Some Notes On Editions of the Towneley Cycle: Part 2. Description of the Manuscript HM1
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This is a continuation of my notes on the manuscript HM1, the only manuscript source for the Towneley Cycle, begun here. In this note: I look at the manuscript in terms of what Jerome McGann calls "bibliographic codes," features of the manuscript that communicate non-lexical meaning (that is, meaning apart from the signification of the actual words of the text). It contains a general description of the manuscript followed by detailed discussions of handwriting, rubrication, stage directions, litterae notabiliores, speech prefixes, and metrical markers.
The standard source for bibliographic description of HM1 is the Introduction to the facsimile edited by Stevens and Cawley in 1976, to which my citations will generally refer. Some additional notes by Stevens have since been published, but very few new observations have been made.
Manuscript Description
The manuscript itself consists of “132 vellum leaves of an average of 12 inches by 8 ¼ inches. It is bound into 19 quires or parts of quires, each of which originally contained 8 leaves” (Cawley and Stevens Towneley Cycle vii). The leaves are ruled, and the margins are not spacious, a feature aggravated by trimming during rebinding (viii). The manuscript gives evidence that the scribe was thrifty with his pages, occasionally writing in double columns and generally (though not always) making extensive use of margins. 1 He most often writes tail-rhymes and speech-prefixes in the right hand margin.
The Towneley Cycle as Manuscript and Through Three Editions
Twenty-eight leaves are now missing, including eight in one complete quire at the beginning of the cycle. Cawley and Stevens speculate that this may have contained the banns, and note that the remaining missing leaves contained (probably) three or four complete pageants between the Ascencio Domini and the Iudicium, and (certainly) missing sections of incomplete pageants.
Thirty-two pageants or fragments of pageants retelling biblical stories appear in the remaining leaves. The pageants are not, however, arranged in biblical order: the stories of the raising of Lazarus and the death of Judas appear after the Last Judgment. The former pageant lacks a feature of the other pageants, an elaborate decorated initial letter (ix); the latter appears in a later hand.
Handwriting and Date
Opinions about the date of the manuscript vary, but not widely: the handwriting is in black ink, a clerical Anglicana script indicating a date “as early as 1475 or as late as the first quarter of the sixteenth century” (ix). The script frequently contracts endings, especially –ys and -er. Latin tags and speech-prefixes are sometimes written in shorthand or contracted: scda for secunda, dict for dicet. With is often written wt. Most of the manuscript has been written by one scribe, but a second hand has contributed the last pageant, Suspencio Iude (which is out of sequence) in a different handwriting of the same general type (but which Cawley and Stevens confidently date in the sixteenth century and so later than the main scribe’s work); some evidence exists that at least parts of other pageants were written by a third scribe whose letter-forms differ slightly from the main scribe’s. 2
Cawley and Stevens, using the evidence of decorated strapwork initial letters and their similarities to more readily dated manuscripts, date HM1 “not earlier than 1500,” though they admit that such decorations do appear in English manuscripts before that time:
If we compare other manuscripts from the same part of England, we find that strapwork, especially of the elaborate kind executed in MS HM 1, hardly occurs before 1500. The City of York Chamberlains’ Accounts for 1486-7 (C4: 1) have a capital C (in Comptus) decorated with relatively simple strapwork, and the House Book for 1503 (HB9, 1503-19) has an initial L (in Liber) similarly decorated. The York Minster Fabric Rolls do not display elaborate strapwork before 1531 [...] The Wakefield Manor Court Rolls first have strapwork decorating the W of Wakefield and C of Curia in the main heading of the roll for 1500 [...] From 1507 onwards this style of decoration is regularly found and becomes increasingly elaborate. (xvii, n. 14)
I suggest that Cawley and Stevens’ examples, while generally supporting their conclusion, are unhappily chosen: while the exact purpose of the manuscript remains unclear, it manifests characteristics different from those of civic or guild records, however ceremonial. Stevens has elsewhere speculated that HM1 may have been a presentation copy, and I think it possible that privately commissioned copies would be more likely to employ innovative techniques than would public documents. In any case, more needs be known about the forces influencing production of the various manuscripts to reinforce their argument.
