University of Virginia Library

Recent Chaucer Editions I (Single-Text Editions)

One of the more striking aspects of recent Chaucer editions is the privileging of the Hengwrt manuscript (Hg) for the Canterbury Tales. Among the editors to have done this are Pratt, Blake, those involved in the Oklahoma Variorum project, and even Donaldson in his earlier normalized edition. The justification for the reliance on Hg is generally claimed to lie in the Manly-Rickert edition of 1940.[15]

The problems of using Manly-Rickert (a genealogical edition) in support of a single-text edition based on Hg have been pointed out before.[16] Manly-Rickert's prefaces are often baffling, and the varying stemmata constructed never show Hg in a position of supreme authority for O' (the supposed common ancestor of all manuscripts that Manly-Rickert attempt to reconstruct). The conflation of competing and often antithetical editorial theories has led to confusion, both in the methods themselves and in the language used to describe them (e.g., best text, base text, copy text, basis of collation).[17]

Such conflation seems to be acknowledged in the Editor's Preface of the 1979 facsimile—the first volume produced by the Variorum Project:

According to this, a best-text method is used to provide a text to serve as the basis of commentary; but the supposedly "neutral" text that results is supposedly one that cannot be improved, that is, the best-text method yields the best edition.[19]

The Variorum Chaucer has dual purposes, and these lead to contradictions (both in tone and in substance) in the prefaces. In the General Editors' Preface (I quote here the version printed in Ross's Miller's Tale), the editors say that their purpose is "only to provide a text upon which the commentary should depend" (p. xv). But the conflicting claims of the 1979 Preface (to produce the best possible edition) are scattered through each volume. In his own introduction, Ross (perhaps following Pearsall p. 97) states: "The text of The Miller's Tale in this edition is in one way more ambitious than is the monumental work of MR. . . . The Variorum Edition may thus present The Miller's Tale as Chaucer wrote it, as nearly as our present knowledge and resources permit" (p. 61).[20] These inflated claims and attendant rhetoric are occasionally repeated in reviews. According to one reviewer, a recent Variorum editor gives "all the evidence necessary for establishment of a text which would probably be as near to the original as present knowledge and scholarship could make possible."[21] Pratt's earlier edition makes similar claims: "the present text represents as accurately as possible Manly's 'latest common original of all extant manuscripts' (O'), with the correction of all recognizable errors in the transmission to O' of Chaucer's own text (O). . . . In attempting to recreate the text as Chaucer wrote it . . ." (p. 561).

The arguments of Pratt and the Variorum Editors seem to assert that Manly and Rickert's reconstruction of the latest common ancestor (O') of all MSS is itself not in question. All that remains to do is to correct the "manifest errors" in that reconstructed ancestor and we are as close to Chaucer's text (O) "as it is possible to get."

But how can Hg be used for what precedes Manly-Rickert's O' when O' is it itself constructed in part on the basis of Hg? The argument for this depends on a serious misrepresentation of Manly-Rickert's methods; Pearsall's statement is an example:

The manifest circularity of the first part of this statement is not at issue here. What concerns me is only the failure to distinguish a "basis for collation" from "base text." Pearsall's reasoning, in a single-text edition, conflates the language of two competing methods. Manly-Rickert used Skeat's "Student Edition" as a "basis of collation" for their recension edition; Skeat's edition is itself based on El (it is eclectic). But Pearsall implies that Manly-Rickert took Skeat as their "base text," emending it in the direction of Hg; that is, he argues as if they were producing a different type of edition.

Manly-Rickert, in the section entitled "Manner of Collating" to which Pearsall refers, discuss only the method of collating manuscripts and the mechanical means of recording variants; as a "basis for collation," they used Skeat's Student's Edition (2:5). Its function was only to collate manuscripts and to aid in the construction of lemmata. The readings in that edition are of course irrelevant and unrecorded. As a text, it has no more authority than a translation, which could have served the same function. To ignore this is to assume that Manly and Rickert, whatever their failings as editors, after examining and describing all the Canterbury Tales manuscripts, did not recognize the difference between a manuscript authority and a modern edition. I am not certain what Pearsall means by his statement that the Manly-Rickert edition "moves consistently from the text used as the basis for collation . . . toward Hg." But if all this means is that in cases where Manly-Rickert differ from Skeat they tend toward Hg, I see nothing surprising in that. Had they used Hg as a basis for collation, similar results might have obtained. In cases where they differed from Hg, they might well "tend" toward something else, perhaps El, perhaps even Skeat.

