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Reading the Forms of Sir Thopas Jessica Brantley 5HDGLQJWKH)RUPVRI6LU7KRSDV Jessica Brantley The Chaucer Review, Volume 47, Number 4, 2013, pp. 416-438 (Article) 3XEOLVKHGE\3HQQ6WDWH8QLYHUVLW\3UHVV DOI: 10.1353/cr.2013.0003 For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cr/summary/v047/47.4.brantley.html Access provided by Boston College (25 Aug 2015 19:58 GMT) Reading the Forms of Sir Thopas jessica brantley Chaucer’s Sir Thopas has always been read in terms of its forms: the ­tail-rhyme that creates the poem’s laughable music, the affiliation with romance that grounds its parody in the forms we call genre. Nor are these forms of Sir ­Thopas inconsequential. Christopher Cannon has recently argued that it was precisely in the forms of romance that textual objects in the thirteenth century rose above the vagaries of matter and became literary essence: through King Horn, Havelok the Dane, and the other texts that Sir Thopas spoofs, “the spirit of English romance became the spirit of English literature.”1 But if Chaucer registers this apotheosis of the literary through a knowing de-materialization of his own text, Cannon’s study of early Middle English literature asks us to return to the matter that grounds that spirit. Similarly, the material forms of Sir Thopas raise questions about how to understand the poem’s essence—that is to say, how the tail-rhyme meter or the layout of a manuscript page might be invested with literary significance. In different ways, both New Criticism and textual materialism have made it common- place to assert that form shapes meaning, but I am equally interested here in the ways in which it fails to do so. For the material forms of Sir Thopas, spe- cifically its manuscript layout, bear a problematic relation to its immaterial These ideas were first presented in a session on the Auchinleck manuscript at the International Congress of the New Chaucer Society (Glasgow, 2004) and were subsequently refined for the Con- ference on Editorial Problems, University of Toronto (2009); the Beinecke Lectures in the History of the Book (2010); and a CUNY Roundtable on Performative Devotional Reading (2010). I am grateful to audiences at each of those events, and to Alexandra Gillespie, Kathryn James, and Glenn Burger for invitations to speak. I also thank Arthur Bahr, Jennifer Bryan, Ian Cornelius, Thomas Fulton, and Catherine Sanok for their insightful readings. 1. Christopher Cannon, The Grounds of English Literature (Oxford, 2004), 207. the chaucer review, vol. 47, no. 4, 2013. Copyright © 2013 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA CR 47.4_06_Brantley.indd 416 20/03/13 11:32 PM jessica brantley 417 ones, specifically ­verse-form and, more ambitiously, genre. Putting this text into its material context prompts ­questions about the posture of the reader before the manuscript and about how the material forms of texts structure their readers’ experiences. Although reading practices are shaped by generic expectations, generic categories are equally shaped by readers’ habits, and both are indebted to the physical forms of texts in manuscript books. The physical form of Sir Thopas—like so many other things about the poem—is a joke. Many early and important manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales, including both Ellesmere and Hengwrt, mark Geoffrey’s first storytell- ing effort by a drastic change (not to say a “drasty” change) in the format of the page.2 Breaking from the more familiar couplets or stanzas in single columns of text, the new layout calls attention to the literary structures of tail-rhyme through an unusual spacing of verses and an elaborate system of brackets. For example, in the Ellesmere manuscript, the first two verses in the left-hand column (the a-rhyme) are linked by a bracket, which then points to the b-rhyme verses, set off in another sort of makeshift column to the right and bracketed also: one reads aa on the left, and thenb on the right (Fig. 1). Halfway down the page, things become still more complex; single- stress bob lines begin to crowd awkwardly into the margin from time to time, just as they crowd awkwardly into the poem. Additional brackets indicate how these bob-lines relate to the rhymes of the more regular pattern. So, for example, the stanza where Thopas declares his love for the elf-queen reads as follows: An elf-queen wol I love, ywis For in this world no womman is Worthy to be my make In towne Alle othere wommen I forsake, And to an elf-queene I me take By dale and eek by downe! (790–96)3 In Helen Cooper’s oft-quoted words, the pattern is “reminiscent of a sched- ule for a tennis tournament with an inconvenient number of players.”4 2. Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales MS Peniarth 392D, and San Marino, Huntington Library MS Ellesmere 26.C.9. 