Thomas Speght Research Articles

The Poet and the Antiquaries: Chaucerian Scholarship and the Rise of Literary History, 1532–1635

The Poet and the Antiquaries: Chaucerian Scholarship and the Rise of Literary History, 1532–1635

Editorial

Editorial M. Lynne Murphy Five new research articles constitute this issue of Dictionaries, representing work on the history, use, and production of dictionaries. In the opening article, "Derwent Coleridge's 'Rough Notes': A Newly Discovered Manuscript from the Formative Years of the Oxford English Dictionary," John Considine and Peter Gilliver share their discovery of "Rough notes on the subject of the New English Dictionary." Derwent was the second son of the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge and uncle to Herbert Coleridge, the dictionary's first editor. His influence on the Oxford English Dictionary had largely been overlooked until now. I am excited to be able to share Considine and Gilliver's full transcription of the manuscript and their detailed commentary on the history of these notes, the thinking behind their contents, and their effect on the "Canones Lexicographici," establishing key points of the OED's editorial policy. Michael Robertson, in "New Solutions for Words in Thomas Speght's Chaucer Glossaries," investigates seventeen mysterious items from the lists of "old and obscure words" in Speght's 1598 and 1602 editions of Chaucer's works. These items had been thought to be "unidentifiable"—not clearly related to any other English (or non-English) word. Still many of them appeared in later dictionaries. Digitization of Speght's work (not to mention many other resources) has made the practically unsearchable into the investigable, and Robertson traces these "ghost words" back to "variant readings, corruptions and misprints" in earlier editions of Chaucer, offering solutions to these lexical mysteries. According to Wikipedia, sales of Funk & Wagnalls' dictionaries went up 30% after the comedy show Laugh-In introduced the catchphrase [End Page vii] "Look that up in your Funk & Wagnalls!"1 Alas, the brand has not survived to feel the boost of Dennis Baron's allusion to it in "Look It Up in Your Funk & Wagnalls: How Courts Define the Words of the Law." Baron explores the American justice system's use and abuse of lexicography in defining, for legal purposes, words that include: concrete nouns, like doll and tomato; abstractions, like sanitation and marriage; and even grammatical items like of. Baron traces how, in the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, courts have manipulated the "authority" of dictionaries in order to give a semblance of objectivity to their own authoritative interpretation of words in law. Next, David Micklethwait sights a ghost editor in the Webster's Improved Dictionary of the English Language published by William Mackenzie of Glasgow around 1858. "Thomas Heber Orr, the Evaporating Editor" is credited with enlarging and improving the dictionary and with discovering a new theory of etymology, the unintentionally[?] amusing "Process of Primitive Wordgrowth." Micklethwait traces Orr's presence and absence in the publishing trade, concluding that Mackenzie was mostly likely responsible for the work attributed to Orr. In the final contribution to this issue, we turn away from the historical and toward the future. Akbar Hesabi and Alireza Amraee are working "Toward the Specialization of Language Resources for Translators." Having observed that translators are underserved by existing resources, Hesabi and Amraee have built a bilingual resource that uses FrameNet structures and corpus data to offer translators insights into word usage in a particular domain (in this model case, road traffic and transportation) across their two languages. In doing so, they stretch the meaning of dictionary considerably, since the resource does not offer traditional entry or definition structures. That might not be to all readers' taste, but [End Page viii] for me it brings into focus the question of what dictionaries are, and therefore what the title of this very journal refers to, in the connected, post-paper age. I hope each reader finds something of interest in this issue of Dictionaries and that it inspires new questions and directions for investigation. Book reviews and the Reference Works in Progress feature will return next time. [End Page ix] Footnotes 1. My confidence in this claim is undermined by the "citation needed" footnote at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funk_%26_Wagnalls (accessed November 16, 2022). Nevertheless, I am imagining all the product placement opportunities dictionary publishers might be able to exploit in the current comedy climate. Copyright © 2022 Dictionary Society of North...

New Solutions for Words in Thomas Speght's Chaucer Glossaries

New Solutions for Words in Thomas Speght's Chaucer Glossaries

Mending “the injurie of oblivion”: “Englishing” Chaucer and Barbour in early printed editions

This article examines the editorial choices made in Edinburgh printer Andro Hart’s 1616 edition of John Barbour’s Brus. Comparison of the 1616 Hart edition with Thomas Speght’s 1602 Chaucer edition displays similar concerns with preserving accessibility to historical texts despite significant language changes in both Older Scots and English, noting shared employment of assistive paratextual apparati. Linguistic assessment comparing Hart and Speght’s editions to their parent texts demonstrates how both editors modernize language to improve reader accessibility while preserving archaic qualities and metricality. Contextualization of the declining prestige of Older Scots during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries further clarifies this assessment. Hart’s edition portrays both a genesis of mutual intelligibility between Scots and English, and a coda for Older Scots as a literary prestige tongue.

