TY - JOUR
AU1 - MacCrossan,, Colm
AB - Richard Hakluyt’s The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation (1st edn 1589; 2nd, enlarged, edn 1598–1600) is the most important collection of travel narratives and related documents published in the Elizabethan era.1 It brings together key accounts of mainly English voyaging to all parts of the world beyond Europe, and in some cases is the unique surviving witness to rare and unpublished narratives and archival documents concerning these activities. Hakluyt is generally seen as having resisted intrusive editing of his sources in favour of (as he put it) ‘giuing vnto euery man his right, and leauing euery one to mainteine his owne credit’.2 With some exceptions, he is usually also considered to have exercised careful judgement in selecting reliable sources.3 While the accuracy of many of the details he retransmitted can today be questioned, such departures from fact appear in general to be genuine errors, consistent with current knowledge of the wider world, rather than deliberate fictions. Although some of the voyages in Principal Navigations are accompanied by celebratory poems, and one or two accounts are actually composed in verse, the collection does not as a rule admit avowedly literary material.4 However, there is a clear exception to this statement, a rogue item which sees Hakluyt diverging from his usually strict editorial principles: the ‘Knight’s Prologue’ from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.5 Extraordinarily, this extract from the author described throughout the sixteenth century as the ‘father of English poetry’ is presented here as a genuine historical source, framed so as to appear to be a true witness to English crusading around the fringes of Europe, from Pagan Eastern Europe (‘Pruce’, ‘Lettowe’, and ‘Ruce’), to the Saracen Middle East (‘Alisandre’, ‘Leyes’, ‘Satalye’, and ‘Palathye’), to Moorish Spain (‘Granade’, ‘Algezer’, ‘Belmarye’, and ‘Tramissen’).6 In the context of Principal Navigations, this is an extremely problematic item. The poetic snippet is itself quite brief, only 226 words, but its significance to the collection is magnified by the manner and extent of its paratextual framing. The poem’s sixty-six-word introductory intertitle is over a quarter of the length of the verse it accompanies, or a third if the forty-eight-word ‘Letter of Cupid’ addendum (discussed below) is discounted: The verses of Geofrey Chaucer in the knights Prologue, who liuing in the yeere 1402. (as hee writeth himselfe in his Epistle of Cupide) shewed that the English Knights after the losse of Acon, were wont in his time to trauaile into Prussia and Lettowe, and other heathen lands, to aduance the Christian faith against Infidels and miscreants, and to seeke honour by feats of armes.7 While in the poem, the near-superhuman valour of Chaucer’s knight is built up through an almost impossible litany of exploits, Hakluyt seeks greater verisimilitude by narrowing his readers’ focus to just the Northern campaigns. He also adds the pivotal ‘losse of Acon’ (Acre) in 1291 as a firm historical event from which to date this new period of crusading, creating a sense of real-world chronology which the ‘Knight’s Prologue’ does not attempt to offer. Another effect of this intertitle is to extrapolate from Chaucer’s single character a broader image of enthusiasm for crusading among ‘English Knights… in his time’. From a narrow point of view, all of this fits the item’s placement in the first volume of Hakluyt’s collection. Each volume of Principal Navigations concentrates on voyages to a specific geographical region, so with Volume I concentrating on voyages to the North and Northeast, it makes sense to deemphasize Chaucer’s Knight’s exploits in more southerly locales (more properly the subject of Volume II). More specifically, it enhances the item’s ability to function as an idealized poetic epiphonema to the preceding chronicle narratives—reprinted by Hakluyt from Thomas of Walsingham—of English nobles attempting to gain crusader glory in the pagan North, a full century after the European drive for Jerusalem had been halted at Acre. The reflection of the supreme qualities of Chaucer’s Knight, ‘Cheualrie, / trouth, honour, freedome, and Curtesie’, is cast backwards onto the varying fortunes of Henry, Earl of Derby—the future King Henry IV—and Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester—son of King Edward III and uncle to King Richard II.8 This additional lustre is arguably necessary; while Henry is portrayed as having had some military success in besieging Vilnius (tempered slightly by the expedition’s final tally of only eight converts to Christianity), the latter mission was objectively a total failure, the fleet failing to navigate its way even beyond the North Sea. Seen in this context, the propagandistic appeal of using the poetic Knight’s triumphs to burnish the record of the historical nobles is clear. However, obvious too is Hakluyt’s discomfort with using a literary work as a historical source, which he tries to alleviate by adding a smothering of critical apparatus, in the form of marginal notes containing cross-references to the fortieth chapter of Froissart’s Chronicle, alongside several glosses for Chaucer’s sometimes confusing rendering of place