But in any event, the flexibility allowed by other evidence, especially handwriting, keeps reasonable speculation within twenty-five years or so (either way) of the date they propose, and it represents therefore a good median. The usual date given is between 1475 and 1525.
Rubrication and Stage Direction
Cawley and Stevens are worth quoting at length in their description of rubrics. Primarily one may note the differences in rubrication between pageants 1-7 (i.e., Creatio through Processus Prophetarum) and those following:
Certain differences may be observed between the scribe’s use of rubrication in plays 1-7 (play 7 being incomplete at the end and followed by a blank leaf, f. 20) and in plays from 8 onwards.
1. The rubricated titles increase in size after play 7. The word Incipit does not begin any of the titles of the first seven plays, and yet the titles of all but six of the following plays begin with Incipit [...]
2. The use of red ink for framing the initial capitals at the beginning of plays occurs only in plays 1 and 2 [...]
3. The use in the left margin of a red token (resembling a superior a) to distinguish stage directions in black within the text is limited to plays 14 and 28 [...]
4. In plays 1-7 there are no stage directions in red, but from play 8 onwards there are red stage directions in five plays [...]
5. In plays 1-7 the initial letters of all speakers’ names, including the first in the play, are usually touched with red; in fourteen plays from 8 onwards the first speaker’s name is wholly in red and the rest of the names are wholly in black [...]
6. In plays 1-7 the initial letter of the first word of each new speech is usually touched with red; after play 7 this practice is discontinued.
7. The word Explicit and the name of the preceding play are written in black ink at the end of plays 2, 3, 5, 6 and 8 (1, 4 and 7 being incomplete). But a miniature red capital E is written inside the E of Explicit at the end of play 8; and in all the remaining plays, except 31 [Lazarus], the word Explicit and the name of the preceding play are written in red [...]
8. Original corrections in red are found only in plays 2 and 4 of the first seven plays, but from play 8 onwards thirteen plays have original corrections in red. (xiii)
The evidence of the rubrication, then, supports the conclusion that 1-7 were written as a group before some exigency (possibly the expense of red ink or even a deadline) made a change necessary. A pricked and ruled blank leaf (f. 20) separates pageants 7 (the incomplete Processus Prophetarum) and 8 (Pharao, which is therefore out of order). A red Incipit Pharao has been erased on this leaf, leading Cawley and Stevens to the conjecture that the scribe intended to complete 7 but, realizing he had not the space, tried to make room by erasing the Incipit.
Finally there are two uses of red ink for the cancellation of “objectionable doctrine” (xiii): these occur on f. 66 (Iohannes Baptista) where a stanza “concerned with the seven sacraments is cancelled with criss-cross lines in red, framed with black lines and bracketed in the left margin, while a later hand has written in black in the right margin, ‘corected & not playd’” (xii). Similarly f. 104v. (Resurreccio Domini) contains a red-cancelled stanza beginning, “That ilk veray brede of lyfe / Becomys my fleshe in wordys fyfe.”
Red ink seems in medieval texts of all sorts to indicate what now we might think of as “meta-textual” material: judging by the irregularity with which the Towneley scribe employs red ink, its use was not essential, however. In Towneley, the scribe’s habits with red ink are either capricious or mysterious: two pageants (20 and 26) give stage directions entirely in red (with one exception in black); but fifteen plays (1, 3-6, 13, 14, 17, 19, 22, 25, 28-31) use black ink with red underlining and red strokes to separate the directions from the text. The remaining pageants either have no stage directions or have them in both black and red ink (Cawley and Stevens Towneley Cycle x).
Stage directions are in Latin with the exception of three English directions in pageant 14 (Oblacio Magorum), all on f. 51v.; and the English word “sing,” apparently added in a later hand, in pageant 12 (Prima Pastorum), f. 37r. (x).
Stage directions on f. 51v. all begin with the word here: T. H. Howard-Hill points out that the Cornish Ordinalia stage directions “usually begin with ‘Tunc’ and ‘Hic,’ forms followed by later directions in English [...] where ‘Then’ and ‘Here’ persist at least as late as the early plays of Shakespeare” (115). Towneley’s stage-directions usually follow this convention, though exceptions can be found, for example on f. 45r. where we find the words Angelus cantat [...]. Similarly Iacob contains, separated from the text by lines, the direction Et vadat Iacob osculandus Esaw [....] But these are exceptions, and the latter is more complex than most directions.
