“Restored to his own antiquity”

A page from  Fragments of a Renaissance Reader: The Text Life of Anne Clifford 

Shelved at the bottom of a neat stack of books in the left panel of Anne Clifford’s  Great Picture  is a volume tagged “All Geffreij Chaucers Workes.” This panel of the triptych represents Clifford as she appeared in 1605, at the age of fifteen; and while she thus apparently valued the works of Geoffrey Chaucer in her youth, we know that she continued to do so during her first marriage. A diary entry from April 1617 records her reading Chaucer, along with a book she calls “the Turkish History,” in her husband’s “closet” (a term in early modern England for a study or small private room) (Autobiographical Writing 60). Clifford’s esteem for Chaucer also found more public expression: in 1620, she erected a monument for Spenser with an epitaph that invokes Chaucer, such that the value she placed on both authors was pithily expressed in a single intertextual reference. Three decades after that, at the end of nearly a decade of civil wars, she referred to “excellent Chaucer’s book” as her sole source of comfort during trying times: “if I had not excellent Chaucer’s book here to comfort me, I were in a pitiable case, having so many troubles as I have here, but, when I read in that, I scorn and make light of them all, and a little part of his ... spirit infuses itself in me.” [1] Over the course of at least half of her very long lifetime, then, Clifford returned repeatedly to Chaucer as a crucial source of meaningful reading experiences. With this in mind, I present excerpts from Chaucer both here and elsewhere in this project’s representation of Clifford’s reading.

Clifford’s copy (or copies) of Chaucer have yet to come to light; this means that there can be no airtight rationale for choosing among the various early printed editions of what purported to be Chaucer’s complete works (and which actually often misattributed various pieces to him) [2]. These early editions include ones called The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, first published in 1532 and edited by William Thynne; however, in this account and the selections below, I draw on Thomas Speght’s 1602 revised edition, first published four years earlier, of what he called The Works of Our Ancient and Learned English Poet, Geoffrey Chaucer, Newly Printed. Even in the adjectives injected into this title (unlike the more straightforward approach taken by Thynne two generations earlier), we can hear the marketing spin Speght sought to put on his project. 

In his first edition, in 1598, Speght also proudly cited his edition’s innovative features, right on the title page:

In this impression you shall find these additions:  1. His [Chaucer’s] portraiture and progeny shown.  2. His life collected.  3. Arguments to euery booke gathered.  4. Old and obscure words explained.  5. Authors by him cited, declared.  6. Difficulties opened.  7. Two books of his, never before printed.

All this superadded paratextual apparatus that Speght touts tells us something about the reading culture in which he worked and what he thought might appeal to purchasers of the volume. Evidently, Speght thought readers would find some fascination in Chaucer’s person, rather than just in what he wrote; accordingly, a portrait, an account of the author’s family, and a biography are foregrounded among the additions. The last item in the list tells us that novelty was tantalizing, then as now—perhaps especially in relation to an author who had been dead for two centuries. The other features enumerated reveal various aspects of what some early modern readers might have valued. Speght bargained that they would desire “arguments” or summaries of the contents, just as we expect blurbs on books we buy; and that they would be glad to have Chaucer’s fourteenth-century vocabulary clarified, since Early Modern English differed significantly from his Middle English; and that they would want to know which authors Chaucer relied upon, through quotations or allusions; and, finally, that they would appreciate having the hard bits explained (“difficulties opened”), rather than being left to tough things out on their own. Each of these facts lets in considerable light on the textual culture of late sixteenth-century England, and to the ways in which it overlaps with (and is distinct from) our own. 

In this account, I select Speght’s edition partly because this kind of paratextual material illuminates so much that was broadly characteristic of early modern books and reading, but also because of ways in which Speght’s work connects to Clifford. His edition was published during her childhood; one can imagine a young Clifford encountering a newly purchased copy, perhaps as a gift. As a child, her eye was especially likely to be caught by the illustrations that open each of The Canterbury Tales (the title for which Chaucer was, even then, best remembered).

Speght’s edition would also have suited the mature Clifford’s respect for primary sources in her historiographic research, as well as her willingness to admit errors and correct the historical record. A similarly humble historicism is apparent on Speght’s title page for the revised edition of 1602, where he takes pains to indicate notable paratextual features, as before, but especially to indicate how the work had been augmented in the four years since its first publication:

To that which was done in the former impression, thus much is now added.  1. In the life of Chaucer, many things inserted.  2. The whole work by old copies reformed.  3. Sentences and proverbs noted.  4. The signification of the old and obscure words proved: also characters showing from what tongue or dialect they be derived.  5. The Latin and French, not Englished by Chaucer, translated.  6. The treatise called Jack Upland, against friars, and Chaucer’s ABC, called La Priere de Notre Dame, at this impression added.

