Fitt Divisions in Middle English Romances: A Consideration of the Evidence

Abstract

Most students of Middle English literature first encounter fitts in the works of two major poets: Chaucer and the Gawain-poet. In their Robinson or Riverside texts of Sir Thopas they find the tale divided by rubrics into two or three fitts: The First Fitt, The Second Fitt; and in the Riverside edition (followingJohn Burrow's suggestion that the address to the audience at the nineteenth stanza should be read as the opening of another fitt), The Third Fitt. Skeat's text, like Robinson's, has just two fitts, and signals only the second by a rubric, and that in square brackets indicating its editorial, not authorial or even scribal authority.' The manuscripts do, of course, mark the division of the tale into fitts, but not by prefatory rubrics. The division is made perfectly clear within the text of the tale by the three narratorial lines concluding the first fitt: 'Loo, lordes myne, heere is a fit!I Ifye wol any moore of it, I To telle it wol I fonde.' A large capital at the beginning of the next line in some manuscripts draws the reader's attention to the beginning of the new fitt. But the modern reader of the standard edition of The Canterbury Tales reads the text sectioned by the editorial rubrics in the manner of chapter headings. In the case of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight editions and critical discussions refer as a matter of course to the four divisions of the poem as Fitts I, 2, 3, and 4. Yet not only is none of them so named or numbered in the manuscript, but the text makes no internal reference, as Sir Thopas does, to the completion of a fitt. It is simply that the manuscript indicates the special importance of the opening lines of four stanzas, spaced roughly equally through the poem, and marking some new departure in the narrative, with a large four, six, or eight-line initial, a space between the stanzas, and a decorated horizontal line. Other large, three-line initials are not equipped with this continuity-breaking line, and probably mark passages of particular interest, like a pointing finger in the margin. Since the poem exists only in this one manuscript there is no problem about reconciling variants in the occurrence or placing of the division-marking initials. So the modern reader has the text divided, possibly as it was always meant to be, but with the