Читать книгу The Penn Commentary on Piers Plowman, Volume 2 - Ralph Hanna - Страница 6
ОглавлениеPreface
This is the third volume to appear of a projected five-volume collaborative project. It has been preceded by book-length guides to the opening and conclusion of Langland’s poem (Galloway 2006 and Barney 2006, respectively). The remaining volumes, by Anne Middleton and Traugott Lawler, remain actively “in progress.”
The substantial volumes already published present themselves in a rather “stand alone” mien. Like most published writings—yet with a strange inappropriateness, given that their subject is the ceaselessly changing Piers Plowman—they strive to obscure, as irrelevant to the product, an underlying history of discussion and changes of course. As a result, exactly how the authors’ work (and the work of subsequently published collaborators, both instant and projected) is to be construed remains slightly opaque (and has provoked some querulousness among reviewers).
The following pages, a personal statement, seek to clarify the origins of our mutual project, some of the thinking that underpins it, and the goals that animate this particular contribution. It builds upon statements made long ago in public fora as to what it was we thought we were about (e.g., Middleton 1990; Hanna 1994). This preface thus substitutes for what we might, and probably should, have made clear to all our readers at the outset.
In its inception, the project was the brainchild of Steve Barney. He initially had the idea of providing a modern replacement for the notes in Skeat’s edition of the poem, and he sought out and convinced all of us, as well as Murray Krieger, then director of the University of California Humanities Research Institute, Irvine, of the worthiness of this pursuit. The self-styled “Gang of Five” (originally including John A. Alford, subsequently to be replaced by Galloway, who was with us from the beginning, initially as a graduate assistant) assembled at UCHRI, Irvine, in the new year, January 1990. (Thus, this was very much a UC project, four of the team at the time we started being UC employees.) Our work began as but one focus amid a more profuse UCHRI collaborative project, a study of “Annotation” and its history (cf. Barney 1991, papers presented at a conference held to mark the end of this endeavor).
We convened with only a hazy initial idea, that we were all interested in writing a modern commentary on Piers Plowman. However, we rapidly discovered that each of us might have differing views about what this apparently pellucid statement might mean, the inception of an ongoing and not entirely concluded debate about alternative methods. This lack of closure remains important because, although all of us have read, several times over, all that each of us has written, we have ultimately imposed no narrow program on one another. Each separate volume retains its crotchets and testifies to what will become obvious, the absence of a single way or single view.
Our work, having divided the poem into five roughly equal chunks, each of us to be primarily responsible for a single portion of the text, began with—and all of us concurred in—some basic logistic guidance. I will return to a number of these decisions later, when I come to describe the construction of this volume. However, areas where we agreed were considerably more tractable than larger questions: What was a commentary? What service did it seek to perform? How did this impact on addressing Piers Plowman?
One choice that we necessarily took early on deserves highlighting immediately. At the time we began, only Skeat had undertaken to provide materials that approached all three versions of the poem, and the convention was most typically to annotate B. This decision was predicated upon literary taste; B was customarily seen as the version possessing the greatest literary interest and frequently was described in terms like “the only imaginatively complete version” (a topic to which I will recur). After a good deal of discussion, we settled that, for our purposes, Piers Plowman was the poem Langland wrote, an amorphous sequence of versions, but all of them the same (developing) poem. This, we believe, was in its maker’s intention always one; its development through the versions represents the exfoliation and clarification of imaginative impulses that had driven the project from the start.
Particularly germane to this volume (as well as the following Volume 3, but not, for example, to Volume 5) is a further consideration. In the second vision of Piers Plowman, my subject here, Langland’s C version substantially retools the standing B text. Some of this work involves extensive and meticulous local rewriting (Russell 1982). But more striking is a prodigious “frontloading” of materials and issues broached in the B version only in the third and fourth visions. (These materials, resituated in C, come to stand as prolepsis for issues now differently bruited in those later visions, similarly subjected to intense revision in C.) In addition, as is well known, in C Langland truncates the standing B “pardon scene” and excises altogether what is for most readers the poem’s central and abiding enigma, Piers’s tearing of the document. However, this omission is balanced (and I will argue below, in certain respects compensated for) by two extensive new initiatives, the dreamer’s meeting with Reason and Conscience (5.1–104) and his very long interjection into the “pardon scene” (9.71–280).
Taken in sum, all these gestures amount to a substantial overhaul of my assigned portion of the poem. And indeed, my activity as a commentator, whatever form it would assume, had necessarily to address the intense work to which the poet had subjected this portion (and in both its B and C renditions). As my identification of the two large-scale additions indicates, the C second vision is much more overtly dreamer-focused than either earlier version (cf. Hanna 2015). As a consequence (and it should go without saying), this reformulation amounts to an implicit authorial rejection of the frequently read B version. Given our sense of the poem’s unity of intention, if not of execution, much of my work would be driven by and would need to account for the substantial changes, detailed and large-scale, Langland had made to these portions.
