University of Virginia Library

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.