Contradictory Responses to the Wife of Bath as evidenced by Fifteenth-Century Manuscript Variants

23 Contradictory Responses to the Wife of Bath as evidenced by Fifteenth-Century Manuscript Variants Beverly Kennedy Manuscripts of The Canterbury Tales which show clear signs of scribal interference have long been dismissed by editors as ‘bad texts.’ Now, however, these same manuscripts are being revalued by reception historians for the evidence they provide regarding the earliest reception of Chaucer’s work1 To be sure, most extant manuscripts of the Tales offer some sort of evidence regarding its fifteenth-century reception, in the form of illustrations, rubrics, marginal notes or doodles; however, it may be argued that striking scribal alterations of the text itself offer the best evidence of how Chaucer’s near contemporaries responded to his work. Those interested in the reception of the Wife of Bath are particularly fortunate in that her Prologue is by far the most altered piece in the Tales.2 I think the primary reason for this is that her Prologue is both contentious and ambiguous: contentious in its discussion of marriage and ambiguous in its representation of the Wife’s sexual morality. As a result, scribal interference with this text is not only frequent and striking, but often contradictory, leading me to hypothesize two different scribal receptions of the Wife’s Prologue: one informed by clerical asceticism, misogyny and misogamy and the other by a more popular and positive attitude towards sex, women and the institution of marriage. In what follows I shall trace these two scribal receptions through three types of variant: spurious links, minor variants which alter the sense of the text, and major variants which involve the omission or addition of substantial passages or significant revision of the text. I will also briefly consider the evidence of glosses and visual images, since these both support the contradictory response hypothesis suggested by the textual variants. The spurious links in La Bw Ld2 Ry2 Nl The two spurious links devised by scribes to connect the Wife’s Prologue to a preceding text offer totally contradictory images of her. The first represents her as outrageously rude and coarse, while the second makes her appear courteous and at least conventionally pious. The first link is unique to the very early Lansdowne manuscript where it is used to connect the Wife’s Prologue to the Squire’s Fragment immediately preceding. After reciting the first two parts of his tale, the Squire gallantly offers to postpone the rest until it is his turn again: Bot I wil here nowe maake a knotte To e time it come next to my lotte THE CANTERBURY TALES PROJECT OCCASIONAL PAPERS II, 1997, 23-39 24 Canterbury Tales Project Occasional Papers II For here be felawes behinde an hepe treulye at wolden talke ful besilye And haue her sporte as wel as I And the daie passe fast certanly Therfore oste take nowe goode heede Who schall next tell and late him speede Than schortly ansewarde e wife of Bathe And swore a wonder grete ha e Be goddes bones I wil tel next I will nouht glose bot saye e text 3 The scribe who composed this link confronted two problems: the unfinished state of the Squire’s Tale and the lack of a text connecting the beginning of the Wife’s Prologue to any other part of The Canterbury Tales. He has solved both at once by having the Squire conclude his first story-telling stint with the second fitt since there are an hepe of felawes waiting to have her sporte. The Squire suggests that the Host choose who schall next tell but the Host is unable to reply before the Wife breaks in with her wonder grete ha e. For sheer rudeness, not to mention blasphemy, the Wife’s interruption is matched elsewhere in the Tales only by that of the drunken Miller, when he insists on telling his tale out of turn (By armes, and by blood and bones! A.3125.) This strong verbal parallel suggests that the Lansdowne scribe thought of the Wife as similar in character to the Miller, i.e. rude and immoral and possibly jolly, but not at all respectable. In contrast, the spurious link which connects the Wife’s Prologue to the conclusion of The Merchant’s Tale in several later manuscripts (BL Royal 18.C.ii, Barlow and Laud 739) represents the Wife as being extremely polite: Oure Ost gan tho to loke vp anon Gode men quo he herkenyth euerychon As euer mote I drynke wyn or ale This marchant hath