Some Notes On Editions of the Towneley Cycle: Part 1

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One of my interests is old manuscripts and how they come into the modern world.  Whether those texts are biblical, legal, historical, poetic, or whatever, they tend to preserve in their physical form some fingerprints of the time and place in which they originate.  As products of human minds and endeavors, they therefore also contain signals about the minds that produced them.

Consider this image.

It shows three versions of the Towneley Cycle, a unique manuscript of an English medieval mystery play, specifically the Processus Noe.

Three Versions of the Towneley Processus Noe. Top left MS HM1; Top right, the Surtees Edition (1836); Below, the E.E.T.S. version (1994) in full-page and close-up for perspective on stanzafication.

At top left is the unique manuscript (there is only one source for the text), which is usually dated between 1475 and 1525.  At top right we see the Surtees Society’s 1836 edition, the first print edition of the entire cycle.   Below, we find a close-up and a full-page view of the first two pages of the 1994 Early English Text Society [E.E.T.S.] version, the most recent complete edition.

Unsurprising differences in the versions’ appearances on the page strike the eye immediately. 

In the manuscript, we find:

• ragged margins;
• names of speakers (this is a dramatic work);
• long lines of poetry in Anglia script;
• red lines drawn across the page separating the speakers’ lines from one another;
• brackets connecting rhyming words together in groups of two, three and four; and
• aggressive use of the marginal space. 

All this gives the work what appears to be a cluttered appearance.  

No modern syntactic punctuation appears in the manuscript, though typical medieval punctuation does.  The effect of the whole on the reader unfamiliar with such manuscripts is a pressing sense that the thing needs to be decoded as well as read: for instance, the fifth line of each stanza actually does not appear in sequence below the fourth line, but rather out to the right hand margin beside it.  For those of us who grew up under the influence of the printing press and its economies of space (a function of the technology itself), that seems a strange placement for lines.  Yet there they are.

Something of this clutter remains in the 1836 edition: the lines run into the margins, reasserting themselves in indented lines below, and indentation approximates the effects of the rhyme-brackets, exploiting more recent conventions in layout to call attention to the verse-structure.  No spaces between lines appear to mark off stanzas,¹ and the overall shape on the page of the long columns of text is at once both uniform and a little wild-looking.  

The speakers’ parts are neatly assembled beneath and beside their names, as is modern practice in a dramatic script.   Modern type has given the letters and lines that regularity which we expect in modern books: the edition follows the practice usual since the early eighteenth century of using roman letters to represent Middle English (See A.S.G. Edwards “Representing The Middle English Manuscript” 65).²  If we miss the elegant capitals, strapwork and ascenders (litterae notabiliores) of the manuscript’s incipit and opening line, or the red ink (obviously missing in the black and white scan above) of the lines marking off the speaker’s parts, we are at least certain that a neat line in block capitals in modern typeface memorializes something in the original.   We have not lost any of the words.  The whole appears on paper which was once white, now yellowing in the Tulane Library Special Collection.

Finally, in the 1994 edition, we can see that a wholesale reorganization of the lines has taken place: the left-hand margin runs neatly in a straight line, and the lines in roman type are conveniently shortened to allow for a smooth slender column.³  The edition leaves the reader to fend for himself in the matter of identifying rhymes, but to compensate for this a bit of blank space cues a break in stanzas.   As a further aid to the reader, a modern title is given, and a reference number 3, indicating that the pageant is the third in the Towneley Cycle.  The paper is thick and off-white.

Editions of course emerge for different purposes and for different audiences, so differences such as those noted above are hardly surprising.  "Bibliographic codes," Jerome McGann's term for those features of a physical manuscript that contain particles of meaning, do the work of alerting us about the intended audience and purpose of a work, surrounding with contextual clues the lexical text of the work, which is what we may call the “words we mean to transmit.”   In this example we can see just a few of the bibliographic codes that we as readers constantly (and sometimes unconsciously) decode and to which we assign variable significance, or importance for the meaning(s) of the work.  This significance, as we see in the examples above, must be a matter both of editorial judgment and of the pressure of the modern demands that readers inevitably must make on the text.