Many of the materials that Speght presents as “inserted” and “reformed” got that way thanks not so much to his own labour as to the intervention of Francis Thynne, son of the William Thynne who first collected Chaucer’s works in print in the early part of the sixteenth century. The junior Thynne, put out by what he saw as Speght’s slipshod scholarship and neglect of his father’s work in the 1598 edition, wrote a letter that pulled no punches in its detailed critique of Speght’s work. Since this was an era before book reviews, responses like Thynne’s are all the more valuable informants about the reading culture of the day. 

To give Speght credit, he acknowledged Thynne’s corrections and incorporated many in the revised edition—if, at times, in somewhat idiosyncratic ways. [3] Whether Thynne was content with the changes is unclear; some seem to confuse rather than clarify the points Thynne took such trouble over. In the original 1598 edition, for instance, Speght presented what he called Chaucer’s coat of arms, with a caption which reads (in what is presumably Speght’s prose): “It may be that it were no absurdity to think (nay, it seems likely, Chaucer’s skill in geometry considered) that he took the grounds and reasons of these arms out of Euclid, the 27th and 28th proposition[s] of the first book; and some perchance are of that opinion, whose skill therein is comparable to the best.” 

Without entering into the accuracy or absurdity of this claim about the possible mathematical origins of this heraldic design, we can compare that caption with its replacement in the 1602 edition:

The caption now opens, rather startlingly, with a disjunction: “But this is but a simple conjecture. For honorable houses and of great antiquity have born as mean arms as Chaucer; and yet his arms are not so mean, either for colour, charge, or partition as some would make them.” It is not at all clear who is speaking, to whom, and to what the speaker objects with this “but”; on its own, the caption makes no sense, since it does not specify which “conjecture” it addresses. It also does not clarify that the words in the caption are not Speght’s but Thynne’s, taken almost verbatim from his critique of Speght’s earlier work. In that critique, Thynne writes in high dudgeon:

Under the title of Chaucer’s country, you {Thynne here addresses Speght directly} set down that some heralds are of opinion that he did not descend of any great house, which they gather by his arms. This is a slender conjecture, for as honorable houses and of as great antiquity have borne as mean arms as Chaucer; and yet Chaucers’ arms are not so mean either for colour, charge or partition as some will make them. And where you say it seems likely, Chaucer’s skill in geometry considered, that he took the groundes and reasons of his arms out of seven-twenty and eight-and-twenty propositiones of Euclid’s first book, that is no inference that his arms were new or first assumed by him out of geometrical proportions, because he was skillful in geometry: for so you may say of all the ancient arms of England which consist not of animals or vegetals {plants}; for all other arms which are not animals and vegrtals, as cheverons, pales, bends, checks {all shapes used in heraldry}, and such like, stand upon geometrical proportions. And therefore how great so ever their skill be which attribute that choice of armes to Chaucer, [they] had no more skill in arms than they needed.

Bafflingly, Speght has replaced his conjecture about Chaucer’s mathematical skill as the basis of his arms (to which Thynne objects) with a sentence from Thynne which does not remotely describe the figure it captions. This revision, far from an improvement, seems to be a record of someone’s failed reading; perhaps, in a note on his copy of Thynne’s letter, Speght asked his printer to use, in the new edition of Chaucer’s works, a passage that was near that which wound up being captioned. 

However meaningless the content of this textual crux might be might be, it reveals another aspect of the reading culture in early modern England: Speght read, and edited, Chaucer; Thynne read Speght, and critiqued his edition; Speght read Thynne’s critique, and revised in light of it—if only, in this case, in a manner that suggests either his own misreading or that of a less informed collaborator in the print shop.

Elsewhere in the revised edition, Speght takes on Thynne’s critique of his 1598 work with greater success. At the end of the account of Chaucer’s parentage, Speght had initially reflected that they might have been merchants, because “in places where they have dwelled, the arms of the merchants of the staple have been seen in the glass windows” (1598 edition, sig. b2r). Thynne, in his response, wielded his expertise as a herald to demolish Speght’s speculation: 

This is a mere conjecture, and of no validity. For the merchants of the staple {dealers in wool, skins, lead, and tin} had not any arms granted to them (as I have been informed) until long after the death of Chaucer’s parents, which was about the 10th or 12th [year] of Edward the third; and those merchants had no arms before the time of Henry the sixth, or muchwhat {nearly} thereabouts, as I doubt not but will be well proved, if I be not misinformed.