Expensive to reproduce in a modern edition, rubrics do contain dimensions of interpretation for the texts: on the basis of scribal handling of such rubrication, for instance, Hansjürgen Linke concludes that scribes occasionally added stage directions in German play-scripts, evidence of re-staging and therefore of shifts in representation and therefore in meaning (550). Then, too, arguments gather new evidence about the order of copying, or the stages of copying: why is the scribe thoroughly consistent in using red ink in two pageants, Conspiracio and Resurreccio, but not in any others? Is there room for argument about whether the scribe copied pageants in groups, occasionally out of order but evincing different habits in each group? Later in these notes I will return to this question, pointing out that structural and poetic features as well as the bibliographic features of the manuscript are suggestively similar in Conspiracio and Resurreccio, a fact muted in all modern editions. (Martin Stevens, in the Introduction to the 1994 Towneley Plays xxiv, v, makes some use of the evidence of rubrication, but his conclusions are, properly, very general and tentative.)
Litterae Notabiliores
Several leaves contain litterae notabiliores of some sort, and these tend to amplify the case that 1-7 were written together. The most common kind are ascenders (unexamined in Cawley and Stevens’ Introduction) occurring in the first lines of leaves, most usually in pageants 1-6. These contain varying degrees of elegance, sometimes utilizing strapwork (e.g. f.12 r. and 13 v), and all but disappear after pageant 6. Before folio 21 (the beginning of Pharao, pageant 8), nineteen leaves contain ascenders, not counting those that appear in decorated initial lines of pageants (of which there are four, giving a total of twenty-three leaves with ascenders). Only eight cases of ascenders, all relatively simple and none involving strapwork, occur after pageant 7, these being in the following pageants: Pharao (f. 25v.) Cesar Augustus (f. 26 v.) Secunda Pastorum (f. 39v. and 40v.); Magnus Herodes (f. 55v.); Purificacio Marie (f. 62v.); Iudicium (f. 124v. and 128v.).
Of these pageants, Secunda Pastorum and Magnus Herodes have strong and acknowledged claims to be entirely the work of the Wakefield Master, and the passage in Iudicium is in this poet’s distinctive stanza. As I hope to argue in further notes, Purificacio shows some resemblances to his work. There might be grounds for arguing that this supports a conjecture that the work of the Wakefield author was contained in an exemplar separate from the other works in the manuscript. Such a hypothesis would be rendered more plausible by the evidence Cawley and Stevens give in their Introduction to the facsimile that the scribe’s copy texts contained extensive “peculiarities” [xiv].) Finally, one ascender occurs in the out-of-sequence final pageant, Suspencio Iude (f. 132r., the only ascender after pageant 7 on the recto side of a folio).
More noticeable than the ascenders, however, are the initial letters at the beginning of pageants. Cawley and Stevens describe them and their significances in the following terms:
1. At the beginning of plays 1 and 2 (ff. 1 and 3) the initial capitals E and A are white on a square black ground with cupped terminals and curling tendrils; they are framed in red, and the shape of each letter is traced in red. This type of decorated initial otherwise occurs only in English books of the first half of the sixteenth century (in French and German books from the 1480s). Possibly there were spaces left for these initials which were not filled in until much later, but this would conflict with the evidence that other capitals were made before the lines of the text were written [...] It is therefore difficult to escape the conclusion that the initials E and A were copied from a printed book not earlier than the 1480s, and that the text was written at the same time [...]
2. [Initials between pageants 3 and 31 inclusive are] unframed and decorated with strapwork [...] The strapwork initials show a general tendency to become larger and more elaborate throughout the manuscript, except at the beginning of play 31. Although elaborate strapwork decoration is found as early as the mid-fifteenth century, a comparison of the Towneley manuscript with York and Wakefield documents suggests that this kind of decoration may offer some evidence for dating the manuscript not earlier than 1500. (ix)
Speech-Prefixes
A speech-prefix (which I will sometimes call a “speaker name”), as T. H. Howard-Hill defines it, is “the designation of a speaker which is usually written to the right of a speech in early manuscripts but prefixed to the start of the speech at the left of the page in sixteenth-century and later manuscripts” (114). Towneley’s speech-prefixes follow the earlier model.