A basis for collation is something used to collate manuscripts and produce lemmata, not a "base text" for an edition. As the Variorum Editors recognize, "The decision about what is a lemma is, of course, purely arbitrary" (Ross, p. 52). To choose a version of the text to be edited is wise from an economic standpoint only, since it would be tedious to set forth every manuscript reading as a variant of an arbitrary lemma. But two sets of lemmata must be distinguished. The preliminary lemmata produced while collating MSS (defined as variants of a "basis of collation") are not the same as those listed in the notes to an edited text (defined as variants of the edited text).[22]

Manly and Rickert use a genealogical method, and as such, they have no base text at all. Pearsall acknowledges this, but then describes Manly-Rickert's "basis for collation" as a "copy-text": "It is noteworthy, therefore, that MR, though they use no base manuscript (the copy-text is SK), draw frequently toward Hg and away from El in their choice of readings" (p. 122).[23]

To speak of a copy-text for Manly-Rickert is misleading and unnecessary, even though certain texts can be identified as serving functions associated with a copy-text. The Student Skeat operates as a basis of collation only (it does not even provide line numbers). For matters of spelling, the function of copy-text is served by a system presumably based on a comparison of Hg and El:

In reference to the Hg-based texts themselves (the Variorum and the editions of Blake and Pratt), the notion of "copy-text" should be merely redundant (thus unnecessary), since "copy-text" is simply subsumed under the notion of "base text" and occasionally "best text." The usual way the Variorum Editors speak of Hg is as a "base text" (the Variorum is "based on/upon Hg."[25] But the term "copy-text" is sometimes used as a variation: "On the other hand, Hg omits two couplets, both of which are included in the present

edition, though enclosed in brackets to indicate that they are not in the copy-text" (Ross, p. 54). Moreover, "copy-text" is also used to mean "the exemplar for a specific extant MS": "[Hg and El] were written from different exemplars at different times. . . . El's copytext had two extra couplets, which may have been Chaucer's . . ." (ibid.).

There is no question that Hg is the "copy-text" for the Variorum Edition, but to speak of it as such is merely to invoke textual-critical language that applies to a different editorial situation. Hg's function as copy-text is trivial, since it is also the base text and for these editors the best text. The Variorum is a simple variant of a single-text edition; Hg is "conservatively emended" from a number of manuscripts, selected on the basis of Manly-Rickert's groupings.[26] It thus has the potential for incorporating not only the virtues of the genealogical, eclectic, and single-text methods but their failings as well.

The arguments of N. F. Blake for the privileging of Hg are similar in many respects to those of the Variorum Editors. But Blake's editing theory gives greater authority to Hg, and provides as well a dynamic model of manuscript exemplars that complicates the entire enterprise of producing a static (i.e., printable) edition.[27] Blake's edition is, like the Variorum, a single-text edition, although Blake refers to Hg as "base MS": "in the light of our present knowledge it is safest to edit the poem . . . using Hg as the base manuscript and excluding anything not found in it" ("On Editing," p. 111). Blake acknowledges the convenience of an assumption of strict linear descent of MSS, an assumption that would turn any manuscript into an absolute authority for all posterior readings: "If we accept that there is a manuscript tradition which goes back to one manuscript, Hg., then there are three possible ways to edit the poem" (p. 105). Blake's purpose is to discard the notion of "authorial variants" and thus to simplify the editorial process; the assumption of lineal descent of all MSS from a single manuscript is a convenient polemical position. But the assumption Blake seems to have made is less radical. Blake assumes the descent of all MSS from an exemplar copied by Hg: "That all manuscripts are ultimately dependent upon Hg's copy-text will guide editorial practice, for it presupposes that there was only one copy-text" (p. 112); "later scribes used Hg's exemplar rather than Hg" (p. 113). This assumption, of course, challenges the absolute authority of Hg, since it acknowledges other lines of descent from O' (i.e., radial descent, rather than linear descent). If this is the case, Hg has no more authority a priori than any other MS., a difficulty Blake tries to overcome by allowing that other MSS may "suggest . . . how Hg may be emended or corrected" (p. 119), leaving open the question of whether they can do so with any authority.[28]

But let us look here at Blake's notion of copy-text, by which he means

the exemplar for Hg, "Chaucer's working copy" ("On Editing," p. 115).[29] Blake claims that this hypothetical exemplar was constantly revised in an "editorial office" (p. 115). As does Pearsall, Blake uses "copy-text" to mean both an editor's copy-text as well as an historical exemplar for an extant version of a text. This notion of copy-text is part of further terminological slippage: "But if the exemplar (i.e., Chaucer's own fragments) was being constantly emended in the editorial office, the good text would gradually disappear under a host of corrections" (p. 116). Whereas Manly-Rickert studied the extremely complex relations among real manuscripts in search of a singular hypothetical origin (O'), Blake reverses this logic, dismissing all complexities among real manuscripts as meaningless, and hypothesizing instead an equally complex (and less well-documented) history that produces the single extant manuscript Hg. Thus, the problems associated with the editorial copy-text (problems the very nature of a single-text edition should solve) are reintroduced on a hypothetical, historical level, where such terms as "exemplar," "Chaucer's own fragments," "copy-text," and "good text" exist in some uneasy equation.[30] Blake's apparent reliance on a single authority, an assumption that should simplify matters, in fact hypothesizes a situation (a medieval editorial office) in which no single authority seems to exist or can be articulated much less recovered. Thus Blake can dismiss as "the rather uncertain art of literary criticism" ("On Editing," p. 103) all attempts to recover editorially more than a group of Chaucerian fragments.