Meaning, Metaphor, and Chaucer's “thikke knarre”

Abstract One of the best-known descriptions in the General Prologue is that of the Miller as a “thikke knarre.” Since the first glossary of Chaucer in Thomas Speght's 1598 Workes, knarre has been related to a Dutch word and literally defined as a stump or thick piece of wood, here with the metaphorical sense of “rugged fellow.” This sense would be unique to the word in the Middle English record, and in fact derivation from the Dutch word has difficulties with semantics, phonology, and lexicography as well as with rhetorical appropriateness. This article proposes a different derivation from a Norse word meaning “freighter,” and more broadly argues that a great deal of secondary evidence can sustain a conclusion that actually has very little primary support. Sometimes history, whether linguistic or social, repeats itself precisely because historians, perhaps in part due to the thinness of the record, cause it to do so.

For the Sake of the Arguments: Reading the Headnotes to The Faerie Queene

Abstract This essay proposes taking a serious poetic and literary-historical interest in the ballad-stanza ‘Arguments’ which precede and summarize every Canto in Spenser’s Faerie Queene. Short, simple, and economical, the four-line Arguments seem at first a very different poetical space from the Spenserian stanza—but on closer reading, they demand an investment in the dimensions of printed language and the spaces and syntax of its storytelling which fits persuasively with the wider poetics of The Faerie Queene and with its narrative structures. The first section establishes the Arguments in a context of analogous early modern paratexts—in the Geneva Bible, Thomas Speght’s 1598 collected Chaucer, printed plays, and the Sternhold-Hopkins psalter. The second reads them closely as a ‘didactic technology’ which might, as well as helping us to read The Faerie Queene, help teach us how to.

Tendre Cropps and Flourishing Metricians: Gabriel Harvey’s Chaucer

Gabriel Harvey’s extant copy of Speght’s 1598 edition of Chaucer has attracted attention since the eighteenth century because of a marginalium which potentially sheds light on the date of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The note has been the focus of intense scrutiny leading to contradictory conclusions. This essay looks at this Shakespearean scholarship, focussing on the primary evidence it has circumstantially turned up over the years. Properly appraised, it is argued, this evidence clarifies ambiguities in Harvey’s note that have often been deemed intractable and yields some indications as to the form in which he is likely to have encountered Shakespeare’s play. More importantly, it provides a fascinating, detailed picture of Harvey’s reading of Thomas Speght’s Chaucer. It shows Harvey engaging with this edition’s philological and literary critical priorities to develop a poetics of his own, with its own distinctive idiom and material articulation. In this sense, Harvey’s Chaucer invites us to nuance some of recent scholarship’s lessons on early modern reading and to make space for the unpragmatic and the unpredictable—for the literary—even in the key exponent of what Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton describe as ‘studying for action’.

Shakespeare in the Marketplace of Words. Jonathan P. Lamb. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Pp. v+243.

<i>Shakespeare in the Marketplace of Words</i>. Jonathan P. Lamb. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Pp. v+243.

“In his old dress”: Packaging Thomas Speght's Chaucer for Renaissance Readers

Abstract This article considers how Thomas Speght's Chaucer editions (1598; 1602) conceive, invite, and influence their readership. Studying the highly wrought forms of the dedicatory epistle to Sir Robert Cecil, the prefatory letter by Francis Beaumont, and the address “To the Readers,” it argues that these paratexts warrant close attention for their treatment of the entangled relationships between editor, patron, and reader. Where prior work has suggested that Speght's audience for the editions was a socially horizontal group and that he only haltingly sought wider publication, this article suggests that the preliminaries perform a multivocal role, poised to readily receive a diffuse readership of both familiar and newer consumers.

