Not Diane: The Risk of Error in Chaucerian Classicism

Abstract

When Chaucer, Lydgate, and their contemporaries made classical characters and classical allusions an important part of English poetry, they risked confusing scribes and readers. In the vein of recent studies of scribes as readers, this article explores the mistakes of scribes in copying and comprehending those details. In addition, this article explores the ways that poets’ phrasing implies awareness of those risks and seeks to mitigate them. The article thus presents the creation of the text as a coproduction between agents, which might be understood in the framework of pragmatics, the analysis of speech acts in social context. These problems in transmission, and the forestalling of them, first reveal how classicism, which later became a monumental tradition, was a risky interaction in some of its earliest phases in English poetry. Second, more briefly and tentatively, these problems suggest the risks of writing for scribal transmission in general.

Keywords:

• Scribe
• reader
• textual transmission
• error
• risk
• Classicism
• pragmatics

Notes

1. As citation of Tales is normally to the apparatus of Manly and Rickert (1940), the few quotations not from MSS or Manly and Rickert’s apparatus also come from their text, despite its flaws, and fragment-lettering and line-numbering are theirs.

2. For brevity and clarity, the references use short titles for the following works: Thebes: Erdmann and Ekwall 1911–30; Troy: Bergen 1906–35; Troilus: Windeatt 1984; Tales: Manly and Rickert 1940.

3. References to MSS use the following abbreviations: BL: London, British Library; BodL: Oxford, Bodleian Library; HEHL: San Marino, Huntington Library; PML: New York, Pierpont Morgan Library. All quotations from MSS expand abbreviations silently.

4. I thank Niall Summers for compiling a database of classical proper nouns from the text and variants of Manly and Rickert (1940, vols V–VIII) and of Erdmann and Ekwall (1911–30). Tallies in this paragraph exclude the frequently repeated main characters and places Arcite, Athens, Aurelius, Arviragus, Dorigen, Emelye, Palamon from Tales, and Adrastus, Argos, Eteocles, Jocasta, Lycurgus, Oedipus, Polynices, and Thebes from Siege and Greece/Greek and Troy/Trojan.

5. There are only four instances of misspelling in the seventeen mentions, each rendered rightly across dozens of manuscripts. More curiously, four times Athens is replaced with Thebes (Manly and Rickert 1940, apparatus for A861, A.873, A.968, A.2098).

6. The editor emends to “Daphne” but admits in his apparatus to line 115 that all the manuscripts have “Diane” again or “Done.”