Alison Wiggins

Based on the number of surviving copies and outside references, the Romance of Guy of Warwick was once one of the best-known tales in England. Nowadays, it's nearly forgotten.

There are at least two good reasons for that. One is that it's really long, and most of that length is bloat; it isn't a good read. The other is that it's in Middle English.

This is an attempt to resolve the latter problem, at least. It's the only edition of "Guy" with an edited text and any sort of reader helps. For show more everyone other than hardcore scholars, this is the only edition out there that's of any use. As with other TEAMS texts, the orthography has been regularized and the text is glossed to make it easier to understand; there are also extensive explanatory notes.

The result still feels a little incomplete to me. For one thing, this is only a third of the story. The so-called "Stanzaic Guy" printed here (as opposed to the "Couplet Guy," and another, later, Guy rewrite, plus a story about Guy's son) exists in only one copy, in the famous Auchinleck Manuscript -- but in fact the "Stanzaic Guy" does not exist as a standalone piece in Auchinleck. It is the middle of three sections about Guy, which in Auchinleck are treated as a single long romance. There is absolutely no indication, except the stanza form, where the "Stanzaic Guy" begins and ends. Nor are the sections separate items in the Anglo-Norman original.

I think this matters. Most people today think that separate authors wrote the separate parts of the Auchinleck text, which were later combined -- but the scribe of Auchinleck did not perceive it so, and the copying may have been influenced by that. And I don't think the (relatively short) introduction makes that very clear; it certainly doesn't give us enough information about the other two parts of the Auchinleck text. And the line numbers refer only to the Stanzaic "Guy," rather than preserving the lineation of Auchinleck, so you can't go from this book back to the published manuscript and check it.

I'm also inclined to think the text a little under-edited. Yes, the textual notes indicate just more than a hundred places where editor Wiggins has intervened in the text, but often these interventions barely deserve to be so called. For example, in line 2867, her text reads "and." The manuscript reads "7 7." "7" was one of several older English shorthands for "and" -- similar to "&" today. Converting a double 7 to "and" is hardly editing; it's more an advanced form of transcribing. And she notes that lines 2002-2004 are missing. But, remember, we have the Anglo-Norman romance from which "Guy" was translated, and we know the rhyme scheme for 2002-2004 from the rest of the stanza. So why not try to restore the lines? Some people like cautious editions, but if the goal is to make the text relatively accessible (as is the goal of the TEAMS series), I think a little more editorial work would have been worth doing.

These aren't terrible defects -- after all, anyone who looks at this book is already pretty far gone into specialization, and may well be able to deal with the minor defects of the edition. But if we are to rescue the Stanzaic "Guy" from its oblivion, we probably need to do more.

Of course, there is a genuine issue of whether "Guy" is worth rescuing.... show less