SOURCE: Dean, James. “Gower, Chaucer, and Rhyme Royal.” Studies in Philology LXXXVIII, no. 3 (summer 1991): 251-75.

In the following essay, Dean examines Gower's application of the rhyme royal verse form, particularly its use for specific types of poems.

Everyone knows that Chaucer was one of the first users, if not the inventor, of rhyme (or rime) royal—also called “Troilus-measure” or the “Troilus-stanza”—a stanzaic verse form of seven decasyllabic lines rhymed ababbcc. Until recently the term “rhyme royal” was thought to be a nineteenth-century coinage to characterize the stanza form of James I's The Kingis Quair (c. 1425), and some have conjectured that the stanza developed from the French form known as chant royal, an intricate prosodic scheme used by Eustache Deschamps and Charles d'Orléans.¹ The problem may be one of terminology, since Deschamps wrote French rhyme royal balades (not normally identified as rhyme royal) as...