Itolde a mery tale How Ianuarie had a lither Iape His wif put in his hoode an ape But here of I wil leue of as nowe Dame wif of bathe quo he I pray 'ou Telle vs a tale now next aftir is Sir Ost quod she so god my soule blis As I fully therto wil consente And also it is myn hole entente To done ou alle disporte as at I can But holdith me excusid I am a woman I con not rehersen as ise clerkes kune And right a non she hath hir tale by gune 4 Not only does Harry Bailly address the Wife respectfully as Dame and politely make his request (I pray 'ou / Telle vs a tale now) but she responds to him in language which may even be overly respectful (Sir Ost.) Moreover she gives the impression of being both pious and humble as well. The expression, so god my soule blis , suggests piety and the admission that she can not reherse as 25 these clerkes kune suggests humility. Of course, both phrases may be no more than hollow expressions of civility. Indeed, the humility may be doubleedged with sarcasm, given what she will have later to say about clerks. But there can be no doubt of her bourgeois respectability. This image of the Wife as a respectable bourgeois woman is taken for granted in the prologue to the anonymous Tale of Beryn (also known as The Canterbury Interlude) a spurious addition to The Canterbury Tales which survives in only one mid-fifteenth-century text (Northumberland MS 455) but was probably composed around the year 1420. After visiting the shrine, hearing mass and having dinner at the inn with all the company, she proposes to the Prioress that they spend the afternoon together: She toke the Priores by the hond: Madam, wol ye stalk Pryvely into the garden to se the herbes growe, And after with our hostes wyff in hir parlour rowe? I woll gyve yewe the wyne, and ye shull me also, For tyll we go to soper, we have naught elles to do. The Priores, as womman taught of gentil blood and hend, Assented to hir counsell, and forth gon they wend.... 5 This is not the sort of woman to interrupt her felawes with a wonder grete oath. Indeed, the images of the Wife created in the spurious Lansdowne link and Beryn Prologue could not be more different. Minor variants Minor variants affecting words or phrases are not usually so indicative of scribal attitudes as spurious links and prologues. However, some of the variants which occur in the earliest manuscripts of the Wife’s Prologue alter the text’s meaning enough to be suggestive of scribal attitudes. Moreover, the alterations they make also point to a divided response to the Wife in that they imply either approval or disapproval of her arguments defending marriage and her behaviour as a wife. The first pair of variants occurs at line 46. The reading familiar to us from modern critical editions appears in both Ellesmere and Harley 7334 (Gg lacks this leaf): For sothe I wol nat kepe me chaast in al But Hengwrt, Corpus, Lansdowne and Cambridge Dd all have For sith [Dd syn] I wol nat kepe me chast in al The Ellesmere line can be read as a declarative statement complete in itself—and is so punctuated in the Riverside Chaucer—but the Hengwrt line is clearly a dependent adverbial clause, meaningless without the rest of the sentence: Whan myn housbonde is fro the world ygon Som Cristen man shal wedde me anon Contradictory Responses 26 Canterbury Tales Project Occasional Papers II The difference between these two texts in terms of characterizing the Wife is considerable. In the first she appears to be boasting of her unwillingness to live in chastity (in the sense of celibacy.) In the second, she is simply explaining that she prefers one form of chastity to another, the third degree (marital chastity) to the second (celibate widowhood.) The Ellesmere variant is more likely to be scribal in origin, because its substitution of sothe for sithe breaks up a complex sentence, making the sense unit coincide with the line, something which Barry Windeatt has shown scribes did frequently when copying Chaucer’s Troilus. The Ellesmere variant is also the more misogynous of the two insofar as it makes the Wife’s justification of marriage and re-marriage as a way of avoiding sin (invoking the words of St. Paul in the line, Bet is to be wedded than to brynne) appear hypocritical. The declarative For sothe, I wol nat kepe me chaast in al implies that her real reason for marrying and re-marrying is not a desire for virtue (marital chastity) but a desire for sexual satisfaction. As a consequence, this alteration may also be taken to imply that the Ellesmere scribe does not approve the Wife’s unwillingness to attempt the greater virtue of celibacy. The other set of minor variants seems to have occurred in response to the inherent ambiguity of ‘chastitee.’ Medieval usage shows that this noun could denote any one of the three degrees of chastity: virginity, celibacy, or marital fidelity. In certain contexts this could lead to confusion. At lines 91-4 Hengwrt, Harley 7334 and Ellesmere offer an ambiguous text, which probably reflects Chaucer’s original: This is al and som: he [St. Paul] heeld virginitee Moore partit than weddyng in freletee. Freletee clepe I but if that he and she Wolde leden al hir lyf in chastitee The ambiguity occurs in the second couplet where the Wife responds to St. Paul’s definition of marriage as frailty by saying that she, too, regards marriage as frailty unless (‘but if that’) the couple are willing to live their entire life in ‘chastitee.’ The word ‘chastitee’ remains ambiguous even in this ‘definition-ofmarriage’ context because the medieval Church allowed spiritual marriage, a relationship in which man and wife lived together as brother and sister, without having a sexual relationship, and this type of marriage was thought to be more perfect than ordinary marriage (Elliott 1993.) As a consequence the Wife’s utterance is confusing. Is she saying that marriage is ‘freletee’ unless the husband and wife live together as brother and sister, in which case ‘chastitee’ would mean celibacy? Or, is she saying that marriage is ‘freletee’ unless husband and wife are always faithful to one another, in which case ‘chastitee’ would mean marital chastity? Among the earliest copyists, neither the Corpus nor the Dd scribe were satisfied with this ambiguity, for each tried to clarify it, albeit in totally opposite directions. The Dd scribe alters the second line of the couplet so that ‘chastitee’ clearly means celibacy: Freltee clepe I but if that he and she Wold here lyues lede al in chastitee 27 He has clarified the sense simply by changing the singular hir lyf to the plural here lyues and shifting the position of al so that it now modifies the phrase in chastitee . The married couple are now depicted not as one flesh, but rather as continuing to lead their separate lives al in chastitee, i.e. ‘totally in chastity,’ or, without sex. On the other hand, the Corpus scribe appears to have wished to emphasize the fact that marriage itself is a form of chastity: Freltee clepe I not but that he and sche Wolde leede here lijf in chastite In order to eliminate the possibility that chastite be taken to mean celibacy, the Corpus scribe has simply removed al from the second line, even though its removal spoils the metre. He has also removed the if following the but in the first line and added a not before it, so that the meaning of the couplet becomes, ‘I call it [weddyng] frailty, even though [‘not but that’ i.e. notwithstanding (the fact) that] he and she would be leading their life in chastity.’ St. Paul may be right to consider marriage ‘freltee’ because it accommodates the weakness of the flesh, but the Corpus scribe wants to insist that faithful marriage is nevertheless a form of chastity. The difference in meaning between these two versions of Chaucer’s couplet implies quite different attitudes towards sex, marriage, and, by extension, towards the much-married Wife of Bath. The Dd scribe appears to have disapproved of sex, much as St. Paul did, and to have thought, regardless of St. Jerome’s definition of marriage as the third degree of chastity, that one cannot have sexual relations and at the same time be chaste—at least, not in the sense of the word which is meaningful to him, that of being pure and chaste, without blemish. On the other hand, the Corpus scribe seems not only to have approved of sex within marriage but also to have been unhappy with the Pauline definition of marriage as ‘freltee.’ Perhaps the Corpus scribe felt that this term misrepresented the difficulty of remaining faithful to one spouse. Certainly he thought it was right to regard such faithfulness as a form of chastity. Given their respective attitudes towards sex and marriage, we may safely infer that the Dd and Cp scribes could not have agreed upon an ethical judgment of the Wife of Bath. The Dd scribe would not have approved of her at all. To marry once is perhaps unavoidable, but five times points to a woeful lack of interest in the virtue of chastity as he understands it. On the other hand, the Corpus scribe might have had a good deal of sympathy for the Wife, interpreting her frequent re-marriage as an acceptable and far from easy way to guard oneself against the temptations of the flesh. Major variants: the renumbered husbands and ‘added passages’ The first set of major variants is actually a sequence of what have been taken to be errors in the numbering of the Wife’s husbands. Needless to say, these ‘errors’ have been corrected in all modern editions, so that a considerable effort of defamiliarization is necessary before one can see how they change the Contradictory Responses 28 Canterbury Tales Project Occasional Papers II meaning of Chaucer’s text. Having made that effort, I am now convinced that they are not ‘errors’ at all. Rather, they are alterations designed to tighten the narrative structure of the second half of the Prologue. In so doing they also change the characterization of the Wife. At that point in the text where the Wife begins speaking of her fourth husband (452-53), the Dd scribe has her begin all over again, with husband number one. Now wol I speke of my first husbonde My first husbonde was a reuelour This is to sey he had a paramour And I was yong and ful of ragerie (452-5) Then, less than thirty lines later, Now forth to telle of my secund husbonde I sey I had in hert greet despit That he of any other had delit (480-82) Then twenty lines later, Now, of my thridde husbonde wol I telle God let his soule neuer come in helle And yet was he to me the moost shrewe (503-5) And again, twenty lines later, My ferthe busbonde, god his soule blisse Which that I took for loue & no richesse He somtyme was a clerk of Oxenforde (525-7) Twenty lines later still we are given the story of how she courted Jankyn, who was to become her fifth husband, and almost immediately after that she tells us, Whan that my fierthe husbonde was on beere I wep algate and made sory chere As wyues moten for it is vsage (587-9) There follows the story of how she fell in love with and married Jankyn; however, she never refers to this Jankyn either as her fifth husband or as a clerk from Oxford. The internal coherence of this revision of the last part of the Wife’s Prologue, which may or may not have been done by the Dd scribe himself, is quite remarkable. It never openly contradicts what the Wife has told us in the previous part, where she classified her five husbands into two groups, the good and the bad. It rather elaborates upon what she has already said by describing each of her five husbands individually. The first was a ‘revelour;’ the second a philanderer; the third, the Oxford Clerk, was a wife-beater but she loved him the best anyway because he played hard to get and was great in bed; the fourth she married for love, not money, but he died when she returned from Jerusalem; and the fifth, Jankyn, was yet another well-educated wife-beater. The sequence is swift and well organized, each husband’s salient characteristic eliciting from the Wife either a reminiscence or a bit of proverbial wisdom. Remembrance of the first husband brings back her own joyous youth; 29 remembrance of the second, the philanderer, recalls how she got even by letting him think she was having an affair, too; remembrance of the third prompts her to remark on women’s ‘queynte fantasie’ of preferring what is forbidden or hard to get; and remembrance of the fourth recalls how she betrayed his secrets and then, during his absence, courted his successor, Jankyn. Everything leads up to Jankyn, in whom the Wife finally meets her match. The consequences of this revision for the characterization of the Wife are interesting. Gone is the garrulous old woman who keeps losing her train of thought and repeating herself. Instead we have the impression of a much younger, more vital woman, fully in control of her present narrative as well as most of her five husbands. What is more, this revised narrative suggests that she was obsessed with the sexual capabilities and activities of all of them. The second set of major variants, the five ‘added passages’ in the Wife’s Prologue have traditionally been taken to be late authorial revisions; however, they are more likely to be scribal interpolations, probably added by the Cambridge Dd scribe (Blake 1985.)6 