I SECTION II THE WORKS OF CHAUCER A. Introduction: On the Canon of Chaucer N studying the work of a nineteenth-century poet, we have at our command a text which has been prepared for the press by the author himself or by his literary executor, so that we are secure of our data when discussing the poet's vocabulary or versepeculiarities. If in various successive editions the author introduces changes, as was true of Rossetti and Wordsworth and Tennyson, we have all those dated editions at our disposal, and an essay like Dowden's on the text of Wordsworth's poems becomes possible. But Early English verse offers us few or no such certainties. There is a sense in which it is true that we do not know what Chaucer wrote. The works of Chaucer, written before the era of printing, have come down to us in a mass of manuscripts, mainly of the century following his death. No one of these texts appears to be in the poet's own handwriting, and notwithstanding the great amount of penwork which Chaucer's position in the Customs required of him, no written line or even signature by him has yet been discovered. (See Life Records pt. IV, pp. xxiv, 233 note, 278 note. See query in Athen. 1868 II: 370.) Further, there appears in Chaucer's case scarcely any evidence of personal effort towards an accurate reproduction of his own works, such as Macaulay has pointed out to be true of Gower; see Works of John Gower, II : clxvii. The only bits of such evidence for Chaucer are the stanza of reproof to Adam his scrivener, and the lines at the close of the Troilus, fearing its too probable "mysmetring". Our text of the poems has to be obtained from the uncorrected copies of fifteenth-century scribes made at second or third hand or even further from the original. Francis Thynne, in his Animadversions, tells of a manuscript of Chaucer, known to his father, which bore the endorsement "Examinatur Chaucer"; but, as Furnivall says, this more than invaluable manuscript has never been seen by any student. We not only have no text in Chaucer's hand or corrected by him; we have no text which is indubitably transcribed from his copy, or of which we can trace the original. The study of Chaucer as a narrator and literary artist is not seriously affected by these considerations, because of the very close agreement of all manuscripts in the general trend of the narrative. In some of the shorter poems the majority of the copies are identical except for the omissions and slight errors of transcription which a scribe always commits; in others there are differences in wording between one set of texts and another which lead some critics to the supposition that two versions by Chaucer were in circulation, one of which had been revised by him. See for instance under the Anelida and the Troilus, here. Some few manuscripts, again, have been deliberately altered by the copyist, as the Selden MS of the Parlement of Foules; but these isolated cases can usually be quickly recognized. So marked is the general agreement among the copies that even the keenest linguistic specialist would probably say, with Pollard (Athenaeum 1901 II:631): “I doubt if in all the Canterbury Tales there are more than twenty lines in which it is possible for editors to adopt readings making any really important change in the sense." Compare also Temporary Preface, pp. 86-7. But with the increasing modern interest in English philology has appeared the desire to know not merely Chaucer's general narrative trend, but also the details of his verse-command and of his language. Every day adds to the number of students who wish for a truthful text of Chaucer even more than for a readable one; and every new monograph upon Chaucer confirms such students in the belief that the truthful edition, when it arrives, will be unchanged in richness of literary texture and in melody of verse, while offering us a more exact reflection of the poet's language and of the details of his verse-technique. For such an edition we must look, not to any "editor with a good ear", but to the existing manuscript copies of the poems. The term "manuscript" is applied roughly to various sorts of Chaucer volumes written by hand. First, there is the volume containing but one work, such as the Canterbury Tales, executed by a professional scribe for some wealthy patron, beautifully written and decorated with colored capitals, chapter-headings, etc., and sometimes with miniatures of the persons and scenes described. Secondly, the volume written by some firm of copyists either on commission or to be sold over their counter, and containing (say) from six to twenty works by various authors; this is often written in different hands, the workmen either relieving each other from time to time or each making a separate copy of some one work, all of which were later sewed together into a volume. Thirdly, the "commonplace-book" of a collector, written perhaps by himself, perhaps by his amanuensis, and containing a mixed mass of anything in which he was interested,-narrative verse, didactic Latin prose, proverbs, medical and culinary receipts, prayers, notes on astrology or contemporary events, etc. Fourthly, any one of these volumes partly executed and then passed from owner to owner until it is filled with the handwriting of several generations. Fifthly, a mass of verse and prose by many authors and many copyists, not intended by the scribes as an unit, but forced into one volume by a later binder. Many of the manuscripts of Gower's Confessio Amantis belong in the first class, as Macaulay has pointed out, loc. cit., but the copies of Chaucer's poems rarely show such care, though a few are of this sort, e. g. the Ellesmere MS of the Canterbury Tales described below, Section III B 7. The second class mentioned above may be illustrated by the MS Tanner 346 of the Bodleian Library, or by the volume described by Chaucer himself in the Wife of Bath's prologue lines 669 ff. An unusually fine example of the third class is the codex Fairfax 16 of the Bodleian Library, with which may be compared any book written by Shirley, as for instance Ashmole 59; the fourth class might be exemplified by Ff 1, 6 of the Cambridge University