Compariing Three Versions of Chaucers Pardoners Tale :: Chaucer Pardoners Tale Canterbury Essays

Compariing Three Versions of Chaucer's Pardoner's Tale One of the interesting things about the works of Chaucer is the amount of difference one can find between the different manuscripts of his work. I thought it would be interesting to look at the difference between two manuscripts, using the transcriptions available in the Chaucer Society Specimens of all the Accessible Unprinted Manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales. I found a copy that has comparative versions of the manuscripts assigned to us, taking a look at the Pardoner's Tale. While we have not looked at that tale in class, and given that it was the only sample I could find in the scattered volumes of the Specimens, I felt it would be interesting to look at them, especially compared to the Riverside edition we are reading in class. Beginning with the Riverside edition, the introduction to the Pardoner?s tale begins with ?Heere endeth the Phisiciens Tale? and ?The woordes of the Hoost to the Phisicien and the Pardoner.? (Benson, 193) These introductory words, as well as the closing words for the previous tale, are not present in the Bodleian text. One could surmise that the transcriber of the text felt these to be perfunctory and unecessary, and though the reproduction I have does not reproduce it, it?s possible that there could be some other dividing point to break off one tale and begin another. The Additional MS has a conjunctive phrase, though it is different than that presented in the Riverside edition. ?here ende the Maister of phisikes tales? and ?Here bigynneth the prologe of the reheytyng of our hoost.? (Specimens 91, 2) It is interesting to not the difference of terminology here. The physician is ?Phisicien? in the Riverside text, yet the ?Master of phisikes? in the Additional MS. One wonders why one i s preferred over the other, and which is the more authoritative version. With only these three texts assigned, it is not for this author to speculate, and again, with a small sample, there can easily be isolated differences. One of the most interesting things to note in these differing manuscripts, I?ve found, is the variance and change that even identical passages can take, separated into various edition. Much like modern English, when you ask several different people to write the same thing, you can get many different variations base on how they?re transcribed.