Rhyme As a Means of Fixing Stanzaic Sequence

One type of "stylistic difficulty" that significantly reduces transposition is the use of rhyme schemes that link one stanza to another or that by some system of alternation dictate the placement of each stanza within the whole poem. Because the motifs of fin'amors can follow in almost any order without disturbing convention, an abrupt contradiction is usually required to betray a frachura in the razo, a "breakage" in the "line of argument." When the versification is inconsistent, however, breakage becomes much more obvious. With coblas unissonans (uniform stanzas, each obeying the same structure and using the same rhyme sounds) and singulars (in which each stanza has an independent set of rhyme sounds), some errors within a single stanza can easily be detected: the mismatched rhyme, the incomplete stanza, or the line with too many or too few syllables. Such errors can signal either a failure of the poet's control or a deterioration through transmitters' imperfect grasp of the poem's requirements. The versification can also alert the hearer to displacement of entire stanzas, but only when it groups or links them in some way.

In my quantitative study of the effects of linking rhymes on the rate of transposition, I found it necessary to treat all types of "poems with linked stanzas" as a group because of the rarity of individual schemata other than the pairing of "twin" stanzas, coblas doblas . Under the heading of "poems with linked stanzas" came coblas doblas (stanzas matched in pairs), coblas ternas and quaternas (stanzas matched in groups of three and of four), coblas alternadas (alternating stanzas), coblas capcaudadas and capfinidas (stanzas linked by head-and-tail rhymes or repetitions), coblas redondas (stanzas paired by a ring structure), and songs with any system of rotating rhyme or alternating refrain words (see Appendix B). 

An illustrated discussion of each of these types of rhyme scheme can be found in Chapter 5. Only about 19 percent of the 552 songs surveyed used linked stanzas (104/552), and nearly half of these were composed in simple coblas doblas (46/104, or 44 percent).

As a group, poems with linked stanzas resisted transposition much better than did those composed with uniform or unmatched strophes in coblas unissonans and singulars; they were much more likely to be preserved in only one strophic sequence. Among poems preserved in more than one manuscript, resistance to transposition is strongly related to stanza linkage: 51 percent (198/390) of coblas unissonans and singulars show transposition; among poems with linked stanzas the rate drops to 23 percent, or almost one in four (21/94). In terms of version production, linked-stanza poems also fare well: while the average unlinked poem produces. 2.2 different stanzaic sequences (863/390), the average linked-stanza poem yields only 1.6 (146/94).^[18]

Poems with linked stanzas were not, overall, much more frequently copied than unlinked poems. Linked-stanza poems average 7.7 mss./ poem, whereas poems without stanzaic linkage average 7.9 mss./poem. Yet a poem with linked stanzas was slightly more likely, if preserved at all, to be preserved in more than one manuscript: linked-stanza poems make up 19 percent of all poems surveyed but only 15 percent of unique-manuscript songs.

These findings present a serious challenge to the theory that the troubadours wished to stabilize their "texts" and therefore invented complex verse forms, using them deliberately to inhibit change in transmission. If the troubadours developed these linked-stanza forms for the purpose of protecting their works from outside influence, why did they use them so seldom? Of all the linked-stanza forms, why did they rely most heavily on coblas doblas? (In view of the possibilities for rearrangement without disrupting the formal requirements, coblas doblas seem to provide the least sequential security of all the linked-stanza forms. Any poet who wanted to use linked-stanza forms to stabilize sequence should, in principle, have favored schemes with stronger interlocking of strophes. Conversely, coblas doblas are the simplest mnemonic device, with no potentially self-defeating complexity; thus, their prevalance could still be used to argue in favor of purposeful preventive use.) We cannot expect the troubadours to have foreseen how the centuries of transmission, both oral and written, would treat their works. But the theory that complex verse forms were 

intended as a "solution" to "problems" of transmission depends on the idea that they tried, to some extent, to second-guess the transmitter and to use forms that seemed sturdiest based on their own experience with jongleurs or with scribes.

