ABSTRACT
‘January and May’ was first published on 2 May 1709. Pope offered slightly conflicting accounts of the period of composition. The ‘Advertisement’ to the 1736 Works suggests a date for the translation – together with the ‘Wife of Bath Her Prologue’ – during a period of self-improvement and precocious practice in versification shortly after the publication of Dryden’s Fables Ancient and Modern in 1700: ‘Mr Dryden’s Fables came out about that time, which occasion’d the Translations from Chaucer’. However, the note Pope attached to the poem itself in 1736 states, ‘This Translation was done at sixteen or seventeen Years of Age’, which would suggest 1704–5. Pope’s copy of Thomas Speght’s 1598 edition of The Workes of our Antient and Learned English Poet, Geffrey Chavcer, newly Printed survives in the library of Hartlebury Castle; it has an autograph inscription of the flyleaf recording it as a gift from Gabriel Young, a neighbour and former owner of Whitehill House, the Pope family home at Binfield (see further Headnote to Windsor Forest): ‘Ex Libris | ALEXANDRI POPEI: | Ac è Dono | GABRIELIS YOUNG 1701’ (Mack 1982: 179). This was most likely the text, therefore, from which Pope made his versions of Chaucer. The translation would seem to have been substantially completed, and in his mind, by the time of Pope’s letter on aspects of English versification to his friend and mentor, the critic and poet William Walsh, dated (if the date is reliable) 22 October 1706; Pope quotes what became line 302 as an illustration of the desirability of avoiding hiatus (Corr., I.24).
