Chaucer's Middle English
To someone reading Chaucer for the first time, his language looks both familiar and foreign. Many of the words are the same as in Present Day English; others are recognizable but strangely spelled; still others are completely unintelligible. Some sentences make instant sense; others may unravel partway through.
There are historical reasons for this, and there are ways to reduce the language gap. The best way is for the language learner to read enough Middle English to become familiar with it. Another way is for the editor to normalize some spellings; this edition selectively normalizes to values found elsewhere in the Corpus Christi manuscript or, less often, in other principal manuscripts of the poem. The approach is described in the section on editing method.
Still another way is to get a historical sense of the structure of Chaucer's language. Old English, the language of Beowulf, and of England before the eleventh century Norman conquest, is a Germanic language. It contains relatively few of the French- and Latin-derived words common in English today. It is also highly inflectional: it tends to make grammar by adding particles to words (etan = to eat). Present Day English grammar is phrasal by contrast: it makes more of its grammar by forming phrases (to eat = etan). It still has some inflectional elements (ring-rang; love-loved; who-whom), but not as many. Present Day English can distinguish between the subject and object cases of most pronouns (who-whom; he-him); Old English could do so with nouns as well.
In terms of sentence syntax, Old English already tends toward the SVO (subject-verb-object) structure that is nearly universal in current English, but the inflectional system of Old English--in particular, its ability to distinguish noun cases--permits variations in sentence order like those possible in literary Latin; these appear especially in works written during the Old English period by monks and other Latin-trained scholars.
Middle English is in between. By Chaucer's day, English has been flooded with French. Chaucer's poetic vocabulary contains about 8,000 words, of which about 4,000 are French. But Chaucer's function words (pronouns, demonstratives, prepositions, conjunctions, auxiliary verbs) are from Old English; we still have the same set of function words today, and these are among the most recognizable of his words to us. This is fortunate for two reasons: it is the function words, the grammatical connective tissues, that convey sentence meaning; and these words are particularly important to Chaucer's literary style, which is adjective-poor compared to later styles like Shakespeare's. The adjectives are there in the natural language, but medieval poetry is interested in the kind of nuance conveyed by the relational elements in a sentence.
By Chaucer's day too, the inflectional system of English has decayed considerably, both under its own momentum and in the presence of Norman French. It no longer has separate noun declensions, and its strong (irregular) verb conjugations are diminished; newly minted verbs get the weak (regular) conjugation, forming the past tense by adding -(e)d. English tends increasingly toward phrasal grammar, for example in its future tense (they will go; Old English had no future tense at all; it expressed futurity by context). Because it can no longer distinguish between subject and object cases in nouns, English relies increasingly on sentence order to establish meaning, and as sentence order becomes more fixed, the inflectional system decays further.
Middle English is capable of the periodic sentence (like the first sentence of Troilus and Criseyde, or of Milton's Paradise Lost, or of the American Declaration of Independence), and Chaucer is one of its few masters. Other syntactic variations in Troilus and Criseyde include VS constructions (to the clepe I; alday failleth thyng), Aux-S-V constructions (can he pulle), and, in dependent clauses, SOV constructions (that love hem bring; til he a lasshe have). For a modern reader, these take getting used to, but the patterns are relatively few, and and they become familiar with practice.
This historical process leaves us with a language that is structurally very much like our own. The process of learning to read it involves three things: getting past the strange spellings, getting used to a number of unfamiliar words left from Old English, and adapting to a poetic style that allows a more complicated, and sometimes more Latinate, sentence structure than we are used to.
Pronunciation
Middle English vowels are pronounced as in modern European languages. Consonants are like those in Modern English, except that gh in a word like knight is pronounced as in Yiddish loanwords like chutzpah, and there are no silent consonants: the k in knight is pronounced. (So that "the knights who say Ni!" are really the knights who say k'neeght.)
This sounds simple, but there are several obstacles to pronouncing Middle English properly. The most obvious is that there are no native speakers living, and our pronunciation guides involve guesswork and sometimes controversy. Was a in a closed syllable pronounced as in Old and Modern English (mat, bat, cat), or, under French influence, as in a romance language? Still, the guesses are mostly well educated. Before dictionaries petrified spelling, spelling was phonetic, and some pronunciation changes can be tracked by spelling changes. Middle English mus (pronounced moose) became Modern English mouse.
Another obstacle is the unexplained phenomenon called the Great Vowel Shift, which affected all long vowels in English. During the fifteenth and succeeding centuries, all long vowels in English were raised and fronted, in other words were moved forward and higher in the mouth. ME grene (pronounced grain) became MnE green; ME name (pronounced nahm) became MnE name; ME bone (pronounced bawn) became MnE bone; ME boot (pronounced boat) became MnE boot. High vowels became diphthongs: ME mus (pronounced moose) became MnE mouse; ME write (pronounced wreet) became MnE write. The shift is still ongoing. The noun route re-entered English from French in the twentieth century with the pronuncation root, but in some uses and speakers the pronunciation has changed to rout.
