Editors and Scribes in Two Clerk's Tale Cruxes

All participants in the recent, largely theoretical debate between scholars who would rely on study of the manuscripts to discern the Chaucerian text of the Canterbury Tales and those who prefer the editorial use of "learning, taste, and judgment" to sort the chaos of prolix variation quickly reject any editorial endeavor that lacks either the blear-eyed wisdom born of midnight oil or the brightening glance of the accomplished dancer.¹ Both groups, however, emphasize the forms of learning, taste, and judgment displayed by modern editors: their careful collation of available witnesses, their attention to typical scribal usages, their understanding of the formal properties of the texts they study and the recurrent concerns of the poet who created them. But in the earliest invocation of the contested phrase that I have found, E. Talbot Donaldson provides a more expansive list, decrying the possible elimination of "his learning, his judgment, his taste, his experience, and his intelligence" from the editor's assets.² In this essay I am less concerned with the broader issues of editorial theory than with the details of two closely connected cruxes in the Clerk's Tale, but my conclusions might serve as a reminder that experience and intelligence are qualities to be found in scribes as well as editors.³ More specifically, I will argue that the early scribes of the Canterbury Tales had a better knowledge of the shifting intricacies of Middle English than any non-native speaker is likely to acquire, and that at least one of them had experience that allowed him to evaluate one textual puzzle with greater precision than our editorial tradition has brought to bear on it.

In Part III of the tale, after Walter has announced his first test, his plan to take their daughter away, Griselda protests her utter faithfulness to his will in these terms, as printed in The Riverside Chaucer:

"Ther may no thyng, God so my soule save,Liken to yow that may displese me;Ne I desire no thyng for to have,Ne drede for to leese, save oonly yee."

(IV 505-8)⁴

In seventeen prominent editions of the Clerk's Tale appearing in the last century and more, lines IV 507-8 appear in exactly two forms, not counting variation in word division and spelling. Eleven editions anticipate or agree with Riverside; five print the other version, about which more in due course.⁵ The sixty-two extant textual witnesses, however, contain sixteen different versions of the lines, counted on the same terms.⁶ There is nothing unusual about that disparity: as is the case throughout the textual record, most variants are easily recognized as scribal errors or substitutions. But the variants are not distributed randomly, as may be demonstrated by an alignment of the four major forms in which line 507 occurs, according to John M. Manly and Edith Rickert's schema of textual affiliations for the tale:⁷

• In Group I (the d* tradition plus eleven unclassified manuscripts), eighteen of twenty-three witnesses read "Ne I desyre no thyng to haue" or a slight variant: these witnesses lack the word "for" which appears in the antepenultimate position in the Riverside text. Four others agree with Riverside.⁸

• Group II (comprising c, the "independent" Ha4, two "alternating" manuscripts, and sixteen unclassified manuscripts) contains the Riverside reading in twenty-one witnesses; the other reads "Ne I desyre no thyng to haue" like most of Group I.

• Group III encompasses the a-b families, because Manly-Rickert claims that "There is little evidence for a-Ln apart from b*" in most of the Clerk's Tale.⁹ In this line, however, the four manuscripts comprising a and Ln all support Riverside, while the entire b* tradition—a total of seven witnesses—has a hyper-metrical variant: "Ne I desire no thyng in ony wyse to haue" (with spelling variation).¹⁰

• Group IV contains three "single" manuscripts (Hg El Gg) authoritative throughout the Tales and three others "Independently Derived" in the Clerk's Tale (Bo2 Ch Py; Manly-Rickert considers Py distantly related to Hg).^11...