B. Robinson's Discussion of His Editorial Method
In an otherwise friendly review, M. B. Ruud complained of
Robinson's failure to note all of his departures from the text of Ellesmere
(El) (MLN 50 [1935]: 329-332), and in noting this criticism
Reinecke attempted to put the best possible face upon the scarcity of textual
notes and the guardedly brief description of textual method:
He is doubtless right in sensing that Robinson's thin selection of text
notes requires us to take more on faith than would be ideal beyond the
undergraduate level. In this connection, however, one ought to review
Robinson's own explanation of why
he abandoned his original intention of publishing a full apparatus criticus
(Preface, p. vii). Beyond the mere question of bulk, there was the fairly
recent appearance of Root's
Troilus and the expectation of
Manly and Rickert's
Tales. This last must have been the chief
factor; every time Robinson explained his reasonings on the basis of the
eight published Chaucer Society texts, the Cardigan manuscript and the
Morgan, he was leaving himself open to embarrassment when the Chicago
monument superseded all previous textual opinions. (235)
In this Reinecke does seem to have fathomed at least a part of the reason
both for the very guarded explanations which Robinson provided of his
editorial method and for his "thin selection of textual notes." If this
is the principal part of the explanation, however, it is hardly
a
defense. After all, those who use a text which claims the title of "critical
edition" have the right to know the critical methods by which the editor
arrived at it. Furthermore, they need enough of such evidence as alternative
readings and textual notes which explain the reasoning behind the choices
to be able to follow the editor's methods in their execution. We may first
turn to what we may gather from what Robinson said about his achievement
and methods and then proceed to what can be learned from charts
comparing his choices with those of other editors.
With a very minor reservation, Robinson claimed for his entire text
of Chaucer's works the status of a critical edition:
The entire text has been made afresh by the editor. . . . In fact the
text may be called a critical edition, with one reservation. In the case of
some of the more important works, including the Canterbury
Tales, the manuscript materials accessible to the editor have not
been
exhaustive. But the best copies of all the works have been available for use
as the basis of the edition, and enough others have been compared to make
possible, in the editor's belief, the establishment of trustworthy texts.
(xxxiii)
Reinecke's comment after quoting this passage certainly seems just:
This is a little disconcerting, because of the ambiguities and subtle
guardedness of "due regard to critical principles," "best copies," and
"enough others." It is just this paragraph that the reviewers tended to fall
upon. Surely Robinson knew that when he spoke of archetypes and critical
editions nearly all would take him to mean what the German
textual-criticism tradition had meant for a century. (238)
The passage alluded to about "archetypes" will be discussed after a look at
Robinson's expansion of his one reservation about having produced a
critical edition.
In alluding to the forthcoming Manly-Rickert "great critical edition,"
Robinson showed how little he was concerned by his reservation that "the
manuscript materials [of the Tales] accessible to the editor
have
not been exhaustive." He initially pointed to the textual knowledge which
the publication of Manly-Rickert would make available: "Their work, which
is eagerly awaited by all Chaucerians, will shed new light on doubtful
readings, and will probably make it possible for the first time to reconstruct
the successive stages in the composition of the Canterbury
Tales" (xxxiii). Yet Robinson quickly undermined the force of this
and implicitly reasserted his claim to having produced something very close
to definitive by his next sentence: "But
it does not appear likely that a text based upon the complete collation would
be materially different from one that can be constructed from the eight
published manuscripts which include the best copy, the Ellesmere MS., and
are so distributed as to represent all the important groups of authorities"
(
Ibid.). The remainder of the two and a half pages of
introduction devoted to the text of the
Tales is taken up
primarily with the claims of two manuscripts, Ha
4 and El.
The role of
Ha
4 in Robinson's text provides important information
about his
editorial method. Moreover, the exact relation of El to his text lies at the
heart of the question of his method.
Reinecke's allusion to Robinson's speaking of "archetypes" referred
to a passage less noted by reviewers than the one about presenting a
"critical edition" but no less important:
In textual method the present editor does not belong to the severest
critical school. When the readings of the "critical text" or of a superior
archetype appeared unsatisfactory or manifestly inferior, he has accepted
help from other authorities more often than the strict constructionists might
approve. He has seen no way of avoiding the exercise of personal
judgment. But he has not practiced mere eclecticism, and in making his
decisions he has endeavored to give constant attention to the relation of the
manuscripts and to all relevant consideration of language, meter, and usage.
(xxxiii)
Probably the chief reason that this passage has drawn less comment is that
Robinson clearly was
not using the word "archetype" in its
usual sense. In textual studies the usual meaning of "archetype" is that
given by those who practice the genealogical method of Lachmann, yet, as
Reinecke noted, the review of Alois Brandl "praises the editor for his
introductions and explanatory notes, only to attack him severely for not
having been possessed by the spirit of Lachmann and pretending to a
'critical edition' while his true basis of textual judgement was his common
sense" (235). Scholars who have attempted to understand what Robinson
meant by an archetype or archetypes that might contain readings superior
to those in the "critical text" have quite naturally turned to the best-text
method, the chief rival to the genealogical method when Robinson edited
his text.
