The Italian line in English after Chaucer

Abstract

This article argues that the English iambic pentameter (EIP) has other important features in addition to the five parameters identified by Hanson and Kiparsky’s (1996) parametric theory ( position number and size, orientation, prominence site and type). One of these features is that EIP contains a mixture of pausing (French) and running (Italian) lines, as determined by whether the syllable in position 4 is word-final. A study of the frequency with which the Italian line is used in the two centuries after Chaucer’s death reveals that Hoccleve and the Scots poets, Henryson, Dunbar and Douglas, adhered fairly closely to Chaucer’s EIP verse design. On the other hand, several generations of English poets, Lydgate, Wyatt, Surrey and Sidney, experimented with alternative types of line that might well have developed into the canonical English long-line metre. Ultimately, however, the examples of Spenser and Shakespeare proved decisive in ensuring the victory of Chaucer’s metre. Between the 17th and 19th centuries, Donne, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Wordsworth, Keats and Browning were among the major poets who consolidated that victory and exploited the Italian line in order to accommodate their own or their age’s choice of diction. The mixture of French and Italian lines in decasyllabic verse is one of the distinguishing features of EIP. Although other factors affect the proportions in this mixture to a small extent, they are primarily the result of individual poets’ aesthetic choice. Significantly, all the English poets after Spenser whose verse is analysed in this article have favoured a more evenly balanced mixture of French and Italian lines than the random deployment of their lexicon would have produced.