They make their first appearance, together with the ‘errors’ in re-numbering the Wife’s husbands, in the Cambridge Dd manuscript and they are monotonously misogynist in import, as even the most cursory reading will show: Of whiche {i.e.husbands} I have pycked out the beste Bothe of here nether purs and of here cheste. Diverse scoles maken parfyt clerkes And diverse practyk in many sondry werkes Maketh the werkman parfyt sekirly. Of fyve husbondes scoleiyng am I. (44a-f) I bar hym on honde he hadde enchanted me My dame taughte me that soutiltee And eek I seyde I mette of hym al nyght He wolde han slayn me as I lay upright And al my bed was ful of verray blood. But yet I hope that ye shal do me good, For blood bitokeneth gold, as me was taught. And al was fals; I dremed of it right naught But as I folwed ay my dames loore As wel of this as of othere thynges moore. (575-84) For certes, I am al Venerien In feelynge, and myn herte is Marcien. Venus me yaf my lust, my likerousnesse And Mars yaf me my sturdy hardynesse (609-12) Yet have I Martes mark upon my face And also in another privee place. For God so wys be my savacioun I ne loved nevere by no discrecioun But evere folwede myn appetit Al were he short or long, or blak, or whit I took no kep, so that he liked me How poore he was, ne eek of what degree. (619-26) Contradictory Responses 30 Canterbury Tales Project Occasional Papers II For which [i.e. Eve’s sin] that Jhesu Crist hymself was slayn That boghte us with his herte blood agayn. Lo, heere expres of womman may ye fynde That womman was the los of al mankynde. (717-20) Whoever added these five passages was clearly a misogynist who thought it reasonable to hold women responsible for the woes of ‘al mankynde.’ He was also interested in blackening the Wife’s character in specific ways. The first passage makes it appear that from the age of twelve she was so greedy and lecherous as to choose all her husbands for their wealth and sexual potency. The second emphasizes her duplicity and that of all women in dealing with men. The third emphasizes her lechery and aggressiveness and the fourth makes her boast of a lifetime of sexual promiscuity. Even though modern critical editions continue to follow Walter Skeat’s lead (1894) and treat these passages as late authorial revisions, there are several good reasons, quite apart from their content, for thinking that they are more likely to be scribal interpolations. First, subsequent to their initial appearance in the Dd manuscript, they achieved a very limited and erratic manuscript attestation.7 Second, within the A and B groups of manuscripts they almost always appear in conjunction with the scribal error of the re-numbered husbands.8 Third, upon examination, they all prove to be rather awkwardly inserted and either repetitious or contradictory of other universally attested passages (Kennedy 1995.) Finally, if they were to be omitted, the continuity of expression in the remaining text would not be impaired in the least (Fisher Forthcoming.) On the other hand, there is only one good reason for thinking they might be late authorial revisions—their ostensibly Chaucerian style. Indeed, this is the only reason, according to Manly and Rickert, why the authenticity of these passages had ‘never been questioned’ before their time (2:191.) But as Norman Blake and others have since observed, stylistic analysis is a highly subjective undertaking and hardly fool-proof (Blake 1985, 46-8.) Moreover, recent research shows that what we call ‘authority’ was in fifteenth-century manuscript culture ‘quite intentionally dispersed,’ being ‘most of the time not the property’ of the individual we would identify as the author (Hanna 1992,122) and that late medieval scribes working in the vernacular ‘could be quite willing to rewrite substantively the text they were copying’ (Machan 1992, 5.) Nor should we assume, as many Chaucerians seem to do, that no fifteenth-century scribe could possibly have imitated Chaucer’s style well enough to fool us, certainly not when we are dealing with relatively short passages.9 If these five passages are scribal interpolations then the Cambridge Dd scribe is an excellent candidate for their authorship, because his marginal comments show that he was both a misogynist and a misogamist. Examples abound in the margins of the Wife’s prologue. Opposite her boast that no man can half so boldely... / Swere and lyen, as a