Proverbs and Chaucer’s Metrical Practice

Abstract

Did Chaucer write the ‘Proverbe of Chaucer’? ¹ Presented in the Riverside Chaucer as the last of Geoffrey Chaucer’s short poems—a promotion from its position as the last of the ‘Short Poems of Doubtful Authorship’ in F. N. Robinson’s edition, and ‘very doubtful indeed’—this eight-line cross-rhymed ditty has attracted doubts as to authorship when it has attracted any attention at all. ² In the most substantial critical discussion, George B. Pace reassesses the poem’s textual tradition while concluding that Chaucerian authorship is ‘probably unprovable’. ³ Previous debate about the authorship of Proverbs centred on the un-Chaucerian rhyme 5 compas/7 embrace, which ignores inflectional -e in the infinitive...