Library, and the fifth by Harley 78 of the British Museum. All these volumes are discussed below. The better fifteenth-century manuscripts, as again in the case of Gower's poem, often have a colophon or a heading, sometimes both, giving the title of the work and the author; occasionally the date of completion may be added. Transcriptions of Chaucer, however, show no such system. We almost never find the date of the copy and only irregularly the name of the author; and it follows from such indefiniteness on the part of the manuscripts that we are not in certainty as to the poet's genuine works. We cannot take the testimony of every manuscript as credible, and make up the list of Chaucer's works on this evidence, because of the plain error of some manuscripts in assigning to him, for example, verse in broad Scotch and of doggerel quality. Nor can we take the testimony of any one MS as to Chaucer's exact words in any given poem; for all scribes must and do err. Two problems therefore confront the student; the determining which are the genuine writings of Chaucer, that is, the establishment of the Chaucer canon; and the determining of the genuine text of Chaucer. Only after the settlement of the former question, a settlement now virtually complete, can Chaucer's use of his sources and his artistic methods be discussed; and upon the settlement of the latter problem depends our knowledge of his language and his verse. The establishment of the canon of Chaucer, a work of many years and still not complete in minor details, has been arrived at by the utilization of several sorts of evidence. Having no text in the poet's hand, and knowing little or nothing of the scribes who copied his verse, we have had to form our conclusions in each case by a grouping of data. First, from such lists as are given in the Man of Law's headlink, in the prologue to the Legend of Good Women, or in the catalogue by Chaucer's contemporary and imitator, Lydgate, can we identify any existing poem or poems? Secondly, among such works, identified with reasonable probability, is there an agreement in literary spirit, in command of language, and in management of rime and verse? Thirdly, are such poems, so identified and so agreeing, marked as Chaucer's in early and credible manuscripts? See for example the note on Authenticity under the heading Book of the Duchesse, Section IV here. It must be observed that one of these sorts of evidence is insufficient unless supported by at least one other test. Thus, the "Retractation" and Lydgate's list of Chaucer's works mention a "Book of the Lion", which has never been found; but if a poem marked with that title were discovered, we could not declare it Chaucer's unless its language, verse, and style agreed broadly with his known works; and even if the poem were marked with Chaucer's name in the text in which it was found, we should still investigate most strictly the credibility of the scribe, and probably refuse to believe him if his statement stood alone against linguistic and metrical evidence to the contrary. Compare, for example, the long continued inclusion of the Lamentation of Mary Magdalen or of the Testament of Love in the canon of Chaucer, and their final rejection. Again, a poem not in any of the lists of Chaucer's works, such as the Mars, may be accepted as genuine, because marked with Chaucer's name in authentic MSS, and because agreeing in style and language with the known works. The doubtful cases are: (a) poems marked by a scribe as Chaucer's, and contemporary in language, but not characterized by the rime and technique of the admittedly genuine works; (b) poems of grace and cleverness equal to Chaucer's, and contemporary in language, but not mentioned in any list nor marked in any manuscript. In the former case, as above said, the vital point is the credibility of the scribe; in the latter case the basis of argument is a personal judgment by the critic who maintains Chaucer's authorship-the most inconclusive of all forms of evidence. Compare Acad. 1889 I: 179, where Pollard says of Skeat's attribution to Chaucer of several anonymous poems because of their smooth metrical flow,-"He is here laying down a new and very dangerous canon." And an additional complication in case (a) just mentioned is the possibility that Chaucer, like other artists, may not only have allowed himself different usages at different times, but may have occasionally deviated from his apparently general rule. Thus, in the discussion of his rimes, note that there are exceptions to the y-ye test, see Lounsbury, Studies I: 388 (opposed by Skeat VI: lvii), and to the nonriming of close and open or long and short vowels, see Skeat VI : xxxi ff. Also, note that Northern forms may appear in rime, see Lounsbury, Studies I: 387. But despite these lesser uncertainties, the canon of Chaucer is at present reasonably settled. There follow here prints of the lists given by Chaucer and by Lydgate, a parallel survey of the lists in Thynne, Leland, and Bale, and a sketch of the subsequent enlargement and modern revision of those lists. The only separate work avowedly devoted to the subject is: The Chaucer Canon. With a discussion of the Works associated with the Name of Geoffrey Chaucer. W. W. Skeat, Oxford 1900. Reviewed Anglia Beibl. 12: 291-2 (Schröer); DLZ 1901, pp. 863-6 (Kaluza); Engl. Stud. 30:450-56 (Koch); Sat. Review 90: 17 ff. Much of the material here presented was previously inIcluded in the Oxford Chaucer. In N. and Q. 1874 I: 185-6 Skeat suggested the non-use of linked stanzas as a minor test; see Lounsbury, Studies I: 398, Skeat VII: lxxv. 1) Chaucer's Own Testimony I. In the prologue to the Legend of Good Women, lines 405 ff. (A), Alceste defends Chaucer against the reproofs of the god of Love: (MS Gg iv, 27, University Library, Cambridge) He made the bok that highte the hous of fame Of thebes thow the storye is knowe lite And manye an ympne for thour halydayis And for to speke of othyr besynesse He hath in prose translatid Boece And of the wrechede engendrynge of mankynde And made the lyf also of seynt Cecile Hym ouu3te now to haue the lesse peyne He hath mad manye a lay & manye a thyng etc. |