Chaucer: The House of Fame (review)

Reviews 181 The Arnolfini Betrothal is a beautiful as well as an interesting book. The colour plates are vivid and clear, and the black and white illustrations give depth and clarity to Hall's argument, enabling the reader to follow him easily. The reliance on historical evidence which Hall insists upon in order to interpret a visual artwork may be viewed in some circles as old-fashioned, but it reads as fresh and vigorous, and commands respect as an approach which clearly still has much to offer. Carole M . Cusack School of Studies in Religion University of Sydney Havely, Nicholas R., ed., Chaucer: The House of Fame (Durham Medieval Texts 11), Durham, Durham Medieval Texts, 1994; paper; pp. viii, 216; 1 plate; R.R.P. US$95.00. 'An edition—especially one of The House of Fame—is never finished', Nicholas Havely states. Nevertheless, University students are already wellserved by the Riverside Chaucer, and a Variorum edition is forthcoming. Should we have been left to work out for ourselves why the series editor encouraged him to begin another? Havely's edition does not claim to be a critical text. It is based on a collation of allfivewitnesses. Like most other editors of The House of Fame, Havely takes. M S Fairfax 16 as his base, while recognising that it is occasionally flawed or defective. H e provides 'a more substantial (though not exhaustive) list of variants than is available in the most recent (Riverside Chaucer) edition' (p. 8). The list of variants runs to nearly 30 pages. Presumably there is an audience for the textual variants of The House of Fame, but as Havely points out, there are a number of cases where the choice between readings 'isfinelybalanced and would be justly reflected only in a parallel-text or hypertext version' (p. 8). From his study of four copies of Thynne's 1532 edition of The Workes of Geffray Chaucer, Havely finds evidence that two press-corrections were made editorially and perhaps with reference to a manuscript. H e concludes: 'Further comparison of these and other copies of the 1532 Workes may perhaps yield some further significant variants for HF and other Chaucerian texts' (p. 133). It may be true that The House of Fame is 'uniquely problematic for editors' because it lacks an ending and a central identifiable source and also survives in manuscripts dated, at the earliest, somefiftyor 182 Reviews sixty years after the poem was composed. But none of this explains why Havely does not offer a complete collation of the surviving copies of Thynne's edition. In most cases, the edition preserves the spellings of M S Fairfax 16. Grammatically and metrically warranted final e's 'have been added only where other versions do so. The forms u and v and initial i and j have been regularised according to m o d e m practice. Paragraphing often coincides with that in Thynne, but punctuation is almost wholly editorial. The regular use of the virgula suspensiva in M S Fairfax 16, which 'appears to have been used to mark rhythmic patterning and emphasis, but not always very effectively' (p. 9), has thus been ignored, in order to present a more familiar-looking text. The text is lightly glossed at the foot of each page. There is a select glossary and an index of proper names. The introduction summarises existing scholarship on the date, language, and versification of the poem and briefly discusses intertextualities, poetics and grotesque elements. Havely considers that Fame's speeches 'contribute to the emerging pattern of grotesquerie and folly in the later stages of the work' (p. 11), but eschews discussion of the broader critical issues raised by this observation. Havely acknowledges a particular debt to John M . Fyler's 'excellent explanatory and textual notes' in the Riverside Chaucer. His own explanatory notes (53 pages) are generally fuller than Fyler's, and have a much more inviting appearance. In many cases, Havely gives a more detailed summary of the scholarship cited, and includes specific references for sources and analogues. University students and teachers who own a copy of the widelyprescribed Riverside Chaucer are unlikely to prefer this edition if The House ofFame is...