Textual Crux Research Articles

Middle English fobbere and the Critical Editing of Piers Plowman

ABSTRACT This essay examines a line in William Langland's Piers Plowman that caused the scribes considerable trouble and which involves the synonymous Middle English hapax legomena fob and fobbere. The word in question appears to differ across the three versions of the poem, “A,” “B,” and “C.” The particular textual crux opens onto a general dilemma that faces Langland's modern editors. Editors of Piers Plowman have constantly to decide whether, and to what extent, to admit into evidence the testimony of parallel versions when editing any one version. Against the drift of a tendency toward parallel editing in the poem's twentieth-century reception, it is argued that the critical editing of Piers Plowman sometimes must involve holding at arm’s length the apparently relevant testimony of parallel versions.

Scribes, Critics, and Malyne’s Tears

ABSTRACT A pair of unrecognized textual cruxes in the Reeve’s Tale indicates the ways that scribal attitudes to gender can minimize attention to the role of Malyne. Analogously, her words and actions are also minimized by critics, both those who ignore Malyne’s speech while discussing key issues in the tale and those who cite her words (most typically only two words) but unpersuasively accept them at face value. Very few scholars discuss her almost weeping—the site of one crux. Malyne’s false claim to have participated in the theft of the students’ meal, universally elided, suggests a distinct view of her as rejecting her paternal heritage and seeking (although without much hope) to regain some of the agency she has lost in earlier action. The parallel between scribal and critical responses to Malyne emphasizes the value of philological knowledge as a prelude to critique.

The Old English Pharaoh: A Neglected ubi sunt Poem

The Old English poem Pharaoh has been largely unconsidered in critical literature owing to its formal and interpretive obscurities, which have led to its relegation to a secondary place in the Old English poetic canon. The text has traditionally been read as an unsuccessful attempt at replicating Latin models of dialogic literature to invite reflection on the typological associations of the crossing of the Red Sea. It has accordingly been read almost exclusively as part of an Easter sequence within the Exeter Book. As a result, the poem has remained unexplored in terms of its artistic quality and potential intertextual connections with other texts and traditions within and beyond the corpus of Old English poetry. This study reassesses the form, function, and interpretation of Pharaoh and provides a new reading of the poem by relocating it within its appropriate contextual background in both Christian doctrine and the Old English poetic corpus. To this end, a new reconstruction of a textual crux is proposed, which reveals that Pharaoh should be read against a new interpretive framework. Drawing from textual parallels in Latin and Old English, this study suggests that Pharaoh is an experiment in textual form and poetic mode that draws inspiration from the common ubi sunt motif and its vernacular adaptation in Old English literature. Ultimately, the interpretive complexity of Pharaoh poses a challenge to modern ideas of intertextuality and literary genre, which prioritise a hierarchical rather than horizontal model of textual influence.

Close Reading: The Inveighing, Envying Martius in Coriolanus 3.3.94

ABSTRACT This close reading utilises new evidence to explore the textual crux of Coriolanus 3.3.94: the Folio prints that Coriolanus ‘enui’d against the people’, but modern editors usually prefer to emend the first word to ‘inveighed’. Drawing on both contemporary textual examples and recent research from the history of emotion, I argue that retaining the Folio’s reading may in fact be the wisest editorial choice.

Mallecho or Malligo? A Crux in Hamlet Revisited

Hamlet’s reaction to the dumbshow preceding the players’ performance of The Murder of Gonzago features a textual crux that has perplexed readers for centuries. The witnesses read: ‘This is myching Mallico, that meanes my chiefe’ (Q1); ‘Marry this munching Mallico, it meanes mischiefe’ (Q2); ‘Marry this is Miching Malicho, that meanes Mischeefe’ (F).1 In Q2 and F the second half of the sentence plausibly serves to explicate the first, while the Q1 version, though not impossible, is usually regarded as a corruption. The real difficulty lies in the first clause. Two clear variants are presented for the verb, whether formed from ‘munch’ or from the lectio difficilior ‘mich’ or ‘mitch’, meaning ‘pilfer’, ‘conceal’, ‘lurk’, ‘skulk’, vel sim.2 But how to interpret ‘Mal(l)ic(h)o’? Thomas Hanmer first glossed this word as ‘a wicked act, a piece of iniquity’, after Spanish malhecho; Edmund Malone, thinking the same, emended the spelling to ‘mallecho’.3 The Hanmer-Malone interpretation, in one orthographical form or another, has since become widely adopted. John Dover Wilson suggested on this basis that Hamlet was castigating the players for ‘prematurely disclosing the Mouse-trap’.4 Yet some skepticism remains: Philip Edwards in the latest Cambridge edition goes so far as to call it an ‘insoluble problem’.5

Andrew Marvell and John Barclay's Satyricon

An unidentified Latin verse quotation in Mr. Smirke proves to derive from John Barclay’s Satyricon (1607).  This discovery resolves what had seemed a textual crux in the standard edition of Mr. Smirke.  It also invites review of how Marvell deploys this material for his present purpose, what confessional considerations arise from the Catholic Barclay’s contribution, and whether Barclay’s example as a Menippean satirist informs Marvell’s successes in this kind.