What Chaucer Did to Shakespeare: Books and Bodkins in Hamlet and The Tempest

This article is less concerned with what Shakespeare did to Chaucer than with what Chaucer did to Shakespeare: that is, how the experience of reading Chaucer, in certain cultural and bibliographical contexts, engaged Shakespeare throughout his career, not only providing sources but provoking his imagination. Like so many of his sources and inspirations, Chaucer's poetry came to Shakespeare not as a performative tradition but as a published book. We take a close look at Thomas Speght's 1598 volume, The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, reprinted in 1602, the only edition to appear in Shakespeare's lifetime. And we examine, in particular, Chaucer's treatment of the death of Julius Caesar in the Monk's Tale, in order to show how Chaucer's handling of this political assassination provoked Shakespeare's exploration of this subject in his own Julius Caesar, as well as in Hamlet and The Tempest.

The Anxiety of &lt;i&gt;Auctoritas&lt;/i&gt;: Chaucer and &lt;i&gt;The Two Noble Kinsmen&lt;/i&gt;

This essay reads Fletcher and Shakespeare's final collaboration, a dramatic adaptation of The Knight's Tale , as an anxious engagement with the Renaissance's understanding of Chaucer as a vernacular auctor , with that word's imbricated senses of authorship, authority, and paternity. From his earliest encomiasts to the late sixteenth century, Chaucer was figured as the father of English literature, a tradition culminating in Thomas Speght's extravagant folio edition of the Workes (1598). Unlike other early modern dramatic adaptations of Chaucerian texts, The Two Noble Kinsmen explicitly names and praises its canonical source. However, the play's relationship with its auctor is at once reverential and confrontational, as the text thematizes its struggle to create art from a venerable literary monument. Allegorizing the treatment of auctoritas throughout the play, Fletcher and Shakespeare find spaces for resistance to authority and imaginative invention within structures of containment at a time when dramatic writing was grappling with its own relationship to the literary.

Making and Managing the Past: Lexical Commentary in Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender (1579) and Chaucer’s Works (1598/1602)

Traditional accounts of the relationship between Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender and the writings of Geoffrey Chaucer foreground the influence of the medieval poet on the work of his sixteenth-century successor. By examining how E. K.’s commentary in the Calender shapes the presentation of Chaucer’s works, this essay considers instead how the Calender influenced the reception and presentation of Chaucer in the late Tudor period. In particular I argue that the editorial apparatus in Thomas Speght’s edition of Chaucer’s Works (1598, rev. 1602) takes from E. K.’s commentary two of its most significant preoccupations: its perception of Chaucer as a figure embodying both classical and vernacular poetic traditions, and of Chaucer’s language as archaic and potentially difficult for readers. E. K.’s epistle to Gabriel Harvey contains some of the longest discussions of Chaucer’s English before the publication of Speght’s Works, which at times quotes it directly. Like the Calender, Speght’s Works includes substantive discussion of Chaucer’s language and, like the Calender, it cites lexicographic forms to illustrate differences between contemporary language and the verse that it presents. In both works the introduction of a lexicon makes newly visible the peculiarities of Chaucerian language, framing it as temporally distant while insisting upon its relevance to contemporary poetic enterprise.

A Festschrift for John Scattergood

THE editors, Anne Marie D’Arcy and Alan J. Fletcher, have added to the title of this volume the apt quotation from Edward Duke of York's, The Master of Game, ‘The key of all good remembrance’, for all who think of John Scattergood, or meet him in Ireland or England or further afield, the few (of whom I am one) who some years ago taught him as an undergraduate, or the many, whom he taught, or who know him as a colleague, all hold him dear, or those who now read and value him as an editor or writer of learned articles, or as a poet. This excellent and well-edited festschrift is a key to that good remembrance: Anne Marie D’Arcy and Alan J. Fletcher (eds), Studies in Late Medieval and Early Renaissance Texts in Honour of John Scattergood (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2005), pp. 416. €75 (£50). ISBN 1–85182–929–6. The contributions are arranged in alphabetical order of the contributors, a distinguished group, and at the end there is an index of manuscripts followed by a very useful general index. Richard Firth Green gives a splendid fully annotated edition of The Hunting of the Hare, a mock-heroic poem comparable with The Tournament of Tottenham, Bannatyne's Colkelbie Sow, and the Rokebys’ Felon Sew. Julia Boffey writes on Chaucer's Fortune, and relating it to William Calverley's Dyalogue of the 1530s, successfully rebuts any division between late medieval and early Renaissance literature, the unity of which is the theme of this festschrift and lies at the heart of its dedicatee. A different sense of limitlessness is promoted in Alan J. Fletcher's ‘Pearl and the Limits of History’. Problems and the effects of post-Reformation readings of Chaucer, such as are in evidence in or to be inferred from the editions of John Stow and Thomas Speght, and the books associated with the former, appear in John J. Thompson's ‘Patch and Repair and Making Do in Manuscripts and Texts Associated with John Stow’. Ralph Hanna, while disavowing any festschrift-like intention in his ‘Notes on Some Trinity College Dublin Manuscripts’, in fact amplifies Marvin L. Colker's Descriptive Catalogue on TCD MSS 69, 75, 271, 423, and 432; he is sure to have whetted the interest of the dedicatee, and that was Hanna's intention after all. Helen Cooper uses an interpolation found only in the Auchinleck Manuscript version of The Short English Metrical Chronicle to date that manuscript.

