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This has led one of the modern editors Charles F. Briggs of On the Governance to argue
that the work was not copied from a completed edition but from “Trevisa’s own working copy”
(i.e. from his annotations). The exemplar’s shortcomings would reflect not those of scribes
intending to replicate but to compile a finished work from a draft of a final product. According to
Briggs, the scribes of Digby 233 were “saddled with the difficult task of not only reconstructing
the text in accordance with what they could surmise was Trevisa’s final intention…but of doing
so on the same parchment leaves that were destined to be bound into their patron’s elegant book
of politics and war.” 419 Digby 233, therefore, reflects the creation of a draft into a “final”
finished copy and not simply a replication of a complete exemplar. Since neither Trevisa nor his
final text guided the construction of Digby 233, the signature “Trevisa” evidences how a group
of scribes understood a Trevisa-text to be read especially when amongst the multiple departures
of the text from Giles’s translation, only three of these are annotated.
More than rendering De Regimine into English, On the Governance preserves a particular
type of translation—a translation recognized as coming from an idea of who “Trevisa,” as an
ideal translator, was. To use another modern analogy, Digby 233 more closely mimics an
adaptation of a “Shakespeare” play rather than that of Romeo and Juliet. In the latter, the text’s
meaning is preserved via interpretation of its content—via what one director wishes to convey.
In the former, the text is interpreted through the image which has made it famous—via what the
general culture assumes “Shakespeare” to signify. Thus, appending the metonym “Shakespeare”
to a play would mean more to a given audience than titling it Measure for Measure or
prior to 1405, it is reasonable to assume he would have made an exemplar available to his business and political
acquaintances in London…and in the absence of Hoccleve’s more modish alternative, chances are he would have
succeeded”(Giles 258). The simplest answer is that Trevisa had not only died before Digby 233 was finished but
also before his own translation was completed (Giles 259). Scott’s observations that Digby 233 was illuminated by
artists acquainted with French styles originating from the Benedictine houses and the colophoned year of 1408 as
coinciding with the coming of age of Henry IV’s son, the future Henry V, and outside the Berkeley-Trevisa
patronage relationship of the late fourteenth century (Vol.2 Cat.No. 35).
419 Briggs Giles 88.
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