Sophocles Trachiniae 1021–22

Lines 1021–22 of Sophocles’ Trachiniae, which come right after a notorious and probably insoluble textual crux, have received much less attention but are in fact extremely problematic as well. Though these lines can be construed, they cannot be understood adequately. The scholia propose two implausible ancient interpretations; modern scholars have suggested either no less implausible interpretations of the transmitted text or unsatisfactory emendations for it. The coauthors of the present note suggest a different strategy for emending the text, which results in two different and alternative suggested conjectures.

New Editions of The Great Gatsby

<i>New Editions of</i> The Great Gatsby

RETIRE WITH THANKS: RETHINKING LUCRETIUS 3.962

AbstractThis article aims at proposing a solution to one of the well-known textual cruces in Lucretius’ De rerum natura. After a brief survey of the suggested emendations, the author will shed some fresh light on Manning's gratus, which recent editors have curiously neglected. The idea that the old man should retire from life with thanks is not uncommon among classical writers. In addition, parallel expressions are also found in Epicurus’ own words. This article concludes that gratus is what we would expect in the last line of Nature's admonition in De rerum natura and, therefore, the most probable emendation.

Nuces Skaldicae: Kennings and their Contexts in alausavísainGísla saga Súrssonar

One of the verses spoken by the protagonist in Gisla saga Surssonar is of potential interest for comparative literature, since it appears to reflect the association found in medieval Continental European and English texts between hazelnuts and sexual dalliance. The verse can be shown to be part of a celebrated sequence of verses in which the protagonist describes a series of dreams that come to him as his life approaches its end. Discussion of the textual cruces in the stanza, its construal, and its dating (the latter a highly controversial issue) is a necessary preliminary to a consideration of the comparative evidence. The invocation of hazelnuts in Gisla saga appears to be figurative and ironical, demonstrating the confidence and flexibility of skaldic poetry in adapting international motifs and ideas to local uses.

Ecdótica, interpretación y fuentes: la edición de los Salmos penitenciales de Diego de Valera

Los Salmos penitenciales de Diego de Valera constituyen un largo poema transmitido por el cancionero SA10a (Salamanca, Biblioteca General Histórica, ms. 2763). Al tener este texto una tradición monotestimonial, resulta más bien difícil detectar eventuales errores o trivializaciones que se inferirían del cotejo entre distintos manuscritos. Aun así, el poema presenta lugares textuales de gran interés para cuya interpretación ha sido muy útil acudir a la Vulgata. La fuente bíblica del poema de Valera, aunque sometida a un ejercicio de reescritura en clave cortesana, se ha revelado de hecho una importante herramienta para editar el texto castellano.

Pindar, Pythian 6.50–51

Abstract Recent editors have printed Bowra’s conjecture to resolve the textual crux at Pindar, Pythian 6.50. This note identifies problems with that approach, reviews the MS evidence, and proposes a new solution.

Hybrid Creatures in Context: Centaurs, Hobby-horses and Sexualised Women (Hamlet, King Lear, The Two

Shakespearean centaurs and centaur-like images have received scholarly attention with relation to Ovid as well as to early modern philosophy, regarding the human-animal divide. This paper argues for a nuanced re-reading of relevant textual cruces in Hamlet, King Lear and The Two Noble Kinsmen in the light of a specific fusion of popular and elite cultures in the man-horse hybrid, as represented by the (male/female) centaur and the early modern hobby-horse, emphasizing the stigmatisation (the “monstrosity”) of bestial passion and illicit sexuality, signified by the hybrid creature and its animal part. English emblem books and Edward Topsell’s 1607 volume on “four-footed beasts” present a complex background to the re-visitation of these well-known passages, and illuminate how Shakespeare used elements of both popular and elite cultures to suit his dramaturgical ends and to address different strata of the audience. The paper offers an overview of the complex iconographical and conceptual semantics of centaur-like creatures, as they existed in Shakespeare’s contemporaries’ imagination, suggesting a tentative summary of the cultural memory of the centaur in early modern England.

