Caxton and the Canterbury Tales
An essay by Lotte Hellinga
In the summer of 1476 Caxton was at last firmly set on his new career path as publisher. He had taken the decisive step of moving to England and equipping a printing house within the precincts of Westminster Abbey. From now on printing had arrived in England, to stay there for good.
Caxton remained until his death in 1492 in the premises he rented from the abbey, and went on to print the 99 items (counting large books as well as single leaves) which are known to be printed by him during his years there. Of those, 48 are represented in The John Rylands Library, which makes it one of the largest collections of Caxtons. Out of this cornucopia a single text has been selected for discussion here.
The new printing house was soon a going concern, profiting from a location that was bound to attract customers from the church as well as the nearby court and parliament. An advertisement for one of his books (a slip of paper that was meant to be stuck on a wall) invites customers, ‘spiritual or temporel’ to his shop in the house named The Red Pale: ‘late hym come to westmonester’ [JRL 23122, ISTC ic00355700]. A centre of the booktrade had long been established at St Paul’s Churchyard, but Caxton created at Westminster a new venue. The almost hundred books he produced there were quite different from what was for sale at St Paul’s. In later years (from 1487), the particular identity of his printing house was reinforced in his books by his printer’s device, that was taken over after his death in 1492 by his successor Wynkyn de Worde.
Caxton’s printing house concentrated on works in English, although occasionally he printed in Latin when it came his way. About half of the English books he published were works by others, the other half his own translations. One of the earliest publications was his most successful book, and set the tone for all that followed. It was Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.
By way of appetizer he had published in the summer of 1476 a few small books with verse by John Lydgate and Chaucer, but this was merely a foretaste of what was already in preparation The great book, the Canterbury Tales, was completed towards the end of 1476 or very early in 1477 [JRL 11567, ISTC ic00431000]. Caxton had at that time only one printing type, a beautiful fount that had been designed and made for him in Flanders, and had been used there only twice for two books in Bruges. Its style was modelled on the writing of scribes of luxurious French-language manuscripts, which had become traditional in Flanders. Its French origin did not hinder the appearance of the Canterbury Tales, that most English of texts, but it was remarkably elegant and gave the text a new flavour, looking as new. The book surpasses anything Caxton printed later.
Its appearance may be unsurpassed to our eyes, but Caxton did attempt to improve the work. Several years after the publication of his first edition of the Canterbury Tales it was brought to his attention that different versions of the text assisted, possibly more complete and with the Tales in different order. Caxton had run into the trouble that every editor of the Canterbury Tales was to face after him: Chaucer had not left one final version of the Tales, but several different versions that had all been in circulation since his death in 1399. Since the text had remained popular, these were copied in many manuscripts. Caxton, anxious to do justice to a revered author, decided in 1483 to bring out a second edition, improving the version of the first by changing the order of the Tales, and correcting the text by comparing it with another manuscript source [JRL 8694, ISTC ic00432000]. By modern standards this was a very patchy exercise, but nonetheless it is interesting as an early attempt at textual criticism as a consequence of distribution of a text in print, becoming known to many more than had been possible in manuscript.
Textual correctness was not Caxton’s only concern. He decided to add woodcut illustrations to this new edition, heading each prologue and Tale with an image of the pilgrim-speaker. Since these woodcuts took up a good deal of space, Caxton used this time for the text a much smaller type that had been in use since 1480. It is a small-scale version of the Flemish type, but it has not the grace of the original design.
The woodcuts followed the tradition of the very few illustrated manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales, and Caxton’s version became the standard from which for very many years the illustrations were copied in later editions. They are by far his most successful set of illustrations. The third edition, printed perhaps just before Caxton’s death in 1492 by Richard Pynson, who at that time was beginning his printing business in the City of London, reprinted the text of Caxton’s second edition; it was illustrated with clumsy copies of Caxton’s woodcuts [JRL 10002, R37631, ISTC ic00433000]. After Caxton’s death, Wynkyn de Worde became his successor, working as a colleague of Pynson, at times in competition. He brought out the fourth edition of the Canterbury Tales in 1498 with Caxton’s set of woodcuts, but making major alterations to the text after extensive comparisons with other sources. Caxton’s first edition had set in motion a critical process that was to continue into modern times.