A few exceptions exist. In Creatio, the name of Deus does not stand before his opening speech. Suspencio Iude has no speech-prefix of any kind and consists entirely of a fragmentary monologue by Judas. Red lines cross the page to help secure the reader’s sense of the limits of the speeches. (I provide a transcripted example above) In several pageants some speech-prefixes are put in the text at their point of beginning and boxed to separate them from the text itself, but this practice is not very common.
Speakers’ names are in black ink, touched in red in pageants 1-7. In fourteen pageants (8-10; 12-14; 19; 20; 22-24; 26; 28; 29) “the first speaker’s name is wholly in red” (x).
Metrics
As with a good majority of medieval plays, the pageants are composed in verse of varying meters and rhyme-schemes. Some pageants are wildly inconsistent in their verse forms, others scrupulously consistent.
Here I must secure one of the central points of my argument: the poetics and punctuation as well as certain other extra-lexical features of HM1 are intimately related, but the relationships are frequently overlooked. In the Towneley cycle, as with other medieval manuscripts of this kind containing text that was meant for declamation, interlocking rhyme is the primary means by which verses form groups that resemble in function the modern stanza, a category employed with some carelessness by many editors. Scribes, for whatever reason (most likely the expense of parchment) did not readily leave blank page-space, such as a line between stanzas, unless it were to leave space for glossing: HM1’s scribe is no exception.
In most pageants black brackets emphasize relationships between rhyming words, a feature which will come in for heavy comment below. Suspencio Iude, which seems to provide an exception to most generalizations about the manuscript, contains “pointed” rather than square brackets.
T. H. Howard-Hill notes that in the ca. 1440 manuscript of The Castle of Perseverance we first see the “usual” rhyme-bracketing accompanied by relegation of tail-rhymes to the right margin and linked with brackets (116). (The rhyme brackets themselves, he says in the same place, are in “the usual manner of Middle English poetical manuscripts.”) These two methods of emphasizing rhyme (by bracketing and marginalizing) are important to HM1’s self-presentation: the scribe followed the practice of visually connecting groups of lines entirely by these two means. 3 They appear on almost every leaf, though they occasionally drop out when long passages follow the same rhyme scheme or a very irregular one (e.g., f. 5r.). As we shall see, editors have sometimes taken these brackets to be the only or primary means of marking rhymes and therefore verses and stanzas, some ignoring marginalization and most ignoring the metrical marks described below.
Couplets sometimes have brackets (e.g. f. 3v; 6v.), but often do not, especially when other marks (usually [:]) are used to separate the verses of the couplet and so enable the scribe to write them on one line: the mark [:] therefore can be taken as one means of signaling both a break and a relationship between verses. Thus the lines transcribed below (from folio 5v. and f. 6r.) are poetically identical (a rhyming couplet containing a four beat line followed by a three beat line); but they are orthographically different, the first linking the couplets by compressing them on one line and separating them with a metrical mark, the second by placing them on different lines and linking them with brackets:
(1)
Caym Caym thou was wode ÷/ The voice of thi brother[ys] blode
(2)
A Caym brother that is ill done
No bot go we hens sone
Metrical Markings and Punctuation
Though Cawley and Stevens (Towneley Cycle), among others, have recognized many of the features I have just described, no very deep study has been done of HM1’s scribal habits with extra-lexical markings such as these. The most important are the rhyme brackets and the metrical markings. 4
The latter are of three basic kinds: the virgules, the colon, and the obelus. Virgules appear singly [/], doubly [//], or triply [///], and sometimes in tandem with the (modern, not Latin) colon and obelus, thus [:/] or [¸/]. Obviously, these symbols did not have for the scribes or intended readers the same values which we give them today; it must be clearly understood that they did not have regular syntactical meanings. 5
This raises a question to which I have not yet seen a satisfactory answer: Do the obeli, virgules, double-virgules, triple-virgules, and colons have identical semiotic, poetic and / or grammatical values? Parkes and Bischoff agree that in Middle English verse manuscripts, such marks have no distinct or precise difference: their evidence is inferential, however, based on cases like these in Towneley, and on habitual scribal ignorance or neglect of the usual Latin prescriptions for punctuation in cases of verse, which does not always lend itself to the usual periodic development or rhetorical structures of prose. There is no volume of scribal guild-rules, however, that specifies how such marks must be used.