In Speght’s 1602 revision, a printed marginal note next to the unrevised original paragraph reads: “This conjecture is of small force: for the merchants of the staple had not any arms granted to them, as I have been informed, before the time of Henry the sixth, or much thereabouts” (sig. b3r). In other words, in his own marginal note, Speght rehearses Thynne’s critique; bizarrely, the note therefore winds up, without explanation, arguing against the main text. For a reader, the resulting typographic psychomachia is unnerving—and forces a very active reading indeed. 

However half-baked, this kind of collaborative approach to historiography is of a piece with Clifford’s own research methodology in compiling The Great Books of Record, her massive three-volume manuscript of familial documentation and biography, including many records from Chaucer’s era and earlier. Indeed, Francis Thynne himself was among Clifford’s collaborators; she draws on the expertise of “Mr Thynne the antiquary” more than once in The Great Books. [4] Speght highlights, in his dedication, the fact that he has with Thynne’s assistance “reformed the whole work, whereby Chaucer for the most part is restored to his own antiquity”—a project of historicist revision with which Clifford’s lifelong antiquarian and genealogical researches congrued. [5]

Clifford’s Great Books also feature a kind of paratext with which Speght’s 1602 Chaucer opens (at least in the copy consulted here): an elaborate Chaucerian family tree, rich with heraldic devices that suggest Chaucer’s rank was proximate to, if not commensurate with, the aristocratic origins of Clifford: 

The illustrated pedigree Speght’s edition is enhanced by a prefatory biographical account, not unlike those offered for Clifford’s ancestors in The Great Books of Record (brief summaries of two of which may be seen in the bottom corners of the illustration below).

Speght purports to consult primary sources in constructing this biography, which he claims is composed of “so much as we can find by heralds, chronicles, and records” (sig. b1v):

Some remarks in the “Life” are indeed substantiated, in marginal notes, with vague but compelling allusions to their sources: “out of the records in the Tower” (sig. b7r) refers to the Tower of London, part of which had served since the fourteenth century as a storage place for official records. Clifford, and her mother before her, similarly substantiated their own ancestral claims after visiting the Tower and other repositories of medieval documents, which were then copied out in The Great Books; like Speght’s before her, Clifford’s margins in these volumes are spotted with citations that identify the location of particular records “in the Tower of London.” [6] The modern editor of those books, Jessica L. Malay, speaks of Clifford’s “passion for manuscript evidence” and of the way in which her use of primary documents in setting forth her legal claims proved decisive in her early legal victories (1606–1609) (Great Books of Record 4–5). Clifford’s historiographic orientation as a reader meshed with legal and antiquarian developments in her day, but the work by Speght and Thynne on Chaucer demonstrate that a similar way of reading could be extended to literary works as well, or at least to their authors. 

Even the way in which the 1602 edition revises that of 1598 resembles Clifford’s practice of revising her own writings, as is evident at various points in The Great Books, where one might consult her marginalia instructing scribes to correct errors in subsequent copies—such as in the following illustration, in which Clifford writes, in the margin, “I believe there is a mistake in this and that it should be in the first year of Henry the 5 or Henry 6” (Great Books of Record 448). 

Sometimes her remarks were heeded; one, which reads “This must be written before the precedent deeds when it is written again,” yielded correctly placed document in the two other (later) copies of The Great Books (Great Books of Record 262) However, much like Speght’s attempt to correct his caption of Chaucer’s arms producing a non sequitur, Clifford’s scribbled corrections were sometimes thwarted by being copied out in the neat hand of scribes hired to create subsequent copies of The Great Books. Again, illumination is thrown upon the period’s collaborative—if not always successfully collaborative—culture of reading, revising, and rewriting by such moments of textual interchange. 

Finally, the convention in Speght’s revised edition of marking up Chaucer’s verse when it yielded proverbs and sententiae meshes with Clifford’s own celebrated habit of excerpting and redeploying similarly sententious “flowers” drawn from her reading (Rainbowe 40). Speght’s method of pointing out such pithy moments is quite literal: it involves the printing of a small hand icon with index finger extended toward lines a reader might want to copy into commonplace books for future use, as was a common practice among early modern readers. [7]

