Chaucer and language

I never did any Chaucer in school but read the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales while hiking through Cornwell a few years ago. I had a Middle English version that I'd borrowed from my husband with helpful notes scribbled in the sideline to translate it, and I got through it in about three afternoons, it's not very long.

The General Prologue isn't much more than a collection of character descriptions but they are incredibly skilful and, beautifully presented. They have levels - the realistic, the satirical and the allegorical and they challege what you think about them. The writing is gorgeous. It doesn't try to make you think, it doesn't force you with an opinion, in fact it provides basically no opinion at all, and at the same time it's written well enough to get you thinking exactly what Chaucer wants you to think.

The language is old and obscure, but in a way it makes it more exciting to read, as you're having to translate as you go. It's like finding some ancient scroll, or an alien code, and creates an even deeper sense of a little world in a drop of water. I remember reading Shakespeare at school and there was this sort of unspoken assumption that the language would be a barrier, a hurdle to try and get over. I think that particular attitude misses a trick. The language does make it difficult to read like an ordinary book, but it makes it more exciting to explore.

In Chaucer particularly the fact it's written in Middle English makes it all the more exciting when you find a sentence that you can easily translate. After a while you start reading the words with strange pronunciations and saying 'eek' instead of 'also' in general conversation. It's like a foreign language, but it's your foreign language, and you can see how words and phrases have evolved over time into modern English. In Chaucer's time there are sayings, and memes, and stylistic conventions that you can see reflected over time.

It's history and literature all mixed up together by an incredibly talented writer. A little snapshot of a strange world which is oddly familiar. 

Iambic Pentameter

Starting off in style with Iambic Pentameter, the meter used by Shakespeare, Keats, and apparently various ancient Greeks. The Iambic foot is a pattern of stresses: an unstressed sylabble followed by a stressed one:

da-DUM - as in "but look!" or "You see"

Iambic pentameter therefore means five iambs in a row:

da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM
If MU-sic BE the FOOD of LOVE play ON.
Now IS the WIN-ter OF our DIS-con-TENT
But SOFT what LIGHT through YON-der WIN-dow BREAKS
etc.

It's a lovely meter to use, as it creates a lilting flowing style, longer than conventional poetry but shorter than free-flow prose. The iambic flow helps to carry the speech along (especially helpful during somewhat long-ish speeches), and five beats per line gives it shape and form.

In Shakespeare's work the strict iambic form is occasionally deviated from, for example the famous "to BE or NOT to BE that IS the QUES-tion" ends in a weak stress known as a feminine ending (and even then the stresses don't quite work, the mind naturally wants to say "to BE or NOT to be THAT is the QUES-tion). However the meter still flows, and during the speeches, or suitably poetic discussions between high-class characters, the flow is all. Free prose (with no stresses, so just said as people normally speak) is reserved exclusively for lower-class characters during humorous interludes, such as the drunken porter in MacBeth. The sudden lack of poetic meter signals to the audience that this part is not relevant to the plot so much as an excuse for bawdy or topical jokes and probably a fair bit of slapstick.

A question often asked is how much the meter should be stressed during performances, obviously you don't want an actor who overstresses every second syllable, but performances where the meter is ignored completely and the whole thing spoken as prose always seem to me to be lacking something. The best performances are usually by those actors who can speak using the iambic stresses but make it sound like that's how they normally speak. The wonderful soaring flow of the meter makes grand speeches grander, desire more beautiful, pledges of love more real and meaningful, and pretentious idiots who think their in love sound even more deluded and pompously grandiose than normal "If music be the food of love!"