But we cannot infer from this that in HM1 they are entirely arbitrary, and the assumption that metrical markers are arbitrary lies at the root of much of the early trouble in editions. The metrical markers do take on ad hoc values from time to time. The scribe’s handling of these marks throughout the cycle is admittedly rather uneven, but when the stanzas of a pageant are regular, and especially in the Wakefield stanza, he usually finds a consistent presentation, sometimes after a bit of experimentation: this indicates to me that the scribe had these units at his disposal and depended on his reader to decode exactly what their usage and value was during his / her reading. In other words, HM1’s scribe, at least intermittently seeking a higher level of order for his stanzas, often uses the marks in combinations as signs (not merely marks) of the reader’s position in the stanza, and it may be assumed that the system of signals and signs shows some individual creativity6 That is, for HM1’s scribe, his use of the marks at least occasionally had meaning.
Furthermore, while it is true that in prose (Malory, for example) these marks serve a paratactic purpose, separating or introducing a pause into sequences of main clauses (Hanks and Fish 273-6), in poetry they appear to have similar but not identical value as a simple mark between metrical units, signaling a pause between lexical units, a mark which a line break may also serve. 7 Punctuation in England was hardly standardized in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but had long since departed from what Bischoff calls the “clear triad” of Latin manuscript punctuation: “low point (comma) for the short pause; medial point (colon) for the middle pause; high point (periodus) for the end of the sentence” (169). Instead, “a large number of combinations of points and virgules were created and used in bewildering multiplicity” (169). Analogies can be found in Latin paleography, especially among shorthand signs, for each of the divisional markers the scribe uses, but none of them seems to help give semantic or semiotic meaning to the scribe’s use of them in poetry. The obelus or division sign [÷], for example, was a standard abbreviation for “est,” according to Bischoff (168), but adding “est” after every second verse of poetry would be absurd. Finally, as I will show, the length of intended pause does not increase with the double or triple virgule. The only interpretation that makes sense to our present state of knowledge is that the signs had more or less identical standard value as a pause or breaking mark that helped to divide rhetorical or metrical units in texts that were not intended for silent reading. 8
Paleographer M. B. Parkes writes, “scribes and readers in the Middle Ages usually introduced punctuation only when they thought it was necessary to avoid possible confusion,” but “examples in verse reveal that it was regarded as a complement to layout and rhyme; punctuation conveyed to the mind complex rhythmic and semantic structures which could be heard in the mind’s ear, but which could not always be adequately expressed when reading aloud” (106). In other words, such marks signaled meanings to the reader as well as what the poetic form of the poem would be, and therefore the meaning: however difficult it might be to “cue” the audience of a recitation, the speaker / reader had to know where the rhythmic breaks and rhymes fell to give some sense of the meaning. The opinions of the earliest editors of HM1 notwithstanding, then, the metrical marks are critical to any finely-tuned reading of pageants.
For convenience I follow Stevens in referring to these marks as “metrical marks” (“Manuscript” 239). I have chosen, not without misgivings, to follow Stevens’ use of the term, though it is not unproblematic: as we shall see, such marks could be called “rhyme markers” with equal felicity. (That the rhyme performs the same function as the metrical marker, namely signaling the end of a verse of poetry, is indisputable, but so imperfectly do rhymes govern the reader’s eye, especially in the complicated Wakefield stanza, that the scribe must actually provide extra-textual cues for these as well in the form of rhyme-brackets.) The term “metrical,” however, adequately suggests the primary function of the marks: to establish the end of one metrical line of poetry. Since the cycle’s metrics rely on sometimes-irregular numbers of stresses rather than syllables, these marks provide a helpful visual index of when (at least in the scribe’s judgment) the line has ended: these signals mark off the end of the line as well as (usually) rhymes.
