Although the primary reason for textual criticism is determining texts,
there may be other reasons. One may simply want to set the record straight
so that erroneous views need no longer be expressed. Or one may hope to
discover the actual copy used for an early printed book. Or one may wish
to answer a question of provenance or even of human biography. Something
of all these "other" reasons underlies the present paper, which employs
textual criticism not to establish a text but to throw light upon the books in
which the text is contained.
The books are: Cambridge University Library MS. Gg.4.27 (a
Canterbury Tales manuscript; "of the highest importance"
—
Manly and Rickert)[1] and Thomas
Speght's 1602 edition of Chaucer's works, the last, except for reprintings,
of the Blackletter Chaucers. The point of impingement is Chaucer's poem
An A B C, which occurs on the opening folios of the
manuscript and appears for the first time in print in Speght's volume.
When Speght published, in 1598, the first edition of his Chaucer, he
obviously knew nothing of the A B C, since otherwise he
would
have printed it. So between 1598 and 1602 Speght came upon a manuscript
having the poem. Can this manuscript be identified? I believe it can be: that
it is Gg.4.27, which is now known to have been in the possession of Joseph
Holland, antiquarian and lover of Chaucer, in 1600.[2] That Holland and Speght were
acquainted
is a virtual certainty.[3] What more
likely place, then, for Speght to obtain the poem than Holland's manuscript
where, as the poem begins the volume, it could hardly be missed?
A close relationship between the Gg. 4. 27 and Speght texts has
generally been recognized, but they have been looked upon, because of
certain differences, as sister texts deriving from a lost common
parent.[4] I believe I
can show that the Speght text exhibits a sufficient number of the marked
eccentricities of the version in Gg.4.27 to leave no doubt that Holland's
volume is Speght's source.
Assuming I am correct, we have a rarity — the actual copy
underlying an Elizabethan printed book — [5] and I shall be interested in
examining the
changes Speght made, the amount and kind of editing to which he subjected
his copy. Finally, I shall also wish to consider the significance of the
derivation for the provenance of Gg.4.27 and for the question of the
authenticity of Speght's well-known assertion that Chaucer wrote the
A B C for Blanche, Duchess of Lancaster and wife to John
of
Gaunt. But first I must establish the derivation.
