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.In the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, poets in English increased the variety and frequency of classical allusions. From the work of Geoffrey Chaucer and John Gower onwards, writers showed off their classical pretensions to support their ambitions for poetry in English. The stylistic shift, from Bevis of Hampton to Hecuba of Troy, is often told as part of a larger one from 'medieval to Renaissance in English poetry'; so A. C. Spearing once put it, noting Chaucer's innovation in invocation of the Muses (1985: e.g. 24-28). We are learning how a renewed classical taste shaped ethics, theology and genre, especially for Chaucer and Lydgate (e.g. recently Minnis 2016; Edwards 2016), but there is more to learn about the stylistic changes in this poetry. These allusions might seem like hackneyed clichés after centuries of gods and fauns, but the style is not trivial: a stylistic tic can carry connotations and have implications for a poem's theory of history, its rhetorical effect and its political prestige. Even if we resist the 1 For brevity and clarity, the references use short titles for the following works: Thebes = Lydgate, The Siege of Thebes = Erdmann and Ekwall ed. 1911-30; Troy = Lydgate, Troy Book = Bergen 1906-35. Troilus = Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde = Windeatt ed. 1984; Tales = Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales = Manly and Rickert ed. 1940. As citation of Tales is normally to the apparatus of Manly and Rickert ed. ( 1940), the few quotations not from MSS or Manly and Rickert's apparatus also come from their text, despite its flaws, and line-numbering is theirs.