CHAUCER AND 'ADAM SCRIVEYN'

Abstract

The poem printed below occurs uniquely in Trinity College Cambridge, MS R. 3. 20, p. 367; my transcript is verbatim:1Adam scryveyne / if euer it bee byfalleBoece or Troylus / for to wryten nuweVnder by long lokkes / bowe most haue be scalleBut affter my makyng bowe wryt more truweSo offt adaye I mot by werk renuweIt to corect and eke to rubbe and scrape /And al is thorugh by necglygence and rapeThe poem is headed 'Ghanaers wordes a Geffrey vn to Adame his owen scryveyne.'2This poem has enjoyed an unquestioned place in the Chaucer canon since it was fiist printed by John Stow in his 1561 edition of The workes of Geffrey Chaucer, newly printed (STC 5075), fol. ccclvv. But there seem to be substantial grounds, some of a previously unremarked kind, for doubting that it is by Chaucer.3Trinity College R. 3. 20 is copied in the hand of John Shirley (f. 1366- £.1456), who is perforce the sole authority for the attribution of this poem to Chaucer. Shirley is a crucial figure in establishing the canon of Chaucer's shorter poems, a number of which are also included in modern editions on his authority alone, including The complaint of Mars' and The complaint of Venus', and 'Fortune', as well as possibly other poems that appear in manuscripts that seem to be Shirley-derived.4But Shirley has not been seen as uniformly reliable as an attributor. A number of poems he ascribes to Chaucer, included in manuscripts he himself copied, or which seem to derive from his own, now lost, originals, have never gained canonical acceptance: the ascription to Chaucer of The balade of a reeve' in BL, Add. MS 16165 nas not been endorsed by modern scholarship; nor has the 'cronycle made by Chaucier' in Bodleian Library, Ashmole 5 9. Other poems with which he is associated have excited similar unease in terms of their attribution.5 And there are other grounds for being doubtful about Shirley's attributional reliability, especially in relation to Lydgate.6The inclusion of 'Adam Scriveyn' (I will use this short form of the tide) within the Chaucer canon is open to doubt on a variety of grounds other than the substantial one of the uncertain authority of Shirley's attribution. Some of these grounds are of limited force: it is, for example, the only poem included in the Chaucer canon that comprises a single rhyme royal stanza.More significant may be lexical evidence. In the seven lines of the poem, there are five words that appear nowhere else in the canon - 'scryveyne' (line 1), 'scalle' (line 3), 'renuwe* (line 5), 'scrape* (line 6), 'rape* (line 7) - and four that are used in senses that occur nowhere else in the canon - truwe* (line 4) in the sense of accurately*; 'cored' (line 6) in the sense of 'remove errors'; 'rubbe* (line 6) in the sense of 'erase'. The last word in this second category, 'makyng* (line 4), is discussed below. Such a dense accumulation of unique occurrences in such a brief compass is without parallel in Chaucer's canonical lexis; it seems potentially significant.7To this evidence may be added that of the situation the poem appears to describe. The speaking voice complains about the errors of a scribe, errors that entail the necessity of the speaker engaging in 'rubbing and scraping'. The general assumption seems to have been that the complaint was directed by Chaucer to his Own' scribe. But put in such terms it is not easy to envision the situation: rubbing and scraping are specialist activities that would normally be undertaken by a scribe to a finished manuscript, that is one that has been completed in fair copy by (generally) a trained copyist, as Adam seems, at least notionally, to have been. At earlier stages in the compositional process such careful efforts at correction would lack necessity since less labour-intensive means of signalling correction would be appropriate: deletion, interlineation, or marginal corrections. Why would Chaucer, at the latest stage in production, be involved in the actual preparation of the final manuscript, doing tasks that fall within the purview of the skilled artisan? …