The Text and its Editors

The pertinent materials for a critical text of the poem that Hary wrote down about the year 1478 are the single extant manuscript penned by John Ramsay in 1488, the fragments discovered by David Laing of an edition printed with the types of Chepman and Myllar about 1509, and the unique copy of an edition printed by Robert Lekpreuik in 1570. The manuscript and the editions have been described elsewhere; it is their relationship that par ticularly concerns Hary’s editor. There is no need to complicate this question by taking account of the different readings of editions other than the ones mentioned above. If the variants peculiar to Henrie Charteris’s texts of 1594 (C1) and 1601 (C2) and Andro Hart’s of 1611 (H) are recorded here along with those of the fragments (F) and Lekpreuik’s book (L)—Hart’s are noted only for the first three Books—it is solely because of the rarity of copies and the editor’s wish to allow others to pass judgment on his procedure. Careful canvassing of their merits by previous editors seems to have been due to a notion that they might derive from different manuscripts, and so Sir William Craigie believed. It is plain, however, that all early editions after that of (?) 1509 derive from it. One printer has followed another, repeating the division of Books, the rubrics—even when misplaced—and the chapter numbers. Their verbal differences reflect merely the different mental habits of printers and compositors.

The relation of F and its derivative, L, to Ramsay’s manuscript—except, of course, for the few occasions of Protestant editing in L—is that of a later and much more corrupt manuscript to an early and usually reliable one. The latter, as Ramsay himself confesses with respect to the companion Bruce (“raptim scriptus”), was hurriedly written, so that certain passages preserved in F and L were passed over, many trivial errors were introduced, and at one point the intended indication of the commencement of a new Book (IX) was not properly made, and the scribe had to proceed with a division of the poem into eleven Books instead of the original twelve retained by the editions.