The Penn Commentary on Piers Plowman Volume 2
The Penn Commentary on Piers Plowman
VOLUME 2
C Passūs 5–9; B Passūs 5–7; A Passūs 5–8
Ralph Hanna
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia
Copyright © 2017 University of Pennsylvania Press
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Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112
www.upenn.edu/pennpress
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
ISBN 978-0-8122-4891-3
Contents
Regularly Occurring Abbreviations
C Passus 5; B Passus 5; A Passus 5
C Passus 6; B Passus 5; A Passus 5
C Passus 7; B Passus 5; A Passūs 5–6
C Passus 8; B Passus 6; A Passus 7
C Passus 9; B Passus 7; A Passus 8
Index of Historical and Modern Works, Authors, Persons, and Topics
Index of Passages and Notes Mentioned in the Commentary
Preface
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,