§2. The Text, and its several Editions.
The first edition of Le Morte Darthur was printed by Caxton at Westminster in 1485, as he tells us in the colophon. Two copies only are known: they are folio, black letter, with wide margin, and among the finest specimens of Caxton’s printing. One belongs to Mrs. Abby E. Pope, of Brooklyn, United States, by whom it was bought for £1950 at the sale of the Osterley library in 1885[[26]]; and the other to Earl Spencer. The Osterley copy, which is perfect, has the autograph ‘Oxford’ on the first leaf; it was sold with the Harleian Library to Osborne the bookseller, and apparently bought of him for £5 5s. by Bryan Fairfax, who sold his library to Mr. Child, maternal ancestor of the Earl of Jersey[[27]]. The Althorp copy, which was bought at Mr. Lloyd’s sale in 1816 for £320, had eleven leaves deficient; but these were supplied by Mr. Whittaker in fac-simile from the Osterley copy with remarkable skill[[28]], though on collation with the original I have found many mistakes. This edition, like all Caxton’s books but one, has no title-page; the Prohem or Preface begins at the top of the first page[[29]].
The two next editions of Morte Arthur were printed by Wynkyn de Worde, the chief workman and successor of Caxton, in 1498 and 1529. Only one copy of each is known. That of 1498 is in the Althorp Library: it wants some pages, but contains the Preface, which is a reprint of that of Caxton, though it here follows instead of preceding the Table of Contents. This edition, which has numerous woodcuts, is not an exact reprint of Caxton’s; there are differences of spelling and occasionally of a word; and the passage in the last chapter but one, beginning ‘Oh ye mighty and pompous lords,’ and ending with ‘turn again to my matter,’ which is not in Caxton’s edition, appears here, as in all later editions[[30]]. The edition of 1529 is in the British Museum, and wants the Title, Preface, and part of the Table of Contents.
In 1557 the book was reprinted by William Copland, with the title of ‘The story of the most noble and worthy kynge Arthur, the whiche was one of the worthyes chrysten, and also of his noble and valiaūte knyghtes of the rounde Table. Newly imprynted and corrected mccccclvij. ¶ Imprynted at London by Wyllyam Copland.’ And on the title-page, above the last line, is a woodcut of St. George and the Dragon, of which that on the title-page of Southey’s edition is a bad copy. A copy of this edition is in the British Museum, with a note that this is the only one with a title which the annotator has seen.
A folio and a quarto edition were published by Thomas East, without date, but probably about 1585, the former of which is in the British Museum.
The next, and last black-letter, edition is that of William Stansby, in 1634, which has been reprinted by Mr. Wright, and which contains the woodcut of the Round Table with Arthur in the middle and his knights around, a copy of which is familiar to many of us in one of the small editions of 1816. From the fact of an omission in this edition which exactly corresponds with a complete leaf in East’s folio, Mr. Wright concludes that the one was printed from the other. Each succeeding edition departs more than the previous one from the original of Caxton; but if we compare this of 1634 with Caxton’s, we find the variations almost infinite. Besides remodelling the preface, dividing the book into three parts, and modernising the spelling and many of the words, there are a number of more or less considerable variations and additions, of which Mr. Wright has given some of the more important in his notes, but which I estimate at above twenty thousand in the whole; and which have probably arisen in the minor instances from the printer reading a sentence and then printing it from recollection, without farther reference to his ‘copy,’ but in the others from a desire to improve the original simplicity by what the editor calls ‘a more eloquent and ornated style and phrase.’
No new edition seems to have been published till 1816, when two independent editions appeared, one in two, and the other in three 24mo volumes. Both are modernised for popular use, and are probably the volumes through which most of my own generation made their first acquaintance with King Arthur and his knights; but neither has any merit as to its editing.
