Chaucerian and Other Pieces: Being a Supplement to the Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer
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Chaucerian and Other Pieces: Being a Supplement to the Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer
Chaucer, Geoffrey, -1400
Truly, here was a noble beginning! The only non-Chaucerian pieces which he
failed to reject explicitly, among nos. 1-41, were the following, viz. 6 (A
Goodly Balade of Chaucer), 17 (The Complaint of the Black Knight), 20 (The
Testament of Love), 31 (The Cuckoo and the Nightingale), 38 (Go forth,
King), and 41 (A Balade in Praise of Chaucer). Of course he rejected the
last of these, but it was not worth his while to say so; and, in the same
way, he tacitly rejected or ignored nos. 6, 30, and 38. Hence it was that
nos. 6, 30, 38, and 41 did not appear in Moxon's Chaucer, and even no. 32
was carefully excluded. In his final list, out of nos. 1-41, Tyrwhitt
actually got rid of all but nos. 17, 20, and 31 (The Black Knight, The
Testament of Love, and The Cuckoo).
As to the remaining articles, he accepted, among the longer pieces, nos.
59, 62, and 63, i.e. The Court of Love, Chaucer's Dream, and The Flower and
the Leaf; to which he added nos. 42, 43, and 60 (as to which there is no
doubt), and also the Virelai (no. 50), on the slippery ground that it _is_
a virelai (which, strictly speaking, it is not).
§ 68. One result of his investigations was that an edition of Chaucer was
published by Moxon (my copy is dated 1855), in which all the poems were
included which Tyrwhitt accepted, followed by Tyrwhitt's Account of the
Works of Chaucer.
Owing to the popularity of this edition, many scholars accepted the poems
contained in it as being certainly genuine; but it is obvious that this was
a very risky thing to do, in the absence of external evidence; especially
when it is remembered that Tyrwhitt merely wanted to illustrate his
glossary to the Canterbury Tales by adding words from other texts. The idea
of drawing up a canon by the process of striking out from luxuriant lists
the names of pieces that are obviously spurious, is one that should never
have found acceptance.
§ 69. There is only one correct method of drawing up a canon of genuine
works, viz. that adopted by Mr. Henry Bradshaw, formerly our Cambridge
University Librarian. It is simple enough, viz. to take a clean sheet of
paper, and enter upon it, first of all, the names of all the pieces that
are admittedly genuine; and then to see if it can fairly be augmented by
adding such pieces as have reasonable evidence in their favour. In making a
list of this character, The Court of Love has no claim to be considered at
all, as I fully proved about twenty years ago[37]; and there is an end of
the matter. The MS. copy is in a hand of the sixteenth century[38], and
there is no internal evidence to suggest an earlier date.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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