Torrent of Portyngale: a critical edition

Abstract

Torrent of Portyngale is a late medieval romance, preserved in a single manuscript, MS Chetham’s 8009. It is a complex mix of romance themes: adventure, loss and restoration, family and social status, piety and hypocrisy, woven around the love between Torrent, the orphaned son of a Portuguese earl, and Desonell, heir to the throne of Portugal. Cohesion to so wide a range of thematic material comes from the author’s careful elucidation of the religious and moral significance of the text’s events. While popular literature with a didactic purpose is not uncommon in medieval literature and elsewhere in romance (cf. Sir Amadace), modern criticism has failed to fully appreciate the purposeful combination of the two in Torrent of Portyngale. Torrent is perhaps the most critically neglected member of the Middle English verse romances. This is, in part, due to the state of the text, which suffers from extensive scribal corruption. The first modern edition, by James Halliwell (1842), was also careless and did little to create a good impression. The poem’s most recent editor, Eric Adam (1887), appreciated the shortcomings of Halliwell’s work and sought to restore Torrent. He incorporated evidence from fragmentary early prints of the text and drew on the fruits of nineteenth–century romance scholarship. Despite his good editorial intentions, however, it is now clear that he also made errors and editorial decisions that have coloured the way in which Torrent has been viewed since. The substantial body of twentieth and twenty–first century scholarship on Middle English romance and medieval studies in general has diminished the value of Adam’s edition to the point where it may be regarded as obsolete and a new edition long overdue. This fresh edition of Torrent has been prepared from microfilm of the manuscript. It re–examines the text’s phonology, morphology, syntax, dialect and vocabulary, to indentify and evaluate overlooked clues to help answer such fundamental questions as its date (scholars have dated it from the mid– fourteenth century to the first half of the fifteenth century) and provenance (it has been mapped from East Anglia to South Lancashire). Both the unflattering reputation that Torrent of Portyngale has gathered in modern times and the long–held notion that it is lacking in originality are challenged by the thorough re–examination of the state of the text, its scribes and their practices and evaluating them against prior and current romance scholarship. This new analysis provides a window through which Torrent can be viewed and valued as a product of its time, allowing it to be judged more accurately against its contemporaries and offering many new insights into a text that was clearly once popular.