The poem `Lenten ys come wip loue to toune' (Brown-Robbins, Index, no. 1861) is one of the most often-reprinted poems of Harley MS 2253. As generally printed, it is a three-stanza poem, each stanza of twelve lines. In the Harley manuscript itself, the poem is followed immediately by what Middle English scholars define as a second poem, `In May hit murgeb when hit dawes' (Index, no. 1504) - a poem conventionally printed as four twelve-line stanzas in the same metre.1 The present note suggests that the poem as defined in Middle English scholarship - the presumably autonomous threestanza unit printed in all editions since the Harley poems first began to be published over two centuries ago - is to some extent illusory. The page layout of the Harley manuscript suggests very strongly that the poem is more than a variant of the poem that presumably follows; the two are intended to be read together, and may even share their final stanza. The textual instability of literary works both in their production and in their reception has received much emphasis in recent scholarship, and there are numerous examples of the kind of instability I discuss here in medieval English literature. The boundaries of the Old English Exeter Book collection of riddles have long been recognized as problematic, and Chaucer editions have since the sixteenth century struggled with the problematic autonomy of several of the minor poems.2 Bibliographers, editors, and scholars are well aware of this, but must still make decisions about the formal boundaries of such works to enable any coherent system of cataloguing or scholarly crossreference to exist. In most cases, these decisions reflect the instability of their subject matter; they are tentative, and often serve as a means of revealing the very instability that ultimately challenges such editorial and bibliographical decision-making (the Brown-Robbins cross-referencing is certainly an example). But the history of the reception of the Harley lyrics shows a much more extreme conflict between material evidence and critical interpretation. Since the first publication of these poems, there has been an almost unrelenting effort on the part of scholars to interpret them and to group them in standard anthologies according to artificial and misleading genres. In the case here, the autonomous status granted each of the two Harley poems is less a function of the manuscript treatment of these poems than a reflection of the literary-historical assumptions of modern anthologies and catalogues. Scholarly Reception and Representation of the Poem The poem `Lenten ys come' was first printed as item VII in Joseph Ritson's Ancient Songs from the Time of King Henry Third to the Revolution (1790) along with seven other poems of Harley 2253. It was entitled 'A song setting forth the good effects of spring' and printed as six six-line stanzas.3 The Lenten poem followed 'Bytuene mersh and aueril', 'Ichot a burde in boure bryht' (`Blow, northern wind'), and `When pe nyhtegale singes'. It was followed by `Wynter wakener al my care' (which Ritson titles 'A ditty upon the uncertainty of this life'). In the second edition of 1829, it is item XIII, following the same three poems and again followed by `Wynter wakenep al my care'. The companion poem `In May hit murgeb' is printed for the first time (item XV, entitled `Advice to the fair sex', pp. 66-7). Both are printed in six-line stanzas. In 1842, Thomas Wright printed the poems again separately as items XIII and XV. Formally, Wright printed them as they are printed today, as a threestanza and a four-stanza poem, each in twelve-line stanzas; and other nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century anthologies followed suit.4 The most important early edition of the poems was the 1878 edition by Karl Bodekker, Altenglische Dichtungen des MS. Harl. 2253. Bodekker's edition printed only the English poems and arranged them under seemingly simple and broad generic categories: 'politisch', 'weltlich', 'geistlich' - variants of the genres implied by Wright in his early selections of these works. …
Read full abstract
Sep 1, 2000
C D C Steele + 2
Open Access