Usurping "Chaucers dreame": Book of the Duchess and the Apocryphal Isle of Ladies

Usurping “Chaucers dreame”: Book of the Duchess and the Apocryphal Isle of Ladies Annika Farber In his 1598 edition of Chaucer's works, Thomas Speght added another dream vision, now known as the spurious Isle of Ladies , but then titled, "Chaucers dreame, neuer before this time published in print. That which heretofore hath gone vnder the name of his dreame, is the book of the Duchesse: or the death of Blanch Duchesse of Lancaster." 1 Isle steadfastly remained in the canon until the late nineteenth century and has since posed two kinds of questions for modern critics. On the one hand, those who study Isle alone concern themselves primarily with issues of dating and authorship and with saving this "flimsy airy fantasy" 2 from the neglect it has earned since being expelled from the Chaucer canon. On the other hand, those who work on the Book of the Duchess and attempt to trace the appearance of the text in print editions are "haunted by a doppelgänger of the poem, in title [End Page 207] though not in text." 3 These two poems, typically dealt with separately by modern critics, are undeniably linked by the realities of printing and reception. Pursuing this link further, that is, actually reading the Isle of Ladies in connection with Chaucer, allows us to see the poem in a new light, at once historical and interpretive. For fifteenth-century poets who were writing in the shadow of Chaucer, a reading of their texts with an eye to the Canterbury poet can reveal what may not have been seen when these poems were considered on their own. Alice Miskimin long ago called for "a return to the texts of the folios themselves, so long despised and ignored, for the wealth of their evidence of 'error' Elizabethans took for truth." 4 These "erroneous" interpretations, instead of being tossed aside as soon as we discover the "correct" reading of the text, can be used to reassess and rediscover the work. From such a study we find that there is a reason why Isle and the Book of the Duchess were so easily linked: the Isle -poet consciously imitated Chaucer, using the rhetorical technique of invention to create his own elaborate story indebted to the Book of the Duchess . To begin this revaluation of the Isle of Ladies , I will first focus on the context connecting Isle and Book of the Duchess as they originally appeared together in Speght's editions and then on nineteenth-century and modern conceptions of Chaucer and Isle as compared to sixteenth-century conceptions of the same. These issues of context and reception will function as a preface to my discussion of the Isle of Ladies itself as a Chaucerian imitation. Any reading of the Isle of Ladies and the Book of the Duchess together must begin with Speght's "arguments" to both poems, which provide an authoritative interpretation for the reader before he even begins the poems. The allegorical description of Isle that Speght gives can be found in both of his editions, unchanged except for punctuation: This dream deuised by Chaucer, seemeth to be a couert report of the mariage of Iohn of Gaunt the kings sonne with Blanch the daughter of Henry Duke of Lancaster, who after long loue, during the time whereof the Poet faineth them to be dead, were in the end by consent of friends happily married; figured by a bird bringing in her bill an hearbe, which restored them to life againe. Here also is shewed Chaucers match with a certaine Gentlewoman, who although shee was a stranger, 5 was notwithstanding so well liked and loued of the Lady [End Page 208] Blanch, and her Lord, as Chaucer himselfe also was, that gladly they concluded a marriage betweene them. (image 20) 6 Strengthening the link implied in the title that Speght gave to the poem, "Chaucers dreame," Speght's introduction argues that the Isle of Ladies functions as the story of the marriage of John and Blanche, forcing the unquestioning reader to read this poem as a companion piece to the Book of the Duchess . While Speght's description of Isle remains constant, the presentation of the...

“The loadstarre of the English language”: Spenser'sShepheardes Calenderand the Construction of Modernity

Modernity is premised on a break from the past that initiates progress. For England, this break is thought to occur in the sixteenth century, and is reflected in the development of the English literary canon. This essay contests such a view by re-reading the prefaces to Edmund Spenser's 1579 Shepheardes Calender and Thomas Speght's 1598 Workes of Chaucer against John Lydgate's Fall of Princes to trace a relationship of inheritance and continuity among fifteenth- and sixteenth-century literary cultures, a relationship it encapsulates in the word loadstarre. Thus, the essay argues for a notion of textual cultures that spans the medieval and modern, calling the very notion of historical period into question.

