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  • English Irony Before Chaucer1
  • Earle Birney

Footnotes

1. For the reader’s convenience I have modernized a number of my quotations. In two cases I have drawn from Shackford’s Legends and Salires from Medieval Literature, 1913, and once from Weston’s Chief Middle English Poets, 1913. Other notes refer the reader to the best printed text of the original.

2. Of Irony, Especially in Drama, University of Toronto Press, 1935; see also his essay on “Dramatic Irony” (University Magazine, Montreal, XII, 1913, 116–34).

3. “Contention of Phillis and Flora;” tr. Shackford.

1. Lines 1435–6; cf. 2277.

2. Tr. from Brut ed. Madden, II, pp. 334–5 (MS. Cott. Calig. A. ix).

3. Tr. Weston, p. 39, lines 9.1–2.

4. Tr. Shackford.

5. Poems, ed. Hall, 1887, no. 9, lines 35–40.

6. Ed. Skeat, lines 521–33, 245–8; cf. 135–6.

7. Tr. from York Plays, ed. Lucy Smith, no. 33, line 365.

8. Ibid., lines 409–20 (modernized).

1. Reliquiae Antiquae, ed. Thomas Wright, II, p. 73.

2. “Thet coc is kene on his owune mixenne;” ed. Morton, p. 140.

3. Canterbury Tales, ed. Robinson, I, 4321. Cf. Troilus, I, 740–1, IV, 1585; and Skeat’s Early English Proverbs, nos. 237, 153.

4. Troilus, IV, 461; see Notes and Queries, ser. 1. III, p. 368.

1. Troilus, V, 1840–1; ef. Skeat, op. cit., p. 205.

2. See the fragment “Al it is fantam. …” prtd. in Reliquiae Antiquae, II, p. 20.

3. Modernized from the fourteenth-century Anglo-Irish poem in F. E. Budd, A Book of Lullabies, no. 1, p. 27.

4. Lines 3167–8.

5. Tr. from Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (Bodl Laud 636), ed. Thorpe, I, p. 354.

6. Ritson’s Ancient Songs and Ballads, I, p. 44, lines 1–8.

7. Child’s English and Scottish Popular Ballads, ed. Sargent and Kittredge, p. 104, no. A-8. The date of composition may be as early as the thirteenth century.

1. Mrs. Dempster’s scholarly, if limited, study of Dramatic Irony in Chaucer (Stanford University Press, 1932) has revealed some less familiar models which lay close to Chaucer’s hand, in his own language as well as in the French.

2. “The Sledman’s Play” (York Plays, op. cit., p. 426).

3. Reliquiae Antiquae, II, p. 273.

4. Modernized from Early English Alliterative Poems, ed. R. Morris, p. 89; linea 109–14, 182 ff.

5. See Winnifred Smith, “Elements of Comedy in English and Scottish Ballads” (Vassar Medieval Studies, 1923, pp. 104–7).

6. Cf the ironic wit in The Owl and the Nightingale (Mätzner, Mittelenglische … Literaturproben, ed. 2, p. 125, esp. lines 1177 ff.).

1. Old English Miscellany, ed. Morris, p. 89.

2. Political Songs, ed. Thomas Wright, I, p. 253.

3. Anecdota Literaria, ed. Thomas Wright, pp. 49–51.

1. See lines 46–9 of the normalized text, in E. K. Chambers, The English Folk-Play, p. 7.

2. See Cambridge History of English Literature, I, p. 366.

3. See F. Bond, Wood-Carvings in English Churches, I, pp. 159–60.

4. See Thomas Wright, Hist. of Caricature and Grotesque, p. 207.

5. “Irony” (Atheism in Philosophy …, 1884, p. 327).

6. Mätzner-Goldbeck, Altenglische Sprachproben, I, pp. 147 ff. For the classical “cockaygne” tradition see Transactions of the American Philological Association, XLI, 1910, p. 175; and Lenient, La Satire en France au Moyen Age, ed. 1893, p. 2.

1. Modernized from Reliquiae Antiquae, II, p. 176.

2. Select English Works, ed. Arnold, I, p. 381.

3. Modernized from Skeat’s ed., Text B: V, 232–9. Cf. the last line with Chaucer’s famous remark on the French of his Prioress.

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