The Problem of Two Prologues to Chaucer's Legend of Good Women (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos or missing text. Not indexed. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1905. Not illustrated. Excerpt: ... III. Lines Peculiar To The F-version. Some of the lines which are peculiar to the F-version have been considered already in their relation to those lines of G to which, in a sense, they correspond, and which, according to my view, they have displaced in the process of revision. Many others, however, cannot be regarded as having taken the place of lines omitted from G. If F is a revised version, they are absolute additions designed to enrich the poem or to contribute to the better fulfilment of its purpose. If F is an original version and G a revision of it, these lines are deliberate omissions dropped out of the poem for some specific reason which it should be possible at least to conjecture. That such a reason is to be found in their intrinsic value as poetic lines, no one has ventured to maintain, for it is these lines that justify the assertion that F is the less conventional, the more elaborate, and the more subjective poem. No more vigorous or effective passages occur in either Prologue than some of those that appear to be additions in F. Three reasons have been suggested as possible grounds for the omission of such lines. These are, first, that they allude too clearly to the Queen to suit Chaucer's mood at the time of revision,1 second, that they are too lyrical in tone to be suitable in a Canterbury Tale,2 and, third, that they were omitted in the course of revision in order to give G a more compact and coherent structure.3 The latter view, that of Lowes, assumes that certain parts of F lack unity and coherence because they have been composed "with the eye on a foreign origina1." Some attention was paid to this assumption in the preceding chapter, and the relation of the Prologue to two of the French poems has been discussed in connection with the p...