On the Eighteenth-Century Ownership
of a MS of Chaucer's Legend of Good Women, British
Library Additional 9832
by
Constance S. Wright
In a note in SB (35 [1982], 154-155), Arthur Sherbo
suggests that Samuel Pegge, an eighteenth-century antiquarian, probably did
not own MS British Library, Additional 9832, containing Chaucer's
Legend of Good Women, but "another but now lost version
.
. ." which was closer to the Additional ms than any other extant ms. An
examination of the ms and the passages which Pegge quotes in a note in
The Gentlemen's Magazine for June 1758 (pp. 260-262)
suggests, however, that it is much more likely that Pegge owned the
Additional ms than Sherbo supposes.
At the outset, it should be pointed out that the only unique variant
which Sherbo cites from the ms and Pegge's note is markidall
(l. 222). This reading is correct for Pegge but incorrect for both Furnivall's
transcription, which Sherbo uses as the basis for his comparison, and for
the ms itself, both of which read makyd all.
An examination of the ms and the citations in Pegge's note shows that
they share a number of readings. The Additional ms was the only one
containing
the lines Pegge cites in private hands in 1758 and Pegge makes it clear that
he had the ms from which he was quoting in his possession: "I have a MS,
of this part of the author . . ." (p. 261). The lemmata for the comparison
are from Bodleian Library, MS Fairfax 16, which contains much more
conventional readings of the passages than do Additional 9832 or Pegge:
- 59 loved] lovith Ad P / hotter in his lyve] hartyer A lyve Ad;
hartyer alyve P
- 60 eye] evyn Ad P / blyve] belyve Ad P
- 61 evere] om. Ad P / gynneth] g. to Ad; ginneth to
P
- 64 the] om. Ad P
- 65 ther] then Ad P
- 180 for] om. Ad P
- 184 of day] o. the d. Ad P
- 212 from a fer] fro me farre Ad P
- 214 real] A Ryall Ad; a roiall P
- 217 flourouns] floures Ad P
- 220 flowrouns] fflours Ad; floures P
- 221 For] And Ad P / of] om. Ad P / fyne] fyne and
Ad P
- 223 which] the w. Ad P
- 225 Considered] Considderith Ad P
Thus in the twenty-six lines which Pegge quotes from his ms of
The Legend—lines 59-64, 180-184, and
212-225—there are
nineteen correspondences (with some trifling orthographic differences)
between the Additional ms and Pegge. In four instances Pegge does not
follow the Additional ms. In line 63, Fa and Ad read she,
while
P reads the; in line 214 Fa and P read grene,
while
Ad reads of grene; in 222 Fa reads I makyd al,
Ad
reads makyd al, and P reads markidall; and in
224
Fa and P read sene, while Ad reads seme.
Lines 63
and 222 may be mistranscriptions. With respect to the other two lines, John
Urry's Workes of Geoffrey Chaucer of 1721 reads
grene at 214 and sene at 224. In his note Pegge
makes it clear that he had compared the readings of his ms with those of
Urry's text (pp. 261-262). If Pegge wrote his collations in a copy of Urry,
as did Timothy and William Thomas and an anonymous
eighteenth-century bibliophile whose readings were probably from
Additional 9832,[1] possibly Pegge's
eye skipped from his marginal annotations to Urry's text itself while he was
making the transcriptions for his note. Moreover, Pegge's quotations are
lineated (and correctly), and Urry's is the first printed edition of Chaucer
to employ lineation.
For these reasons I think that it is much more likely that Pegge owned
Additional 9832.
It would also be interesting to know if Pegge owned Additional 9832
in 1758, since possession of that ms might indicate the whereabouts of MS
Phillips 6570, containing fragments of the Canterbury Tales,
with which the Additional ms was bound in 1745, but from which it was
divided when the mss were sold from the library of Joseph Haslewood in
1833.[2]
Notes