womman kan (D.227-28) he writes, ‘Verum est’! (f.69v.) Opposite her admissions that women have a propensity to desire what is forbidden them (D.519-20, f.73r ) and konne no thyng hele (D.950,f.78r), he responds in exactly the same way. Later, like the Hengwrt 31 and Ellesmere scribes, he responds with a nota to Jankyn’s proverb that a man who suffreth his wyf to go seken halwes /Is worthy to been hanged o the galwes (D.657-58, f.74v.) He then finds equally notable Jankyn’s saying that wives are so wikked and contrarious / They haten that hir housbondes loven ay (D.780-81, f.75v.) Such examples of misogamy are also to be found in the margins of the Merchant’s tale. Indeed, the Dd scribe seems to have particularly enjoyed the Merchant’s sarcastic mode of expressing his hatred of marriage. For example, opposite the Merchant’s ironic assurance, A wyf wol laste, and in thyn hous endure / Wel lenger than thee list, paraven (E.1317-18), he writes ‘Verum’! And to the Merchant’s equally ironic assurance that If [her husband] be poore she helpeth hym to swynke (E.1342), he responds playfully, or to drynke! The Dd scribe’s responses also indicate a prurient interest in sexual relations between married partners, with perhaps a special interest in their sadomasochistic potential. In the margins of The Merchant’s Tale he responds with a ‘nota’ to January’s first meditation upon the beauty of May, but to his meditation upon the pain he must inflict upon her on their wedding night, the Dd scribe responds with a ‘nota bene’ in the right margin and in the left margin draws a hand doodle with index finger pointing to the passage (f.112r.) Likewise he responds with a ‘nota’ to the Wife’s admission that Jankyn could always gloose her into bed whenever he wolde han [her] beal chose even though he had just beaten her on euery bon (D.509-10, f.72v.) And there are other indications of his particular interest in the Wife’s own sexuality. At the top of the same folio (72v) he draws a hand doodle with finger pointing to her proverbial remark that a likerous mouth must han a likerous tail (D.466) and later he responds with a ‘nota’ to the boast that her husbands told her she had the best quoniam that myght be (D.608, f.74r.) Of course, the Dd scribe’s marginal comments do not prove that he is responsible for the five ‘added passages.’ He may have found some or all of them in his copytext, just as he may have found rather than invented the ‘errors’ of the re-numbered husbands. We will probably never know who first added these passages to Chaucer’s text, because the manuscript evidence is inconclusive. However, their hermeneutic impact suggests that it could not have been Chaucer himself (Kennedy 1995, 1996.) Therefore, they should be regarded as yet another example, among many, of a negative scribal response to Chaucer’s Wife of Bath. It is important to note that all of the examples of a negative reception discussed above originate in two small genetic groups of manuscripts, Manly and Rickert’s A and B groups.10 With few exceptions, explainable by contamination, they do not appear in manuscripts belonging to the much larger C and D groups.11 Moreover, in many of these C and D manuscripts there is evidence of a more positive scribal attitude towards the Wife and marriage. For example, Barlow and Lincoln, like the very early Harley 7334, omit 605-8. This omission could be explained as either scribal error or authorial cancellation.12 However, it could also be explained as a case of deliberate omission by a scribe who thought the passage did not ‘fit’ the Wife’s character. Barlow, it will be remembered, is one of the three manuscripts which has the Contradictory Responses 38 Canterbury Tales Project Occasional Papers II 21 Blake’s edition of The Canterbury Tales is still the only one to be based rigorously on Hengwrt, while loyalty to Ellesmere remains strong, especially in North America (Blake 1980; Hanna 1989), even though Hengwrt has been adopted as the base-text of the New Variorum Chaucer. John Fisher will include all five Dd passages in the text proper of the Variorum edition of The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale, bracketing them to indicate their omission from Hengwrt. His judgement is that the present state of our knowledge does not allow us to determine whether they are authorial revisions or scribal alterations. 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