Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- List of Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 The Two Dreams of Charles d’Orléans and the Structure of His English Book
- 2 Charles d’Orléans’ Cross-Channel Poetics: The Choice of Ballade Form in Fortunes Stabilnes
- 3 The English Roundel, Charles’s Jubilee, and Mimetic Form
- 4 A Grieving Lover: The Work of Mourning in Charles’s First Ballade Sequence
- 5 Charles d’Orléans’ English Metrical Phonology
- 6 The English Poetry of a Frenchman: Stress and Idiomaticity in Charles d’Orléans
- 7 Verb Use in Charles d’Orléans’ English
- 8 Charles d’Orléans and His Finding of English
- 9 Aureation as Agon: Charles d'Orléans versus John Lydgate
- 10 Charles d’Orléans, Harley 682, and the London Book-Trade
- 11 The Form of the Whole
- Select Publications, 2007–2020
- Index
6 - The English Poetry of a Frenchman: Stress and Idiomaticity in Charles d’Orléans
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 October 2020
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- List of Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 The Two Dreams of Charles d’Orléans and the Structure of His English Book
- 2 Charles d’Orléans’ Cross-Channel Poetics: The Choice of Ballade Form in Fortunes Stabilnes
- 3 The English Roundel, Charles’s Jubilee, and Mimetic Form
- 4 A Grieving Lover: The Work of Mourning in Charles’s First Ballade Sequence
- 5 Charles d’Orléans’ English Metrical Phonology
- 6 The English Poetry of a Frenchman: Stress and Idiomaticity in Charles d’Orléans
- 7 Verb Use in Charles d’Orléans’ English
- 8 Charles d’Orléans and His Finding of English
- 9 Aureation as Agon: Charles d'Orléans versus John Lydgate
- 10 Charles d’Orléans, Harley 682, and the London Book-Trade
- 11 The Form of the Whole
- Select Publications, 2007–2020
- Index
Summary
How did poets adapt to the writing of Middle English verse when English was not their native tongue? In the medieval period, when foreigners did not trouble themselves with learning English (which had not yet grown into a language that mattered in the wider world), there are few writers of whom we can ask the question, but Charles d’Orléans is an interesting exception. Charles was a bilingual writer, fluent both in his native French and in English, the language of the country that was his home between 1415, when he was captured at the battle of Agincourt, and 1440, when he was finally released. Although his French poetry has never been short of admirers, he was a very accomplished English poet, too. The dream vision (sometimes entitled Love's Renewal) in which he encounters Venus and Fortune, and sees the woman with whom he is to fall in love after the death of his earlier lady, ranks among the finest narrative poems of the fifteenth century. One of the best ‘English’ poets of the fifteenth century was a Frenchman.
Charles d’Orléans was almost twenty-one years old when he first set foot in England and found himself immersed in the English language. The consequences of the belatedness of this linguistic immersion must have been the same then as they are today: twenty-one is well beyond the critical period of childhood and puberty when someone can expect to acquire proficiency in all the domains of a language – phonology, syntax, lexis, and so on – with the effortlessness and perfection of a native speaker. Charles cannot therefore have been at home as much in English as he was in French, but, as Eleanor Hammond noted, his writing nevertheless shows ‘an easy command of English’. My aim in this chapter is to provide some hard evidence for Charles's interest in and aptitude for the English language and English poetry by focusing on two understudied aspects of his verse: stress and idiomaticity.
I should begin by explaining why I think stress and idiomaticity are revealing in an investigation of the English poetry of a Frenchman. To take stress first, accentuation is an aspect of language that marks a major difference between English and French. The nature of that difference is summed up by the advice of a professional voice coach, Ivan Borodin, to Anglophone actors who want to impersonate a Frenchman speaking English. His top tip is to distort the stress patterns in polysyllabic words.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Charles d’Orléans' English AestheticThe Form, Poetics, and Style of Fortunes Stabilnes, pp. 145 - 168Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2020