A textual study of Sir Richard Ros's 'La Belle Dame Sans Merci'

Abstract

In this new edition of La Belle Dame sans Mercy the chief aim has been to examine the textual problems presented by the manuscripts of the poem with a view to restoring as nearly as possible the substantive readings of the author's text, in the externals of dialect forms and spelling of one fifteenth century scribe working not very long after the poem was first written. Descriptions of each of the six known manuscripts and of Pynson's (1526) and Thynne's (1532) printed versions are intended to provide as much information about the transmission of this text as possible. The characteristics of each scribe are mentioned briefly, and an analysis of the relationship between the manuscripts is attempted, although it is not possible to draw many firm conclusions. A detailed analysis of all variant readings in the eight texts revealed the type of error likely to occur during the transmission of the poem. This information here leads to a discussion of the way in which such classification of error and the resulting knowledge of scribal tendencies can play a major part in establishing original readings. All substantive variants are set out in footnotes to the text, so that an editorial decision may be questioned and tested at any point. Thus a method of determining originality first used by Professor Kane in his 1959 edition of the 'A text' of Piers Plowman is applied to a text quite different in kind and scope, and found to be equally effective.