The Norton Chaucer ed. by David Lawton (review)

Chaucer scholars and students alike may be grateful to David Lawton for his composition of a much-needed and reasonably priced classroom-friendly edition of Chaucer's complete works. The sturdy, hardback Norton Chaucer provides reliable texts and helpful introductory material, and it is admirably user-friendly for both students and a general audience. Pages are easy on the eyes, presenting Chaucer's poetry and prose in single columns and a large and crisp font. Marginal glosses are placed at the side of each page, with explanatory notes at the bottom. Lawton's lightly modernized texts are easily legible, and the presentation is comfortable enough for sitting back in a chair and reading.

As best as I can tell, the only other edition of the complete works currently in print is Oxford University Press's 2008 paperback reissue of the 1987 Riverside Chaucer, available in Britain but not for sale in the United States or Canada. Thus, for North Americans who wish to read all of Chaucer, the book is a necessity. British readers may also prefer Norton, as the Riverside paperback's minuscule print and back-of-volume notes are difficult to use for many readers.

It must be acknowledged that the Norton Chaucer is not a replacement for Riverside as a standard scholarly edition. The glories of Riverside are its voluminous explanatory and textual notes, detailed (albeit now out-dated) discussions of the critical tradition, and an authoritative list of primary texts. In contrast, Norton includes no textual notes and relatively few explanatory notes, treats the critical tradition only minimally, presents a selective three-page bibliographical note that ignores primary sources, and prints only fifty lines from the G-text of the Prologue to The Legend of Good Women (those related to "Chaucer's library" [1117]). Recommendations for reading about Chaucer's life are limited to Derek Pearsall's 1992 biography and two articles by Christopher Cannon on raptus and rape (though a careful eye will find Marion Turner's massive Chaucer: A European Life mentioned in relation to "Chaucer's place as a European writer and thinker" [51]). Norton's twenty-six-page glossary hardly compares with Riverside's hundred pages of Middle English words and seventeen pages of proper names.

What the Norton Chaucer does offer is a splendid volume for classroom use. Lawton's General Introduction (fifty-three pages) speaks lucidly of Chaucer's life, reading, afterlives, and reception; of the urban and national political and social environments that he inhabited; and of the manuscripts and principal editions of his various works. An additional section (eleven pages) offers a cogent treatment of Chaucer's language and meter, and a rationale for mild modernization of the manuscript spellings. Brief descriptive analyses introduce each of Chaucer's longer works, the different parts (fragments) of the Canterbury Tales, and the shorter poems. This presentation facilitates "reading Chaucer in his original language" by recognizing that "nonspecialist readers … may need less apparatus and more help than standard scholarly editions provide" (45). A CD included with the book introduces readers to the sounds of Chaucer's Middle English. Twenty-nine admirably clear recordings from across Chaucer's work—by Lawton, Jennifer Brown, Ruth Evans, and Elizabeth Robertson—capture the energy and many voices of Chaucer's poetry.

What matters most in a Chaucer edition is, of course, the quality of its texts, and Lawton's texts are reliable. He has reedited "[e]very line of Chaucer's poetry, consulting manuscripts, [E. Talbot] Donaldson's text [in the 1958 Chaucer's Poetry]), and the decisions of other editors" (ix), including light adaptation of Kathryn Lynch's Norton Critical Edition of the dream poems. Chaucer's prose texts are newly edited by Jennifer Arch. Following on Donaldson's lead, Lawton has rethought punctuation and modernized spelling, though not to the extent of his predecessor, and he has retained the traditional Canterbury Tales line numbering by part instead of Donaldson's separate numbering of each tale...