I have therefore these notes sometimes hesitated between the words “metrical” and “scribal” in describing these marks, usually choosing the former to emphasize that my argument deals with something proper to “metrics,” namely the best way to determine the end of a line of poetry. I have used the word to refer not only to the metrics of lines but the determination of stanza forms and rhyme-schemes since in the 1897 edition the editors’ idea of the “stanza” was almost entirely guided by their treatment of the metric line: one editor of that edition remarks that “Furnivall himself added notes of the meters” (ix), where these notes actually deal with the stanza-forms and rhyme-schemes. In other words, there is latitude in scholarly use of the word “metrical,” but broad agreement that it has to do with how one determines the beginnings and endings of lines, which obviously has strong implications for how one establishes the stanza: so I find it convenient to follow the convention rather than reclaiming the most exact use of the term.
These metrical marks are not punctuation in the usual sense, and the point is worth stressing: the manuscript’s use of virgules and other standard medieval punctuation marks appears to be metrical in the sense that I have argued above rather than punctuation, since they do not necessarily bracket main clauses but rather signal the end of a verse. In Noe, for example, we find the lines:
Take to thi ship also // of ich kynd beest[ys] two
Mayll & femayll bot no mo /// Or thou pull vp thi sayll (f.9r.)
In a prose manuscript like the Winchester Manuscript of Malory, the double virgule typically indicates a break in ideas or rhetorical units, or terminates a paratactic string of clauses. Here, it simply seems to signal the end of the verse. The triple virgule seems to perform the same function.
But these metrical markers are by no means the only ways the scribe has of signaling poetic units or verses. Margins, line-breaks, and rhyme-brackets are all used to set verses apart from one another as well. We may look at the opening stanza of Processus Noe for an illustration. The first three stanza-units (on f. 7v.) are presented with the cauda-verses written as individual manuscript lines, as if the scribe (or his exemplar) desired to call attention to the verse-form. Thus:
Myghtfull god veray ÷/ maker of all that is
Thre p[er]sons withoutten nay ÷/ oone god in endless blis
Thou maide both nyght & day ÷/ best fowle & fysh As thou
All creatures that lif may ÷/ wroght thou at thi will Wel myght
The son the moyne verament
Thou maide the firmament To shyne thou maide ful bright
The sternes also full feruent
(The scribe indents the frons and the first line of the cauda to make room for the bottom of the decorated capital “M” that I do not reproduce.) Note that the rhyme brackets here clearly emphasize the frons (first four manuscript lines), cauda (the group of three rhymed lines), and tail-rhymes. The placement of the tail-rhymes outside the rhyme brackets may have the effect of suggesting that the lines (1) “belong” with either the frons or the cauda as modifiers of their main clauses; or (2) exist as discrete units. Both tail-rhymes here are dependent clauses, and in general the lines that appear in these positions do not stand alone as main clauses in the Wakefield stanza.
But after giving three stanzas in this form, the scribe reverts to the more economical pattern we see on folio 12 (Fig. 2, page 68 below), with the cauda verses separated (usually) by the double and triple virgules and by continued use of the margins for tail-rhymes, a practice continued (with some variations) throughout the pageant. At the bottom of the pageant’s first leaf the scribe introduces the virgule-separations, double for the first cauda break and triple for the third cauda break. (The second verse in the cauda receives a physical line break.) Apparently the scribe introduces this practice here in order to keep the last stanza on the sheet together without a page break. The markers do not merely signal the presence of a break between verses, but they signal which break.
To sum up, the Towneley scribe certainly made use of these marks as well as page space to separate the metrical units of the pageant, and probably did so, not infallibly, but with a conscientious desire not to confuse his reader by excessive irregularity. What modern editors make of such indications will tell us something about what they see in the manuscript, and will emphasize the fact that poetic features that we frequently think of as clear or fixed (such as the nature and properties of a poetic stanza) are in fact contingent on our cultural situation to a larger degree than editors typically admit.
