Verse-Craft, Editing, and the Work: Shadows of Orfeo

Abstract

Abstract The notorious divergence between the three extant texts of Sir Orfeo has tripped up some past studies and seemingly makes the poem forbidding ground for literary criticism. Yet study of those texts informed by Paul Eggert’s recent revitalization of the concept of the ‘work’ reveals that some aspects of form and versification persist surprisingly well across the three known copies. Criticism has frequently noted the two points in Sir Orfeo which use descriptive comparisons to Paradise. The standard referencing edition, however, presents the first paradisiacal comparison with deceptively little information about its textual state. Scholars, even those alert to manuscripts, have consequently erred when discussing the relevant passages. Attention to aspects of the poem’s versification such as through-rhyme, rhyme-pairing, and rhyme-breaking can offer a partial solution to the problem. This insight opens up a broader approach to reading the verse-craft of Orfeo across its extant witnesses. A study of the poem’s use of comparison offers a trial of that approach. Though individually formulaic, the poem’s comparisons would have had a significant cumulative effect on readers. This effect has implications for scholarship’s understanding of the figure of Orfeo and of the poem as a whole. Future research on this text might fruitfully attend more closely to textual problems, to verse form, and to the relationship between the two; future studies of Middle English texts in general might benefit from the concept of the work.