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William Blake's Descriptive Catalogue for his 1809 Exhibition features a detailed account of the tempera painting Sir Jeffery Chaucer and the nine and twenty Pilgrims on their Journey to Canterbury.[1] Both the picture, later engraved on a large scale, and the Catalogue, which contains nineteen short quotations from the Canterbury Tales, evince careful study of some version of Chaucer's poem. Because the editions available to Blake differ substantially in both content and quality, establishing which one he used has important implications for those studying his pictures of the Pilgrims and the Descriptive Catalogue. Once Blake's source is known, we can better understand his pictorial responses to Chaucer and consider his performance as an editor offering a difficult text to a general audience.
In the passages he quoted from the Canterbury Tales, Blake freely modified word order, spelling, punctuation, and even the words themselves in an apparent effort to make the verses metrically pleasing and easily understood by readers unfamiliar with Middle English. As a result, the approximately fifty-five lines printed in the Catalogue do not correspond closely to any published text of Chaucer, a circumstance that has led some Blake scholars to despair of finding strong evidence in the quotations themselves (Kiralis 173, Bowden 173). Most arguments have therefore focused upon other considerations, particularly Blake's reference to a note that appears in 1598 Speght and all later editions, and suppositions about his scholarly practices.
But because early editors and compositors of Chaucer also introduced changes in the text, each edition differs from the others in ways that would influence spelling and wording even in a heavily modified text such as Blake's. Close analysis of the word choice, word order, and spelling in the Chaucer quotations shows that Blake used the 1687 version of the great Speght edition of Chaucer's complete works, a text that has never been fully considered as a potential source for the Descriptive Catalogue quotations.[2] Further, he still had access to a copy of this edition three years later, when it supplied the text for a pamphlet promoting the engraved version of his picture, and again about ten years thereafter, when he added five lines of additional quotations in the fourth state of the engraving. The accumulated evidence not only makes it certain that Blake used this edition as the source for his Catalogue quotations from Chaucer, but also more likely than not that he owned it.[3]
There have been four published explorations of the relationship between Blake's quotations and the editions of Chaucer that were available to him. Three different editions of the Canterbury Tales or the complete works have been proposed as Blake's source: G. E. Bentley, in the 1964 Blake Bibliography, suggested that Blake used the 1602 Speght edition, and included it among the "Books Owned" by Blake (201-202); Karl Kiralis, in a 1969 article about the painting and engraving, responded with an extended but muddled review of the evidence, vigorously attacking Bentley's reasoning and concluding that Blake probably used a much better and more recent edition, the 1775-78 Tyrwhitt edition of the Tales or some reprint of it (167-74); Bentley, in the notes to his 1978 edition of Blake, reiterated his belief that Blake used 1602 Speght, this time offering somewhat sounder arguments, but also granting that Kiralis' suggestions were plausible (2:822-823) (Bentley also dropped any mention of a Chaucer edition from the less speculative "Books Owned" section of his 1977 Blake Books); and in 1980 Betsy Bowden re-reviewed all the evidence and decided that Blake probably used yet another edition, the notoriously unreliable (but sumptuously produced and illustrated) Urry edition of 1721 (173-174). In 1984 Bentley again identified 1602 Speght as Blake's source without mentioning Kiralis or Bowden (133).
A systematic comparison of Blake's modernized text and the source texts available to him suggests that he could not possibly have derived his quotations from either the Urry or Tyrwhitt texts, and that the 1687 Speght edition is much more likely than the 1602 or any other to have been the source behind the Descriptive Catalogue. This 1687 edition is essentially a reprint, with modernized spelling, of the 1602 edition of the complete works that has been specified by Bentley, who may have supposed 1687 too rare to be considered as a potential source, or imagined it to be identical to 1602.[4] The 1687 edition is not, by modern standards, a good one; it is the last and probably the worst of a long line of casually edited "vulgate" Chaucers printed in blackletter, each a copy of its predecessor that introduces a few corrections, a few more "works," usually spurious, and many corruptions in the form of progressively modernized spelling and attendant garbling of the meter.[5]
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