The Tale of Beryn and The Siege of Thebes: Alternative Ideas of The Canterbury Tales

Abstract

It is safe to say that few people have read John Lydgate's Siege of Thebes or the anonymous Tale of Beryn, two fifteenth-century attempts to continue the journey and tale-telling of Chaucer's unfinished masterpiece. Yet in a real sense very few people have read the Canterbury Tales. What they have experienced is a modern fabrication by Skeat, Robinson, Baugh, Fisher, and other editors who offer the poem as a coherent work, albeit marred by gaps and rough edges, but nonetheless recounting what was said on a one-way trip from Southwerk to the outskirts of Canterbury. This is technically a fabrication because no surviving manuscript arranges the fragments in an order which gives perfect geographical support to this design -- not without the notorious Bradshaw Shift -- and no single manuscript, not even Ellesmere, contains all the tales and links to be found in a modern edition with its scholarly conflations. To recognize and investigate a recoverable idea," as Donald Howard has done so brilliantly, really means to grant priority to the idea of the scribe-editor of Ellesmere, though let me say that I have no objection to any reader's wish to invest confidence in this careful attempt to give order to the poem at some time during the decade following Chaucer's death. The goal of this paper is rather to investigate the ideas arrived at by two other fifteenth-century readers, who perhaps understood Chaucer's intentions a great deal better than most of us, or perhaps a great deal worse. Nonetheless they understood the Canterbury Tales collection differently from Ellesmere and Howard, and their efforts as continuators represent editorial decisions and critical responses which are nearly contemporary and therefore deserve more recognition than has hitherto been granted.

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