* * *
At the very least, “The Gang of Five” were attempting to update and supplement a sequence of scholarly classics. There was a great deal we could amplify—much of it summary of past discoveries, some of it the results of our own scholarly investigations. But beyond such modernization, some of us were struck by a further problem. Skeat’s annotation, and indeed all annotation of the poem we knew, did not seem to at least some of us particularly rationalized in its procedures. That is, Skeat had approached the poem in a traditionally partitive manner, inherited from nineteenth-century German Philologie (and the regimen of classical studies that lies behind it). His notes, grand as they are, address the poem as a series of bits—the difficult word, the potentially untranslatable line, the subject of a verse paragraph. In a certain sense, he addresses Piers Plowman as if it were a document, but never quite as a poem.
At least one of our hopes, when we assembled, was to identify, and to argue out a theory for, some other mode of procedure. This would address the (now perhaps old-fashioned) concern that a poem forms “an organic unity”—in the full consciousness that we were working with a literary object always considered particularly problematic in this regard (e.g., Lewis’s sneering reference to “fragments but not a poem,” 1936:158–61 passim). We could rather readily agree to two basic gestures in this regard, both generically forms of “mapping.” First of all, our annotation should include a division of “parts,” progressing through the entire poem. These divisions would indicate those units of sense by which the poet prosecutes his argument, a great number of them considerably longer than simply the “verse paragraph.” We did agree in finding in the work’s frequently remarked episodic structure and fragmentation a model for how to go about reading and explaining it.
Yet such mapping was scarcely any invention of our own, but at least one model provided us by medieval commentative regimes (where Langland may well have learned it as a compositional technique). One might exemplify such a move from the first entry in Bartholomew of Brescia’s standard gloss to Gratian’s Decretum, an example we owe to Howard Bloch:
This [first] distinction is divided into two parts. In the first he proves by four canons.… In the second part, which begins, “There is, however… ,” he gives seven differences. (Gratian 1993:3a [s.v. D.1])
Every serious commentator begins with a “divisio textus”; this provides a reference system predicated upon what might be described as “argumentative stages” of the text. Simultaneously, these may be seen as providing the contextual limits that govern some normative reading. But it is a naïve reading of what we have written that presupposes that this step exists as authoritative end-all. Having found in the poem tranches that we consider self-consistent formulations, we agreed that we would attempt to refer these units to the discursive structures from which they had emerged, and to use that information to guide our detailed annotation. As is manifestly obvious, segmenting the text intrudes our sense of its contours upon our readers and is a thoroughly interpretative decision.
Divisions address the poem as an ongoing narrative whole. In these terms, textual division may have been a sufficient gesture for medieval commentators, largely concerned with texts “proscriptive” or “argumentative” (Holy Scripture, Gratian, the Lombard). We, in contrast, were dealing with a poem, a verbal structure presumed to be integrative. Thus, we argued, reducing the limits of annotative attention to a single textual chunk had always to coexist in oscillation with integrative moments, to which we planned to give special attention.
We could all agree that Langland’s poetic narrative is persistently crossed by a sort of division different from the narrative chunk, one broadly thematic. That is, as all its readers know, Piers Plowman often seems distinctive because it is engaged with, not a plot, but a vast mélange of conflicting voiced opinions. Skeat’s partitive annotation occasionally attends to such repetitions of (often violently bruited) topics or subject matters. We thought these oscillations into reiterated nodes of contention should receive rigorous notice. Indeed, the further all of us proceeded with our work, the more forcefully the importance of such linkings among congruent discussions (and with them, an interest in both their developing terms and the nature of those figures enunciating these) was borne in upon us.
To achieve this integration, we agreed, first of all, that we would strive for a system of extensive cross-references. This would draw together comparable discussions elsewhere in the text—highlighted by having distinguished their unique status as central within individual passages. This effort would map the poem’s development, not just vertically, through a sequence of versions, but longitudinally as developing argument, one in which later passages may qualify or extend earlier ones—and thereby reveal their perhaps unique confirmations. Not all such linkages, it seemed to us, are obvious or even overtly marked in the text. For example, see 8.341–52n; the dreamer’s prophecy of dearth has received extensive and constructive critical notice qua prophecy. Yet overlooked in all discussions is a major point of integrative connection: this is the the second vision’s second appeal to the corrective force of natural disaster (cf. 5.115–22), not to mention this passus’s second example of “houping after hunger” (8.168), the dreamer trying to voice Piers’s frustrations at non-feasant workmen.
This example also highlights a further issue germane to Piers Plowman that Bartholomew’s logically ordered “divisio textus” ignores. Unlike Gratian’s presentation, textual segmentation or division in Piers Plowman seems frequently characterized by utter logical discontinuity, largely the collision of voices representing disparate discursive sites. In this example, at the end of passus 8, the dreamer angrily interjects himself into the narrative he has allegedly only dreamed passively. Yet equally, one might feel that the transition between “parts” of Langland’s poem involved some segue or another (in this case highlighted by the repetitions noted in the last paragraph).
