests that the clear marking of tail-rhymes might be meant to help “less sophisticated readers” appreciate the form.30Sir Thopas offers perspective on both readerships, of course, for the climactic tail-rhymes to which the layout points turn out to be laughably banal. If Chaucer the pilgrim and Harry Bailly (each in his own way) prove “less sophisticated,” Chaucer the poet and his readers (we flatter ourselves) grasp the cleverness of the piece. John Burrow has taught us that the three-fit structure of Sir Thopas follows a principle of progressive diminution, making the disintegration of the episodic romance a part of the joke.31 And, as Tschann has observed, the layout of the poem—which asks to be read horizontally as well as vertically—dwindles away as it spreads across the page.32But a more intriguing codicological analogue in Middle English tail-rhyme for the layout that the early scribes created for Sir Thopas is not witty punctuation poems, verse for dullards, or indeed any kind of lyric. Instead, the most strikingly consistent use of such a layout in the fifteenth century is in dramatic manuscripts. The Carpenters' Play in the York manuscript (London, British Library Additional MS 35290) shows, for example, tail-rhymes set off to the right, though without brackets. Moreover, the York Armorers' Play of the Expulsion shows a displayed tail-rhyme of precisely the Sir Thopas sort: b-rhymes to the right with brackets clarifying their structure (Fig. 5). San Marino, Huntington Library MS HM 1, the manuscript of the Towneley plays, exhibits a Sir Thopas layout even more thoroughly, and not only in isolated plays, as in York, but in all of them. Medieval plays outside the Northern biblical cycle drama also use a tail-rhyme layout like this. For example, the East Anglian Castle of Perseverance and the play of Wisdom, both in the Macro manuscript (Washington, Folger Shakespeare Library MS V.a.354), use similar layouts to display literary form when characters speak in tail-rhyme. The manuscript copy of Wisdom visually displays the difference between the regular stately anaphora of Anima's speech (“Wan I was nought þou made me thus gloryous / Wan I perysschede thorow synne þou sauyde”), and the chaotic words of Lucifer (“Owt harow I rore!”) which erupt onto the page in displayed tail-rhyme.33Where did the displayed tail-rhyme come from in these dramatic manuscripts, and what does it signify? In the layout of York, Towneley, and The Castle of Perseverance, the speakers' names are embedded with the b-verses on the far right—for example, in the Armorers' play, Eua, Adam, and Angelus (Fig. 5). The frequent practice in play manuscripts of naming characters on the right might have influenced their scribes' choice of the Sir Thopas layout, if only in terms of a visual correspondence. But, as we have seen, setting tail-rhyme to the right is a practice older than the dramatic habit of writing speakers' names there, and the visual model cannot fully account for the Sir Thopas layout in the plays. It is certain, too, that when a text makes a meaningful rupture between the literary form of some speeches and of others, as in Wisdom, the scribe registers that distinction by this drastic change of layout. Tail-rhyme marks the speech of villains and fallen heroes in some plays, and it is probable that the Sir Thopas layout appealed to scribes who wanted to display that distinction visually. Perhaps, then, this altered arrangement registers a difference between the uses of early tail-rhyme (romance) and later tail-rhyme (villainy). Or perhaps it even capitalizes on a general sense in the fifteenth century that this form is humorous. But the contemporary Findern lyrics, neither villainous nor humorous, argue against these suggestions, as does the high seriousness of tail-rhyme's Latin heritage in the hymns.One more likely explanation suggested by the dramatic manuscripts is that displayed tail-rhyme in the fifteenth century (and perhaps even before) marks a text that relies on oral performance in a fundamental way.34 Of course, tail-rhyme romances are not the only parallels critics have seen to Sir Thopas: Laura Hibbard Loomis herself, who famously proposed the parallel with the Auchinleck romances, also cites “pious legend, romance, or lyric” for the “minstrel style” that Chaucer is parodying. But the inclusion of the drama allows us to be more precise—even as we broaden the range of allusion—about what fifteenth-century readers understood to be the object of Sir Thopas's parody: not so much a minstrel style, specifically, but oral performances of all kinds. Seth Lerer has described the “romance of orality” pursued by Chaucer's Sir Thopas,35 and it seems that the early scribes agreed with him about this aspect of the poem. They adopted a performative layout to call attention to the interactions between the written and the spoken that form a part of the tale's humor—and its significance.The visible realization of Middle English poetry is usually far less considered than, for example, George Herbert's typographical experimentation in The Temple, but nevertheless the physical layout of medieval poems can be instructive. The diagrammatic and unvoiceable brackets that highlight the rhymes of many Middle English verses demonstrate neatly how the seen and the heard are productively combined, for even though the rhyme-lines themselves can have no vocalization, they exist to elucidate visually the structure of the poetry's preeminent sound effect. Thus they transform the heard into the seen. The Sir Thopas layout—an elaborate example of a widespread impulse towards the bracketed display of rhymes—is ultimately the visible realization of relations that should be listened for, and therefore for fifteenth-century scribes and readers it presents a paradox: the striking visual layout of a literate text that compels even a private, silent reader to enact in imagination a bumbling spoken performance.36 Tangled questions of orality and literacy in medieval culture are vexed by limitations of the evidence, which can include only written words. Who can say with certainty what a written trace of oral performance would look like? As Loomis observes in her essay on a “Possible London Bookshop”: The minstrel may, of course, have sometimes been identical with the hack translator and versifier, but in so far as he became a maker and user of texts, it is evident