ABSTRACT
While speculation about what exactly happened to the end of The House of Fame – was it written and then lost or never composed [71]? – has fuelled some critical reception of that poem, and although there has been some question over Chaucer’s authorship of the fragments of The Romaunt of the Rose [62] and The Equatorie of Planetis [88], the main focus of manuscript debate has been The Canterbury Tales. Ever since Caxton there has been dissatisfaction with the printed text of the Tales. Indeed, if we are to believe Caxton, the appearance of the second edition in 1484 was entirely due to complaints from ‘one gentleman’ who ‘said that this book was not according in many places vnto the book that Geffrey chaucer had made’ (Crotch 1928: 91). The debate has continued since then, moving through the first attempt at a Complete Works in Thynne’s 1532 edition (for which Thynne, at Henry VIII’s behest, searched libraries and monasteries for Chaucer manuscripts), to Urry in 1721, (who, in common with others before him, included many works not by Chaucer) to Tyrwhitt’s Tales of 1775 (the first to exclude works and to attempt to recreate an original text through the comparison of manuscripts; Thynne is credited with being Chaucer’s first ‘modern’ editor) to Skeat’s Oxford Chaucer of 1894, which still stands as a monument to editorial and textual scholarship. Lately the argument has given rise to The Variorum Chaucer. Rather than seeking a single definitive edition which purports to be what Chaucer wrote, based on principles of ‘best’ text and scholarly reconstruction and correction of sections which are either illegible or incomprehensible, a variorum edition reproduces all the variants and allows readers to draw their own conclusions. The difficulty with the single edited ‘ideal’ text is that it presents a text which quite probably never existed before. The difficulty with a Variorum, apart from its sheer unwieldiness, is that it is easy to select readings of individual lines which suit one’s own inclination, but together result in something that has not existed before: the integrity of the manuscripts is thus destroyed. Moreover, even a Variorum must decide which text to take as the base, around which the variants cluster, and this in itself gives a particular manuscript or version more canonical standing than the others.