In our study of past writing about the poem, this issue of implicit connectives has come to represent perhaps the greatest difficulty it has presented to its readers. One might state as one of our annotational postulates that Langland’s juxtapositions customarily represent, not anacoluthon but connection. As a preliminary annotational goal, we determined that we should attempt to supply such implicit connectives. Doing so would indicate what we all believe, that whatever the difficulties of modern readers, Langland was engaged in trying to write a coherent and “smooth” narrative (even if addressing a subject that resisted coherence). We thus, while acknowledging its fashionable imbrication in early twenty-first-century literary practices, would reject such an argument as that of V. Smith 2009, that the poem’s inexplicitness about its own procedures keeps the text open to continual interpretation. Even in his generosity toward all views, we are sure Smith would agree that some proposed connectives might be less plausible and compelling than others.
To these initial steps, we could concur unanimously. At this point, I turn to consider my take on the elephant that still remained in the committee room, largely a consideration of what “the commentable” might consist of. For it remained variously clear to all of us that what we were undertaking was imbedded within an essentially Victorian model of textual practice that had grown up with Philologie, in the process of recovering and presenting pre- and early modern texts. This, like the foundational textual studies of that period, had developed within a “scientistic” model, predicated upon the presumption that it was the job of the textual sciences to present “objective information” so that others might have a text on which to practice “interpretative” activities. The edited text had to be presented, it was argued, in a form arrived at through logical rigor and a scientific process (Lachmann’s recension preferred). Correspondingly, as the accompaniment to such an “objective” document, the annotator should offer only objective information—linguistic data culled from fruits of Philologie, references to specific source-texts, relevant bits of historical data (what was a friar?).
As we argued about this issue, at least some of us were forced to see this procedural mode as rather a misstep—or one insufficiently theorized. Leaving aside editors’ claims to “objectivity,” any analogous claim on the part of commentators should have always been deeply suspect. Annotators had always been subject to some selective principle that defined the “needs-to-be-explained.” All had made choices concerning (a) what was in need of annotation (some standard of obscurity or difficulty, or some judgment about an implicit audience); (b) what information was to be provided; (c) how extensive a search should be undertaken in its pursuit. One of us pointed out that in even the clearest case, a direct quotation, one could fairly easily find more than one example of the same words elsewhere (a prospect now turned multiform with the possibility of online searches), and that all examples were not equally relevant to a single citation within a particular textual context.
This view posed the issue pretty neatly. If the annotator cited every identical thing, s/he would achieve something approximating “objective completeness.” But if the annotator realized that not all instances of the same words were equally relevant, s/he would be engaged in an act of judgment, not “objectivity” at all. (And always providing one limit on the entire procedure was the fact that it could never be final or definitive, because there might always have been another identical evocation that one had missed.) Somehow the interpretative and the provisional and supersessible quality of all annotation had to be recognized.
Commentary always assumes the plenitude of the text. This, for us, is not simply a function of “language languaging,” or that Langland could not constrain the text to mean as he wished (although the frequency of revision indicates his fleeting hope that he might). Rather, like medieval commentators, we assume the capacity of the author to generate multiform meanings, that he is more intelligently capacious than we, more widely read in a rich range of materials (many perhaps closed to us), and considerably more verbally adept. Thus, what we provide, however extensive, is always partial, and completeness of presentation a goal we cannot achieve. Moreover, we remain aware that only naïve readings have ever seen commentaries as complete, or utterly authoritative; to cite merely one example, the most frequent medieval citations of the glossa ordinaria appear within sermons, where they serve, not simply as statements of the commonplace, but—just as Langland’s appropriations from a range of texts—as sites for individual rhetorical invention.
These lucubrations suggested to us that all commentative practice responds in some way to a sense of “relevant context,” however that might be defined. Clearly, commentators have always strived to reduce anomaly, to “smoothe” [render coherent] ongoing sense. But this goal may only be achieved by a prior perception of what the sense ought to be, which depends, in turn, on the annotator’s reading of the enigma in question within some surround, and very likely one larger than the immediate line.
For us, this raised a familiar, if ancient, distinction, that between the art of grammar and the art of commentary. Compare Leofranc Holford-Strevens’s passing comment, “Lacking comprehension of a poem as a whole, to which each passage, line, and word is subordinate, Gellius is at one with the despised grammatici” (2003: 213). Traditional commentaries on Piers are, in this account, “grammatical” (and there’s nothing wrong with it: the greatest commentator on Virgil, Servius, was resolutely so). But their fragmentation, the attention to the bit, while it supports the cause of objectivity, resolutely avoids the knowledge—the broader sweep of the poem—that had enabled the helpful comment in the first place.