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

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...

Identifying Chaucer Allusions, 1991-2000: An Annotated Bibliography

Identifying Chaucer Allusions, 1991–2000:An Annotated Bibliography James D. Johnsonjjohnson94@cox.net The appeal of collecting allusions to famous authors is suggested by the book-length compilations available for such writers as Shakespeare, Spenser, and Jonson, as well as for lesser figures such as George Herbert.1 Because of Chaucer's early date, achievements in poetry, and impact on several centuries of readers and writers, he has been an especially fruitful and rewarding subject for "allusion-chasers." Collecting Chaucer allusions dates back at least as far as 1598 when Thomas Speght included a selection in his edition of Chaucer's Works, but the primary repository of Chaucer allusions remains, of course, Caroline F. E. Spurgeon's Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Criticism and Allusion, 1357–1900, first published serially by the Chaucer Society from 1908 to 1917 and subsequently in three volumes in 1925.2 It was Spurgeon herself who first began to augment her collection. "Appendix A" of the third volume of 1925 contains 109 pages of "Additional English and Latin References" ranging in date from 1391 to 1787.3 In 1920, Spurgeon also produced a privately printed supplement of allusions for the years 1868–1900.4 It was in the 1920s, too, that other scholars' additions and corrections to Spurgeon's compilation began to appear in scholarly journals, and these contributions continue to the present day.5 At first, these supplementary allusions usually followed Spurgeon's basic format of identification with minimal or no accompanying commentary. Such raw information is of limited value, however, and in order to be truly beneficial allusions must be put to use, not just cited. Spurgeon recognized this necessity, and in her "Introduction" detailed several possible uses for Chaucer allusions.6 Recent literary theory has added more refined methods of analysis, such as intertextuality, in which allusions are primary evidence. [End Page 436] Chaucer allusions reflect a variety of influences and a multitude of perspectives, from those of casual readers scribbling comments in the margins of manuscripts and books to major authors creating masterpieces. Basically, however, the possible uses of allusions can be divided into three broad areas. The first area focuses on Chaucer's own popularity and literary reputation. Allusions enable scholars to identify the kinds of people reading Chaucer, establish which of his works were most popular at a given time, and chart fluctuations in his critical reception and in the astounding variety of ways he has been perceived over the centuries—sage, Protestant reformer, alchemist, moralist, and so on. The second area focuses on the authors who have alluded to Chaucer. Their allusions indicate not only the nature and depth of Chaucer's influence on other writers, but the analysis of how allusions are used and altered by other writers can also provide insights into the creative transformations of Chaucer's works and a view of how those writers' minds worked. In the third area, on a wider scale, allusions to Chaucer constitute a representative history of cultural evolution and literary taste, criticism, and scholarship over a span of more than six centuries. In two previous bibliographies, I tried to facilitate access to the publications identifying Chaucer allusions that appeared in the years 1953–1980 and 1981–1990, respectively.7 That purpose also guided the present bibliography, which continues this coverage for the ten-year span from 1991 to 2000, with fifty-seven entries representing the work of some fifty scholars. Also included are a few earlier references previously overlooked. The format and method of annotation follow those of the earlier bibliographies. Spurgeon did not offer a definition of allusion, but her practice indicates that her conception of it was broad, and her example has been embraced by those who have supplemented her work. Following this well-established lead, I have adopted a definition of allusion that encompasses direct references in the form of quotations, poems, parodies, biographical and critical essays, and so on, as well as other references to Chaucer or his works, both named and unnamed, whether the publications label them allusions, borrowings, echoes, supplements to Spurgeon, or whatever, or even if they bear no such label at all. I have, however, sought to distinguish allusion from...

