University of Virginia Library

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:

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:

Reinecke's comment after quoting this passage certainly seems just: 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, Ha4 and El. The role of Ha4 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:

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,

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": 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:

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 Ha4 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:

In illustration of Robinson's neglect of manuscript relations, Reinecke pointed to the way he nevertheless "tended to cling to this manuscript [Ha4]," 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 Ha4 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.