A third obstacle is final -e. During the process of inflectional decay, the vowels in inflectional syllables were reduced from full vowels (-o, -a, -u) to -e. By Chaucer's time, these final -e's were probably silent in normal speech, as in Present Day English, but still pronounceable (as ə, like the a in sofa) in poetry. In this edition, pronounced final -e's are identified by the diaresis: My purpose is, ere that I partë fro ye.
A fourth obstacle is that in Middle English manuscripts, u is used for both u and v word internally (honour, but also loue) and v is used for both letters word initially (verray, but also vsed). Modern editors typically use modern spellings for these letters, and this edition does the same.
Meter
Boccaccio's Filostrato is composed with an eleven syllable norm in an eight line lyric stanza. Chaucer's poem uses a seven line lyric stanza called rime royal; the rhyme scheme is ababbcc. The form conveys virtuosity and, usually, high seriousness. Most of Chaucer's narratives are in rhymed couplets; rime royal appears elsewhere only in The Parlement of Fowles and in three tales of Canterbury: The Man of Law's Tale, The Clerk's tale, and The Second Nun's Tale. The first two of these are secular saints' lives, and the third is hagiography proper.
The metrical line is iambic pentameter; this statement is still potentially controversial, and it needs to be justified. The modern study of Chaucer's meter began in 1755 with Thomas Tyrwhitt, who seems to have been the first modern to understand the pronunciation of final -e. For the past century, the study has occupied a tiny but contentious niche in the field of Chaucer scholarship. The main issue is whether Chaucer's line is iambic pentameter (a ten syllable line with five iambic feet), or a ten syllable line with alternating stress but no iambic foot (xXxXxXxXxX) or a roughly four-beat line like that of some native tradition Middle English verse. An underlying issue is what an iambic foot--and therefore an iambic pentameter line--actually is: an abstract template imposed on the language, or a concrete pattern embodied in the language.
My own view, based on theoretical and statistical analysis of this poem, is that the study of Chaucer's meter is essentially the study of word and phrase syntax. Two syllable trochaic words (double, sorwe, woful) appear with the grain of the meter, except when they appear as line- or phrase-initial trochaic inversions (the most frequent rhythmic variation throughout English poetry). Likewise, two-syllable iambic words (abood, forsook) always appear with the grain of the meter, in other words in odd-even metrical position. But two-syllable words are a minority; 76% of all words in Chaucer are monosyllabic, and major class monosyllables tend to be paired with function words: an hous; to love; his help; in pris; have seyde; so cleere. These phrases are iambic feet, and they appear overwhelmingly with the grain of the meter: He cast anon out of the town to go. In other words, the iambic foot is a concrete linguistic reality, not something imposed on the poem from outside.
As for the length of the line, in lines with no variable vowel phenomenon (final -e or any other possible elision or diaresis), the ten syllable norm is invariable.
In one large class of words, word stress is interesting. Middle English includes many two syllable French nouns (nature, honour) in the process of being naturalized as English words. These are stressed on the second syllable in French and on the first in English. In Chaucer, they appear in both orientations. Tyrwhitt and almost all later analysts have recognized them as stress doublets: they take French stress in odd-even position (And al thonour [th'honour] that men may don yow have) and English stress in even-odd position (As til hir honour neede was to hold). The point here is that the way the word is positioned in the line evokes the register of one language, not that the word is warped to the metrical template.
Chaucer's meter is clearly iambic pentameter, but it is a medieval system of pentameter, different in several ways from a renaissance system like Shakespeare's. Chaucer's line is less dense--it has fewer word stresses--and its signal rhythmic variations are different from Shakespeare's, just as Shakespeare's are different from Milton's. Typical of Shakespeare's dense line is, Be thou the tenth muse, ten times more in worth, with five full word stresses in a row in the middle of the line. This never happens in Chaucer. Among recent metrical poets, Gwendolyn Brooks often resembles Shakespeare; Robert Frost often resembles Chaucer.
Chaucer's signature rhythmic variations involve ternary rather than binary rhythms: Thanne thynketh he though I praunce al byforn; or By my wil she sholde al be thyn tomorwe. These cadences seem to come from French. A secondary point of dispute has been whether Chaucer's pentameter line is mainly influenced by the French decasyllabe or the Italian endecasillabo, but if one reads Troilus and Criseyde next to Boccaccio's Filostrato (its primary source) and Machaut's Jugement dou Roy de Behaingne, the closer similarity of Chaucer to Machaut will be clear.
The best guide to reading metrical poetry is the advice given by George Gascoigne in the sixteenth century: read the rhythm embodied in the actual line; don't impose a singsong abstract rhythm on the line. A line like the one above should be stressed Thanne thynketh he, though I praunce al byforn, not Thanne thynketh he though I praunce al byforn.
This metrical analysis often means that the present edition accepts the readings of the base manuscript for lines that earlier editors emended in order to make them conform to fairly rigid late Victorian ideas of pentameter (see the mention above under the discussion of editorial method). This practice is consistent with the general conservatism of the edition.
Current editors still have divergent ideas about meter, and it is possible to derive an editor's views from a detailed study of the edition. Even so, to almost all readers, all of the standard current editions, and even the early twentieth century editions, are closely similar to any but an obsessive eye and ear. Chaucer is still Chaucer, or as close as we can get, regardless of our theories.