Princeton University

 

In 1598, Thomas Speght oversaw the publication of a new folio of Chaucer’s works, which was based upon the 1561 edition and expanded with help from antiquarian John Stowe. While Chaucer’s poems had been in print for more than a century, and available as a collected edition for more than sixty, Speght’s edition distinguished itself from its predecessors by providing a wealth of supplementary material designed both to impress upon readers the cultural importance of the poems contained therein and to aid them in the interpretation of Chaucer’s increasingly obscure verse. Among the most notable of additions in the later category is a glossary of approximately two thousand words, which was revised and expanded to include more than 2,600 terms for the second edition, published in 1604. Not only do these glossaries offer insight into the difficulties that late sixteenth and early seventeenth century readers might have experienced when reading Middle English, they place Chaucer’s English in the context of the emerging field of English-language lexicography. They seem to have immediately and influentially instantiated a kind of historical distance between Chaucer’s language and the language in use at the turn of the seventeenth century: beginning in 1616 with John Bullokar’s An English Expositor, the majority of words marked as “old” or “Chaucerian” in dictionaries published throughout the following century first appear designated as such in Speght’s glossaries. The persistence of this lexicon, drawn from the works of a single author and making no claims to encompass the variability of Middle English, has substantial implications for the understanding of the history of the English language and of a specifically vernacular poetics prior to the rise of philology at the end of the eighteenth century.