Chaucer Criticism: A Review of Revisions

BOOK REVIEWS Chaucer Criticism: A Review of Revisions Robert W. Hanning Columbia University A sampling of recent books on the poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer reveals strong revisionist currents within the constant flood of scholarship and criticism. While the Canterbury Tales (CT) is the major subject of discussion in these books, the issues raised ultimately have relevance for our understanding of Chaucer's overall achievement as a poet and of the cultural and artistic context within which he worked in fourteenth-century England. The most vexing problem for students of CT today is the precise status of the Hengwrt manuscript (Hg). Hg is the earliest ms of CT— it was probably written shortly after Chaucer's death in 1400 — and it offers a superior, quite error-free text of the poem. But because it is incomplete — it lacks several links between tales, the Canon's Yeoman's (CanYeo) Prologue and Tale, the last part of the Parson's Tale and Chaucer's Retractions — and has the tales in an order different from that of other early mss, Hg has not, until very recently, been favored as the base text for editions of CT . Ellesmere (El), a deluxe, carefully prepared and beautifully illustrated ms — it includes the famous pilgrim miniatures that appear at the beginning of each tale — presents CT as, in effect, a completed work, with the tales (including that of CanYeo) deployed in a largely rational order by means of many more links than Hg contains. Moreover, all the extra material in El has until very recently seemed, on thematic and stylistic grounds, to be genuinely Chaucerian. Hence its dominance among editors and critics of Chaucer. Since the Manly-Rickert edition of CTfrom all known mss (1940, 8 vols) highlighted Hg's textual soundness and suggested that El's text showed signs of editorial activity — i.e., deliberate, as opposed to inadvertent, changes in what Chaucer wrote — Hg has enjoyed greater esteem and attention among Chaucerians (including those who chose it as the base ms for C7"in the new Variorum Edition of Chaucer's works, 1979- ). Its most ferocious partisan since the late 1970s has been N. F. Blake, who published the first edition of CFever to be based squarely on Hg (1980), and who now, in The Textual Tradition o/The Canterbury Tales, marshalls in one place all his far-reaching arguments about the normative significance of Hg for all future study of Chaucer's last work. Within the space limitations of this essay I can only summarize some of Blake's revisionary hypotheses, of which perhaps the most notable is that Chaucer never published (i.e., deliberately circulated mss of) any of his works during his lifetime. Blake argues that Chaucer never revised, or set in order, the fragments of text he had composed during the years he worked on CT ; when he died, he left his papers in untidy confusion, and with parts of the ms sewn together badly to take into account his unrevised, but evolving thought on grouping tales (190). After Chaucer's death, an editor (or editors), anxious to make available a poem doubtless well known 77 78Rocky Mountain Review from Chaucer's recitations of parts of it (cf. the Envoy a Bukton, which mentions the Wife of Bath) found and assembled the fragments according to a prologue-taleprologue scheme (see ch. 5). Where no links were found, the editor put tales together as rationally as possible (e.g., placing the Wife of Bath's material before that of the Clerk and Merchant, who mention her), and commissioned someone to write other interstitial material to fill in the gaps. Spaces and changes of ink in Hg reveal the scribe awaiting, and in some cases inserting, material. (Blake's crucial notion of an editor comes in part from Manly-Rickert, and partly from the work of A.I. Doyle and M. B. Parkes on the compilation of manuscripts in early fifteenthcentury London.) Subsequently, as newly commissioned material came in, it was added to the master exemplar (i.e., Chaucer's papers) in the editor's possession and thence copied at various times by various scribes (see chs. 6-8). The many orders in the...