Since poems with linked stanzas were comparatively stable, as a group, I expected to find that poets who used them most frequently would score lower in their rates of transposition. Not so: the percentage of stanza-linked songs (LK) among a poet's works did not correlate with his rate of transposition (TR). Frequency of stanzaic linkage as measured by LK+ (an index limited to poems in more than one manuscript) actually tends to increase slightly with versions per manuscript (Fig. A-12). Habitual use of linked stanzas therefore did not by itself persuade a poet's retransmitters to preserve the stanzaic arrangement in his whole body of poetry. In other words, it did not create "reputations for fixity" that particularly inspired reverence for a given poet's exact, "authorial" array of stanzas. One might expect the opposite in a written tradition: that the more usually a poet organized his rhyme scheme in ways that dictate stanzaic sequence, the more precision in sequential copying would seem to be called for in all his works.

Other indices also teach us something about the behavior in transmission of poems with linked stanzas: poems with unlinked stanzas behave much more predictably. When I subdivided the versions-per-manuscript index into separate categories of "linked" and "unlinked" poems, the songs with linked stanzas resisted nearly every trend. The very existence of these correlations signifies predictability, dependence on known factors in transmission or poetic form. Poems with linked stanzas generally refuse to fit neatly into the patterns obeyed by their unlinked counterparts.

Thus, poems with linked stanzas protected themselves from transposition, but the habit of using them did not particularly improve a given poet's chances of stabilizing his opus—except perhaps when combined with other kinds of "stylistic difficulty." So few poets use them more than 20 percent of the time that their variations in stability must be explained as resulting from other causes. The most telling factor was circulation. The poet's appeal, his success with audiences, encouraged transposition more consistently than other influences discouraged it.

Nevertheless, the finding that stanza length and stanzaic linkage affect stability proves that the formal properties of each song could influence whether or not performers and scribes rearranged the song. Although a 

preference for linked stanzas seems to be mildly associated with in stability (so that stanzaic linkage, if conceived as a purposeful "solution," sometimes backfired), poems with linked stanzas do fare better as a group than do songs constructed without a built-in mandate for stanzaic sequence.

The concept of the fixed text evidently did come to light in troubadour poetry. Many poets did connect textual fixity with stylistic complexity and elaborate rhyme schemes. But textual fixity was an idea before its time. The transmitting culture overwhelmed and appropriated whatever most appealed to it. It relentlessly altered whatever it chose to, no matter how strongly safeguarded. No doubt the troubadours observed the ultimate power of the transmitters within their own lifetimes. True, they seem to have envisioned an ideal of the fixed text, worked out grand ways and aesthetically impressive devices to safeguard it, and produced prototypes of the "incorruptible text." But the ideal of the fixed text was impractical within their transmitting culture. The same poets who most dramatically proved the possibility of fixing the text through monosequential rhyme schemes—Peire Vidal, Arnaut Daniel, Rigaut de Berbezilh, Giraut de Bornelh—were ultimately the poets who relied least on stanzaic linkage for their poems' stability. These poets earned their stability (or, in Peire Vidal's case, instability) through a combination of factors of "stylistic difficulty." Some of these factors, unmeasured here, could prove revealing in some future study: for example, lexical rarity might account for some variation. My investigation isolates only two factors of stylistic complexity—stanza length and stanzaic linkage—both of which contribute measurably to the stability of troubadour poetry.

Many poets who took part in exploring the concept of the fixed text seem, ultimately, uncommitted to its practice. Arnaut Daniel uses stanzaic linkage in only two of his eighteen or nineteen songs; he pokes fun at "the firm intention" (the ideal of incorruptibility) in his sestina. Giraut de Bornelh was said to have undergone a conversion from trobar clus to trobar leu . I suspect he tried the fixed text and then abandoned it, since he knew the only truly effective way to preserve textual integrity was to limit the song's circulation—and what good is an unchanged song if it is unheard?

The reasons for the unpredictability of songs with linked stanzas will be partly explained by a closer look at individual metrical forms: those for which the poets claimed superior stabilizing powers and those which 

we might expect to stabilize the sequence of stanzas. In the next chapter, the manuscript tradition of exemplary poems in each type of rhyme scheme will give us much information about the advantages and shortcomings of such inventions as coblas capfinidas as safeguards against amateur revision. At the same time, this study will allow us, in some cases, to compare the poet's apparent expectations regarding textual stability with the actual outcome of manuscript transmission.