One such “flower” or excerpt from another of Clifford’s favoured writers precedes the authorial biography in Speght’s edition; this epigraph in praise of Chaucer comes from William Camden, or “Guilielmus Camdenus,” as his name is Latinized here (sig. b1v). Camden’s high esteem for Chaucer is cited again toward the end of this account, where Speght summarizes responses to Chaucer’s work, both in and immediately after Chaucer’s own day and in early modernity. In this section (excerpted below), Speght quotes many other authors whom Clifford rated highly: not just Camden but Edmund Spenser and Philip Sidney, all of whose works also appear in the left panel of The Great Picture.  Speght even highlights one passage from Spenser—about Chaucer infusing him with his spirit—that Clifford later featured both in her epitaph for Spenser and in the letter of 1650 mentioned above. This part of the “Life” is among the passages transcribed below, not least because it might have entered into Clifford’s assessment of Chaucer’s value—which was not, at the time, wholly uncontroversial. As the playwright Francis Beaumont indicates in his prefatory letter to Speght, Chaucer had sometimes been critiqued for his bawdiness (or, as Beaumont puts it, being “too broad and plain”), as well as for his obscure vocabulary (the words having become “hoary” with age), and his occasionally broken meter. Speght’s life of Chaucer, however, casts him as “the first illuminer of the English tongue” (sig. b2v) and bolsters him with backers of the highest classes: “friends he had in the court, of the best sort: for besides that he always held in with the princes, in whose days he lived, he had of the best of the nobility both lords and ladies, which favoured him greatly” (sig. b6v). This last claim perhaps had particular clout with the highly class-conscious Clifford.

In this, the first of several prefatory poems, a generic and ideal reader’s admiration for Speght’s edition is ventriloquized; the poem thus conditions those opening the volume to treat the entire edition in kind—that is, kindly. 

In the poem, the fictive reader is portrayed as if in friendly dialogue with Chaucer, which might have been a tantalizing offer for a reader like Clifford; many readers can identify with the longing to speak with the dead, and particularly with authors whose voices seem so lively on the page, however long ago they passed away. [8]

The conversation is crafted to let the reader express gratitude to Speght—the unnamed “one” of line 5 and “he” of line 7—for his paratexts on Chaucer’s life and lineage. These texts are implicitly characterized as graciously returning Chaucer from “exile” (line 3) to his rightful place—a journey not unlike that taken by Clifford, whose disinheritance from ancestral titles and exclusion from properties she saw as hers was the defining exilic experience of her life.

The Reader to Geoffrey Chaucer Reader:        Where have you dwelled, good Geoffrey, all this while,                       Unknown to us, save only by thy books? Chaucer:     In halkes and hirnes {nooks and corners}, Go wot {knows}, and in exile,                      Where none vouchsafed to yield me words or looks;                                     Till one which saw me there, and knew my friends,                                    Did bring me forth: such grace sometime God sends. Reader:        But who is he that hath thy books repaired,                       And added more, whereby you are more graced? Chaucer:    The self-same man, who has no labour spared                     To help what time and writers had defaced;                                    And made old words, which were unknown of many,                                    So plain {clear} that now they may be known of any. Reader:        Well fare his heart: I love him for thy sake,                       Who for thy sake has taken all this pains. Chaucer:     Would God I knew some means amends to make,                      That for his toil he might receive some gains.                                     But wot ye what? I know his kindness such,                                     That for my good he thinks no pains too much. 

Speght summarizes responses to Chaucer’s work, both in and immediately after Chaucer’s own day and in early modernity. In this section, Speght quotes many other authors whom Clifford rated highly, including Edmund Spenser and Philip Sidney.

Two of the purest and best writers of our days, the one for prose, the other for verse, Master Ascham and Master Spenser, have delivered most worthy testimonies of their approving of Chaucer. Master Ascham in one place calls him “English Homer,” and makes no doubt to say that he values his authority of as high estimation as ever he did either Sophocles or Euripides in Greek. And in another place, where he declares his opinion of English versifying, he uses these words: “Chaucer and Petrarch, those two worthy wits, deserve just praise.” And last of all … he puts him nothing behind either Thucydides or Homer for his lively descriptions of site of places and nature of persons both in outward shape of body and inward disposition of mind; adding this withal, that not the proudest, that have written in any tongue whatsoever, in these points can carry away the praise from him.

Master Spenser, in his first eclogue {pastoral poem} of his Shepherd’s Calendar, calls him Tityrus, the god of Shepherds, comparing him to the worthiness of the Roman Tityrus, Virgil. In his Faerie Queene, in his discourse of friendship, as thinking himself most worthy to be Chaucer’s friend, for his like natural disposition that Chaucer had, he shows that none that lived with him, nor none that came after him, dare presume to revive Chaucer’s lost labours in that unperfect tale of the Squire, but only himself: which he had not done, had he not felt (as he says) the infusion of Chaucer’s own sweet spirit, surviving within him. …

… And that we may conclude his praises with the testimony of the worthiest gentleman that the court has afforded in many years: Sir Philip Sidney, in his Apology for Poetry, says thus of him: … “I know not, whether to marvel more, either that he in that misty time could see so clearly, or that we in this clear age walk so stumblingly after him.”

