Rotheley, the De Vere Circle, and the Ellesmere Chaucer

Abstract

I . v rom William Caxton's first printings through those of Wynkyn de Worde, Richard Pynson, and William Thynne, the of Geoffrey Chaucer were presented as a formed poetic canon.1 All writings deemed relevantthat is, legitimate authorial effusions together with others fortuitously or circumstantially connected to them-appear between covers in arranged format (as small volumes in Caxton's and de Worde's versions, as a three-volume set in Pynson's edition, and finally as one large folio book in Thynne's). The model of the works established by Pynson and Thynne, perhaps owing something to the example of complete texts of Latin and Greek authors, has set the standard, not just for our understanding of the work of Chaucer, but also for our conception of the English literary canon as a whole. Chaucer's Works, in their modern, single-volume Riverside edition, now sit easily next to those of Shakespeare, Milton, and Keats.2 But before Caxton, Pynson, and Thynne, during the productive period of Middle English literature, things were quite different. Even such masterworks of the Poet as The Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde circulated in fitful and surprising ways, often as separate in loose quires and booklets. And the fate

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