names. As a result, the ratio of paratext to text rises further, to well over half once these thirty-six words of marginalia are added to the count. An additional nineteen-word Table of Contents entry, along with fifty-nine words describing this item in the volume’s ‘Preface to the Reader’, results in the paratextual framing actually narrowly outweighing Chaucer’s own verse by 180 words to 178.9 Both the Preface and Table of Contents extrapolate from Chaucer’s specific characterization of his individual Knight a more widespread record of ‘long voyages’ and ‘woorthy’ or ‘valiant exploits’ among ‘our English Nobles, Knights, & Gentlemen’: And lastly, our old English father Ennius, I meane, the learned, wittie, and profound Geffrey Chaucer, vnder the person of his knight, doeth full iudicially and like a cunning Cosmographer, make report of the long voiages and woorthy exploits of our English Nobles, Knights, & Gentlemen, to the Northren, and to other partes of the world in his dayes.10 The association of Chaucer with Ennius as the fathers of poetry in their respective vernaculars was conventional for Elizabethans.11 However, Hakluyt attempts to exploit an additional, more specific comparison, based on Ennius’s reputation for having (in John Skelton’s words) ‘wrote of marciall warre at length’.12 Yet, while Ennius was celebrated principally for his long historical poem, the Annales, the same is not true of Chaucer, whose usual mode was not historical epic. Hakluyt attempts to pivot between the fairly standard comparison between the two poets in terms of authority, towards a new equivalence concerning subject matter, in order to present Chaucer as a witness not unlike a ‘cunning Cosmographer’. However, this is an untenable over-extension, a situation reflected in Hakluyt’s addition of burdensome marginal annotation to the verse itself, and the manoeuvre is ultimately unsuccessful. Ostensibly, bestowing real-world cosmographical credibility on Chaucer’s invention should work in the service of national myth-making. Clearly, the bundling up in the ‘Preface’ of the sentence quoted above into a paragraph alongside summaries of the journeys of Henry and Thomas emphasizes an intention for them to function as a single cluster. However, while the positioning of Chaucer’s single knight so as to hypotactically enhance the appearance of Walsingham’s two English nobles might have had a chance of success, the further extrapolation of this in the Preface to now speak to the experiences of a whole assembly of ‘Nobles, Knights, & Gentlemen’ becomes unsustainable. Moreover, Hakluyt’s apparent discomfort with the credibility of The Canterbury Tales as a source results in a subsequent attempt to further historicize Chaucer in this item, which ultimately places the entry under greater strain than had the poem simply been printed without commentary. This occurs at the point in which the twenty-four lines of the ‘Knights Prologue’ give way to five lines from another poem, the ‘Letter of Cupid’, self-dated to ‘The yeere of grace ioyfull and iocond / a thousand, foure hundred and second’. The hoped-for benefit from grafting on this appendix is explained in another marginal note, which claims that ‘The time when Chaucer wrote, is thus mentioned in the end of his letter of Cupide’, presumably in the hope of further securing his readers’ sense the poem’s reliability as a historical source. However, this manoeuvre also backfires for a number of reasons. One of these is the fact that the ‘Letter of Cupid’ was not written by Chaucer but rather by Thomas Hoccleve.13 Although the ‘Letter’ was often attributed to Chaucer in sixteenth-century editions, its true authorship was noted in Thomas Speght’s editorial commentary for an edition of Chaucer published in the same year as this volume, 1598.14 More troublesome still is the likelihood that Chaucer was not actually alive in 1402. In the same edition, Speght—citing the monument erected in his memory at Westminster Abbey by Nicholas Brigham in 1556—dates Chaucer’s death to 25 October 1400, more than eighteen months prior to the date transferred by Hakluyt from the ‘Letter of Cupid’ onto the ‘Knight’s Prologue’.15 As a pupil at Westminster School from 1564–70, Hakluyt will have had many opportunities to have viewed this monument, and this biographical aporia effectively negates the ‘Letter of Cupid’ as a piece of corroborating evidence for Chaucer’s positioning by Hakluyt as a credible witness to English valour overseas.16 Between the various kinds of paratextual material, and the additional lines from the ‘Letter of Cupid’, Hakluyt goes to significant pains in order to try to leverage Chaucer’s authority in the unfamiliar realm of long-distance travel and to harness the poetic vigour of the ‘Knight’s Prologue’ to the more prosaic needs of Principal Navigations. Why Hakluyt persisted with the inclusion of Chaucer in spite of his obvious anxieties, however, is uncertain, though it seems likely to have been at the urging of one of a number of learned—and frequently more accomplished—men with whom he associated during this period. The second edition of Principal Navigations in particular carries the influence of a number of antiquaries who were active in Oxford and London during the last decades of the sixteenth century. Sources