Whether we're reading a medieval text or the Bible, our assumptions are being shaped by what we see. Medieval and classical textual scholars feel these realities particularly acutely, conscious as they always are of scribal presences intervening between author and reader.   A reader’s understanding of a medieval work’s author necessarily must be shaped by the scribe, editor, or some other functionary in the mechanisms of publication: scribes, like editors, necessarily influence the reader’s perception of the author’s work not only by their intervention in the lexical text of their exemplars (through mistakes or emendation), but also in the layout, presentation, illumination, and of course the quality of his work.

In the Bible as in medieval texts, the editor never frees herself from that operation long enough to become a simple presenter of the author’s words.   In short, nobody has “just edited” the text of the Towneley cycle: all the editions produce a version of the work contained in HM1 that bears marks of the editors’ understanding of it, an understanding for which we can give an account.⁴

In future posts I plan to look a bit more at the editorial history of the Towneley Cycle, and to examine how, even as the words remain the same, the meanings are influenced in their presentation in a new time and a new place and in new technologies.

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¹The use of the word “stanza” is a bit of an imposition insofar as the word implies a typographical unit which obeys modern typographical rules (white-space borders, arrangement of verse-lines one above the next, certain arrangements relative to the margins and so on).  Such a unit does not exist in this physical form in HM1, though the denotative meaning of “stanza” as a poetic unit, a group of lines linked by poetic features, is more or less accurate.  The scribe does typographically set off the stanza in many cases, and how he does so will supply much material below. For convenience I will use the word to mean simply a group of lines the unity of which the poet or scribe shows by either graphical cues (such as rhyme-brackets or metrical symbols) or poetic devices (such as rhyme and meter).

²Before 1721 (when Urry printed Chaucer in roman type), it was usual to print Middle English in black letter, even after roman and italic type had been introduced to England.  Edwards cites and enlarges upon observations on typography by W. Alderson and A. C. Henderson (about Urry’s edition) and significant conclusions drawn by Bromwich (259-63) and Lucas (148-88) about the history of representing Old and Middle English.

³Peter Happé, in a review of this edition in The Review of English Studies, remarks that “A great deal of attention has been paid to layout and to ways of making the text available in a form which allows the reader to be aware of the manuscript” (565).   Happé’s remark punctuates one of the real paradoxes of this kind of comparison: it depends on exactly what features of the manuscript Happé is thinking of.   For instance, the manuscript does call attention to the fact that the manuscript seems to regard its short “half-lines” as entire verse units, and issues a line-break to indicate the fact.  In other words, the manuscript’s lines “Myghtfull God veray” and “Maker of all that is” appear on one line in the manuscript, but, since they are separated there by a metrical marker [:/], the 1994 edition breaks the verses apart on separate lines.   But no one reading the 1994 edition would be “aware of the manuscript” and its habit of printing such verse-pairs on one line.  In fact, what the reader has become aware of is not the manuscript but the interpretation of the editors that these lines represent metric / poetic units which are best recognized by modern readers as individual lines.  (I will generally refer to “verses” when I mean these short metric units and “lines” to designate the physical lines of manuscript or edition.)

⁴This idea of “just editing” the text without any real theoretical system or agenda is more common than one might think, and perhaps especially in editing medieval texts.  E. Talbot Donaldson, for instance, insists that in editing Chaucer one must deal with problems subjectively as they arise, settling difficult questions ad hoc (Speaking 102-18): of course, in practice what this amounts to is the editor’s constructing the text, particularly if the “text” is a conjecture to begin with.  Thus where the Chaucer manuscripts Hengwrt and Ellesmere differ, the editor arrives at the conjectured (“correct”) text by an ad hoc solution.  Of Donaldson’s perspective, McGann remarks, “We may perhaps theorize his polemic and argue that, in problem-solving situations, the possibility of error must exist if the possibility of truth is to remain.  The rule is a corollary of the principle of falsifiability” (Critique 107).  A colleague has likewise told me that her dissertation advisor at Oxford told her not to distract herself with theory, but rather to “just edit.”