The Overheard Song: Medieval Lyric in the Mixed Genre

This dissertation examines a medieval genre that combines narration, in prose or verse, with inserted lyrical poems. Although well known in France, this “mixed genre,” whether as a prosimetrum or its all verse variation, has received very little scholarly attention in English, even though it was a very popular literary form in medieval England. Chaucer, for example, organizes his Troilus and Criseyde with a series of inserted lyrical set pieces designed to emphasize both the passions of love and its inevitable undoing. Medieval lyrics, however, have been described as playful exercises in rhetorical conventions, whose seemingly repetitive repertoire of conceits and figures point more to the rules of composition than to our Romantic conception of the poem as self-expression. And yet, within the mixed genre, narrative frames surround these conventional poems, grounding them in concrete incidents, and so create a “contextual subjectivity” for the singer, a fiction of the self that emanates from the song. In revisiting the problem of the medieval “lyric I,” so often called impersonal and conventional, I argue that the mixed genre introduces a new concept of song as a locus of subjectivity within a framed performance. I am interested in the form’s capacity to suggest, or even stage, the impression of a singular, emotional subject in a variety of works: Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, the Tristan en prose, John Gower’s Confessio Amantis, Charles of Orleans’ two books, one in French and the other English, and Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet