A Computer-assisted Quantitative Comparison of the Editions of Chancer's Dream Poetry

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What follows is an interim report of a comprehensive textual comparison of Chaucer's Dream Poetry. In The Book of the Duchess, we have undertaken a comparison of the following editions : Benson's The Riverside Chaucer (Boston : Houghton Mifflin, 1987), F.N.Robinson's The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer (Boston : Houghton Mifflin, 1957), and H.Phillips's "The Book of the Duchess, " Chaucer's Dream Poetry, edited by H.Phillips and N.Havely (London : Longman, 1997). In The House of Fame, the following three editions are compared : Benson's The Riverside Chaucer (Boston : Houghton Mifflin, 1987), F.N.Robinson's The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer (Boston : Houghton Mifflin, 1957), and H.Phillips's "The House of Fame, " Chaucer's Dream Poetry, edited by H.Phillips and N.Havely (London : Longman, 1997).In this study, we have used the same method as we did in our Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde projects. It has been first necessary for us to make the corresponding lines, taking one from each of … More the editions, after we have made Benson's edition the basis for comparison. We have left all punctuation marks intact as they appear in the original editions, because they may indicate the editors' different interpretations of Chaucer's syntax. In Part I "Lines With Different Word Forms" of the present book, we have listed all the lines which contain one or more different words and spellings including upper/lower case differences. In Part II "Word Form Correspondence Index" we have made an alphabetically ordered word index to the sets of corresponding words. This index makes it possible to check every word set quickly and comprehensively. We are now preparing for "Cross-References" in order to make the comparison for each edition easier. The present list comprises the basic material for a further quantitative and qualitative study of the differences in spelling and vocabulary among the four editons. We have tried to make a contribution to Chaucerian texutal criticism by clarifying the textual similarities and differences among the editions. Less