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Late Fifteenth-century Woman’s Revision of Chaucer’s “Against Women Unconstant” and other Poems by the same Hand
A copy of William Caxton’s first edition of Dictes or Sayeingis of the Philosophres (1477; trans. Anthony Woodville; STC 6826) in the library of Trinity College, Cambridge, contains handwritten verses on its end flyleaves. On the verso of the final flyleaf, folio 77v, is a variant copy of John Skelton’s early lyric, “Manerly Marjery Mylk and Ale,” which A. S. G. Edwards and I edited in 1994. 1 On the recto side of the same last flyleaf are three verse stanzas not previously edited, copied by the same early sixteenth-century cursive hand. The first and third, and possibly the second as well, are written as by a woman to her lover, who is disdainful of or unfaithful to her. In light of their appearance with the Skelton lyric, which speaks partly in the woman’s voice, one might suspect that the three edited below were also written by men expressing a woman’s point of view. However, the fact that the third is a simple revision of the first stanza of the Chaucerian lyric poem, “Against Women Unconstant,” leads me to believe that at least that stanza may be female-authored. 2 While I can imagine a male poet writing an original poem from a woman’s point of view, I find it hard to imagine any but a woman rewriting a poem written by another poet to change its gender perspective. Such a change, it seems to me, would be most appropriate to a female pen in the case of this particular Chaucer lyric, since changing the gendered viewpoint reverses the poem’s accusations about infidelity. Where Chaucer’s poem “Against Women Unconstant” suggests from the behavior of one unfaithful woman that all women are prone to this vice, the revision suggests that a man may be just as guilty of infidelity.
The first poem consists of a single stanza of eight lines, rhyming roughly ababbbcc. It begins with a first line used again in late Middle English verse as the first line of “A Farewell by Edward Stafford, Third [End Page 344] Duke of Buckingham,” a poem of 22 quatrains each ending “remedyles,” supposed to have been written by Buckingham on the eve of his execution in 1521. 3 Only the first line of the newly discovered verse edited below parallels the Buckingham poem, which has a male narrator and speaks of the injustices he has suffered at Fortune’s (rather than Cupid’s) hands. The poem edited below has a female narrator and speaks of the wrongs she has suffered for not being able to reveal her love for a man and for being separated from him. The repetition of this line in two such different contexts leaves open the question of which came first: if Buckingham’s poem had been about lost love instead of lost fortune, we might have assumed that this was another instance of our author altering known verse, as in the third example; but its application to love leaves open the possibility that she is writing an original piece, as in the second example. 4
The second poem edited below has the least to commend it in terms of both rhyme and meter. It rhymes, roughly, abcbbdbd, and its meter is all uneven, especially in the first four lines. In it, the writer speaks of a “most pleasant thing” that the addressee sees from a chamber window, then expresses a desire to grant the addressee’s wishes, and finally bids that the addressee will remember the writer. The addressee or reader is addressed in the second person. This verse, even more than the first and third, has the appearance of a first draft by an amateur poet, perhaps lifting lines or phrases from other poems. The writer concludes this second verse with his or her unusual spelling of “amen,” “Amend.” The absence of this conclusion after the first verse, and its presence both here and after the third, might suggest that the poet or writer considered these first two eight-line stanzas as part of a single work. Nevertheless, because of the change in point of view, from speaking of the lover in third person to speaking to him in second person, and because of the change in quality of the piece and apparent change in the subject of the complaint, I have treated them as separate pieces.
The third poem edited below is a revision of the first stanza of the poem “Against Women Unconstant,” usually accepted as Chaucer’s. 5 Whereas the original Chaucerian poem consists of three rhyme royal stanzas, this consists of a single 8-line stanza, rhyming roughly ababbccc. In it, a female narrator berates her lover for his fickleness, ending with the line which serves as a refrain in Chaucer’s poem, “In-stad of blov ye may wer gren,” meaning that instead of wearing blue to signify fidelity and purity the addressee should wear green to signify unfaithfulness.
