The General Prologue. 2 vols. A Variorum Edition of the Works of Geoffrey Chaucer. Vol. 2, The Canterbury Tales, Parts 1A and 1B ed. by Malcolm Andrew, Charles Moorman, Daniel J. Ransom (review)

REVIEWS MALcoLM ANDREW, CHARLES MOORMAN, and DANIEL J. RANSOM, eds., with the assistance of Lynne Hunt Levy. The General Prologue. 2 vols. A Variorum Edition of the Works of Geoffrey Chaucer. Vol. 2, The Canterbury Tales, Parts lA and lB. Norman and London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993. Part lA, pp. xxvii, 298. Part lB, pp. xxiii, 623. $115.(,)0 (both vols.). This is the latest and largest of the volumes of the Variorum Chaucer to appear. It is divided into two parts. Part lA, a collaborative undertaking, prints critical and textual commentary, text, collations, textual notes, and bibliography. Part lB, more than twice as large, is by Andrew alone and comprises the explanatory notes. Part lA inspires some degree ofbibliographical and textual unease from its opening pages. The list ofmanuscripts (pp. xxi-xxiii) records sixty-one copies ofThe Canterbury Tales. It cannot be too widely known that there are eighty-two recorded manuscript copies in whole or in part of Chaucer's work. The principles on which some are recorded here and others not are not readily explicable. One might have thought that, since about one­ fourth of all surviving manuscripts contains selections from among the Tales, they would have been excluded here. To some degree this is so, and it accounts for the omission of such copies as Ct, HI1-3, Hn, LI2, Np, Pp, Ra4, and St, among others, as well as such fragments as Ds2 and Kk (although it would have been nice ifthese omissions were explained). It is rather more difficult to grasp the inclusion of Ad2, En2, Ha1, Ha5, He (now Princeton University Library 100--the shelf mark is omitted), LP, Mc, Ox, Ph3, PI, and Ra1, none ofwhich contains The General Prologue, or ofMe (a fragment of The Nun's Priest's Tale). It is even less easy to under­ stand why there is no mention ofBritish Library manuscript Add. 10340, a fragment of The General Prologue, and Add. 35286, which has most ofit. Nor are the two substantive printed editions ofCaxton dealt with happily. We are told "later scholarship {than Manly-Rickert} indicates that 1476 is more probable" (p. 82) as the date of publication for CX1 . In fact, the revised STC (published in 1986) dates it to {1477}. The date of CX2 is given as "1484" (p. 83). The revised STC gives it as {1483}. The list of modern editions collated includes Robinson's second edition, even though 157 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER this has been superseded by the Riverside Chaucer of1987 under the general editorship of Larry D. Benson (although its variants from RB2 are briefly noted on p. 122). Nor is there any attempt to take account of the objec­ tions that have been raised to the textual procedures employed for editing The Canterbury Tales in the Variorum, particularly Ralph Hanna's devastat­ ing critique in Analytical & Enumerative Bibliography (8 [1984}: 184-97), which seems, in textual terms, to do to the Variorum what the iceberg did to the Titanic. Some of the other sections of Part A also leave something to be desired. The Textual Commentary (pp. 60ff.) contains some curious elements. Thus the unique spurious lines that occur in the Northumberland manuscript are sometimes recorded, even though the readings of this manuscript are not otherwise included. But when its spurious lines appear in other manu­ scripts, its evidence is not noted (for example, line 836). There may be some sense here, but I am not sure that it is worth struggling to find it. In accordance with Variorum policy the Textual Commentary records only selected manuscript variant readings, while the readings in such obsolete printed editions as Morell's (1737) and Tyrwhitt's (1775) are given in full. At times one is tempted to wonder a little at the criteria that are employed in recording variants even among the manuscripts that have been collated. Thus some random checking ofGg iv.27 noted such points as the omission of its reading pynche for pynchen (line 326), one which, since it affects syl­ labic value, ought to have been noted. Similarly, it reads hethnesse for hethenesse (line 49), again with metrical consequences; the reading is not noted...