The Evolution of the Canterbury Tales

Walter W. Skeat

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317233572
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer, published in 1475, is quite possibly the most famous text written in Middle English and has been studied and analysed countless times over the several hundred years that have passed since original publication. Skeat's essay, originally published in 1907, aims to explore the organisation of the tales within the whole manuscript. This title will be of interest to students of English Literature

First Published 1907

HASKELL HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD.

Publishers of Scarce Scholarly Books
280 LAFAYETTE STREET
NEW YORK, N. Y. 10012

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 68-24919

Haskell House Catalogue Item # 240

Printed in the United States of America

The Evolution of the Canterbury Tales.

Table 1.

	Knight, &c.	(1) Wife, &c.	(1) Shipman, &c.	(1) Manciple.
Hengwrt	1	3	7b^*	9a
A. Petworth	1
B. Lansdowne ^*	1
C. Harleian	1
C^*. Ellesmere ^†	1

^* also Corpus.

^† also Cambridge.

Table 2.

Table 3.

Table 4.

The Evolution of the Canterbury Tales.

(Read at a Meeting of the Philological Society, Nov. 1, 1907.)

IN the excellent Temporary Preface to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, issued by Dr. Furnivall in 1868, the question as to the right arrangement of the Tales is carefully discussed; and the result arrived at was sufficient for the purpose. That purpose was, to place the Tales in the order in which Chaucer might have arranged the Tales himself, if he had lived to complete the work.

Dr. Furnivall showed that the Tales can be divided into about nine distinct groups. Those that occur within the same group are clearly linked together by the help of additional lines, occurring between the Tales, that serve to dismiss one Tale and to introduce another. In other words, there is no evidence that any of the arrangements in the manuscripts is final. All that can be said is that some arrangements are preferable to others; and the arrangement made by Dr. Furnivall is suitable for practical purposes.

What I now propose to discuss is not quite the same proofem. I have no wish to propose any arrangement of my own, or to form any theory at all beyond such as is borne out by the evidence. My purpose is purely historical, viz., to show that we have evidence for at least four different arrangements or schemes, and we are able to determine quite clearly how these four schemes came into being. They represent the Tales in four different stages, so to speak; and each depends, as of course it must depend, upon the scheme that preceded it. Whether such schemes are due to Chaucer himself, or to scribes, we shall see as we proceed. One at least of them is due to an editor, but the rest may well be his own. It is very difficult for any one accustomed only to printed books to realise what happened in the days of manuscripts. In the case of Langland's poem of Piers the Plowman, we have at least five forms in which the poem appears, not counting others which are obviously absurd. Of these five forms, three are due to the fact that the poem was twice rewritten; this gives us at once an A-text, a B-text, and a C-text; and it is now being maintained, not without reason, that this implies at least two authors, since the author of text B appears to have misunderstood some of the expressions used by the author of A. Besides these three texts, we have two more, certainly due to the mistakes of scribes; for there is a set of manuscripts that contains a mixture of the A and C types, both imperfect, and unintelligently combined, and another unintelligent combination of the B and C types, likewise imperfect. We thus have positive evidence that the scribes who were employed to multiply manuscripts frequently did precisely as they pleased. They copied what they could come by; and, if they could not get a perfect copy, they copied an imperfect one, completing it by help of another without considering whether it belonged, so to speak, to the same recension or not. Nothing can be more misleading than to apply ideas derived from the habits of modern printing to times when the very idea of printing was unknown. Just as we should expect to find printed copies, at the present day, resembling each other very much or altogether, we ought to expect the very contrary In the days when every copy was produced separately. Even if a reader dictated aloud to six copyists at once, each of these had, to say the least, his own ideas of spelling, or even of rhythm or of grammatical expression.

These preliminary remarks are absolutely necessary before any explanation is possible. Having made them, I propose to show that there are four main schemes of arrangement of the Canterbury Tales, neglecting, with one remarkable exception, the manuscripts in which no particular order has been observed.

For I propose to show, beforehand, that we actually possess one MS. which may be fairly regarded as approaching to the idea of an archetype; a MS., namely, in which the Groups of tales appear, at first sight, to take quite a casual order; a MS. in which they may have been committed to writing with a view to future re-arrangement. By such re-arrangement we must, of course, construct a scheme that is necessarily the oldest of the four more orderly schemes, from which also, in turn, each of the later schemes can be naturally developed, in regular succession. The MS. to which I refer is the Hengwrt MS., which must, in any case, be considered, since it is generally agreed that it is, with one exception, the best we possess, at any rate as regards the grammatical forms.

THE HENGWRT MS. OF THE CANTERBURY TALES.

The Hengwrt MS. of the Canterbury Tales is known to be one of the best. It stands second among the seven MSS. selected and printed by the Chaucer Society. An examination of its contents shows that it is unique, not only in the arrangement of the Tales but in particulars relating to the Tales themselves.

I believe it can be explained as showing the Tales in their oldest known condition. It represents, so to speak, a form of them in which the idea of arrangement was quite imperfect; and it was written out, probably with a view to future use, as a sort of working copy. In fact, Dr. Furnivall noted, in 1868, that it is "the least handsome of our six MSS., the least formally written." But it may be a late copy of a MS. of a similar kind. We should naturally expect it to be incomplete; and indeed, its omissions are significant.

I suppose few remarks have been more frequently made than this, viz. that the idea of the Canon's Yeoman was an afterthought. There is no hint of his existence in the General Prologue; and the idea of inserting him among the rest did not occur to the author till he had made considerable progress with his work. It is highly probable, as has often been said, that Chaucer suddenly discovered that he had something satirical to say about the doings of the alchemists; and the ingenious way in which the number of the pilgrims is said to have been enlarged by the addition of the Canon and his Yeoman is almost beyond praise. The thought was most happy and successful.

Now the Hengwrt MS. is so antique in its type that it knows nothing of either the Canon or his Yeoman. All that we find is the rubric: "Here is ended the Nonnes tale," on leaf 173. We turn the leaf, and find, to our amazement, the Prologue to the Clerkes Tale, which ought perhaps to have come in earlier, but did not.

Another remarkable point is the absence, in its due place, of the Tale of Melibeus, which nearly every other MS. and all the printed editions put in its proper place, between Sir Thopas and the Monk's Tale. But this MS. divides Group 7 into two parts, giving the two last tales (the Monk and Nun's Priest) precedence, and relegating all the rest to a position just before the Parson. And this is done in spite of the reference in the line—"When ended was my tale of Melibee"—with which the Monk's Prologue rightly begins.

A m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Half Title
• Original Title
• Original Copyright