University of Virginia Library

Later Quotations

It is evident then that Blake either owned or borrowed a copy of 1687 Speght when he wrote the Descriptive Catalogue. That he owned the 1687 edition is suggested by the fact that two additional instances of quotation from the same edition over the next fifteen years can be associated with Blake. The first evidence that 1687 Speght was available to him after 1809 can be found in a promotional piece for his engraved version of the painting described in the Catalogue; this 1812 pamphlet, The Prologue and Characters of Chaucer's Pilgrims, is one of several Blakean works also containing quotations from Chaucer, but all the others are obviously derived from the Descriptive Catalogue and the quotations in them are not evidence that Blake had fresh access to an edition of Chaucer. The 61-page Prologue and Characters, on the other hand, contains most of the General Prologue in two different versions, one copied more or less accurately from "the edition of Thomas Speight, printed Anno. 1687," and the other from the Modern English verse translation assembled in 1741 by George Ogle. The booklet also includes a short introduction, signed "THE EDITOR," and two small, rather crude engravings by Blake. "THE EDITOR" is obviously not Blake; most have accepted Gilchrist's conjecture that he was Benjamin Malkin, a friend and patron (264-265). Yet the two engravings and the fact that he was the printer and publisher of the work promoted by the pamphlet suggest that Blake was involved extensively in its production, and it is not unreasonable to suppose that he provided the antiquated edition from which the Middle English text was taken.

Strengthening the evidence that Blake's own copy of Speght was used for both the pamphlet and the earlier Catalogue is the appearance of five

more lines from the 1687 edition in the fourth state (formerly called the third state) of Blake's large-scale engraving after the tempera, titled Chaucers Canterbury Pilgrims, originally engraved in 1810. Robert N. Essick dates the fourth state c. 1820-23, about ten years after the pamphlet (68-69). Four lines from Chaucer and two Blakean mottos were lightly scratched in drypoint on either side of Blake's title and imprint; these were burnished or worn off in the fifth state. Beneath the lines from Chaucer are fainter vestiges of two more pairs of lines, making the new lines barely legible. An additional quotation, "Ye gon to Canterbury God mote you spede," at the bottom of the imprint replaces the address (until 1812) of Blake's brother on Golden Square; this line was deeply engraved and survives in the final state.

The four faint lines from Chaucer that appear only in the fourth state are difficult to decipher, and Bentley, Essick and I have arrived at different readings.[7] Bentley's transcription is inaccurate, perhaps because he was studying a copy of this state that is even fainter than the one at the Huntington Library, the one transcribed here and in Essick. My reading of the Huntington copy differs only slightly from Essick's, who sees "gadrid" where I see "gadird" in the very faint third line (Essick 68-69).

Nevertheless, these four faint lines and the fifth, which is deeply engraved in a clear "Gothic" lettering style, provide sufficient evidence to show that Blake copied them from 1687 rather than 1602:

Blake:
A morrow when the day began to spring
Up rose our Host and was our alder cocke
And gadird us together on a flock—
***
Let see now: Who shall tell the first Tale
***
Ye gon to Canterbury God mote you spede,

That Blake and 1687 capitalize "Host" whereas 1602 does not is weak evidence in itself; similarly, we would expect Blake to modernize the somewhat difficult "se" of 1602. But these instances of agreement between 1687 and Blake, taken together with the presence in both of "gon" rather than the "gone" of 1602, make it much more likely that Blake was working with 1687

than 1602 or any of the other editions (all of which differ even more substantially from Blake's text).[8]

The inscriptions on the engraving are particularly good evidence that Blake owned 1687 Speght, for two reasons. First, the quoted lines are from three different places at the end of the General Prologue, and none of them were included in the Descriptive Catalogue or The Prologue and Characters. He must, therefore, have newly consulted a copy of the 1687 edition. Further, the project of engraving additional lines was rather casually undertaken and executed. Blake had no strong need to add lines from any edition of Chaucer, not even where the old address had been burnished out (flourishes would have served to balance the composition of the imprint at least as well), so it does not make sense to imagine that he went to the trouble of borrowing for this purpose a copy of the unusual edition that he had used ten and fifteen years before.