Speght prides himself on including “arguments” before each of the books in his edition of Chaucer. These arguments let us read Speght’s reading, since they are not merely summaries but interpretations that guide the reader in understanding and valuing the texts. “The Argument to the Prologues,” below, precedes the opening of The Canterbury Tales. If Clifford trusted Speght’s edition, his argument may have influenced her take on Chaucer’s most canonical text. 

Speght directs us to notice how the “quality” (social station) of the characters affects the way we judge what they say. In suggesting that Chaucer adhered to the classical literary ideal (expressed by the ancient Roman poet Horace) that linked a person’s rank to their speech, he underwrites his claim about Chaucer being a very learned man “of great reading”—which means that Speght imaginatively reads Chaucer’s reading.

While Speght appeals to the standards set by antiquity, he also suggests Chaucer’s Middle English was capable of equalling the achievements of classical tongues—a point by no means taken for granted in his day, when even early modern English was often considered (even by the English themselves) a barbarous and backward language. 

Speght pithily sums up Chaucer’s ironical gist in the general prologue, which is that most of the pilgrims riding en route to a sacred site, Canterbury Cathedral, are not precisely respectable themselves. Speght also shows his appreciation of the “cunning” of Chaucer’s ironic technique and how it let him safely skewer people’s vices without fear of reprisal.

The author, in these prologues to his Canterbury Tales, does describe the reporters {narrators} thereof for two causes: first, that the reader seeing the quality of the person, may judge of his speech accordingly; wherein Chaucer has most excellently kept that decorum, which Horace requires in that behalf. Secondly, to show how that, even in our language, that may be performed for descriptions which the Greek and Latin poets in their tongues have done at large. And surely this poet in the judgment of the best learned is not inferior to any of them [the Greek and Latin poets] in his descriptions. … Under the pilgrims, being a certain number, and all of differing trades, he comprehends all the people of the land, and the nature and disposition of them in those days—namely, given to devotion rather of custom than of zeal. In the Tales is shown the state of the church, the court, and country, with such art and cunning, that although none could deny himself to be touched {implicated}, yet none dare complain that he was wronged. For the man [Chaucer] being of greater learning than the most, and backed by the best in the land, was rather admired and feared, than any way disgraced. Who so shall read these his works without prejudice shall find that he was a man of rare conceit and of great reading. 

[1] The ellipsis in the quotation represents a single word, apparently an adjective, that has been transcribed differently, by different scholars, as either “beauteous’ and “divine”—words that attribute very different kinds and degrees of value to Chaucer. On this crux, see Knight, pp. 257–9.

[2] Malay specifies a 1606 edition of Chaucer, which does not exist (which suggests this date is in error); in the pertinent footnote, she suggests that the 1602 edition (the one relied on here) is “likely” the one represented in a 1684 manuscript inventory of Clifford’s books that she discusses there (“Reassessing Anne Clifford’s Books,” p. 27, n. 102).

[3] For the acknowledgment, see Speght’s prefatory address “To the Readers” in the 1602 edition; he credits Thynne with most of the additions to the revision, including the definition of old words, the marking of sententiae, and the correction of the text by other copies.

[4] Quotation from Great Books of Record, 110; Thynne is also referenced twice more (p. 112; 319). 

[5] As Spence notes, “with her intellectual interests and scholarly connections, she must be placed alongside the leading antiquaries, indeed historians, of the Stuart era. She lays claim to being a trailblazer in family history and, in current usage, a medievalist to boot” (p. 253).

[6] See Malay on Clifford's consultation of such records (Great Books of Record p. 3); for examples of marginal citations of the Tower of London (Great Books of Record, pp. 3, 118–19).

[7] On this iconic pointing fist, called a manicule, see Sherman, pp. 25–52.

[8] On the readerly desire to “speak with the dead,” see Stephen Greenblatt: “I began with the desire to speak with the dead. This desire is a familiar, if unvoiced, motive in literary studies. … It was true that I could hear only my own voice, but my own voice was the voice of the dead, for the dead had contrived to leave textual traces of themselves, and those traces make themselves heard in the voices of the living. Many of the trades have little resonance, though every one, even the most trivial or tedious, contains some fragment of lost life” (p. 1). I quote as much of this passage as I do in part because such attention to traces and fragments of voices and lives, gone but not lost, is among the guiding motivations of Fragments of a Renaissance Reader.