Keeping this in mind, I will have a great deal to say about how ideas are arranged and grouped in editions as considered against the manuscript: there, the main breaks we find are of six kinds: (1) line-breaks; (2) breaks between pageants (usually marked by incipits and explicits, white-space, capitals and decorations); (3) metrical markers, most often the virgule, double-virgule, triple-virgule, obelisk, colon, or some combination of these; (4) end-rhyme, emphasized by the busy work of visual cues, namely rhyme-brackets throughout the text that connect rhyming lines (couplets frequently but not always excluded); (5) speaker-names, emphasized by red lines drawn across the page and between lines; and (6) page breaks, frequently accompanied by ascenders or other decoration on the new page.
But the temptation to impose the modern idea of the stanza, as well as the temptation to punctuate a medieval drama like some other sort of poetic text, will play a great role in the story I have to tell. For the editor, transcribing the words is only a beginning; deciphering the meaning of such features of the text as rhyme-brackets, the sudden appearance of double-columned writing, or metrical marks is going to prove to be subtler work. 9
Other Bibliographic Codes Functioning in the Text
To further illustrate the total effects of the bibliographic codes I have described, we may look at another typical stanza. On folio 12 (my transcription below) we see a series of breaks signaled by the obelus with virgule [÷/] (in the frons), line breaks, double virgules, and triple virgules. There is also one break indicated (in the fourth line) by the placing of a tail rhyme outside the rhyme brackets: the words are “Bot husband,” and in other stanzas the corresponding rhyme (“ordand”) is likewise moved to the margins. (My transcription excludes ascenders in ll in the word will and the b in bere in the first line. The red speaker lines break the text into units of some rhetorical value, so I include them here to assist in visualizing them, but will not include them below.)
Noe
The thryd tyme will I prufe ÷/ What depnes we bere Uxor
Now long shall thou hufe ÷/ lay in thy lyne there Noe
I may towch with my lufe ÷/ the grownd evyn here Uxor
Then begynnys to grufe ÷/ to vs mery chere Bot husband Noe
What grownd may this be // The hyllys of armonye Uxor
Now blissid be he /// That thus for vs can ordand Noe
The poetic grouping appears to exist on this leaf in six manuscript lines, but, if each break (whether [÷/], line break, virgules or placement in the margin) indicates the end of a verse-line, we count thirteen, ending with the line “That thus for vs can ordand.” Common sense in this case tells us that the frons is an octet, and that the rhyme brackets are shorthand indicating that the four manuscript lines are in fact a cross-rhymed octet and not a quatrain: the brackets do not say “each of these four lines rhymes with the others,” but rather “each of these pairs of verses rhymes with the other pairs of verses.” (While common sense does tell us that the frons is an octet, it took scholarly editors about a hundred and sixty years to print the lines that way for reasons I will trace.) I will deal in some detail with the ramifications of these different understandings of the lines in future notes, but for now it is enough to note that over-commitment to either hypothesis produces difficulties: to produce the frons as an octet ignores the manuscript layout, which arguably does more prominently emphasize the B-rhymes, while a quatrain minimizes the effect of the mid-rhymes too much.
Note that the scribe uses a double-virgule in the next-to-last line of the group, and then a triple-virgule in the last, to separate out the rhymes of the cauda. This is his standard, though not infallible, practice in Noe after the pageant’s second leaf. (In this and in later notes I will demonstrate that these marks and this system of signaling were largely ignored or else digested by the critical aims of the earliest editors, so that these traces of the scribe’s attention to metrics were lost, occasionally with significant consequences, particularly for the very prosody that scholars would admire.)
Absent Bibliographical Codes
One final point about HM1’s extra-lexical features requires comment, specifically concerning some of those that do not appear in the manuscript but which will appear in later editions in spite of the fact that they could not under ordinary circumstances be part of the bibliographic makeup of a medieval manuscript.
