The Review of English Studies has just published my latest article, ‘Verse-Craft, Editing, and the Work: Shadows of Orfeo‘. In it, I explore what potential the concept of the work has to help us in understanding early English material which exists in multiple witnesses, using Orfeo as my example and attention to the craft of verse as my method.
The three surviving manuscript copies of Orfeo diverge considerably, but (I suggest) some aspects of the poem’s construction are more consistent and more trustworthy than previously thought. Remembering that Orfeo is one work with multiple texts helps us see this; remembering that it is a poem helps us trace what in its construction has survived transmission. In this case, textual criticism, attention to verse craft, and thematic alertness to the poem aid each other and work together.
None of this is meant to suggest that the three witnesses don’t have their own intrinsic importance and interest. Middle English textual studies sometimes seems to me to have an either/or attitude to the tension between work and text(s), when a both/and attitude might bear more fruit. This article happens to focus more on the work, but I hope I’ve published enough writing elsewhere examining manuscripts for their own intrinsic qualities and significance to avoid the impression that I’m interested in recovering more-authorial works at the expense of texts and the people who copied and used them! That’s certainly not my goal.
As for why I’m calling the poem Orfeo rather than Sir Orfeo—well, if you’re curious I suggest you read the article and find out!
Any academic article only reaches publication through a great deal of often-obscured labour, and I’d like to record here my gratitude to the anonymous reviewers and the editors and production staff at RES.
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