[He] was a functionary in the royal household [of Henry VIII]. Surviving records trace his rise through the bureaucratic ranks. In a document from 1524, the earliest containing a definite reference to Thynne, he is called second clerk of the kitchen. By 1526 he had become the chief clerk of the kitchen, his title in household records dating through 1533 as well as in the preface to the edition of 1532. In documents from 1536 and 1538, Thynne is referred to as clerk controller of the king's household. By the end of 1540 he was one of the masters of the house-hold, a position that he retained until his death in August, 1546.

2 See The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer and Others. And see Greetham (1994), p. 363:

indeed . . . the printing of a work in the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries typically entailed the loss of exemplars and other sources upon which the printing depended.

4 For terminology here and elsewhere in the Introduction, I follow the definitions of Peter L. Shillingsburg as I have found these quoted in Machan, pp. 6-7. Abbreviated they are: work, the intellectual product, "'the message or experience implied by the authoritative versions of a literary writing'" (p. 6); version, an instance of a work, "'one specific form of a work -- the one the author intended at some particular point in time'" (p. 7); text, "in a bibliographic sense . . . 'the actual order of words and punctuation as contained in any one physical form'" (p. 7); and document, "'the physical material, paper, and ink, bearing the configuration of signs that represent a text'" (p. 7). Machan is quoting from Scholarly Editing in the Computer Age (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986).

5 "Many of these things I have attempted to set right" (Skeat, p. xix). And see further Edwards, p. 186:

In this conviction he was further sustained by the comforting knowledge that if fifteenth-century scribes did not know how to spell Chaucer's works, he did. He is quite frank about this:

    There can be no harm in stating the simple fact, that a long and intimate acquaintance, extending over many years, with the habits and methods of the scribes of the fourteenth [sic] century, has made me almost as familiar with the usual spelling of the period as I am with that of modern English.
    It is little more trouble for me to write a passage of Chaucer from dictation than one from Tennyson. It takes me just a little longer, and that is all.
 

7 See the article by Heyworth for suggestions on how re-punctuation should be undertaken in TL. Leyerle's critical edition, his PhD thesis, is an attempt at a global punctuation of TL.

8 I have not altered capitalization of words or punctuation in Thynne. Thus I present here a sixteenth-century reading of TL according to the conventions of that age. I have left, unemended, the numerous compiler's errors. On diplomatic transcriptions, see Greetham (1994), p. 350; quoted below at page 18.

9 Nor should anyone for a moment consider this sentence innocent. I know that I am, in Hanna's words, "substitut[ing] a certain modern neatness -- partially driven by a sense of how canonized texts should work -- for manuscript material evincing a much more various author (and far more various reception)" (p. 178). Hanna's words are more than just a re-phrasing of Dagenais's; they point, additionally, to the bias, potentially even violence, of editorial "clearing." Call it colonizing, call it territoriality, call it what you will, editing remains appropriation by the editor of the text to his or her meaning and thus expropriation of the text from others who read it differently. But it also offers a direct presentation of the editor's hard choices in understanding the text and presenting it, as responsibly as possible, to the modern reader.

10 See Strohm (1992), pp. 145-60, especially p. 157, quoted below at p. 24.

11 See Jellech (1970), p. 3, on the corruption of Thynne's imprint. Jellech, like Skeat and others, also recognizes and reports the commonly acknowledged fact that all subsequent imprints of TL, depending as they do on Thynne, are of no use in establishing a text -- worse, in fact, they only introduce more corruption into TL: "I have examined in microfilm each of these later printings and found none which contains a text superior to the 1532 edition." As a control for my project, I examined the text of TL in the copy of Speght's 1598 edition, The Workes of our Antient and Learned English Poet, Geffrey Chavcer, in the Smathers Library of the University of Florida, checking one chapter per each book of TL; my findings in this experiment were the same as those Jellech reports for her more elaborate undertaking -- the text had obviously degenerated; and I conclude, therefore, that it is safe to assume no later printing need figure in my work.

