Animadversions on the Text of Chaucer, 1988

Abstract

The address of the President to his colleagues at the Medieval Academy is an invitation to speak about a subject close to the heart. was told by the aunt who met me at the boat when returned from Persia (as it was then called) at the age of fourteen a typical Kipling child, leaving my family on the other side of the world and returning home to school that when she asked me what was going to do when grew up, said firmly, I am going to teach Chaucer. Well, it has been my privilege to study and teach and edit and write about Chaucer for nearly half a century. So there is no subject that could speak about closer to my heart. What would like to do is to sum up where we stand today, as see it, on the text of Chaucer, particularly the text of The Canterbury Tales. It is almost exactly 601 years since Chaucer began compiling the collection the putative date of the gathering at the Tabard Inn is 17 April 1387;' and it is nearly a hundred years since Frederick Furnivall and Walter W. Skeat chose the Ellesmere manuscript as the best copy text the death of Henry Bradshaw in 1886 left to Skeat the editing of the Oxford Chaucer.2 We are now in the throes of a change in our views of the texts of both Troylus and Criseyde and The Canterbury Tales which may bring into question much of the criticism since 1900; hence the importance of the sexcentenary reinforces my personal predilection for the subject of my remarks. The first important fact to bear in mind is that we have no authoritative text for any of Chaucer's writings. It is striking that neither of the first two fathers of English literature left official texts. In both cases they obviously felt that performance was more important than publication. No authoritative manuscripts of any of Shakespeare's plays survive. He may have concerned himself with printing Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, but his plays belonged to the company. Only after his death did his colleagues, John Hemings and Henry Condell, collect the prompt copies, players' scripts, and