Review

Review

Repeated Cues and a Textual Crux in Marlowe’s Dido, Queene of Carthage

Repeated Cues and a Textual Crux in Marlowe’s Dido, Queene of Carthage

JUVENAL 5.104: TEXT AND INTERTEXT

This paper draws on Juvenal's intertextual relationship with comedy to solve a textual crux involving fish-names. The monograph by Ferriss-Hill will no doubt warn scholarship away from the treatment of Roman satire's intertextuality with Old Comedy for a time. Yet, Greek comedy's influence on Roman satire is far from exhausted, and this paper will show that this influence goes more widely, and more deeply, than is usually seen. In time, one might hope for a renewed monographic treatment of the subject.

El texto de La adúltera penitente: comicidad, censura y exigencias escénicas en una comedia de santos

La adúltera penitente, a hagiographic comedia attributed to the collaboration of three noted playwrights active in the mid-seventeenth century (Juan de Matos Fragoso, Jerónimo de Cáncer, and Agustín Moreto), envelopes the motif of the penitent sinner in a series of comic plot twists. This article begins with an examination of the textual cruxes presented by the two extant versions of the comedia, pondering the implications of variants between two textual witnesses—one print and one manuscript—for our understanding of the material history of dramatic compositions at all phases of the creative process, from composition, to staging by professional theater companies, and print publication. In turn, I contemplate the intervention of censors in response to the decidedly profane and sexually charged plot of the comedia. Other points of analysis relate to the information we can glean about the staging of divine intervention in hagiographic dramas and to the conceptions of authorship in the case of dramatic works that took shape as collaborative compositions.

The 1992 Revision of the Good News Bible: The Context for Revision

This article surveys the wider context in the 1970s–1980s that compelled Bible publishers to prepare revisions of their translations: the rapid shift in spoken English was making the masculine-heavy English of major Bible translations feel antiquated to readers. The Good News Bible New Testament was first published in 1966 and its Old Testament in 1976, but already by the mid-1980s revision was being contemplated by the American Bible Society. The revision process was thoroughgoing and collaborative, with all English-using Bible Societies participating. More than 6,000 revisions were proposed and reviewed, with about 2,500 meeting consensus. Most were related to gender-exclusion, but a few were exegetical. Although the United Bible Societies’ Hebrew Old Testament Text Project recommendations on almost 6,000 textual cruxes were published in preliminary form by 1979, the Good News Bible revision process could not incorporate those data. An addendum discusses the addition of the deuterocanonical books in 1979.

Marking Boundaries in Beowulf: Æschere’s Head, Grendel’s Arm and the Dragon’s Corpse

Abstract In the Old English poem Beowulf, several body parts are put on display, including Grendel’s arm at Heorot and Æschere’s head on top of a cliff. The first instance has been widely discussed by various scholars, who have tried to find out why and where the arm was hung. By contrast, scholarly treatments of the second instance are relatively scarce. This article places the exhibition of Æschere’s head by Grendel’s mother in the context of similar practices of decapitation and display in Anglo-Saxon England. It will be argued that the placement of the head of Æschere on top of the cliff towering over Grendel’s mere resembles the Anglo-Saxon heafod stoccan, ‘head stakes’, which acted as boundary markers. The monster’s act, therefore, would not strike as foreign to the Anglo-Saxon audience, but would be familiar. As we will show, the identification of Æschere’s head as a boundary marker, placed at the edge of the monsters’ domain, also has some bearing on the interpretation of other potential boundary markers in the poem, including Grendel’s arm and the dragon’s corpse. Lastly, we will argue for a new reading of two textual cruces in Beowulf’s speech prior to his fight with Grendel.

Medieval Corporeality and the Eucharistic Body in Julian of Norwich's A Revelation of Love

This essay questions the current critical attitude toward medieval understandings of the body. It tests the limits of the contemporary “corporeal turn” by reassessing a textual crux in Julian of Norwich's A Revelation of Love. Contesting the dominant, defecatory reading of the “fair purse” passage, it argues that interpretation of the image of the purse has suffered at the expense of current preoccupation with the material and allegedly digressive body. The essay uses lexical evidence to demonstrate the significance of ingestion as much as digestion to Julian's image, and to align the passage with her thought elsewhere in A Revelation. Ultimately, it argues that the full resonance of the passage lies in its relationship to the sacrament of the altar. This article thus contributes to debates on religion and the body, and more specifically to underexamined eucharistic dimensions of the body in Julian's theology.