12 See Machan, p. 190: "The Middle English canon . . . is very much a canon shaped by economics."

13 Richard would, of course, suffer even more brutal defeat some dozen years later when Bolingbroke deposed him. We have here, I strongly suspect, the main reason that no manuscripts of TL survive: it was perceived as Ricardian work by a Ricardian man -- why would Lancastrians want copies of it circulating? Below I offer a conjecture as to why at least one copy of TL might have been preserved -- see Section vi f, "The Problem of the Broken Sequence of Book 3."

14 See pages 14-17 below, Section iv, "Usk and His Contemporaries."

15 See Twomey, pp. 182-215, for a helpful introduction to medieval encyclopedias.

16 Jellech addresses Usk's sources at great length ([1970], pp. 53-118), some 65 pages. I have made no attempt to duplicate that work in this edition. In particular, and especially given also Leyerle's work with Usk's sources, I have deliberately chosen to minimize references wherever they are not instrumental for readers of this edition.

17 On Usk's inventiveness, see Schaar, p. 13; Leyerle (1977), p. 325; and Medcalf, pp. 182, 194. C. S. Lewis (1936), p. 228, on the other hand, is as hard on Usk as Medcalf is approving of him:

But Usk remains, even when we have made every allowance for a corrupt text, a clumsy and sometimes an unintelligible dialectician. All that he has to say can be found, much better, elsewhere.

Perhaps because Usk presumes in the book a dizzyingly analogical pattern in the universe, but more because his book is an exaltation of love and the new world which love has revealed to him, it is written, where it is engaged in philosophic argument, in a high style by no means as crabbed as it has sometimes appeared. It is in fact not only the first book of original philosophy in English, but also the first book in which English prose is made to have something of the pattern, gorgeousness and poignancy of poetry.

18 See Vona for a massive compilation of patristic commentary; see also Ohly; and Wailes, pp. 120-24.

19 The reader may also want to reflect on the history of the image of the pearl by recalling Claudius at the end (Hamlet V. ii. 271-74; Evans, p. 1184):

The King shall drink to Hamlet's better breath,
And in the cup an [union] shall he throw
Richer than that which four successive kings
In Denmark's crown have worn.

20 Skeat opines (Thynne [1905], p. xl) "how Usk came to think of this curious device. . . .

We may feel sure that Usk must have been acquainted with Higden's Polychronicon. . . . But this very device, of indicating the name of the author of a work by means of the initial letters of the chapters had already been adopted by Higden. . . . We see that Usk simply copied Higden's device.

21 Bennett also cites a quotation from Butler in the OED:

As Scriveners take more pains to learn the slight
Of making knots, than all the hands they write.

23 Ars Poetica 189-93:

Neve minor neu sit quinto productior actu
fabula quae posci volt et spectata reponi.
nec deus intersit, nisi dignus vindice nodus inciderit.

[A play should not be shorter or longer than five acts if, once it has been seen, it wishes to remain in demand and be brought back for return engagements. Nor should any god intervene unless a knot show up that is worthy of such a liberator

(trans. Hardison and Golden, p. 13).]

25 See Holy Sonnet #12 (1-4) in Carey, p. 178:

Father, part of his double interest
Unto thy kingdom, thy Son gives to me,
His jointure in the knotty Trinity
He keeps, and gives me his death's conquest.

"O frate, issa vegg'io," diss' elli, "il nodo
che 'l Notaro e Guittone e me ritenne
di qua dal dolce stil nuovo ch'i'odo."

"O brother, now I see," he said, "the knot
that kept the Notary, Guittone, and me
short of the sweet new manner that I hear."

28 For Gower, see 8.2941-57 (Macaulay, vol. 2, p. 466); for Henryson, see the edition by Kindrick (pp. 147-86); and for Villon, see Sargent-Baur, pp. 51-193.

29 See, among others, the studies by Perrow, Rice, and Sargent-Baur in her edition of Villon, p. 196 n 73.

30 Here I list vocabulary items that signal main images in TL: beest, burjonen, cloud, clips, confounded, cosinage, crommes, daunger, ebbinge, endite, fantasye, fruite, graffed, jangeleres, knit, knot, pearl, prison, pyles, shyppe, styred, testament, tillers, tilth, wilde. In the hypertext version of the edition that I plan to launch on the World Wide Web, I will index, key and "hotlink" these items.

