The Poet and the Antiquaries. Megan L. Cook

      The First First Folios

      Chaucer’s Works in Print

      In 2016, academics and enthusiasts across the globe commemorated the four hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare’s death with conferences, exhibitions, and performances. Prominently featured in the celebrations were copies of the 1623 volume Mr. William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies, or, as it is more commonly known today, the First Folio. In the United States, a “tour” of First Folios set up by the Folger Shakespeare Library that exhibited copies in all fifty states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico was heralded by promotional materials touting a chance to come “face to face” with “the book that gave us Shakespeare.”¹ Brought forth from the vault of the Folger to commemorate the death of their author rather than the anniversary of their own publication, the touring folios took on the status of relics, offering an opportunity for Shakespearean enthusiasts to bear witness to an object central to the poet’s lasting reputation.

      The enduring impact of the Shakespeare First Folio depends on its form as well as its contents. When it was published by Isaac Jaggard and Edward Blount in 1623, it did more than gather together Shakespeare’s plays—previously circulating in manuscripts or single-text quartos—into a single, large volume. It also presented a particular version of the author and his works to the world. With its large size and engraved frontispiece depicting the deceased playwright, it staked a claim for the cultural and literary significance of its contents in the English literary marketplace. In its scale and scope, it functioned—and continues to function—as a particularly effective monument to Shakespeare and his literary accomplishments, the scholarly and financial value accorded to it today reflecting Shakespeare’s unique place in the English-language literary canon.

      The Shakespeare First Folio was not, however, the first First Folio.² That distinction belongs to The workes of Geffray Chaucer, first printed in 1532 by Thomas Godfray and overseen by a courtier named William Thynne. The 1532 volume marked the first attempt to combine all the works of an English-language author into a single, impressively large printed book. Dedicated to Henry VIII, The workes of Geffray Chaucer brought together a wide range of Chaucerian texts that had previously only been available in manuscript or in smaller printed volumes. Like the Shakespeare First Folio, the Thynne edition of Chaucer’s Works set a precedent for later printers: for close to two and a half centuries, until Thomas Tyrwhitt’s edition of the Canterbury Tales (1775–1777), the folio collected works would be the dominant format for printing Chaucer.³

      Chaucer was a mainstay of English printing well before the publication of the Works, but the books produced by William Caxton, Wynkyn de Worde, and other early printers works were different in both size and scope from the larger volumes that would follow.⁴ Pre-1532 editions of Chaucer were either quartos or small folios consisting of a single longer work or several shorter pieces.⁵ A transition to more comprehensive collections began in 1526, when Robert Pynson published a series of Chaucerian volumes, each with its own title page, designed to be bound together as a Sammelband, giving readers the ability to assemble their own grouping of Chaucerian works.⁶ For the first time, buyers had the opportunity to own a large portion of the Chaucerian canon in print in a common format. While these editions—along with manuscripts produced both before and after the arrival of print—continued to circulate in the sixteenth century and beyond, the large folio editions of Works produced after 1532 were a bibliographic departure from their predecessors and, in time, would come to outnumber these earlier publications.

      Through their contents, their commentary, and their material form, these folio editions demonstrate the persistent link between Chaucer and emerging ideas of “Englishness,” as well as Chaucer’s role as a privileged innovator in the history of the English language. They also map a crucial phase in the development of English literary and linguistic history and the tools for pursuing it: the 1532 Thynne edition presumes Chaucer’s Middle English will be more or less accessible to its readers, but by the end of the century Thomas Speght will append a substantial glossary of Chaucer’s “hard words” to his 1598 version of the Works. Between these two poles lies a slow evolution of Chaucer’s status as a writer and as a historical figure. Chaucer in the Renaissance occupied a middle position between the literary and the scholarly, at once good to read and, increasingly, in need of specialized study.

      Caroline Spurgeon’s foundational work of bibliography, Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Criticism and Allusion, provides ample evidence of wide-ranging and diverse engagement with Chaucer in early modern England.⁷ The sixteenth and early seventeenth century produced some of the most celebrated reworkings of Chaucer’s verse and stories, including Spenser’s Faerie Queene and Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida. But Chaucer also figures in works that are not primarily concerned with poetry, such as John Foxe’s Protestant historiography, William Camden’s topographical history of the British Isles, John Stow’s Annales, or the Catholic Anglo-Dutch antiquarian Richard Verstegan’s Restitution of Decayed Intelligence. The diversity of these responses invites several broader questions: How did an increasingly robust body of extrapoetic commentary on Chaucer enable, on the one hand, specific stories about the English past and, on the other hand, new ways of conceptualizing English literary history? How did Chaucer’s dual role in poetic and extrapoetic discourses shape the way in which his writings were read and the forms in which they were transmitted?

      This chapter addresses these questions, first, by tracing the development of Chaucer’s printed Works across successive printed editions, from 1532 to 1602. In the middle section of this chapter, I look more closely at several paratextual additions designed to shape the way readers thought about Chaucer and his place in English history: William Thynne’s preface to the 1532 Works, a woodblock frame depicting the genealogies of the houses of York and Lancaster used in the 1561 Works (but originally created for the 1550 edition of Edward Hall’s Union of the two noble and illustre famelies of Lancastre and Yorke), and an intricate full-page engraving, depicting Chaucer and his genealogy, prepared for the 1598 Works by the antiquarian and cartographer John Speed. A final section reflects on the special emphasis given to Chaucer’s language in antiquarian commentary and considers how this discourse evolves as Chaucer’s Middle English grows ever-more distant from contemporary forms of the English language.

      Throughout the chapter, I argue that Chaucer’s exceptional status in early modern England was created and secured by a unique sense of his temporal doubleness. For antiquarians and for those who read their work, Chaucer and his language were a site at which they could simultaneously celebrate a connection with the past and measure distance from that past. In the Works and in antiquarian commentary alike, this doubleness combined with a sense of Chaucer’s special relationship to the English language to make Chaucer an ideal figure with which to think through early modern England’s relationship to its medieval past.

      Printing Chaucer, 1532–1602

      For all its topical and methodological diversity, early modern engagement with Chaucer remained centered on the half dozen folio editions of Chaucer’s collected works published between 1532 and 1602.⁸ From the early 1500s to the eighteenth century, these black-letter editions were the form in which most readers encountered Chaucer and his works.⁹ Each was produced under the supervision of an individual with ties to antiquarian communities: William Thynne (1532, reprinted 1542 and 1555), John Stow (1561), or Thomas Speght (1598, revised 1602, reprinted 1687).¹⁰ As these collections transmitted Chaucer’s writings to a new and wider audience, they mediated and shaped readers’ understanding of Chaucer and his text. Those responsible for the production of these volumes made decisions about which texts to include and which exemplars to use (if and when multiple sources were available), arranged the works within the volume (the Canterbury Tales