In the first place, there is no use of “white-space” to separate poetic units, particularly stanzas. Second, modern punctuation, as has been noted, is entirely absent from the manuscript, as are the usual signals which medieval paratactic prose employed to sort out main clauses: such signals (virgules, for example) are frequently employed but with poetic and not paratactic significance. Third, the text itself obeys the idiosyncratic, but not senseless, habits of medieval texts generally: among these are medieval rather than modern habits of capitalization, spelling, contractions (of both English and Latin), unusual letter forms (such as initial ff and the interchangeability of u and v that produces haue and vs for modern “have” and “us”), and litterae notabiliores.
Finally, modern conventions for presenting drama -- specifically dramatis personae, speech-prefixes in the left margin, “blocking” individual speeches with white space, the liberal use of stage direction to make sense of lines, and the arrangement of text in clear stanzas -- all find very imperfect analogues in HM1.
[ 1] My use of the masculine pronoun for the scribe should not be taken as ignorance of the possibility that the scribe might have been a scriptorix. The conventional “he / she” and consequent “scribe / scriptorix” is, however, laborious and (more to the point) less than ordinarily justified in the north of England. But the possibility should be born in mind that the scribe might have been female.
[2] Cawley and Stevens (Towneley Cycle) point out that some letter forms are different in eight of the pageants (12, 23-29); but they add, “It is not certain whether this distinctive hand is that of the main scribe or whether it belongs to a different scribe” (ix). The larger size of the letters and a more regular handling of metrical markers, as well as a thicker stroke, suggest that these pageants were the work of another scribe. But the writing is very similar, and no strong conclusion has been reached. Cawley and Stevens’ discussion of the handwriting and decorations remains the most comprehensive (xv, xvi, n. 12), as is their discussion of rubrication (xiii).
[3] Simon presents plates of some German Carnival plays from roughly the period of the HM1 scribe’s period (though perhaps a bit later) which do contain rhymed verses broken visually with spaces into stanzas in a reading copy of Nuremberg’s “When To Marry.” See Plates 5 and 6 in his “Manuscript Production in Medieval Theater” (156, 7). He cites Hansjürgen Linke’s 1988 essay on “types and characteristic features of German play manuscripts,” but this essay is concerned with classifying manuscripts according to their uses and socio-economic origins. He has little to say about the semiotic or semantic values of spacing between lines or the kinds of symbols with which I am here concerned.
[4] I will argue later for my use of this sometimes-problematic term and explain my use of the word “metrics”
[5] For the history of punctuation in poetry see M. B. Parkes (Pause 150 ff.); Hanks and Fish offer a useful article which details how modern punctuation imposes meaning on medieval texts, though their analysis is of Malory’s prose and so has limited application here.
[6] I have seen similar regularity in the York manuscript, usually with regular combinations of double-virgules: but the complex stanzas of the Towneley cycle afford the scribe a field for more creative use of the marks at his disposal.
[7] Very generally, these marks set off clauses in poetry as well, but counterexamples are too numerous to list and in too high a proportion to conclude that the marks function primarily paratactically as often they do in prose. In any case, Parkes allows that punctuation in verse was unstandardized in the extreme (Pause 106 ff.).
[8] On the fact that medieval texts were intended for declamation, recitation, or chanting, see especially Putnam (I. 302).
[9] The most comprehensive examination of the Wakefield stanza in the manuscript versus the editions is Martin Stevens’ “Did the Wakefield Master Write a Nine-Line Stanza?” Stevens discerns three “formats,” the A, B, and C formats, each rendering the same number of verses in a different physical way. (My aim in this study is not primarily with the stanza, so I do not always refer to these, but I describe each in different places below.) He concludes that “I can find no systematic justification for the use of one pattern over the other,” a conclusion with which I generally agree (103). But some cases invite reasonable speculation, and where they do I note it. Stevens does the same: see especially his section III (104-108) on the first appearance of the stanza in Format C.
This essay of Stevens is also the best study at suggesting stanzaic analogues in other Middle English works.
Reader Comments (4)
I think so, too.
I dunno, Otter. I like how Jamie was able to convey everything that you conveyed, but in a format I could read in a Tweet. I really think you need to put a lot more thought into how you express yourself. Have you considered taking a 102 writing course at a local college?
I've thought about it, Susan, but I really find that I'm happier not knowing anything.
Oh, a new challenge condense your dissertation into 140 characters.