The Chaucerian Apocrypha: A Selection ed. by Kathleen Forni, and: Chaucerian Dream Visions and Complaints ed. by Dana M. Symons

Abstract

REVIEWS How should we categorize a writer who employs populist forms even while manifesting great distrust for ‘‘the people’’? Although Ford’s book may not offer the final word on this question, it successfully highlights the Festial as a rich resource for ongoing scholarly investigation. Moira Fitzgibbons Marist College Kathleen Forni, ed. The Chaucerian Apocrypha: A Selection. Kalamazoo : Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University , for TEAMS in association with the University of Rochester, 2005. Pp. vii, 169. $15.00, paper. Dana M. Symons, ed. Chaucerian Dream Visions and Complaints. Kalamazoo : Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University , for TEAMS in association with the University of Rochester, 2004. Pp. vii, 293. $22.00, paper. The Middle English Texts Series began modestly in 1990 with the prospect of inexpensive student editions designed for classroom use, but many of these paperbacks quickly established themselves as the new standard editions for scholarly citation. This has been particularly true for works of the ‘‘Chaucer Apocrypha’’ previously available only in outdated EETS editions and Walter W. Skeat’s still-useful Chaucerian and Other Pieces: Being a Supplement to the Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer (1897), with its assembly of thirty-one of these spurious texts. The previous TEAMS volumes The Floure and the Leafe (1990), Six Ecclesiastical Satires (1991), The Canterbury Tales: Fifteenth-Century Continuations and Additions (1992), Poems of Robert Henryson (1997), Thomas Usk’s Testament of Love (1998), and John Lydgate’s The Siege of Thebes (2001) placed most of the longer texts in print according to editorial standards much more exacting than would normally be expected in undergraduate textbooks . Original manuscripts and early printings have been consulted for establishing base texts and assessing variant readings. Introductions and annotations as well as textual notes maintain high standards of professional rigor. Bibliographies are comprehensive and timely. Nowhere are PAGE 495 495 ................. 16596$ CH13 11-01-10 14:08:25 PS STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER these dual commitments to scholarship and pedagogy so beautifully balanced perhaps than in the two volumes under review here. Kathleen Forni’s The Chaucerian Apocrypha: A Selection arrives as a valuable supplement to her critical study The Chaucerian Apocrypha: A Counterfeit Canon (2001). Her volume includes some well-known pieces by named authors as well as the flotsam and jetsam of the ancillary tradition , mostly preserved in the folio editions of William Thynne (1532), John Stow (1561), and Thomas Speght (1598). The determination of Chaucer’s genuine productions and the gradual removal of inauthentic pieces from the canon started with Thomas Tyrwhitt’s landmark edition of The Canterbury Tales (1775–78), continued with the enterprises of the nineteenth-century scholars such as Bradshaw, Ten Brink, Furnivall, and Skeat, and was still being hashed out by Robinson in his first Riverside Chaucer (1933). Here we can revisit some of the texts that contributed to Chaucer’s early reputation and continue, almost on a subliminal level, to color the ways that we conceive of the personality and productions of the Father of English Poetry. After a welcome new edition of The Court of Love, Forni proceeds by grouping shorter texts under three general headings. ‘‘Literature of Courtly Love’’ includes The Floure of Curtesye written by John Lydgate, ‘‘The Antifeminist Tradition’’ offers Beware (The Blynde Eteth Many a Flye) newly attributed to Lydgate, and ‘‘Good Counsel, Wisdom, and Advice’’ brings the collection to a close with John Gower’s In Praise of Peace and Henry Scogan’s Moral Balade. There are many happy surprises in these groupings. For example, Shakespeare’s anti-Petrarchan Sonnet 130—‘‘My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun’’—clearly had a native precedent in the seven-stanza verse (pp. 105–6) preserved only in Cambridge Trinity MS R.3.19 and the more recently discovered Leiden MS Vossius 9: I have a Lady, whereso she be, That seldom ys the soverayn of my thought; On whos beawté when I beholde and se, Remembryng me how well she ys wrought, I thanke fortune that to hyr grace me brought, So fayre ys she but nothyng angelyke – Hyr bewty ys to none other lyke. These new editions play catch-up, in a sense, with recent critical interests in these long...