31 Medcalf speaks, in a felicitous phrase, of Usk's "lateral habits of mind" (1997), p. 251.

32 The most eloquent witness is Dante -- see Freccero, p. 24, for helpful comment.

33 "Pitee renneth soone in gentil herte" -- CT I A 1761.

34 I would like to take this occasion to thank John Bowers and Kathryn Kerby-Fulton and her co-author, Steven Justice, for their scholarly collegiality in sharing with me their work in progress or in press. Their goodwill has ensured that the METS TL is better informed than it otherwise could have been.

35 Compare Bennett (Gray), p. 347: "The apparent familiarity with the Troilus and the Boece that he shows in his Testament may be due simply to his general recollection of passages that he had copied."

36 Kerby-Fulton is at work on a list of parallels she proposes between TL and Piers Plowman; I have seen only a preliminary, incomplete version of this list that includes the passages in TL but not those in Piers supposed to be parallel.

37 See, further, Lewis (1995), pp. 432-33; see also Medcalf (1997), p. 248: "Given their common religion and their common culture, it must remain uncertain whether Usk took the image of the tree from Langland."

38 My positions here depend primarily on Strohm and Bressie, although I am very pleased to acknowledge my several conversations with Bowers which helped me refine my thought. I also want to record my debt to Leyerle's work. I find his arguments on the distinctiveness of the mode and idiom of the Testament congenial (p. 393):

Idioms appropriate to a man's political service to his lord had been transferred since the twelfth century to the situation of a lover's service to his lady. In the Testament Usk does the reverse: idioms appropriate to a lover's service to a lady are applied to Usk's political service to his lord. Usk's intentional application of the language of love service to his situation in London politics is central to an understanding of the mode and idiom of the Testament.

39 Leyerle reports (p. x) that in his text, "extensive use was made of Thynne's punctuation, which is usually helpful, but occasionally mistaken." I tend to disagree with Thynne's punctuation somewhat more often than Leyerle.

40 Hanna and Lawler (p. 1003); Siennicki provides an elaborate table of correspondences between TL and Boece in her thesis (pp. 225-63).

41 Consider, in this light, how attractive to any sovereign the following would appear (Book 1, lines 105-08): For I trowe this is wel knowe to many persones that otherwhyle, if a man be in his soveraignes presence, a maner of ferdenesse crepeth in his herte not for harme but of goodly subjection, namely as men reden that aungels ben aferde of our savyour in heven.

42 The offending matter may once have been even more obvious (Skeat, [Thynne, 1905], p. xl):

Mr. Bradley has since kindly pointed out to me [viz., Skeat] that Usk's first design seems to have been to make his sentence end with THOMAS VSK instead of THIN VSK. There is a conspicuous O in Chapter IV of Book III, and a conspicuous M in Chapter V. . . . The A at . . . and the S at . . . are less certain, and the reading THIN certainly sounds better, and is more convincing.

43 Leyerle's conclusions are relevant here. He reports (p. xxii):

I had worked out the correction to the Bradley shift completely before noticing that Ramona Bressie had come to much the same conclusion, although her analysis does not correspond in all the details to the one presented here.

Gatherings o, p, and q contained the dislocation. Stripped of the unnecessary complexities introduced by Bradley and compounded by Skeat, the dislocation of texts in the Testament is, thus, very simple: gatherings o and q were interchanged.

44 I could be wrong, however, I admit. It is conceivable that Thynne is, in fact, the culprit. Thynne may have recognized the acrostic and deliberately mangled Book 3 to conceal Usk's name, the better therefore to pass the work off as Chaucer's -- we know what "Chaucer-olatry" flourished in Henry VIII's court (see above Blodgett, note 1). I am not reluctant to assign such a dark motive to Thynne out of any sentimentality: it is possible that he mutilated the text, indeed mutilated it even out of a reverence for Chaucer (to augment him in the eyes of Henry's court), placing TL after the House of Fame, definitively Chaucer's, as a kind of extension of that poem's argument, which in a great many ways it is (see especially the note to Book 1, line 652, below). But of the two interpretations of the available evidence, I think at this time that the one I have offered above is much more likely to approximate the truth: the motive is clear, the result comprehensible, the politics altogether (alas) explicable.