for newly added material in this edition include William Camden’s Britannia (1586), Sir Henry Savile’s Rerum Anglicarum scriptores post Bedam (1591), and William Lambard’s Perambulation of Kent (1596). One very senior member of this circle, John Stow, whose Annales of England (1592) and Survay of London (1598) also appeared in this period, is a particularly likely candidate for having suggested to Hakluyt the suitability of Chaucer as an authority. Stow established himself as a leading antiquary through the publication of successive editions of A Summarie of Englyshe Chronicles (first issued in 1565, and subsequently ‘inlarged’ and reprinted every year or two up until his death in 1605). Before this, however, he had produced an edition of The Woorkes of Geffrey Chaucer, which—in line with earlier sixteenth-century editions—included the ‘Letter of Cupid’ as apparently canonical.17 Hakluyt’s acquaintance with Stow can be traced back to at least 1582, when the latter supplied him with a manuscript copy of Fabian’s Chronicle.18 If the younger scholar was in fact submitting to pressure from Stow in choosing to include the passage from the ‘Knight’s Prologue’ in Principal Navigations, it was an unfortunate decision. The fact that Speght’s edition of Chaucer was issued in the same year by one of printers of the Principal Navigations, George Bishop, is just one of a series of ironies surrounding this rare and misguided attempt to add poetic glamour to the otherwise soberly constructed text of Principal Navigations. But it is not entirely alone. The presence of this and other rogue items reveal how Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations project changed in the decade between the first and second editions, as moments of tension between the text and paratext provide glimpses into the circles in which Hakluyt was moving and the influences he was subject to as an increasingly public figure. Even taken in isolation, the awkward insertion of this brief poetic item into a collection that runs to over 1.75 million words provides an accessible and instructive insight into the human relationships and processes that contributed to the construction of this hugely significant but often monumentally impenetrable text. Footnotes 1 References here are to the second edition: Richard Hakluyt (ed.), The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of the English Nation, 3 vols. (London, 1598–1600). 2 Hakluyt, III: sig. A2v. 3 See the twelve regionally focused essays analysing ‘Hakluyt’s Use of the Materials Available to Him’ in D. B. Quinn, (ed.), The Hakluyt Handbook, 2 vols. (London, 1974), I: 155–260. 4 Besides commendatory verses on Principal Navigations itself (I: sig. **3r-v), poetic items include: George Turberville’s three letters in verse sent from Moscow in 1568 (I: 384–9); Theodor Beza’s ‘Ad Serenissimam Elizabetham Angliae Reginam’, celebrating the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 (I: 606); a short verse in Welsh and English concerning the medieval prince Madoc, who supposedly reached the Americas prior to Columbus (III: 1); a lengthy Latin poem celebrating the launch of Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s 1583 Newfoundland venture, written by Stephen Parmenius of Buda (III: 137–43); and two poems issued to accompany Sir Walter Raleigh’s Guiana enterprise of the mid-1590s, George Chapman’s ‘De Guiana Carmen Epicum’, and Lawrence Keymis’s ‘Ad Thomam Hariotum… De Guiana Carmen’ (III: 668–72). 5 Hakluyt, I: 124. 6 For identification of these locations, see Muriel Bowden, A Commentary on The General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales, 2nd edn (London, 1967), 44–73. 7 Hakluyt, I: 124. 8 Hakluyt, I: 122–3. 9 Hakluyt, I: Table of Contents; I: sig. **v. 10 Hakluyt, I: sig. **v. 11 The comparison between Chaucer and Ennius is made, for example, by Barnabe Googe (1565), George Puttenham (1589), Sir Philip Sidney (1595), and Francis Meres (1598). 12 John Skelton, Pithy Pleasaunt and Profitable Workes of Maister Skelton, Poete Laureate, ed. John Stow (London, 1568), sig. A7. 13 For a useful discussion of Hoccleve’s negotiation of his relationship to both Chaucer and the original poem from which he adopted the ‘Letter’, Christine de Pizan’s ‘Epistre au dieu d’Amours’, see Jonathan Stavsky, ‘Hoccleve's Take on Chaucer and Christine de Pizan: Gender, Authorship, and Intertextuality in the Epistre au dieu d'Amours, the Letter of Cupid, and the Series’, PQ xciii (2014), 435–60. 14 Geoffrey Chaucer, The Workes of our Antient and Lerned English Poet, Geffrey Chaucer, Newly Printed (London, 1598), sig. ci. 15 Chaucer, sig. civ. 16 See D. B. Quinn and A. M. Quinn, ‘A Hakluyt Chronology’, in The Hakluyt Handbook, I: 265–6. 17 Geoffrey Chaucer, The Woorkes of Geffrey Chaucer, Newly Printed, with Diuers Addicions, Whiche Were Neuer in Printe Before (London, 1561), ff. cccxxviv–ccix. 18 A. M. Quinn and D. B. Quinn, ‘Contents and Sources of the Three Major Works’, in The Hakluyt Handbook, II: 338, 372. © The Author(s) (2019). Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Hakluyt’s Use of Chaucer
JF - Notes and Queries
DO - 10.1093/notesj/gjz079
DA - 2019-09-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/hakluyt-s-use-of-chaucer-GR0zsJvEsb
SP - 393
VL - 66
IS - 3
DP - DeepDyve
ER -