Chaucer's Works, Volume 3 — The House of Fame; The Legend of Good Women; The Treatise on the Astrolabe; The Sources of the Canterbury TalesChaucer, Geoffrey
General
Chaucer's Works, Volume 3 — The House of Fame; The Legend of Good Women; The Treatise on the Astrolabe; The Sources of the Canterbury Tales
Chaucer, Geoffrey
English poetry -- Middle English, 1100-1500
According to Lowndes, other later editions of Chaucer's Works are the
following:--Edinburgh, 1777; 18mo. 12 vols.--Edinburgh, 1782; 12mo. 14
vols.--In Anderson's British Poets, Edinburgh, 1793-1807; royal 8vo. 13
vols.--In Cooke's British Poets, London, 1798, &c., 18mo. 80 parts.--In
Chalmers' English Poets, London, 1810; royal 8vo. 21 vols. I suppose that
all of these are mere reprints; such is certainly the case with the edition
by Chalmers, which merely reproduces Tyrwhitt's edition of the Canterbury
Tales, and follows 'the black-letter editions' throughout the other poems.
The same remark applies to the edition printed by Moxon in 1855, and
attributed to Tyrwhitt as editor.
Other editions are those by S. W. Singer, London, 1822, fcp. 8vo. 5 vols.;
by Sir H. Nicolas (in the Aldine edition of English Poets), London, 1845,
post 8vo. 6 vols.; and by Robert Bell, London, 1855, 12mo. 8 vols. The last
was really edited by Mr. Jephson.
Bell's (so-called) edition was conveniently reprinted in four volumes, in
Bohn's Standard Library; a revised edition of this was published in 1878,
with a Preliminary Essay by myself. Of the Legend of Good Women, the editor
(Mr. Jephson) remarks that 'the text of the present edition is founded upon
a careful collation of the MS. Fairfax 16, in the Bodleian Library, and MS.
Arch. Seld. B. 24'; i.e. upon a collation of F. with A. It gives us the
text of MS. F., with the missing lines supplied from Thynne or from MS. A.
It omits ll. 960, 961, and inserts ll. 1326, 1327 _in the wrong place_,
viz. after l. 1329. At l. 2338, it gives both the correct and the spurious
forms of the line; so that here (as in Thynne) _three_ lines rime together.
In l. 2150-3, the same confusion occurs as is noticed below, in the account
of Morris's edition. The chief gain in this edition is that it has a few
explanatory notes. Of these I have freely availed myself, marking them with
the word 'Bell' whenever I quote them exactly; though they were really
written, as I am told, by Mr. Jephson, whose name nowhere appears, except
at p. 12 of my Essay, as prefixed to the revised edition.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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