Not all the “Gang of Five” would accept the way in which I attempted to move past this impasse and construct the commentative stance I assume through what follows. I will try to illustrate this, again with an example—and some explanation of the thinking that underlies it. Although, in jumping to the very end of this volume, it prejudges a very long developing argument (unlike a grammarian, I strive to enunciate a view of the whole), I would contrast my predecessors’ and my own handling in the notes to 9.305 and subsequent lines. There Will discusses Joseph’s dreams and their outcomes.
What we all came to call “normative [or grammatical] annotation” can unpick the issues here relatively automatically. There were, in the Middle Ages, standard ways of talking about dreams, quite familiar to all readers on the basis of Chaucer’s persistent invocation of the topic (at least one of which, at CT VII.3123–35, takes up Langland’s examples here). These my annotation notes, although not to the profusion of my predecessors.
But, in my reading, these discussions might be described as resolutely inattentive to what is to be annotated here. In turn, this only emerges by engaging with the text of Piers Plowman as poem, as a continuing and situated argumentative procedure. As I argue below, Langland’s point is quite other than the conventional annotation, at a certain level rather less sophisticated and considerably more instrumental. As C 9.299 (A 8.133, B 7.150) “if hit so be myhte” [if what I saw sleeping might actually be/exist] indicates, the issue is not the truth value of dreams, the customary subject of discussion, which past annotators have attended to very well. Rather, the discussion here arises as a wish to actualize as an achieved event what has occurred only as a recollected dream. And the conventional examples here have been chosen (and “tweaked”) with that end in view.
This annotative bit provides a classic (and easily repeated) example of Middleton’s “set-texts out of place” (cf. 2010:109). The poem can only be comprehensible by relying upon a surround of accepted discourses; but it can only have an argument of its own—something thus meriting annotational attention—by adapting, rereading these inherited materials in a newly imagined context. As a consequence, what is at work in Piers Plowman is not the familiarities uncovered by the conventional annotational regimen but what Middleton describes as “the difference or dislocation of the refound or reused fragment from its primary site of production.” In discussing Joseph’s dreaming, “normative annotation” recognizes the “set-text” or “primary site,” but ignores why, as all annotators note, Langland chooses here to “mis-emphasize” conventional biblical loci. The text means differently from the expected—here a signal that the dreamer has decided to make his dream real by trying to perform Piers, in the waking interlude of C 10. There, like Piers in his confrontation with the priest over the pardon-text, the dreamer will assert his untutored knowledge against that of clerical authority.
Thus, this commentary is particularly conscious of a global form of such misprision endemic in past practice. While past commentaries have tended to follow the standards of nineteenth-century Philologie, they have equally made contextual assumptions about the poem that might well be queried. These are more than forgivable, because ultimately the assumptions answer what one might consider The Big Question, “What is Piers Plowman?” Annotation has to seek a way to situate the extraordinarily sui generis character of the poem, to define a field in which it makes some sense. This task has, of course, absorbed every critic of the poem—always with a sense that there are “pretty good” but far from absolute fits. For example, although Piers is clearly an alliterative poem, it rarely fits neatly within the developed criticism of the alliterative tradition (although cf. 21.26–198). Likewise, Duggan’s metrical studies show the uniqueness of its meter.
Similarly, distinguished efforts at tackling the poem head-on have typically found it situated along unbridgeable fissures. Infamous in this regard is Bloomfield’s non-genre of “apocalypse” (1961), actually a combination of six genres, a perception constructively developed in Justice’s arguments for a poem dipping into a succession of genres (1988). Here the usual annotative moves have been predictable.
Most customarily (and this is true of all its annotators), the poem is taken as “vernacular theology,” a Middle English religious text that strives to communicate the broad truths of Latinate Christendom. These are conventionally seen as erupting into the poem as Langland’s citations; the most rigorous assertion of such a view, that the poem provides a persistent doctrinal allegory (Langland’s opinion of …) was provided by Robertson and Huppe (1951; cf. Alford 1977). One episode germane to this volume, its presentation of the Seven Deadly Sins, obviously places the poem in some contiguity with the outburst of Middle English pastoralia almost exactly contemporary with Langland’s writing. A similar move, probably most pronounced in the Victorian Skeat (and much later Muscatine 1972), sees the poem’s varying twists as mimetic of social crisis, again linking the work with the contemporary scene (although in this case its historical vicissitudes).
I once remarked in passing that the poem, if it reminded me of circumambient pastoral theology, did so as the deconstruction of that rhetoric. If Langland’s efforts were blandly instructive, as this siting would imply, he was a remarkably inept hand at the business. Indeed, as a variety of notes below will argue (even as I will persist in citing pastoral analogues for Langland’s detail), the poem seems persistently engaged in exposing, not the outlines of proper penitential processes, but precisely how those practices must always fail. But that perception implies that the pastoral analogues, although real, are always in negative play. The persistence of melancholic irony, in the Middle Ages called “wanhope,” throughout this portion of the poem implies that finding out about sins and their parts, precisely to avoid “wanhope,” which forms the persistent business of Middle English pastoralia, was not what concerned the poet at all.
