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The Order of The Canterbury Tales Larry D. Benson Harvard University T.ORDER OF The Cant,,.bury Ta/,,-how ,n editoc should mange the Blocks oftales-is the oldest and one ofthe most vexing problems in Chaucerian scholarship. It bothered Chaucer's earliest printer: William Caxton printed·the tales in one order in his first edition and another in his second, though neither was satisfactory and Wynkyn de Worde used yet a third arrangement when he reprinted Caxton's second edition. The problem faced by Caxton and his successor bothered even the scribe ofour earliest surviving mss, the Ellesmere and the Hengwrt. When he wrote the Ellesmere he had no difficulties; he wrote the tales continuously and confidently in the order familiar to us from the editions ofRobinson and others. However, when he wrote the Hengwrt MS., he had no orderly exemplar or guide to the order of the tales. He had instead a set of fragments. They were fragments of one or more mss that had an orderly arrangement (as shown in Section VIII below), but once the ms(s) had been broken up, there was no way of telling exactly what the order had been, and the scribe had to arrange the fragments as best he could. This often happened in the manuscript history ofThe Canterbury Tales. Chauc er had not organized his tales into numbered books (as in Gower's Confessio Amantis), nor days (as in the Decameron), nor apparently had he jotted down numbers for the tales (as did some later scribes of The Canterbury Tales), and when the work was broken into fragments to facilitate copying, as seems often to have been the practice, confusion about the proper order frequently resulted. Such confusion, along with rearrangements to accommodate scribal errors, the development of a variety of spurious links and, sometimes, mere carelessness, produced what seems to be a bewildering variety of competing arrangements of the tales in the mss-perhaps as many as 77 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER twenty-seven in all-that confront the editor of The Canterbury Tales with the problem of which of these arrangements, if any, represents Chaucer's intention.1 The mss seem so confusing that it is often said that they can be ofno help at all in determining the proper order ofthe tales, and there is perhaps almost as much a sense of relief as of characteristic gusto in Furnivall's enthusiastic acceptance ofthe "Bradshaw shift": "A happy hit! and it sets us free to alter the arrangement of any or all the MSS, to move up or down any Group oftales, whenever internal evidence probability, or presumption requires it."2 The still flourishing debate over the order of The Canterbury Tales, which has now narrowed to arguments for or against the "Ellesmere order" and the "Bradshaw shift," has been carried on pretty much free of any necessity to consult the mss, and proponents on both sides argue almost purely on the basis of literary analysis.Though Skeat years ago and E.T.Donaldson morerecently argued vigorously for the importance ofthe manuscriptevidence, the debate has continued to be conducted on purely literary grounds mainly because Manly and Rickert's great study seems to have demonstrated that the mss indeed have no authority in this matter.3 They made a full study of the manuscript arrangements of the 1 See E. T. Donaldson, "The Ordering of the Canterbury Tales," in Essays in Honor of Francis Lee Utley ed. Jerome Mandel and Bruce A. Rosenberg (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1971), p. 195; for a survey of the literature see, in addition to Donaldson, the thorough discussion in Robert A. Pratt, "The Order of the Canterbury Tales," PMLA, 66 (1951), 1141-67. See also Edward S. Cohen, "The Sequence of the Canterbury Tales," ChauR, 9 (1974-75), 190-95, who proposes a new order; George R. Kaiser, "In Defense of the Bradshaw Shift," ChauR, 12 (1977-78), 191-201, offers fresh arguments in favor of the B1-B2 arrangement; Charles A. Owen Jr., Pilgrimage and Story Telling in the Canterbury Tales (Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1977), reiterates and expands his argu ments for arranging the tales on the...
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