In a section called "The Text (Theory)," Reinecke followed the most
general surmise about Robinson's method from the first reviewers to the
general editor of the "Third Edition": "Was Robinson aware of Joseph
Bédier's devastating critique of the strict Stammbaum
method in the Introduction to his Lai de l'ombre (1913)? This
French scholar's analysis of the German method led him to adopt a
procedure very similar to that which Robinson actually used for his
Chaucer: choose a 'best' manuscript and edit it in the light
of
the others, using common sense and scholarly knowledge and experience"
(239). Reinecke did not specify that El was this "best" manuscript, but
because El was the only one which Robinson discussed at any length in
positive terms (as opposed to Ha4 in negative ones) and
because he said
that he generally followed it in "mere matters of orthography" (xxxv),
Reinecke clearly took for granted that El was Robinson's base, as did others
who
attempted to understand his method, such as Everett. For
example, in the textual introduction to the "Third Edition" of Robinson, its
general editor, Larry Benson, first noted of the "over 160 changed
readings" in Robinson's Second Edition, "That there were not more shows
that Robinson was not convinced by Manly and Rickert's theory that the
Ellesmere is an 'edited' manuscript whose scribe (or 'editor') frequently
'corrected' the meter. That theory has now been refuted by George Kane
in his essay on the Manly-Rickert edition, which appears in
Editing
Chaucer (ed. Paul G. Ruggiers, 1985)" (
Ibid.).
Although a comparison of the discussions of El by Variorum editors
such as Thomas Ross and Derek Pearsall with the critique by Kane will
show how far Kane is from having refuted the theory of editing in the
production of El,[5] what is important
about this quotation for the present study is that in defending the text of El,
the editor of the Third Edition of Robinson seemed to believe that he was
defending the basis of Robinson's text. A look at Robinson's own
discussion of El shows some warrant for this general belief about his having
used El as his base-text but also presents (especially when taken with other
comments and the charts to be discussed below) stronger grounds for
thinking that Robinson had another procedure in mind.
After noting that he had "no such means of testing" the variants of El
"as was afforded for the Harleian manuscript by Professor Tatlock's study"
and looking to the forthcoming Manly-Rickert to "show just how much
scattered support such readings may have," Robinson continued,
But from the evidence furnished by printed texts and the editor's
collation of the Cardigan and Morgan manuscripts it does not appear that
they are to be accepted without scrutiny on the bare authority of Ellesmere.
That manuscript, though superior to all others, has its proportion of errors,
some of which it shares with other manuscripts of the a
group.
It therefore cannot be regarded as an independent witness to the original
text; nor do its peculiar readings look like revisions by the author.
(xxxv)
Particularly in its rejection of El "as an independent witness," such a
description gives very little support to the notion that Robinson used El as
his substantive base; however, there is perhaps a little in his closing
comment upon the El accidentals: "In mere matters of orthography, when
verbal variants are not involved, the Ellesmere copy has been followed, as
representing a good scribal tradition. But throughout all Chaucer's works
. . . the spellings of the manuscripts have been corrected for grammatical
accuracy and for the adjustment of rimes" (
Ibid.). Although
Robinson's discussion of El might arguably offer a little support to the very
widespread assumption that he used El as base, his rejection of it as an
independent witness and his discussion of such matters as "a superior
archetype" seem to argue otherwise, as does the evidence of charts to be
discussed below.
The key to Robinson's conscious editorial method seems to be in just
what he meant by the phrases "the 'critical text'" and "a superior
archetype." The usual meaning of "critical text" is that which an editor
aims to construct on the basis of extant or reconstructed documents thought
to be the most authoritative (though subject to emendation). In the absence
of
the copy from which extant ones derive, the usual meaning of "archetype"
is that which a textual critic aims to reconstruct by his studies of descendant
copies. Since there is nothing in his discussions nor in such analyses as that
of Reinecke to indicate that Robinson himself attempted such a task as
reconstructing an archetype and since he seems to refer to a "critical text"
apart from his own, the question must arise of where Robinson turned to
find "the 'critical text' or a superior archetype" whose
readings
at times "appeared unsatisfactory or manifestly inferior." Whatever
Robinson may have meant by putting the article "a" before "superior
archetype" (seemingly allowing for the possible existence of multiple
'superior archetypes,' perhaps of the so-called 'Type A' and 'Type B'
manuscripts), the remainder of his discussion seems to hint that he believed
he found something like one of them in the agreements of what he called
the "A type of manuscripts":
In the Canterbury Tales . . . the A type of manuscripts,
represented by Ellesmere, Hengwrt, Cambridge Dd, and Cambridge
Gg—whether or not they all go back to a single archetype below the
original—is generally accepted as of superior authority to the B type,
which includes Harleian 7334, Corpus, Petworth, and Lansdowne. They are
the basis of the present text, as of all recent editions. In the
Pardoner's Tale, for which nearly all the authorities have
been
printed and compared, there seems to be no case where the reading of the
more numerous manuscripts of type B is preferable. But elsewhere in the
tales there are a few passages where the B readings seem to the editor
superior to the A readings, and he has not hesitated to adopt them.
