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In a recent article in this journal, A. S. G. Edwards casts doubt on the traditional attribution of Chaucers Wordes unto Adam, his Owne Scriveyn to Geoffrey Chaucer.1 Edwards begins by questioning the reliability of John Shirley's attribution of the poem to Chaucer in the unique surviving manuscript copy, Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.3.20 (second quarter of fifteenth century).2 He then mobilizes generic, lexical, and thematic evidence indicating that Adam Scriveyn (I will use this short title) was composed not by Chaucer but by 'a person with overall responsibility for overseeing the writing of a manuscript or manuscripts of Chaucer's works', in whose voice, Edwards argues, the poem is most comfortably read.3 The present note supplements the case against Chaucerian authorship of Adam Scriveyn with metrical evidence.
Adam Scriveyn is composed in the English pentameter, the accentual-syllabic metre that Chaucer invented and popularized. It comprises a single stanza of rhyme royal (rhyming ababbcc), one of the stanza forms invented by Chaucer. With respect to metre, the poem conforms to the normal practice that Chaucer bequeathed to some of his fifteenth- and sixteenth-century poetic successors.4 A line of pentameter consists of ten or eleven metrical positions, alternating weak and strong, the first and eleventh being optional. The template is thus (x) SxSxSxSxS(x), where 'S' represents a strong position and 'x' represents a weak position. Assuming elision of 'ever' (line 1), stress shift in 'makyng' (4), and monosyllabic 'thorugh' (7) (<OE þurh), each line of Adam Scriveyn fulfils the template of pentameter. Metrical typology gives no grounds for supposing that someone other than Chaucer composed Adam Scriveyn.
The evidence of metrical phonology, that is, the linguistic forms that fill out metre, is more informative. The third line of Adam Scriveyn reads: 'Under thy long lokkes thou most have the scalle'.5 The line scans SxxSxSxSxSx, with metrical demotion of 'lokkes', or perhaps xSxSxSxSxSx, with metrical demotion of 'lokkes' and wrenched stress in 'Under'. Both plausible scansions require monosyllabic weak plural 'long' (as indicated by Shirley's spelling) and monosyllabic plural 'lokkes' (despite Shirley's spelling). However, leaving aside phonological contexts in which elision may be assumed, weak and/or plural 'longe' (41 occurrences) and plural 'lokkes' (5 occurrences) scan as disyllables elsewhere in Chaucer's poetry.6 The same is true of the...