Few periods of literary experimentation in English rival the end of the fourteenth century. During this period, large-scale fictive verse and non-fictive prose first emerged as literary phenomena in Middle English. Contemporaneously, many Middle English authors created theories of prose and poetry, indicating a clear rise in authorial self-consciousness and aesthetic ambition. Why was this so?

Periods of creative ferment often result from community interaction. Frequently, that community is a self-aware and deliberately cultivated peer-group of artists who encourage one another. But there is another kind of literary “community” to consider: one in which each member is responding not to a single, pre-existing literary forebear— an authorial “schoolmaster”—who provides exemplary literary practices and principles. That was very much the case in late fourteenth-century England, where the “schoolmaster” in question was Boethius, a sixth-century Italian philosopher, poet, and statesman who wrote one of the most influential texts for the later Middle Ages. The De consolatione philosophiae tells the story of Boethius’ philosophical, spiritual, and aesthetic self-discovery, a process shepherded by the personification of Philosophy.

Ranging from the fickleness of Fortune to the greatness of God, the De consolatione’s themes appeared throughout the literature of late medieval England. But it was not simply in themes that Boethius indelibly marked this literature; my doctoral research demonstrates that the formal structure of the De consolatione had at least as profound an effect. The form of the De consolatione was prosimetrum, a toggling back and forth between prose and verse. Not only did he practice prosimetrum, Boethius also carefully theorized how prose and verse worked on a reader, ultimately insisting that each form works both cognitively, by appealing to the reader’s rational capacity, and aesthetically, by appealing to the reader’s senses. This theory of prosimetric functionality shaped the literary experiments of a generation great Middle English writers, across genres and discourses, in texts secular as well as religious, in fictive and non-fictive works.

Geoffrey Chaucer took on the challenge of prosimetrum several times over the course of his career, and did so with significant consequences for the subsequent history of English literature. Perhaps the most conspicuous case is Troilus and Criseyde, Chaucer’s longest poem, which eventually provided a great deal of Shakespeare’s material for Romeo and Juliet. The poem tells the story of a star-crossed love, set against the backdrop of the Trojan War. Troilus, a young prince of Troy, falls in love with a Trojan woman named Criseyde. Aided and abetted by his friend Pandarus (from whose name we derive the modern English “to pander”), Troilus succeeds in his suit for Criseyde’s love. The two are blissfully happy, but only briefly: Criseyde is untimely exchanged in a hostage swap with the Greeks. Once she has left Troilus’ side, her fidelity disintegrates; she accepts a Greek lover. Troilus is heartbroken, but there is nothing he can do: human happiness is fleeting, and earthly delights—including women—are ultimately vain.

In composing this story, Chaucer was also working closely from Boccaccio’s Il filostrato, but he diverged frequently from it to include paraphrases and themes drawn from Boethius. But, more than the thematic Boethian echoes that Chaucer added to the Troilus, it is the formal echoes that interest me. When Chaucer took on Boccaccio’s poem as a project, he did so with an eye toward Boethianizing it by creating a multi-layered prosimetric reading experience in his final project.

On one level, Chaucer’s reengagement with prosimetrum shows up in his emphasis on the two modes of discourse that govern the story: song and dialogue. In structuring the plot around these forms, Chaucer reengages with Boethian prosimetrum: in the De consolatione, “song” is what Boethius calls his metrical sections, while dialogue is the sine qua non of his prose. For Boethius, both forms are mutually reinforcing and are equally necessary as modes of persuasion. Reflecting that persuasive functionality, Chaucer casts song and dialogue as the two modes that persuade Troilus and Criseyde to pursue their love.

But on another level, Chaucer recreates prosimetric functionality in his bifurcation of the poem into the story of Troilus and Criseyde’s love and the intermittent interjections of the narrator. The story itself is a carefully-planned causal narrative, in which each plot element depends logically on what had come before it, and in which the timescale of the story is continuous and linear. The narratorial incursions, by contrast, work less like chronological narration, and more like atemporal, lyrical monologues: in them, the narrator comments omnisciently upon the events of the story he tells, but none of his incursions link up with each other end-to-end. This bifurcation into narrative and narrator reproduces the effect of the division of Boethius’ text into prose and meter: his prose tells a continuous, linear narrative, but is frequently interrupted by metrical portions, spoken by an omniscient narrator who comments retrospectively upon, rather than participating in, the ongoing narrative of the dialogue between Boethius and Philosophy. So, not just within the story, but also in the narratorial frame that surrounds it, Chaucer recreates prosimetric functionality.

The final level of Chaucer’s reinvention of prosimetrum is that of sheer poetic form. Now, as I have already noted, Troilus and Criseyde is composed in verse, not in proseand- verse, but the form of verse it is composed in works like prose. Or, at least, like medieval prose was supposed to work. Prose theorists in the Middle Ages held that clauses and sentences were the fundamental units of prose—the prose equivalent of “feet” or “meter.” Because of this recognition of clauses and sentences as the basic units of prose composition, medieval prose theorists urged prose writers to ornament their prose writings at the level of the clause and sentence. The canonical way to do this was through the use of cursus, a mode of ornamenting the ends of clauses and sentences through certain prescribed patterns of rhythm or “cadencing.” This cadencing was not just an ornament: it provided a mode of punctuation and emphasis in prose writing before the regularization of orthographic punctuation conventions, distinguishing clauses, sentences, and points of argumentation, and emphasizing certain ideas.

How does all this relate to Troilus, which, as I have already noted, was written in verse? As it turns out, the particular verse form in which Troilus was composed was so-called “rime royal,” a stanzaic verse form with an intricate rhyme scheme. Somewhat bizarrely, this particular form was often referred to as “prose” by its practitioners—Chaucer himself included. The reason for this nomenclature, I believe, lay in the way in which the verse form matched syntactic units—clauses and sentences—to metrical units—lines of verse. Indeed, Chaucer routinely ends his lines at natural breaks in syntax, and he ends nearly every stanza in his poem with a full stop. His verse form thus became a framework for metrical punctuation, aestheticizing each individual clause through rhythm and meter, and aestheticizing whole sentences through the deployment of rhyme scheme and line-count. The verse form of Troilus, that is, works like cadenced prose, aestheticizing, separating, and emphasizing units of syntax and argumentation. Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, then, was a metrical work, but one that was designed to do what Chaucer and his contemporaries saw as the fundamental aesthetic work of prose.

Thus, in three ways, Troilus was a unified, remodeled prosimetrum, and I believe its tripartite prosimetric functionality—within the text, in the relation of narrator to story, and in the basic form of its composition—significantly impacted the works of fifteenth-century poets like Thomas Hoccleve, as well as the great playwrights of the Renaissance.

Townsend Fellow Eleanor Johnson is a Ph.D. Candidate in English. In addition, she is a poet whose works have been inclduded in fascicle.com, shampoopoetry.com, freshyarn.com and the magazine Back Room.

This article can be found in the April/May 2008 newsletter.