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.
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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