Rather, the primary thing about Piers Plowman is that it is a poem, indeed, as Zieman puts it (2008:150–80), the initial Middle English assay at “the literary form of sustained fiction” and thus outside the mode of instruction (it is shaped by what Middleton [2012] calls “poetic rather than pastoral discourse”). Thus, perhaps the most important thing about Piers Plowman is its reliance upon first-person narration (as opposed to the third-person voice of authority in The Prick of Conscience and normative pastoralia of its ilk), and upon personified contact.
The latter feature, that the first-person engages with other speakers, immediately identifies statement with dramatic contact/conflict. Conversation or “voicing,” the poem’s most abiding mode, only occurs in a state of difference—information to which only one party is privy, disagreement about the meaning of a statement. As poem, Piers Plowman is predicated upon differing discourses, available elsewhere fragmented (yet always, within each of the individual sites, within a claim of internal discursive completeness). Yet here these separate voices are unified within the same text. Normative study, which has constructed the poem’s enigmatic status, has been predicated on a refusal to recognize that quality of “voice,” to refuse to contextualize statements. Rather, the tendency has been to take all statements, unless glaringly partial, as equally fervent statements of authorial opinion.
Insofar as these are recognizable social discourses, the poet did not make, but inherits them. And, as preexisting his work, they ensured the poem’s social legibility. But, in their combination they are freed, the product of Langland’s poetic vision. The poet can appropriate any variety of publicly available discourses, but he alone is responsible for their conjointure. In joining them, he automatically places what had been nontangential forms of speech, the property of discrete communities, in collision—so that none can mean precisely the same thing as any of them had meant before in isolation (a peril to the normative annotational regime, with its interest in the sort of identity relations implicit in “source-hunting”). Further, as publicly available, these speech-forms “belong” in different sites, to different communities (e.g., the Seven Deadly Sins to parish priests, the language of Statutes to the law).
The poet, while conversant with all these discourses, certainly “represents” all the individual communities to which they might properly pertain. Here Langland’s self-presentation, particularly in those portions of C treated in this volume, is telling; he belongs to no community at all, to the chagrin of those who interrogate him at the head of this vision. Indeed, he is engaged, particularly aggressively in the C version, in constructing a community populated, it would appear, by himself alone. Analogously, although discourses might be associated with communities, the poet’s appropriation of them is defiantly non- or anti-institutional (which is also to be problematic, unplaced and estranged from the unity the poem seeks—and that the originals of the discourses, here effaced, had once allegedly provided).
What follows, then, can only be imbricated in a personalized reading, not just of the fine annotators who have preceded me, but of the poem itself. There is no way of escaping the hermeneutic circle. Past annotation of Joseph’s dreaming is deeply learned, predicated on a knowledge I don’t possess. But, annotationally, it appears to me an ineffectual learnedness (what some of our group dismissively call “lore”) because it does not address what I think the poem is saying or attempting to emphasize. As a result, what follows is unabashedly interpretative; I can see no way of offering helpful annotation without a prior critical engagement. Only this gives a sense of what might be “at stake,” fundamental to deciding what might need to be explained (as well as what might need to be ignored, decisions that comparisons of the following pages with other of the poem’s annotators will highlight).
At the same time, I would suggest that there is a difference, at least in underlying rhetorical invention, between my activity here and what I would undertake in a critical essay. Rather than imagining my commentative engagement as an expression of personal brilliance, I here try to imagine myself as any active and inquisitive reader, alternately comforted and shocked by words in juxtaposition, and to imagine (and to discover) the kinds of information that underwrite such excitements. Given the long space since this project’s inception, many points that should have been bruited here have appeared in the interim as “outtakes” of one sort or another (starting with my 1990). They are rarely repeated in this volume with any exactitude, and the differences between formulations on those earlier occasions and that provided on this one are salient. They indicate, both in information provided and in rhetorical mien, the difference I conceive between writing about the poem within a framework “critically interpretative” and writing a commentary. It will be for readers to judge whether this effort at depersonalization has borne fruit or not.
* * *
Having identified my own take on the issue of commentary, I return to the various decisions in which I concurred with the remainder of the team. These are those decisions I have above described as “logistical” and that defined the outer limits of our common project. We readily agreed that we pursued the impossible, to replace the irreplaceable, Walter Skeat’s grand annotation of the poem in the second volume of his 1886 edition. This is an impossible task, because Skeat had a virtually tactile grasp of the available Middle English archive, having edited most of it (and knowing the rest of it thoroughly). His was a virtually universal knowledge none of us—and perhaps not all of us together—could match (cf. the very selective bibliography at Skeat 1896: lxxix–lxxxiv).
