University of Virginia Library

Implications for Interpretation of the "Clerk's Tale"

Exactly what kind of guidance does a reconstruction of the production process for HM140 provide for evaluating the absence of major sections, the "Prologue" and the "Lordynges" and "Wife of Bath" stanzas, from the text of the Clerk's Tale? These omissions are crucial for constructing any interpretation of the tale in its HM140 context because these sections of the tale provide the reader with a guide for reading the work. I have argued elsewhere that, in The Canterbury Tales, the "Prologue" introduces two of the narrative voices which constitute the tale's dialogic discourse (Multi-Voiced). The two transitional stanzas towards the tale's end also promote the dialogic voicing of the tale because they allude specifically to the performative frame of the Canterbury context. The absence of these passages in the HM140 site has the effect of reducing the complex and contradictory voicing of the tale to a more monologic narrative voicing, which fits a more conventional moral viewpoint. So it is important for any interpretation of the tale in the HM140 anthology to evaluate whether their absence is the result of deliberate editing, omission in the exemplar, or scribal mis-transcription.

This analysis shows that it is very probable that the scribe simply missed these two stanzas in his copying. Their omission comes right at the end of his stint, just before the final five lines on f84, and he had just dropped a complete stanza several folios earlier (f81; E1009-1015). This, combined with the fact that the frequency of the line omissions increased towards the end of his stint, makes it plausible that he simply missed the lines, possibly because he was interrupted. The fact that his stint ended just three lines before the end of the folio page strongly suggests that it was not planned but the result of some distracting interruption, which may very well have been the reason for the termination. But my conclusions that the missing stanzas were the result of mis-transcription are also based on an analysis of the tale in other manuscripts.

Such a conclusion, however, is not immediately apparent. When I examined the twenty-two manuscripts in the group Manly identified as having a close textual relationship with HM140 I found the following.[21] Virtually all of the manuscripts in this group (except Np and Ra1) have the "Prologue," which is not surprising because all, except Np, contain the tale in its Canterbury context. Most have the "Wife of Bath" stanza (except Ld2, Lc, Mg, Np),

and all have the "Lordynges" stanza. One conclusion that can be drawn from this analysis is that the version of the tale in HM140 is unusual for the group with which it shares a close textual affiliation because it is missing important contextualizing sections of the tale that virtually all others have.

In a detailed analysis comparing all the missing lines in HM140 with those of the four other manuscripts that Manly identified as having the closest textual affiliation, I found that none has any of the omissions that HM140 has, and only one has a single set of similar line transpositions.[22] The fact that there are so many missing lines unique to HM140 confirms my conclusion that the omissions in the text, including the "Lordynges" and "Wife of Bath" stanzas, could have resulted from disruptions in the copying process itself, and not from editorial changes or omissions in the exemplar. An examination of 6 other manuscripts randomly chosen from the group sharing a close textual affiliation with HM140 (Ry1, S12, Ld2, Np, Cp, La) further confirms this evaluation. Except for La, which transposes lines 456/457, none of these MSS has any of the line transpositions of HM140. And except for Np, none of these manuscripts is missing any of the lines lacking in HM140.[23]

But it is possible that some changes in the text of the tale are the result of the tale's new non-Canterbury context. Unlike virtually all of the manuscripts with which it shares a close textual affiliation, HM140 contains an "independent" version of the tale. When we look at this class of manuscripts, a slightly different pattern emerges: none of these manuscripts has the "Prologue" or "Wife of Bath" stanza. Thus we can deduce that the usual ordinatio of the tale in non-Canterbury sites is without the contextualizing frame that the Prologue provided. And the omission of the "Wife of Bath" stanza is not unusual even in the Canterbury context, where it is absent in about twenty manuscripts. So it is possible that the exemplar for HM140 had no "Prologue" or "Wife of Bath" stanza. Both these patterns, which suggest different histories for the tale's transcription, raise serious doubts about the deliberate editing out of the two transition stanzas in the HM140 context.

A plausible narrative regarding the omissions is that both the "Prologue" and "Wife of Bath" stanza were absent in the exemplar and that the scribe

miscopied the "Lordynges' stanza, as he did the earlier stanza (f81 seven lines [E1009-15] missing between lines 2 and 3). The possibility of a miscopying of the stanza has an even greater plausibility because it occurs right at the end of scribe 3's stint. But an even more important point is that we cannot determine from the manuscript "evidence" whether these omissions of text were intentional "excisions," as Lerer claims (and if they were, at what point in the process of manufacture they occurred) or whether they were a consequence of the problematics of production. These conclusions regarding the poor quality of the transcription and the standard ordinatio of the "independent" versions raise serious doubts that the absent sections of the text were deliberately edited out.

What I think this detailed codicological analysis of HM140 makes abundantly clear is that the quality of the manuscript's production was not high, or rather that it suffered a radical decrease in the sixth quire, where most of the Clerk's Tale was transcribed. Consequently, the inferences that can be drawn about the missing parts of text have to be carefully qualified. The analysis shows that the manuscript "evidence" is, at best, ambiguous, throwing real doubt on the definitive status of the "intentional structure" of the tale's ordinatio. The lack of a clear conception of this structure makes it impossible to ground any interpretation of the tale. The destabilization created by the low quality control of the tale's transcription is also advanced by other ambiguous features in the residue of the manuscript: the unfinished state of the first two booklets and the heterogeneous collocation of booklets in the manuscript's compilatio.