3. Chaucer’s texts are cited from The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson, 3rd edn. (New York, 1987). 4. Helen Cooper, Oxford Guides to Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales (Oxford, 1989), 300. CR 47.4_06_Brantley.indd 417 20/03/13 11:32 PM 418 The Chaucer Review fig. 1 San Marino, Huntington MS EL 26.C.9 (Ellesmere), fol. 152r. ­Reproduced by ­permission of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California. CR 47.4_06_Brantley.indd 418 20/03/13 11:32 PM jessica brantley 419 Similar layouts occur in the Hengwrt manuscript and in other significant copies of the Canterbury Tales, such as Cambridge University Library MSS Gg.4.27 and Dd.4.24. Judith Tschann, in an important article published in this journal in 1985, notes eleven manuscripts (of fifty-three) with what she calls the “landmark layout” of Sir Thopas. Four more manuscripts imple- ment this layout inconsistently. Five more make a separate column of tail- rhyme lines without marking the bob. And nine more use brackets without other formal markings.5 Such a deliberate and complex arrangement of what I will call “displayed rhymes” is found nowhere else in Chaucer’s works. The choice to write Sir Thopas in this way was made by an unusually authorita- tive group of scribes, including Adam Pynkhurst, who has recently been identified as the scribe of both Ellesmere and Hengwrt, and the probable addressee of Chaucer’s­ famous poem “Adam Scriveyn.”6 Most scholars agree that the choice of layout was likely Chaucer’s own.7 But whether scribal or authorial, the Sir Thopas layout—which I will define as b-verses set to the right, joined to the other verses by brackets—suggests a recognition that the metrical form of tail-rhyme itself constitutes a particular feature of this poem’s parody.8 It is all the more surprising, then, that the ostensible targets of ­Chaucer’s caricature—the earlier English tail-rhyme romances as collected in the Auchinleck manuscript—do not exhibit this sort of arrangement.9 5. Judith Tschann, “The Layout of ‘Sir Thopas’ in the Ellesmere, Hengwrt, Cambridge Dd.4.24, and Cambridge Gg.4.27 Manuscripts,” Chaucer Review 20 (1985): 1–13. The “landmark” manuscripts include: Ad3, Ch, Dd, Ds, El, En1, Gg, Hg, Ld1, Ph1, Ra3. The inconsistent manuscripts are: Ad1, Dl, En3, Ry1. Five that separate the tail-rhymes without marking the bob are: Cn, Ii, Mc, Py, Ra1. The nine that use brackets alone are: Bo1, Gl, Ha3, Ha4, Ht, La, Lc, Mm, and Sl2. See, more recently, Rhiannon Purdie, “The Implications of Manuscript Layout in Chaucer’s Tale of Sir Thopas,” Forum for Modern Language Studies 41 (2005): 263–74, and Anglicising Romance: Tail-Rhyme and Genre in Medieval English Literature (Cambridge, U. K., 2008). 6. For the identification, see Linne R. Mooney, “Chaucer’s Scribe,” Speculum 81 (2006): 97–138. 7. See, for example, Cooper, The Canterbury Tales, 300. 8. For a consideration of the way in which scribal decisions can shape meaning, see B. A. ­Windeatt, “The Scribes as Chaucer’s Early Critics,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 1 (1979): 119–41. 9. The connection between Thop and the Auchinleck romances was made most forcefully by Laura Hibbard Loomis, “The Auchinleck Manuscript and a Possible London Bookshop of 1330–40,” PMLA 57 (1942): 595–627, and “Chaucer and the Auchinleck Manuscript: ‘Thopas’ and ‘Guy of ­Warwick,’” in P. W. Long, ed., Essays and Studies in Honor of Carleton Brown (New York, 1940), 111–28; both repr. in her Adventures in the Middle Ages: A Memorial Collection of Essays and ­Studies (New York, 1961), 150–87, 131–49, respectively. For a recent assessment of Loomis’s work, see ­Christopher Cannon, “Chaucer and the Auchinleck Manuscript Revisited,” Chaucer Review 46 (2011): 131–46. For the manuscript itself, see Derek Pearsall and I. C. Cunningham, intro., The Auchinleck Manuscript: National Library of Scotland Advocates’ MS.19.2.1 (London, 1977); and David Burnley and Alison Wiggins, eds., The Auchinleck Manuscript, National Library of CR 47.4_06_Brantley.indd 419 20/03/13 11:32 PM 420 The Chaucer Review For ­example, the opening of Bevis of Hampton (the most sustained ­passage from any romance to be echoed in Sir Thopas) occupies two consistent and regular columns of text, neither displaying the b-verses in any way, nor marking any rhymes with brackets.10 Sir Tristrem, a romance found only in Auchinleck, is the only one other than Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (and Sir Thopas itself) to use the one-stress bob, but it does not call attention to this unusual feature of its stanza structure, indicating the beginning of each stanza with only a paraph-mark.11 Guy of Warwick, also found only in Auchinleck (at least in its stanzaic form), is the romance most often echoed inSir Thopas’ language,12 but it also restricts its innovations in layout merely to marking stanzas with red and blue paraphs.
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