The Wars of Alexander ed. by Hoyt N. Duggan, Thorlac Turville-Petre (review)

SWDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER whomyou might quite well see one day at a heavenly top-table" (p. 49); ofa checkered cloth described as"striped" (p. 56); ofthe term"law-keeping" to parallel "belief" (p. 124); ofa pardoner referred to as a "fraudster" (p. 86); or ofa (not untypical) sentence like "Langland did not live there[Westmin­ ster], and he reels offthe passers-by as they pop up like snap-shot targets, suitably alliterated: assizers, summoners, sheriffs, [etc.]" (p. 64). The map of London on the endpapers is handy but would have been even more useful ifit had included Westminster (discussed on pp. 59-61). Minimally punctuated, the text is marred by illogical shifts of tense, problems of pronoun reference and parallelism, misplaced modifiers, and strings of one-sentence paragraphs. MARY-JO ARN Bloomsburg University HOYT N. DUGGAN and THORLAC TURVILLE-PETRE, eds. The �rs of Alexander. EETS, s.s., vol. 10. Oxford: Early English Text Society/ Oxford University Press, 1989. Pp. lviii, 397. $64.00. In the beginning lines of the Middle English Wars of Alexander, the anonymous poet describes the types of obviously oral compositions that fourteenth- or fifteenth-century courtly audiences enjoyed hearing, after (ofcourse) they were"festid & fed."Some ofthe nobility enjoyedhearing of ancient stories, which contain events and deeds "or pai ware fourmed on fold or paire fadirs opir." Others enjoyed hearing saints' lives, still others "lufe lay[e]s" or exemplary tales of"curtaissy, of kny3thede, of craftis of armys." And some enjoyed the fabliaux, tales of"wanton werkis, pa pat ere wildhedid." The poet then moves to the subject of his present work: the wondrous birth and deeds of"athill Alexsandire." The poet will "rehers" these deeds in a 5,803-line poem (divided into passus, or"fitts"), provided that his listeners hold their tongues. The poet concludes this little prologue by indicating that his performance will be so divided that every listener may rest at various intervals which correspond to passus divisions in the poetic text. In fact, at the end ofpassus 14 the poet indicates arriving at a stop to allow himself to "tary for a time" and "tempire" his "wittes." As many Middle English scholars know, this late-medieval description of a courtly audience may be only a conventional fiction. Whether or not 188 REVIEWS actually designed for oral performance, The Wirs of Alexander is, in narrative structure, one of the more bookishly derivative of the Middle English alliterative romances, its author a cleric, its narrative closely adapted from the third interpolated recension of the Latin Historia de preliis AlexandriMagni, its lines sprinkled with such narrative attributions as "pe buke tellis." In this new edition of the Wirs, Duggan and Turville­ Petre emphasize the bookish, clerical origins of the poem. By annotating citations of pertinent source passages from the Historia (some of which the Wirs poet translated almost verbatim into Middle English), they have produced an editionsuperiorto the earlier editions of Stevenson (1849) and Skeat (1886). Still other editorial achievements ensure that this edition is the authoritative, edited text of the poem. The edition contains the standard editorial apparatuses, including fac­ simile plates of a folio page each from the two fifteenth-century manu­ scripts of the Wirs: the Bodleian Library, Oxford, manuscript Ashmole 44 (=A) and theTrinity College, Dublin, manuscript 213 (=D). Of primary interestto theMiddle English textualscholaris the introduction, which can serve as a model ofeditorialexplanationfor any budding textual editor. It is divided under six headings: "Manuscripts and Editions," "The Sources," "Metrical Criteria for Establishing the Text," "Language," "Authorship and Date," and "Treatment of the Text." Throughout these sections the editors repeatedly defend the various choices or interpretations that any editor must make in the preparation of a text. One of these choices concerns the use of alliterative technique to deter­ mine authorial intention and consequent emendation. The editors, widely known as experts on the Middle English alliterative long line, demonstrate this expertise by deducing principles concerning alliterating sounds, allit­ erative patterns, syllable stress, the stress patterns of both a verses and b verses, and larger organizing units (whether or not based on consecutive alliteration) within the poem. On the basis of such principles the editors follow a...