(xxxv)
Any resort to Manly-Rickert or to the Variorum discussions will show how
various are the manuscript traditions lumped together in the two categories
of "Type A and Type B," particularly the former.
[6] In the event this is hardly
surprising: one
of Bédier's most trenchant challenges to the genealogical method
was
that far more often than credible it resulted in bifid stemmata, and
Manly-Rickert's much more rigorous than usual application of the method
showed how thoroughly misplaced had been earlier analyses which had
resulted in a bifid stemma for the manuscripts of the
Tales.
[7]
Because the Manly-Rickert data and analyses so thoroughly disproved
the earlier bifid stemma of the 'A type-B type' sort and because Robinson's
second edition appeared seventeen years after Manly-Rickert, we might
have expected a revision of this description of method and of the method
itself; however, in the Preface Robinson showed the opposite of an
awareness of any conflict:
. . . since I have seen no reason for changing my general method of
dealing with orthography, grammatical rectification, and such matters, often
not to be settled simply by comparison of manuscripts, I am republishing,
practically without change, the introductory chapter on the text.
Fortunately, although I had only some dozen more or less complete
authorities to work with, the manuscripts provided by the Chaucer Society
had been so well selected from different groups that they made possible
when supplemented by textual studies then available, the application of
critical method. (vii)
Such an apparent unawareness of the degree to which the Manly-Rickert
data and analyses had shown the opposition of the full manuscript evidence
to the
earlier bipartite grouping reinforces the point made by Reinecke about
Robinson's neglect of manuscript relations: "Robinson's emphasis on 'the
relation of the manuscripts' often in application seems secondary" (240).
Reinecke illustrated the point with reference to the role of
Ha
4 in the
text.
Well over half of Robinson's textual introduction was devoted to a
discussion of the defects in Ha4 with the following
explanation:
Some editors, among them Professor Skeat and Mr. Pollard, have
held it to contain Chaucerian revisions, and they have consequently felt free
to draw upon any of its readings that seem intrinsically attractive. Other
scholars have doubted the special authority of the manuscript, and, in the
opinion of the present editor, it has been virtually disproved by Professor
Tatlock in his study on the subject. (xxxiv)
In illustration of Robinson's neglect of manuscript relations, Reinecke
pointed to the way he nevertheless "tended to cling to this manuscript
[Ha
4]," including at times accepting some of its unique
readings.
Because he focussed, as others have done, upon the relations of Robinson's
text to various manuscripts, Reinecke had no way of recognizing the full
import of Robinson's neglect of 'the relation of the manuscripts" (240) nor
of the source of his Ha
4 readings. In the next section,
charts showing
the relations of Robinson's emendations to those of earlier printed editions
will help to clarify the matter.
Because of the critical mysteries in Robinson's description of his
method, because he was editing in the heyday of the best-text method, and
because he joined earlier editors in calling El "superior to all others"
(xxxv), it is small wonder that, from the first reviewers to the editor of the
Third Edition, many have thought that Robinson meant that he had used El
as something like a base text. After much study and correspondence with
others, George Reinecke gave this description of Robinson's method: "It is
therefore best to define Robinson's text as conservative, highly informed,
and eclectic, though arrived at after much of the procedure for establishing
a critical text had been performed. He was careful about his choice of copy
text; he rarely accepted unique readings. When he did depart from his
copy, it was usually for a reading connected either with grammar or with
metrics (241). Reinecke and others who have understood Robinson's
editorial method in this way have taken for
granted that for the text of the Canterbury Tales Robinson
used
El as his base text or base copy (depending upon what Reinecke means by
"copy text"). Also, Reinecke spoke for many in approving Robinson's
"utilization of only ten manuscripts" as "a sensible decision": ". . . this
number included all the manuscripts commonly termed 'good,' and going
further would mean competing with Manly and Rickert, though it promised
ever-diminishing textual returns" (Ibid.). The problem with
this
is that it neglects the manuscript relations discovered by Manly and Rickert
as completely as Robinson did in his second edition. Furthermore, there is
evidence that the text which Robinson emended was not that of a
manuscript at all.