The writer re-voices Chaucer’s stanza principally by reversing the gender in the first two lines: changing Chaucer’s “Madame” to “Yong man” in line 1; changing “Many a servaunt have ye put out of grace” to “Many is the lady at hass povt yov owt of her gras” in line 2. Other changes [End Page 345] involve reversals of order of words, simple substitutions of “
e losst” for “your lust” in line 6, and “half yere” for “full yere” in line 5—this last the only significant change besides the gender changes and the added line 7, suggesting as it does that the “Yong man” is even more fickle than the “Madame” whom Chaucer addressed. The added line 7, “ly
ght fore somer, ye wot what I mene,” may be read with either line 6 or line 8. With line 8, it might refer to the shade of the colors that are specified to the reader, that is, that one would wear light green (or blue) in summer, rather than darker shades. 6 With line 6, it might refer to looser sexual behavior associated with the season, that is, that for whatever reason men and women were freer to pursue their ever-keen sexual desires in summer than in other seasons. 7
All three of these new poems testify to the amateur status of their author or authors. The second in particular demonstrates the poet’s ignorance or carelessness about metrical patterns in formal verse; and the third adheres to these patterns only insofar as it copies Chaucer’s original text. The rhyme scheme of the second is defective; and the added line in the revision of Chaucer’s poem, which would presumably have been meant to translate rhyme royal to Monk’s Tale stanza, has the wrong rhyme: it should rhyme with “gras,” “spass” and “plass” rather than with “kyne” and “gren.”
The only other example of re-voicing medieval lyric that I know of occurs in a fifteenth-century songbook in the Cambridge University Library, MS. Addit. 5943, where an eight-line poem with two-line burden, written initially with a female narrative voice, beginning, “The man that I loued al ther best / In al thys contre est scher west / to me he ys a Strange gest.” 8 Suprascript variants for the gendered pronouns in the poem change the gender of the beloved described in the poem from male to female, and thus change the narrative voice (if we assume heterosexual love) from female to male.
The amateur status of this author as scribe is also testified by the condition of the texts, where the handwriting is crude and almost childlike and the orthography highly idiosyncratic. Beyond the idiosyncracies, all three of these newly edited texts exhibit orthography that would be consistent with composition in the northeastern counties of Norfolk, Cambridge, Lincoln, or York. 9 The copying of a variant version of Skelton’s poem in the same volume may indicate composition in the southern end of this coast—as also might its present location in a Cambridge library. [End Page 346]
The texts of the three poems are as follows: 10
A Woman’s Love-Complaint
Alass to chom schall I complane Of this grett payn
at I in-dvr ffor dred of danger and dyssdan,
TEXTUAL NOTES
5. I commend: I Re commend (“Re” struck through)
EXPLANATORY NOTES
4. dysschor: “discover”?
6. in-sor: “insure”
7. desshess: “disease.” Perhaps we are meant to understand the sense “In spite of” at the beginning of this line.
8. I trest he well well love me a-gane: “I trust he will well love me again”
The Lover’s Farewell
Ye schayn owt of yovr chambore wondoe The most plascauns thyng. Crest send yov yovr wyssyng whan ye ar alon. And yff I wyst what yt war, ouer to yov [I] wold it breng. 5 I commend me to yov a-boff all thyng; [I] be-schesch yov to hav me in rememeraunc, And I schall pray to
TEXTUAL NOTES
4. [I] wold it breng: wold it breng
6. [I] be-schesch: be schesch
7–8. [treated as a single line in MS.]
EXPLANATORY NOTES
1. “Ye see (or ‘shine’?) out of your chamber window”
Against Man’s Inconstancy
Yong man, for yovr nowfangellnys, Many is the lady
ght fore somer, ye wot what I mene: In-stad of blov ye may wer gren. Amende.
TEXTUAL NOTES
2. many is: many this is (‘“this” struck through)
4. [wehell]: added above line
EXPLANATORY NOTES
1–8. Chaucer’s text, from The Riverside Chaucer, third edition, gen. ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston, 1987), 657, is as follows:
Madame, for your newefangelnesse Many a servaunt have ye put out of grace. I take my leve of your unstedfastnesse, For wel I wot, whyl ye have lyves space, Ye can not love ful yeer in a place, To newe thing your lust is ay so kene. In stede of blew, thus may ye were al grene.
