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General Comments
Throughout Stow's print, spelling is modernized and to some slight extent regularized. For instance, he regularly prints "i" for vocalic "y," regularizes somewhat the use of "u" and "v," adds or deletes final "e" (with no discernible system), doubles single consonants (and vice versa), regards "o" and "ou," "e" and "ea," and "ai" and "ey" as equivalent. All these changes are very much as might be expected and are, of course, very unlikely to represent Stow's personal influence.
Less expected is the generally high substantive accuracy of his print. In the 2170 lines of verse which Stow took from t, he varies substantively less than 200 times. In three or fourscore cases he corrects clear errors in t, and in a slightly smaller number of cases he introduces errors of his own which distort the text. We are therefore justified in placing considerable reliance on the texts in Stow which are independent, and may assume that his print of the Norfolk manuscript is faithful. This high degree of accuracy coupled with the vague nature of the directions to the printer in t suggests that Stow was in very close contact with the printer's shop, perhaps even present during the actual composition. There are very few places where emendations have been supplied in t in a hand even remotely resembling Stow's (e.g., Poem 16, line 7). The hypothesis of such close contact fits well with the way in which the poems seem to have been added. After having introduced the first four poems (28 lines in all) as fillers, he adds four poems from (probably) various manuscripts. He then takes up t to print two poems which occur together amongst the eighteen in the first fascicle, two poems from the three in the seventh fascicle (omitting La Belle Dame sans Mercy, already in Thynne), and four poems which occur sequentially in the first fascicle (omitting BR 1838 which borrows heavily from the Craft of Lovers, already printed). He then jumps to the tenth fascicle and prints three of its nine poems (omitting Lydgate's Horns, which comes between the second and the third). Then, after adding "A Complaint to his Lady" (Poem 20) from the leaves which are now bound in Harley 78, he notes a space to be filled before the beginning of the Court of Love, which on account of its size was surely set up separately, and fills it with another poem from the first fascicle of roughly correct size. There remained only one more filler from R.3.20 and the Siege (which was also surely set up separately).
Stow demonstrates some sophistication by returning to T.C.C. R.3.20 rather than using his own copy of that manuscript in the case of poems one through three. I can find no evidence that his textual sophistication extended to collation as a basis for stop press corrections however. Such corrections as my selective check of STC 5076 reveals appear to be the result of no more than a haphazard reading for sense. It would be unreasonable to expect more of Stow than the enlightened fidelity which he already gives his manuscript sources.
Similarly, there is no convincing evidence that Stow went to secondary manuscripts (except possibly in the case of Thebes according to Erdmann and Ekwall) to supply readings which his own invention could give him. In the case of Poems 9 and 20, for instance, he does not pick up extra stanzas at the ends of the copies in manuscripts he is known to have been acquainted with.
Of the poems in t Stow has generally chosen the more courtly and secular to include as Chaucer's. He seems to have had some notion forty years before the publication of his Lydgate canon in Speght's Chaucer of what sort of verse was Lydgate's, as he carefully avoids almost a dozen of Lydgate's poems in t. But whether he actually believed that all the poems he attributes to
To sum up the state of our knowledge with regard to Stow's additions, we may say with confidence that fourteen of them were taken directly from t (4, 9-19, and 21-22), with reasonable certainty that four were taken from T.C.C. R.3.20 (1-3, and 23), and with less certainty that one each was taken from Cotton Cleopatra D.vii (5), Fairfax 16 (6), and Harley 78 (20). Finally, in two cases (7, 8) Stow's print is certainly itself an authority and one (24) awaits a further investigation.
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