We also could agree that for this purpose, we would rely on the texts produced by George Kane and his collaborators in the Athlone editions. (We remain particularly grateful to George Russell and to Kane for making a prepublication version of their edited C text available to us from the start.) Yet simultaneously, we agreed that one could not set out one version as somehow existing in a space that did not include the others. (This fact, although seldom discussed here, tends to undermine the Athlone editorial project, which, as has been traditional since Skeat, hermetically seals off the versions from one another; cf. Brewer’s critiques, 1996 passim.)
In considering how to frame our endeavor, we decided to key our commentary to C. On the one hand, we had before us the model of Skeat, who had prioritized C; on the other, we assumed that, in its various revisions, the poem had developed, and that C had a certain priority as Langland’s considered “last words,” whether or not these are complete last words, and whether or not this is the version of the text most usually read. Largely because we recognize the continuing pedagogical priority of the B version, we decided to hypermark our text to facilitate access to our opinions on any version. (Undermarking of parallel passages is a persistent annoyance in using Skeat.)
Thus, as I have already indicated, we planned to follow Skeat’s model and to present annotation to the poem, in all its versions. To a much greater degree than Skeat’s practice reveals, this decision for us meant approaching the poem as a developing object (although not necessarily one with any particular telos). In turn, this necessitated some decisions about both the poem’s trajectory of development and its extent. In our discussions, we unanimously ratified the traditional view that, in gross, the poem Langland wrote exists as three discrete versions, chronologically ordered as A, B, and C. We had, before Jill Mann’s 1994 intervention, rejected the possibility that A might have followed B; one of us subsequently wrote a detailed refutation of Mann’s views (Lawler 1996, and cf. Kane 1999), in which we all concur.
Further support for this decision emerged from our agreement about the prominence of B in studies of the poem. In our discussions, we came to see the centrality of this version as, in the main, an historical accident. The B Version was what Robert Crowley found to print in 1550, and it remained almost exclusively what was in print down to Skeat’s work on the poem. The only exception to the rule, Thomas D. Whitaker (1813; cf. Brewer 1996:37–45), offered C, and A was not identified as a distinct version of the poem until Skeat’s researches of the 1860s. Modern critical preference has arguably enshrined as Piers Plowman a decision taken on accidental grounds (likely the availability of a copy from which to typeset a printed version) long ago. Equally, the extensive revision that converted B into C would indicate the wisdom of keying a commentary dedicated to the poem’s development to C (and arguments for this version’s incompleteness, e.g., at RK 82–88, are mistaken and have forestalled thinking on this issue; see further Hanna 1998).
We equally concurred in omitting any extensive treatment of the socalled Z-text (although it occasionally appears in notes, e.g., that to B 5.226). This rendition of the poem, unique to MS Bodley 851, we find the work of an enthusiastic (and not always very savvy) admirer of William Langland, but not Langland himself. Kane’s showing in 1985, to which our various researches have presented a host of further analogous examples (e.g., Hanna 1996:195–202), seems to us compelling. Reading the text in detail constantly reveals the Z-reviser’s misprisions of what Piers Plowman was about; a small but telling example of such obtuseness appears at Z 2.56. There “meble” is legally inept, since the following charter describes real property (as the legally literate poet was certainly aware).
We further believe with the Athlone editors that the poem was promulgated thrice, and thrice only (ignoring the issue of what the term “promulgation” would mean in Langland’s case, and whether all versions were subject to identical procedures). We regard a variety of other proposals, notably Scase 1987 (a D text?) and Warner 2002/2007, as unconvincing. We agree that these arguments rest only upon an inability to conceptualize appropriately the vicissitudes of texts in manuscript transmission (see Hanna 1996:204–14, 2010; Adams and Turville-Petre 2013).
We also agreed to adapt a traditional approach to the problem of versions. Our commentary, perhaps unhelpfully, has been predicated on the method of parallel texts laid out by Skeat (and now followed in Schmidt). This choice in many ways was driven by our conception of the textual problem, the view that Langland had begun with A, worked A into B and then B into C, and that our task was to outline this ordered development. As we have worked, at times we have come to feel that this may be a weak point in our procedures; certainly, considering the poem as a developing entity has often led us to believe that versional revisions may not always most usefully be predicated upon passages immediately congruent in parallel-text structure. Revision may, in a number of situations, reflect the poet’s responses to loci very distant in the texts (a point raised by Wood 2012). Our chosen form of presentation may well have precluded our noticing a great many such instances.
Decisions like these provided our annotational group a framework within which we might proceed. It did not, however, resolve the issue of our relationship to our predecessors, to how we would handle the rich variety of suggestions about Langland’s meaning thrown up over a century and more of active scholarship since Skeat. We discussed at considerable length various rhetorical modes in which our commentary might be situated. At a relatively early stage, we rejected the possibility of a variorum commentary (which might include our own additions). Here we were especially cognizant of Pearsall’s excellent bibliography (1990) and its annual continuations in YLS. Access to a relatively complete listing of interpretative and annotational suggestions is available elsewhere.
