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Notes
F. N. Robinson, The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, 2nd ed. (1957), pp. 865, 543; hereafter cited as Robinson. The printing of the Proverbs begins in the sixteenth century and continues, in complete editions of the poet's writings, unbroken up to the present day.
Carleton Brown and R. H. Robbins, The Index of Middle English Verse (1943), p. 746; Aage Brusendorff, The Chaucer Tradition (1925), p. 286; A. W. Pollard, H. F. Heath, et al., The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer (1904), p. 634 (here-after cited as Globe Chaucer); W. W. Skeat, The Chaucer Canon (1890), p. 145 and The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer (1894), I, 91 (the latter hereafter cited as Skeat). The Middle English Dictionary, ed. Hans Kurath and S. M. Kuhn ("Plan and Bibliography," 1954, p. 33), includes the Proverbs in its list of Chaucer's works but precedes the title with a question mark.
For an early printed text to possess "MS. authority" is of course nothing unusual; the names Caxton, Thynne, and even Stowe occur frequently in Robinson's textual notes. Skeat, who did not use the Stowe copy of the Proverbs, had, however, a good opinion of it: "There is a fair copy of them (but not well spelt) in the black-letter edition of 1561" (Skeat, I, 564).
The readings for S are from a copy in the British Museum, those for the MSS from my own transcriptions made from the MSS; the three MSS are also printed in the Chaucer Society's Parallel Texts of Chaucer's Minor Poems, Ser. 1, no. 58, p. 431.
The assumptions are, for instance, either stated or implied in the rationale of textual criticism by A. A. Hill, "Some Postulates of Distributional Study of Texts," SB, III (1950-51), 63-95.
The OED, s. v. Mine, states the normal practice: "Already in the 13th c., the rule in southern and midland Eng. was to use myn before vowels and h, and my before consonants, and this subsisted until the 18th c."; exceptions exist to this "rule," but the Tatlock-Kennedy Concordance to the Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer (1927) does not show a single instance of my before a vowel in Chaucer's writings.
There is also the following internal evidence: the Proverbs exhibit no positively non-Chaucerian features (cf. Robinson, p. 865); the second proverb occurs, with rather similar phrasing, in The Canterbury Tales (B2 2405; "For the proverbe seith, 'He that to muche embraceth, distreyneth litel'"). The recurrence of a proverb, in the sense of popular saying, might mean nothing; however, B. J. Whiting (Chaucer's Use of Proverbs, 1934, p. 43) says the Proverbs of Chaucer are not of a "popular" variety (the second proverb, even so, resembles M 1295, p. 484, in Tilley's A Dictionary of the Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, 1950).
Since Stowe attributes to Chaucer poems which are now known definitely to be spurious, his word with regard to the Proverbs might seem to deserve little weight. My point is not that Stowe was right in his attribution but that he must have had a reason for it.
As for other differences, I shall limit myself to a collation with Robinson's text, which is also based on F (Robinson's readings are given first): Proverbs, Proverbe of Chaucer; shul, shal; thise, these; manyfold, manyfolde; Lo, loo; hote, hoote; greet, grete; cold, colder; world, worlde; Hit, it; wol, wil. Some of these differences, but not all, result from Robinson's decision to normalize spelling.
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