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D. Flaws in Robinson's Editorial Method and Why They Matter

Because for more than fifty years Robinson's text has been Chaucer's text for almost everyone, resistance to the idea that it is basically flawed is inevitable. While one reader of an earlier version of this study pointed out that Robinson's editions "have presented a sanitized, smoothened Chaucer to too many generations of students and scholars," two others spoke for what will likely be a majority in their doubts that any material gains would be made if Chaucer's text were edited in a different way. I have only the space to respond to such doubts by the description of method given above and by a brief discussion of why an alternative is preferable. Fortunately, however, ample materials are available now, as they were not in 1933, to anyone who honestly wishes to resolve the question for himself. In closing I shall briefly address the question of a preferable method.

In response to my conclusion that Robinson's text "indicates a heavy dependence upon earlier editions," a critic might ask, "Why necessarily bad?" If the editors of those editions had been in full possession of the relevant manuscript evidence, if those editors had been primarily responsive to that evidence rather than to earlier editions, if further the editor who used those earlier editions had taken both the manuscript evidence and the editions fully into account, and if finally that editor had given a full and accurate account of his procedure, then that way of editing might at least be arguable. I believe that I have presented enough evidence that such was not the case with Robinson's edition, but I would argue that such a procedure is not desirable in any case.

In the first place, the editors who published before Manly-Rickert possessed only a fraction of the manuscript evidence. Furthermore, they worked with a reading of the manuscript evidence which any resort to Manly-Rickert or to one of the Variorum fascicles will show was badly flawed. And finally, those editors were influenced by much faultier editions published earlier which further vitiated their work. Skeat very eloquently conveys the shock of learning how the editors before him had done their work:

The accretion of such changes is, after all, a version of what happened in the descent of the manuscripts themselves: not only did scribes inevitably make inadvertent errors in copying, but their suspicions that such errors existed in their exemplars led some of them to make deliberate changes of just the kinds made by later editors with similar suspicions, the changes accumulating through the years so as to move the text progressively away from what Chaucer wrote. While editors of the Tales such as Robinson who have based their editions upon earlier ones have removed some of the accretions to Chaucer's text of earlier editions, they have brought forward many others, as in Robinson's acceptance of very questionable Ha4 readings adopted by Skeat. Furthermore, when, as with Robinson, they have worked not inductively from the manuscript evidence but deductively from such grounds as rigid notions about grammar and meter, then they have necessarily added their own accretions to the 'cloak' of editorial changes which Chaucer's text wears.

Thus, this way of editing by primary resort to earlier editions performs in a way effectively the opposite of the genealogical method which strives to work back through the layers of change to the archetype. The principal reason for an initial attempt to work out the relations of the manuscripts is that by doing so an editor can have objective help in detecting and removing the changes to which an author's text has been subjected since he wrote it. By choosing among earlier editorial choices of readings with little regard for their bases in the manuscripts and their relationships, Robinson piled his own particular set of choices upon those made by earlier editors, in their turn based upon others, often in a chain all the way back to the earliest editions.[16] If nothing else, an editor who begins with the testimony of fifteenth-century manuscripts will have to deal with the accretion of only a few decades of changes in Chaucer's text rather than five centuries of them.

One very important reason that the editor's starting-point usually has such great influence upon his decisions and thus upon his completed text is simply the influence of use. A look at the hold which the very erratic Ha4 text had upon the nineteenth-century understanding of the text should be cautionary for all: as the basis of the printed texts which scholars learned from, taught from, and cited in their studies, that manuscript and its readings gained so much credibility from sheer use that some of them labored long and hard after the appearance of the Six-Text Edition to explain the vagaries of Ha4 (in clear opposition to the testimony of the six) as revisions by Chaucer himself. Robinson's text has been a like case for this century, with the added confusion that the supposed basis of his text in El has not been as most have thought: this belief has led some to argue for El's superiority without reference to the evidence in Manly-Rickert and in the Variorum fascicles that the text of El was carefully changed in its making in much the way a modern editor might do, and despite the evidence of collation that in the great majority of cases of conflict the evidence of independent lines of manuscript descent favors the Hg reading.

Thus, the latest edition of Chaucer, the Riverside or "Third Edition" of Robinson's text, follows and perpetuates a very unfortunate example. The first flaw in Robinson's way of editing is that it neglected the all-important first step of inductively examining the manuscript evidence. Rather, Robinson's first steps were deductive and based upon untenable assumptions: that the manuscripts are related by a bifid stemma, that among them Skeat and other early editions adequately represented the better branch of that stemma

("type A"), and that Robinson possessed virtually unerring guides in his ideas about Chaucer's grammar and meter. Also, Robinson's primary resort to editions rather than to manuscripts caused patterns in his choices which were at odds with his own theories: Ha4 readings adopted by Skeat persist in Robinson's text despite his acceptance of Tatlock's critique of its testimony; also, because his primary points of reference were the editions, he failed to note how his textual decisions continued the movement from El to Hg readings begun by Skeat, despite the assertion of both editors that El was clearly the superior (a matter to be developed in a separate study).

Because manuscript testimony had only secondary importance for Robinson, and because he believed that his very neat and rigid ideas about Chaucer's meter and grammar fully matched Chaucer's own throughout the fifteen or more years that Chaucer worked on the Tales, those ideas served as much more constant guides for his decisions than the manuscript testimony. Space is too limited to demonstrate the effects of Robinson's imposition of these ideas upon the text, but materials are readily available for anyone to make the comparison: for reading an 'unsanitized, unsmoothened' Canterbury Tales, the First Fascicle of the Variorum Chancer[17] presents a facsimile and transcription of the Hg text with marginal collation of El, so that anyone with a copy of Robinson's text can compare it with one copied by a scribe who consciously changed nothing (Hg) as well as with one copied by a careful scribe given to a certain amount of "smoothing" of the meter and occasionally to coming up with a 'better' word (El). Alternatively, those who wish to compare Robinson's way of editing with that of other editors and with the available manuscript evidence may turn to the other Variorum fascicles of tales which have been published to date (with collations below the text). In either case, because of the influence of the texts of El and especially of Robinson, the reader's initial tendency may be to lean toward the 'smoothened' version. Before long, however, a preference should emerge for the more lively verse, freed from five centuries' encasement in editorial decisions and supported by the best manuscript evidence.