Further, variorums are fraught with rhetorical difficulties that we hoped our annotation might avoid. A true variorum, since it requires citing everything ever said, forms something of a rubble heap, every suggestion duly noted, regardless of value. At the other extreme, what one might call a “critical variorum,” would require a potentially ceaseless stream of negative commentary (e.g., even the customarily amiable Pearsall describes one study as offering “cues for misreading” [1990:96]). We agreed that we were not interested in engaging in dogfights over the value of individual contributions; equally, we found an unannotated variorum hopeless in its failure to discriminate things any interested student should read from all things, e.g., Pearsall’s dismissal of a book-length study above (or his comment on another book, “surely exaggerates the mystical element” [1990:243], a thorough rejection of the thesis argued in the work so described).
We determined not to pursue exhaustiveness in favor of some more pointed goal, while affirming that we would offer references to all discussions of the point under consideration from which we had drawn useful knowledge. Unless it seemed a view thoroughly entrenched in need of detailed refutation, we agreed to allow views we did not find helpful to pass in silence. This decision may place an undue burden upon our readers, in the absence of overt statements of disagreement. However, the general arguments here pursued will implicitly indicate why we have found some statements about the poem of minimal helpfulness.
Thus, we ultimately concurred in a program that would support an eclectic method, a well-defined medieval compendiary pursuit of “gathering flowers,” the best that has been thought and written, that might be most useful to a reader. (Cf. Thomas of Ireland’s prologue to his Manipulus florum, Rouse and Rouse 236.) We further agreed that, while eschewing exhaustiveness, we would not simply report the best from materials already available in the formal annotation and scholarly literature of Piers Plowman. Some past notes might be fruitfully extended, and many passages that remained problematic to us had never received any thorough treatment. Thus, we would rely to some extent on our own research-based knowledge, to identify the many valuable contributions of past scholars, as well as to pursue additional helpful materials.
We also discussed, and were able to resolve fairly quickly, the issue of our target audience. The most recent models (or competitors) for what we envisioned, Bennett and Schmidt1were composed for neophyte readers in undergraduate teaching contexts. (This did not mean, particularly in the case of Bennett, a wise master of the uniquely Oxbridge exercise known as “critical commentary,” that there were not notes in these volumes edifying to any reader of the poem, no matter how experienced.) However, we were agreed that we wished to address a more sophisticated cadre, to offer annotation for colleagues and graduates. Thus, our model would differ from the most contemporary annotational modes and would follow those we found in Skeat, probably in Pearsall1 (originally composed for an extraordinary group of graduates at the University of York, many now prominent professors), and, in a volume that has appeared in the course of our work, Schmidt. And we remained acutely aware of a narrowing of focus in Piers Plowman studies, in which what were the basic interpretative commonplaces guiding readers as recently as the 1980s might require some form of reassertion.
However, the broader issue—what a commentary was and what ends it sought—remained unresolved, and often a contentious issue among us. At the same time, we felt there was an ample arena in which work could proceed. We remained conscious of the fact that Skeat’s labors were more than a century old. Many more texts, particularly examples of devotional prose, had appeared since his time. Moreover, particularly in the years since 1949, when Donaldson had laid the vitiating “authorship controversy” to bed, the poem had appeared as an object of criticism, analyzed within any variety of provocative contexts. These had, of course, suggested new ways of explaining its contours and implicitly identified a rich surround of discussions available to Langland across a range of languages and discursive sites. And when we began, in the absence of Schmidt, no one since Skeat had attempted annotation of “the poem Piers Plowman’ ” in all its versions. The variations in explanatory technique that mark the various volumes of The Penn Commentary largely are predicated upon our laissez-faire decision made at this point—and the specific difficulties each of us found in his or her portion of the text. The explanation of procedures I have offered above seeks to explicate the form of this volume alone.
As I have indicated, the commentary team agreed on these guiding procedures by sometime in spring 1990. However, because coming to completion has proved such a protracted process, our work now emerges, a prospect we could not have envisioned when we began, in a context in which Carl Schmidt’s full parallel text and apparatus are readily available. It is thus appropriate to offer some account of how our efforts interface with his.
Certainly, Schmidt’s parallel texts offer a useful scholarly service. They helpfully expand upon the evidentiary basis on which Skeat relied and provide a considerably more satisfactory account of the poem (but for their inclusion of Z) than Skeat was able to give. However, Schmidt’s textual decisions rely too heavily upon attestation/stemmatic reasoning, and his product, as a result, is considerably less cogent than that, thought through on a variant-by-variant basis, of the Athlone editors (cf. Hanna 1997a, and for an assessment of Schmidt’s skills as grammarian and lexicographer of ME, Kane 1993). We see no reason, particularly given our decision to address a sophisticated audience, to abandon our previous decision to key our text to the Athlone edition. (Our decision to provide lemmata, as well as line references to all three versions, will facilitate the use of Schmidt’s notes, as well as those of other editions.)