"What Is Hecuba to Him or [S]he to Hecuba?" Lucrece's Complaint and Shakespearean Poetic Agency

Previous articleNext article No Access"What Is Hecuba to Him or [S]he to Hecuba?" Lucrece's Complaint and Shakespearean Poetic AgencyMary Jo KietzmanMary Jo Kietzman Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 97, Number 1Aug., 1999 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/492804 Views: 4Total views on this site Copyright 1999 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Benedict Whalen “For one’s Offence Why Should so Many Fall”?: Hecuba and the Problems of Conscience in The Rape of Lucrece and Hamlet, Religions 10, no.11 (Jan 2019): 38.https://doi.org/10.3390/rel10010038 Sung-Kyun Yim “Out, idle words”: Tragedy in Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece, Shakespeare Review 54, no.11 (Mar 2018): 193–212.https://doi.org/10.17009/shakes.2018.54.1.010 Reading list, (Jun 2006): 306–309.https://doi.org/10.1017/9780511819094.015

Editing Chaucer: The Great Tradition ed. by Paul G. Ruggiers

REVIEWS "a modest increment in our understanding of the language spoken and written five hundred years ago." LISTER M. MATHESON University of Michigan PAUL G. RUGGIERS, ed. Editing Chaucer: The Great Tradition. Norman, Oklahoma: Pilgrim Books, 1984. Pp. 301. $34.95. This collection of essays provides an epic accoun� of the giants who have wrestled with the monster Error for our reading of Chaucer's text. There is some irony in this endeavor since Chaucer himself seems to have been nearly as unconcerned as Shakespeare about the preservation of his writ­ ings. The caveat at the end of Troy/us (V.1793 ff) shows that he was aware of the problems of textual transmission; but unlike his friendJohn Gower, who at the end of his life seems to have devoted himself to setting his literary house in order by supervising the production of authoritative manuscripts of his poems, Chaucer evidently died without overseeing the production of a single authoritative manuscript of any of his works-in spite of the tantalizing reprimand to Adam, his own scrivener. The manuscripts thathave come down to us were all put together by friends and dealers, probably from sources nearly as diverse as those for the First Folio. Set against this lack of authorized texts is the fact that the readings of the good manuscripts and early printings are remarkably satisfactory. It is possible to wax righteous about ignorance and contamination, but when one begins to collate, it turns out that the variations are largely verbal and orthographic and dropped or added lines. The most troublesome problem is the order of the tales in the Canterbury collection. Again ironically, in the Hengwrt manuscript, whose text is the most satisfactory, the tale order is least satisfactory.Editors have tried to cope with the problems presented by thefifteenth-centurymanuscriptsand incunabulareditionsby choosing or inventing readings and tale orders according to their own tastes and judgments or by applying logical and mechanical editorial methods. It seems that on the whole the most satisfactory editions have been the most eclectic and judgmental (Speght, Tyrwhitt, Skeat, Robinson), and the least successful have been the most logical and mechanical (Urry, Root, Manly-Rickert). 239 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER The interesting and detailed essays in this collection onWilliam Caxton by Beverly Boyd,William Thynne byJames Blodgett,John Stow by Anne Hudson, Thomas Speght by Derek Pearsall,John Urry byWilliam Alder­ son, Thomas Tyrwhitt by B. A.Windeatt, Thomas Wright by Thomas Ross, F.J. Furnivall by Donald Baker,W.W. Skeat by A. S. G. Edwards, R. K. Root by Ralph Hanna, and F. N. Robinson by George Reinecke provide an exegesis of the growing sophistication of the reading of Chau­ cer. The improving apparatus receives the highest marks from the ex­ positors. Even the life, the annotations, and the glossary in Urry (none of them, of course, by Urry) are praised, and Tyrwhitt and Skeat provide the backbone for this body of material. But none of the texts escape censure. Through Tyrwhitt the method for establishing text was to use the previous edition as copy text (Tyrwhitt used Speght, not Urry), which meant that over the centuries a primers' vulgate developed. Beginning with Thynne- or for that matter with CX2 - editors compared the vulgate with the manuscripts and substituted readings that appeared to them preferable.Tyrwhitt was the last to employ this method. His text was the best until then produced because his editorial principle dictated that he never introduce an emendation that was not found in some manuscript, and because his extensive acquaintance with medieval and classical lan­ guages and literatures enabled him to make better selections than previous editors. Nevertheless, his edition was a subjectively improved version of the vulgate. ThomasWright was the first editor to recognize the fallacy of thismethod and to adopt the "best text" method that had been established by classical scholars- that is, using the best contemporary manuscript as the copy text. However, Wright chose an inferior manuscript of The Canterbury Tales (Harleian 7334) as his copy text, and his notes were so skimpy that his edition was not influential. The Athenaeum reviewofWright's edition called attention to the super­ iority of the Ellesmere...

Thomas Speght as a Lexicographer and Annotator of Chaucer's Works

(1959). Thomas Speght as a Lexicographer and Annotator of Chaucer's Works. English Studies: Vol. 40, No. 1-6, pp. 194-208.