that he ceased his characteristic oral function. He became then simply a writing man, indistinguishable from any other. But the scribes of Sir Thopas, themselves indistinguishable “writing men,” distinguished the performance of this tale from the other spoken narratives of the Canterbury pilgrimage in ways that evoke the visible forms of oral performance. In their hands, Sir Thopas—even more than the “roadside” theater of the rest of the Canterbury Tales—becomes a kind of closet drama.What then, on this reading, does the form of tail-rhyme itself mean? For a literary structure so laden with significance, it proves surprisingly hard to say. The connection between this form and any meaning in genre or theme is particularly slippery, as tail-rhyme begins with one set of associations (in hymns and pious works), and imports that meaning into another context (romance), and finally brings both into yet another (drama). This is not to suggest that one meaning moved temporally to another, for all exist concurrently. While Chaucerian manuscripts employ displayed tail-rhyme to invoke popular doggerel romance, the Beinecke scroll uses it to suggest that individual meditative devotion can borrow from the form of hymns. Within the drama itself, tail-rhyme adorns simultaneously the speech of devils and tricksters, on the one hand, and the most significant moments of Christ's Passion and Resurrection, on the other.Moreover, the form shows a balance between widely disparate contexts of reception: tail-rhyme can be described as both popular and elite. Although most critics have emphasized the popular uses of the form, its origin in hymns complicates any simple characterization. The hymnic form may itself stage the emergence of popular sentiment from ecclesiastical structures: tail-rhymes are sometimes understood as refrains sung by the people, that is, a call-and-response formula. By this interpretation, Latin ecclesiastical origins merge with popular origins.37 Displayed tail-rhyme has been aligned, in particular, with popular productions in material terms. Purdie, noting Auchinleck's failure to account for the graphic tail-rhyme in Sir Thopas, suggests that Chaucer had “far less glamorous manuscripts in mind” when he composed—and presumably laid out—the poem.38 But such identifications are speculative at best: whether considering tail-rhyme's likely subjects or its contexts of reception, the horizon of expectations established by this form is so broad and varied that it almost ceases to exist.The displayed form of tail-rhyme even straddles the transition between manuscript and print, although one would imagine that such a layout would be easier to write than to set in type. Malcolm Parkes has pointed out its difficulties in transferring to print, and indeed Caxton never did print Sir Thopas in this manner. Wynkyn de Worde, however, reproduced the layout of the earliest manuscripts in his edition of the Canterbury Tales (1498; STC 5085). De Worde does not make any attempt at printed bracketing, but he does situate the b-verses to the right in an allusion to the manuscript tradition (Fig. 6).39 Printed displayed tail-rhyme existed in other genres, too, notably those associated with performative devotional reading. In Stephen Hawes's 1509 Conuercyon of swerers (STC 12943, 12943.5), a devotional lyric of the “behold and see” variety (similar to the illustrated Beinecke scroll) is displayed in printed graphic tail-rhyme (Fig. 7).40 Hawes's poem, in an inversion of the patterns traced by Herbert's Easter Wings several centuries later, moves from short to long lines and back again, also setting its displayed tail-rhymes to the left. Because of the space required for an associated imago pietatis and the necessity of printing the last lines on the next page, the poem makes a less unified impression than Herbert's does, but there is no doubt that its displayed tail-rhyme is part of a carefully considered visual design.What does Sir Thopas have to do with the Conuercyon of swerers? This unlikely question crystallizes the problems inherent in reading Chaucer's poem through its forms, for it posits a limit-case for the sorts of phenomena we observe when we attend to formal structures and question the relation of those structures to the meaning of a text. Putting Chaucer's familiar self-parody in a range of unlikely contexts—connected through the shapes of displayed tail-rhyme—poses the broadest possible questions about what the physical forms of manuscripts reveal about the meanings of medieval texts, and especially about the ways in which their literary forms were read. As Malcolm Parkes has taught us, “punctuation is not a matter of ‘accidentals’, but a form of hermeneutics.” He goes on: The principle which underlies the various conventions found in the manuscripts was to emphasize rhyming words. This enabled medieval readers to identify the rhyme scheme, and provided them with a fundamental guide to the rhythmic organization of the verse, which, in turn, enabled them to identify the form of the poem, thereby alerting them to the conventions of that form embodied in the text.41 But what are the conventions of a form? And how are they embodied in a text? The physical form of Sir Thopas tells us little about the literary form of tail-rhyme itself. Instead, it suggests analogues not so much formal, or even generic, as modal. Displayed tail-rhyme implies a mode of understanding that can be replicated across many centuries, many subjects, many genres, and many formal conventions. What binds all of these poems together is their interest in transforming hearing into seeing, and bringing public performance—perhaps remembered—into the spaces of private reading. If Geffrey characterizes Sir Thopas as “a rym I lerned longe agoon” (VII 709), the displayed rhymes on the manuscript page serve to evoke that long-ago performance for a fifteenth-century reader.The displayed tail-rhyme of Sir Thopas signals not so much the forms and genres of literature, or even the physical manifestations of those forms, but the performative mode in which it is used and understood. Displayed tail-rhyme comes to imply a developing mode of understanding rather than a static form—a modus operandi rather than an opus operatum, to borrow Pierre Bourdieu's terms.42 A survey of displayed tail-rhyme as it appears in the manuscripts does not provide an external observer with a clear