In content as well as in form, the 1532 Workes of Geffray Chaucer newly printed set the pattern for Chaucerian printing for the next two centuries. Drawing on previously printed editions of Chaucer as well as on manuscripts, it dramatically increased the size and scope of the Chaucer book in print, making a bold claim for Chaucer’s cultural import as it did so.12 The book was very much a product of the Henrician court: William Thynne was chief clerk of the kitchen, his collaborator Brian Tuke was treasurer of the chamber, and Thomas Godfray, who printed it, was the recipient of the first royal patent for printing a book in England.13 Unsurprisingly, the book was dedicated to Henry VIII, and equipped with a fulsome preface addressed to the monarch.
A hefty folio of nearly four hundred pages, Thynne’s edition and its successors retained their status as the largest printed volume of English poetry throughout the sixteenth century. The 1532 edition includes the first printed editions of a number of Chaucerian texts, including the Legend of Good Women, the Treatise on the Astrolabe, and Chaucer’s translation of the Romaunt of the Rose. In addition, Thynne added—unwittingly or otherwise—a number of non-Chaucerian works; taken together, these apocryphal pieces constitute nearly a quarter of the book’s pages.14 Most of these pass without comment, but in later editions of the Works, some, such as Lydgate’s “A Balade of good conseile,” were identified as the work of their non-Chaucerian authors.
The 1532 Works were reprinted in 1542 and again in 1550, after Thynne’s death in 1548. The chief textual difference between these editions and the 1532 Works is the addition of the spurious Plowman’s Tale, an antifraternal satire, to the Canterbury Tales.15 (Godfray, printer of the 1532 Works, brought out a separate edition the Plowman’s Tale around 1534 [STC 5099.5], although it appears it was conceived of as a publication separate from the Works.)16 The Plowman’s Tale does not appear in any earlier printing of the Tales, and it is not found in any surviving Canterbury Tales manuscript.17 In the 1542 edition, it appears after the Parson’s Tale, making it the final element in the Tales, while in 1550, it was moved into the penultimate position between the Reeve and the Parson, disrupting the link between these two segments in what was perhaps an attempt to affirm its status as a full part of the Tales rather than a supplement. The Plowman’s Tale was carried forward in this place in subsequent editions of the Works.
In 1561 the Works were printed again, this time under the aegis of the antiquarian John Stow.18 The 1561 Works mark the first time a Chaucerian text had been printed during Elizabeth’s reign (Mary is the only Tudor monarch under whose reign no texts attributed to Chaucer were printed). Stow’s edition reproduced the text of the 1542 Works with only minor alterations, but it added a series of shorter poems at the end of the volume, most of which were drawn from two fifteenth-century miscellanies (now Cambridge, Trinity College MS R.3.19 and R.3.20).19 R.3.20 was compiled by the scribe and bibliophile John Shirley (ca. 1366–1456), an important source for the attestation of many of Chaucer’s shorter poems.20 Of the pieces added by Stow, only Adam Scriveyn, A Complaint Unto His Lady, and Against Women Unconstant and the Proverbs remain canonical today. Although Stow’s Works appeared when he was in his midthirties, he would return to Chaucer almost forty years later, contributing materials related to Chaucer’s biography to Thomas Speght’s edition of the Works.21
In 1598, more than sixty years after Thynne’s first edition, the Works were printed again, under the auspices of schoolteacher Thomas Speght. Speght’s edition was revised and reprinted in 1602, and reprinted a third time in 1687 for a consortium of booksellers. The 1598 edition reproduces Stow’s 1561 text and adds two previously unprinted apocryphal poems, The Assembly of Ladies and The Floure and the Leafe. These are included in the 1602 revision, which also adds two more works, both religious in nature: the A.B.C., Chaucer’s previously unprinted translation of a French poem in praise of the Virgin Mary, and Jack Upland. Jack Upland, a proto-Protestant prose polemic, had been previously printed at least twice, once in the 1530s and in the 1550s (in an edition by John Day described by John Bale but now lost). Jack Upland was also included—and attributed to Chaucer—in John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments, beginning with the second edition of 1570.
In addition to these new texts, the Speght editions expanded upon previous iterations of the Works by adding a significant amount of paratextual material designed to help readers better appreciate Chaucer and his work. This material places a focus on explanation, rather than simply praise, of Chaucer and his writings. The new front matter included dedication to Sir Robert Cecil and an address to the reader, as well as the prefatory material from the original 1532 Works, a substantial life of the poet, and summaries of each of the Canterbury Tales.22 At the back of the volume, Speght added translations for Chaucer’s Latin and French phrases, a list of authors cited in the text, and a hard word list—the first significant glossary of Chaucer’s Middle English.23 All of these components, with the exception of the material taken over from the 1532 prefatory materials, were revised and expanded in the 1602 reprint. In some ways—its glossary, its explanation of Chaucer’s metrics, and working assumption that readers will find Chaucer’s poetry both difficult and distant—the 1598 Speght edition is the first to look forward to modern editions of Chaucer and other Middle English authors. In other ways, however, it is a culmination of the past century’s engagement with Chaucer: throughout the paratextual materials, Speght presents Chaucer as a medieval author who anticipates and enables the literary successes of later English poets, while also remaining exemplary of his own historical and literary moment.
The Cultural Work of the Works
Although they appeared over a span of seven decades, the Chaucer folios share a number of features that demonstrate the importance of both historical and literary concerns in the production, marketing, and use of the Chaucer book.24 The sustained run of monumental folio editions from the 1530s onward is a unique feature of Chaucer’s early modern transmission: no other author’s works were collected, printed, and reprinted on such a scale. No effort was made to gather the writings of John Lydgate, the only other Middle English author with a similarly large and diverse vernacular canon.25 Of the writings of John Gower, whom admiring fifteenth-century writers often invoked alongside Chaucer and Lydgate as the greatest of English poets, only the Confessio Amantis appeared in print (in 1483, 1532, and 1554). The collected editions of John Skelton and John Heywood’s writings published later in the century were both smaller in format (octavo and quarto, respectively), as were the works of the Scots poet Sir David Lindsay and the poems of George Gascoigne (both also quarto).26 The folio edition of the English works of Sir Thomas More, published in 1557, was not reprinted.27
While Chaucer’s contemporaries in the continental vernaculars—Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Dante, as well as the Frenchmen Chartier, Ronsard, and Marot—were printed more frequently than their English counterparts, they were most often published in small-format books that did not seek to encompass the author’s entire canon. In bibliographic terms, the folio Chaucers look less like other literary productions and more closely resemble the large-format legal, antiquarian, and religious productions that would have formed a substantial portion of the libraries of the lawyers and scholars in Chaucer’s early modern audience. The heft of these editions helped lend Chaucer an authoritative, scholarly air, but at a certain cost, since folios are less portable and less suited to private, individual reading than smaller formats.
Chaucer’s sixteenth-century print history is also remarkable for what it does not include: editions of individual works. Despite their large size and significant price tag, the