THE GAWAIN POEMS: A STATISTICAL APPROACH TO THE QUESTION OF COMMON AUTHORSHIP

Abstract

number of definitely assigned works. The first kind of debate is historical, speculative, and largely useless:1 it would not help much our understanding of an anonymous medieval poem if it suddenly acquired a named author of whom little was known (Thomas Chestre, for instance, has been a name to do little more than conjure with). The third kind of debate has been more or less concluded, or at least the noises of disagreement have died down: there is perhaps the chance of an odd poem or two being added to or dropped from the Chaucer or Hoccleve or Lydgate canon, but nothing substantial would be changed. The second kind of debate has perhaps provoked more contentious hot air than either of the others (the history of the struggle to prove common authorship of the three versions of Piers Plowman is the most notable example), but a number of questions remain open, and to answer them would be a significant advance in understanding. The New Criticism may well scorn the historical reductionism of mere biographical knowledge, and the new New Criticism happily ignore it completely, but there is no doubt that secure attribution of a number of works to the same author, named or not, allows an added dimension to critical understanding. The comparisons that are made possible grant insight into the continuities and changes in theme and style, reveal hidden patterns of meaning, emphasize particular preoccupations. The quality of our understanding of Chaucer, and the quality of the criticism devoted to him, owe something to the security of the