Schmidt’s annotation is extensive and often very helpful. But he conceives his annotational role, as in his criticism (e.g., Schmidt 1987): as someone displaying Langland as poetic craftsman, a careful shaper of often moving verse. As a result, Schmidt’s textual notes, although filled with brilliancies concerning grammatical relations and local poetic detail (a number of which I include or allude to), fall largely within what we call “grammatical annotation.” One gains very little sense from Schmidt of poetic argument (as opposed to local poetic craft), or of the poem entering a world in which many of its topics would encounter and jostle with widely dispersed discursive concerns. Our approaches should best be viewed as complementing one another.
* * *
Using the traditional commentaries on Piers Plowman is relatively easy. Their authors proceed, as grammarians always have, by the line. A reader finding something puzzling in the text and seeking guidance can turn immediately to that line number in the consecutively arranged “notes” and find whatever information the commentator has provided to help resolve the dilemma.
Our commentaries include a large number of the local assays familiar from these past models. But simultaneously, they are considerably more capacious. This follows from the arguments above that unraveling local enigma requires a general contextual decision that is larger than the simple line number that identifies past “grammatical annotation” of the poem. As noted above, we agreed rather early in this procedure to a commentary predicated on the medieval technique of divisio textus. We sought to identify substantial blocks of text, many longer than even the “verse paragraphs” demarcated by some of the poem’s most careful scribes (e.g., the copyists of LMRW of the B version). These offer a surer contextual grasp on poetic argument and its direction than merely considering lines in isolation, or within a five- to ten-line surround.
However, this decision does place on our readers unaccustomed burdens. In general, our “division notes,” the headnotes that preface the varying stretches into which we have divided the text, are elaborate and detailed. They are much more so than what succeeds them, the more traditional notes addressing “grammatical” matters. These longer headnotes, as I have indicated above, present a paradox; while we segment the poem, these notes most forcefully attempt to present its continuities. Hence, the most attentive user of our volumes will need to consider both sets. (In both sets, references have been keyed to the lineation of Russell and Kane’s C version [with “L” indicating one of Langland’s Latin lines]; cross-references to corresponding passages in A and B follow in parentheses.)1
Although all of us have collected long lists of readings from all three volumes we should have preferred not to see in a printed text of the poem, we agreed, as a general rule, to accept the Athlone text of the poem’s three versions without comment. Quite infrequently we point toward printed readings that have suppressed ones we find instrumental in pursuing the poem’s argument; see, for example, 5.10n or my one protracted assay, five possible corrections included in the notes to 8.206–88 passim. All Latin, both Langland’s citations and my illustrative materials, has been translated; as a general rule, translations are my own. However, all renditions of biblical materials have been taken from the Douay-Rheims version, and I have provided Siegfried Wenzel’s elegant facing-page translation, occasionally corrected, of the many citations I have drawn from Fasciculus Morum.
* * *
I am personally indebted to a large number of people. First of all, to the other five members (including our retired colleague John Alford) of our group for a generation’s worth of readings, commentary on drafts, general amiable conversations, and suggestions. Most particularly, Steve Barney and Anne Middleton were assiduous in going over every word—and more than once—and in offering comfort and suggestions. This intense level of interchange means that the text below can scarcely be presented as single-authored, since I have absorbed more material and suggestions from the remainder of the team than I can acknowledge. I am particularly sad that Anne won’t see her many contributions and inspirations in print. Our common academic patrons, UCHRI and the National Endowment for the Humanities, also deserve thanks for their generous support of the project, particularly in its earliest stages. I have also benefited from the largesse of Keble College and of the Faculty of English Language and Literature, Oxford University.
A number of my colleagues have, often inadvertently and without meaning to feed my various manias, made significant contributions to this volume. I deeply regret that one, a friend and support for half a century since we were graduate students together, will not see these pages. I miss Lee Patterson’s growl (he’s the only person who has ever thought I wasn’t cynical enough) and his tenacious probity, the model lucid historical investigator and a coparticipant in the UCHRI “Annotation” project with which this volume began. My persistent interlocutors, Vincent Gillespie, Anne Hudson, Lynn Staley, Thorlac Turville-Petre, and Sarah Wood, have given me far more than they knew. Both Derek Pearsall and Robert Swanson, as they have for other volumes in this series, offered meticulous and fully detailed readings of the script, from which I profited immensely. Jerry Singerman and the University of Pennsylvania Press have performed admirably to bring some now aged computer files into an elegant published form. In spite of all these efforts at making this script into something of authority, I acknowledge my responsibility for all its shortcomings.
1. The presentation of Piers in this volume differs slightly from that outlined by my predecessors in their “Notes to the Reader” (Galloway 2006:vii; Barney 2006:ix). I cite the texts in the order C (always unmarked), then A and B, in that order. Latin lines outside the poem’s general lineation are indicated by citing the preceding numbered line, followed by “L.” For the abbreviations Galloway and Barney list in these headnotes, see p. xxvi below.
