The Problem of Authorial Variants in The Wife of Bath's Prologue

Elizabeth Solopova reassesses the long-standing claim that the so-called “added passages” in The Wife of Bath’s Prologue represent scribal interpolation rather than Chaucerian revision. Through detailed stemmatic and textual analysis, she argues that these passages are highly likely to be authorial and that their uneven distribution across the manuscript tradition reflects the transmission of an unfinished authorial working copy rather than later embellishment. The five added passages are supported by a broad and early range of witnesses—principally the AB group, Dd, El, and Cx2—while their appearance in other manuscripts can be convincingly explained by contamination rather than independent descent.

Solopova demonstrates that manuscripts often dismissed as anomalous (such as Ch, Gg, Ad3, or Si) do not preserve independent authorial states but selectively import the passages from earlier exemplars. The consistency, literary quality, and metrical regularity of the added passages contrast sharply with genuinely spurious lines elsewhere in the tradition, which are typically isolated, poorly written, and metrically defective. This qualitative distinction strongly supports the authenticity of the added material.

Beyond the added passages, Solopova finds little evidence for further authorial revision in the Prologue. A small number of potentially authorial variants—such as experiment for experience in line 1, and soth in line 46—are discussed, but these lack the strong manuscript and structural support of the added passages. The overall stability of the text suggests limited revision.

Solopova concludes that the added passages most likely descend from a single early exemplar, plausibly Chaucer’s own working draft, containing alternative readings marked for inclusion or deletion. The divergence between manuscripts that include or omit these passages may therefore represent competing editorial choices made by early scribes confronting Chaucer’s unfinished text, rather than later corruption of an otherwise stable original.