Although new texts were added and some line readings changed (whether by design or accident), the text of Chaucer remained largely stable across these folio editions. In 1532, Thynne drew from a mix of print and manuscript sources, reflecting the variety of textual witnesses in circulation; two manuscripts and a copy of Caxton’s Boece used in the preparation of his edition survive today.29 Subsequent editions of the Works relied on the most recent previous edition, with the 1542 printers using a copy of the 1532 Works, the 1550 printers using the 1542 edition, and so on. Through this process of enchainment, Thynne’s text remained the basis for all printed editions of Chaucer until Thomas Tyrwhitt’s 1775–1777 edition of the Canterbury Tales, published three hundred years after Thynne’s main source for the Tales, Caxton’s 1477 edition.30 (Poems and other texts added to the Works in later editions generally came from manuscript sources, although Speght took Jack Upland directly from the text printed in Foxe’s Actes and Monuments.)31 For good or for ill, this stability meant that decisions made in the preparation of one edition of the Works continued to shape Chaucer’s text as it was encountered by many future generations of readers.
The tendency of one edition to build on the previous through a process of textual accretion affected not just individual passages in Chaucer’s text, but the development of his canon as well. Once a text was printed in the Works, it was also reprinted in the Works (this was also true of paratextual elements like Thynne’s dedication to Henry VIII, which appeared in every edition of the Works until the eighteenth century). As noted above, while the folio editions contain most of the Chaucer canon as we regard it today, they also include a significant number of apocryphal texts, which early readers generally seem to have accepted as Chaucer’s own. Thynne’s 1532 edition, in particular, introduced several longer apocryphal works—among them Usk’s Testament of Love, Robert Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid, and The Floure of Curtesie, now attributed to John Lydgate—but new, non-Chaucerian texts were also added at later stages of transmission: the Plowman’s Tale (1542), most of the poems supplied by John Stow (1561), and three of the four pieces added in Speght’s editions (The Assembly of Ladies, The Floure and the Leafe, and Jack Upland are apocryphal; the A.B.C. is not).32
These spurious works played a significant role in shaping readers’ understanding of Chaucer as an author. While the Plowman’s Tale supported Chaucer’s posthumous reputation as a religious reformer, many of the poems added by Stow (most of which do not carry attribution in manuscript) cast Chaucer as a courtly figure by the way they engage with topics of courtly love and fin amor.33 While later sixteenth-century editions of the Works sometimes identify certain texts as the work of other writers, it is not always clear whether unmarked new additions—some of which are titled simply “a ballade”—were included on the basis of an amorphous notion of Chaucerian affinity and affiliation, or with the understanding that they were written by Chaucer himself.34
As the size of Chaucer’s canon expanded, so too did the amount of paratextual material, often antiquarian in nature, that accompanied it. As in the case of the Works’ literary contents, an additive tendency prevails: once a new element is introduced, it generally appears in all subsequent editions. Thynne’s 1532 dedicatory preface to Henry VIII, which I discuss in greater detail below, was included in editions of Chaucer’s works long after the demise of its addressee.35 Later publications carried over other elements from Thynne as well, including a table of contents (which is updated to reflect additions and changes in later editions) and three short non-Chaucerian poems that appear sandwiched between the table of contents and the interior title page for the Canterbury Tales. Greg Walker has argued that these three poems—“Eight goodly questyons, with their aunswers” (Digital Index of Medieval English Verse [hereafter DIMEV] 4978), “To the kynges most noble grace, and to the lordes and knyghtes of the garter” (written by Hoccleve, DIMEV 6045), and an untitled fourteen-line excerpt from prophetic verses sometimes attributed to Chaucer and sometimes to Merlin (DIMEV 6299)—were placed there deliberately, forming a kind of bridge between the concerns of the preface and the main body of the text, and that their didacticism offers a model for interpreting the Chaucerian pieces that follow.36 Like the dedicatory preface, these were reprinted in later editions of the Works, even though the specific cultural and political moment they appear to address had passed. Along with the preface, their continued presence in later editions marked Chaucer as a poet who had become, in important ways, a Tudor author as well as a Ricardian one.
Chaucer’s Language and the Language of Chaucerian Praise
In the paratextual material associated with the Works as well as in other antiquarian contexts, extrapoetic discourse around Chaucer coalesced around a few major themes during the sixteenth century, most significantly the excellence of his language. For many commentators, Chaucer’s most noteworthy poetic accomplishments were not his robust characters, his sophisticated engagements with classical and continental sources, or his experiments in meter. They were, instead, his words, which were seen to have a salutary impact on the language as a whole, such that Chaucer could be credited with single-handedly elevating English to the same level of richness and sophistication as the continental vernaculars. (Chaucer, in this sense, occupied a role analogous to that of Shakespeare in the later Anglophone world, a proper name to which wide-ranging claims of linguistic innovation could be attached.) Chaucer’s language was important to his poetic admirers from Thomas Hoccleve and Thomas Usk onward, but the collected folio editions of the Works were especially attuned to the broader extraliterary significance of claims for Chaucer’s eloquence.
The dedicatory preface to William Thynne’s 1532 edition of Chaucer’s collected Works offers what is perhaps the most fully articulated account of this view. Addressed to Henry VIII, the preface underscores Chaucer’s potential usefulness to early modern projects of nation building, while also emphasizing the importance of learning and wisdom to good government.37 For Thynne, eloquence goes hand in hand with other forms of cultural excellence. Discussing the biblical, then the classical past, he writes that “Amonges other / the Grekes in all kyndes of sciences / semed so to prevayle and so to ornate their tonge / as yet by other of right noble langages can nat be perfitely ymitated or folowed.” Similarly, “the Latyns by example of the grekes, have gotten or wonne to them no small glorie / in the fourmynge / order / and uttrynge of that tonge.” Whatever eloquence these languages now possess is a tale of corruption followed by redemption, an important detail if one is to imagine the eventual perfection of the English tongue. Thynne explains that the Spanish language, “beinge also latyn was by Vandales / Gothes / Moores / Sarracenes / and other so many tymes blemysshed / as marveyle it is to se nowe unto what perfection these two [Italian and Spanish, the two languages that Thynne identifies as being closest to Latin] formed out of the latyn and barbare speches be reduced.” He continues, “Next unto them / in symilytude to the latyn is the Frenche tonge / whiche by dilygence of people of the same / is in fewe yeres passed so amended / as well in pronunciation as in writyng / that an Englyshman by a small tyme exercised in that tonge hath nat lacked grounde to make a gramer, or rule ordinary therof.”38 For Thynne, as for most premodern writers on the topic, language and identity were deeply related. Here, “French” refers both to the language and to the “people of the same,” whose cohesion as a group stems from their shared language.
The preface suggests that Thynne valued regularity and systematic organization in language, qualities not particularly prominent in early modern English, but also that he saw linguistic improvement and standardization as the result of intentional effort—“dilygence”—on the part of a language’s speakers rather than as an organic process.39