1. Chaucer used the word “newfangleness” not only in “Against Women Unconstant” but also in the Squire’s Tale (F 610), the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women, F 154, and Anelide and Arcite, 141: see Explanatory Notes to “Against Women Unconstant” in The Riverside Chaucer, 1090. See also Sir Thomas Wyatt the Elder’s poem, “They Flee From Me,” line 19, for use of the word nearly contemporaneously with the writing of the verses edited here.
2. gras: “grace.”
4. The writer conflates Chaucer’s “wel” and “whyl,” but the same original scribe’s hand makes the correction above the line: “For know I well, while you have life and space...”
7. This line may be proverbial (see B. J. Whiting, Proverbs, Sentences and Proverbial Phrases: from English Writings Mainly before 1500 (Cam., Mass., 1968): B384), but also occurs in French as the refrain to a poem of similar subject matter by Guillaume de Machaut: (in Le Livre de Voir Dit, ed. Paulin Paris (Paris, 1875): 309): see Explanatory Notes to “Against Women Unconstant” in The Riverside Chaucer, 1090.
Footnotes
1. A. S. G. Edwards and Linne R. Mooney, “A New Version of a Skelton Lyric,” Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society 10 (1994): 507–11.
2. The source poem, “Against Women Unconstant” is included under “Poems Not Ascribed to Chaucer in the Manuscripts” in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston, 1987), 657, with summaries of the debate about canonicity on pages 636–37 and 1089–90. For lyric poems written by women, see also my edition of “‘A Woman’s Reply to her Lover’ and Four Other New Courtly Love Lyrics in Trinity College, Cambridge MS. R.3.19”, MÆ 67 (1998): 235–56.
3. The full text, of 22 quatrains, is numbered 158.9 in Rossell Hope Robbins and John L. Cutler, Supplement to the Index of Middle English Verse (Lexington, KY, 1965) (hereafter IMEVS). It survives in British Library, Harley 2252, folios 2v–3. The first stanza appears separately in Bodleian Library, Ashmole 176 (SC 6659), f. 100 (IMEVS 158.8). Its text, “Alas to whom should I complayne / or shewe my wofull heavynes / syth fortune hathe me in disdeyne, / and am exyled remedylesse” is edited by Ethel Seaton, Sir Richard Roos c. 1410–1482, Lancastrian Poet (London, 1961), 405. Seaton joined to the single quatrain another quatrain occurring on the same folio, “ Adewe adewe my hartes lust...,” and attributed both to Sir Richard Roos.
4. The question of the author’s altering known verse, raised here, also affects the conclusion Edwards and I reached in 1994 regarding the variant version of Skelton’s “Manerly Margery”: “The version of the poem in Trinity suggests that [Skelton’s] characteristic tendency to circulate variant texts of the poems may have been one that was established early in his career” (Edwards and Mooney, 1994, 10).
5. See The Riverside Chaucer, 1089–90. On p. 189, Laila Z. Gross comments that it “[is] generally accepted as genuine,” and cites arguments for and against by Skeat, Koch, Hammond, Brusendorff, and Robinson (p. 190). None of the manuscripts ascribe the poem to Chaucer, but Stowe does in his collected works of Chaucer published in 1561 (STC 5075).
6. MED, “light,” adj. (2) 1b. (c): “of color: not deep or dark, light, pale.”
7. MED, “light,” adj. (2) 8 (b) “fickle, unsteady; ~ of love, inconstant, unfaithful”; adj. (2) 8 (c) “of persons, the heart, eyes, glances, etc.: lewd, lascivious; of women: unchaste.”
8. Carleton Brown and Rossell Hope Robbins, The Index of Middle English Verse (New York, 1943), no. 3418; edited and discussed by Richard Leighton Greene, The Early English Carols (Oxford, 1933; 2nd ed., rev., 1977), 275.
9. For instance, “a-boff,” “agane,” “chom,” “erde,” “hass,” “lovff,” “lyff,” “now”=new, “owt,” “schall,” “whan,” “yong.”
10. Modern punctuation has been applied, as well as modern rules for capitalization. Hyphens have been added to combine separate words in the MS. to form modern compounds.