In 1817 Messrs. Longmans and Co. published an edition in two volumes quarto, with an introduction and notes by Southey, who says,’The present edition is a reprint with scrupulous exactness from the first edition by Caxton, in Earl Spencer’s library[[31]].’ As it appears from a note[[32]] that he had nothing to do with the superintendence of the press, which was undertaken by Mr. Upcott, he was probably unaware that eleven leaves were, as I have mentioned above, then wanting in the copy from which this reprint was made. These had not then been restored in fac-simile; for Earl Spencer’s copy contains a note, signed by Messrs. Longmans and dated 1816, which gives a list of the pages then wanting; and, in fact, the substitutes for them which actually appear in Southey’s edition differ widely from the restored, or the original, text. Thus in chapter xii. of the last book, besides the interpolation of the long passage ‘O ye myghty and pompous lordes,’ &c., which is not in Caxton, there are in the first eleven lines thirty-five variations of spelling and punctuation, besides the introduction of the words ‘but continually mourned un—’ and ‘needfully as nature required,’ which are not in Caxton, and the change of Caxton’s ‘on the tombe of kyng Arthur & quene Guenever’ into ‘on kynge Arthur’s & quene Gwenever’s tombe.’ And thus throughout the pages in question—seventeen in number[[33]]—the spelling constantly, and words and even sentences occasionally, differ from the real text of Caxton[[34]].
When at page 113 of volume i. the editor introduces the words ‘certayne cause’ to complete the sense, he is careful to call attention, in a foot-note, to the fact that these words are not in the original, but taken from the ‘second edition,’ by which I presume he means that of 1498. But when he subsequently supplies seventeen pages which were also not in his original, he gives no hint of the fact; and his reticence was so successful that for fifty years the interpolations passed as genuine among learned critics, who quoted from them passages wholly spurious as Caxton’s genuine text. It was only in 1867 that, in collating Earl Spencer’s copy with the edition of Southey, I discovered that these passages—to which my attention was directed by Messrs. Longman’s note above mentioned—did not correspond with Caxton’s text, as represented by Whittaker’s restorations: and on afterwards collating them with the Osterley text itself I found the like result. It remained to trace them to their real sources. This was not so easy as might be supposed, for though it was evident that Mr. Upcott must have had recourse to one or other of the existing editions, the interpolated passages in fact agree exactly with none of them. But a careful collation of the last four chapters of the book (which include more than half the interpolations, and may be taken as a fair specimen of the whole) with the old texts, leaves no doubt that, with the exception of the first thirty-six lines of chapter x, they were taken, like the two words mentioned above, from the first edition of Wynkyn de Worde, but with the spelling occasionally altered, and here and there a small word put in, left out, or changed. These alterations throw an ingenious disguise over the whole; but if we penetrate through this we find that in these four chapters there are only thirteen words differing from those in Wynkyn de Worde’s first edition, and these unimportant; while in his second edition, and in those of Copland and East, the variations from Mr. Upcott’s text of the same chapters are respectively fifty-seven, fifty-six, and fifty in number, and many of them important in kind: and if we go to the edition of 1634 we find the differences still greater, except as to those thirty-six lines, which are supplied from this edition, as they were wanting in the other copy. But the colophon, or concluding paragraph of the book, Mr. Upcott could not take from any of the editions which followed that of Caxton; for though Wynkyn de Worde might, and in fact did, supply at least one or two of the first words, the latter part of his colophon relates to his own edition, and departs widely from that of Caxton, while those in the later editions are still more unlike; and yet Mr. Upcott’s colophon is a tolerable, though not an exact, representation of that of Caxton. But his other materials can be ascertained beyond a doubt. They are, the colophon as given by Ames, and repeated by Dibdin in a modernised and otherwise inexact form[[35]], and that which first appeared in the Catalogue of the Harleian Library[[36]], and was thence copied in the article on Caxton in the Biographia Britannica, and also in Herbert’s Additions to Ames. The colophons of Ames and of the Harleian Catalogue have important variations from each other and from that of Caxton; and as Mr. Upcott adopts some portions of each which are not found either in the other, or in Caxton, we see the manner in which the paragraph in question was compounded. Each stone of the ingeniously fitted mosaic may be referred to the place from which it was taken. We cannot indeed choose positively between Ames and Dibdin, or among the Harleian Catalogue, the Biographia, and Herbert; but as the two paragraphs which are required in addition to that of Wynkyn de Worde are both found in Herbert’s Ames, it seems most probable that Mr. Upcott had recourse to that work, though another combination would have served the purpose equally well. That the interpolated passages are not taken from the Osterley Caxton itself, even in the roughest and most careless manner, is quite evident[[37]].