Yet most obviously, this waking interlude disrupts the poem as it had stood in AB and significantly changes how one might read it. Through this intrusion, the entire standing text is completely reconfigured. No longer can one read C altogether profitably in parallel with AB; the waking interlude introduces new terms of engagement, with projective effects throughout the second vision—and extending into the third (cf. 9.293n). For differing views, see Kane 1998 and Wittig 2001 (and 6.Headnote at the end, 6.2n).
Most important, this episode writes the poem into a mode familiar from earlier Continental dream visions, with their emphasis on the dreamer’s contact/dialogue with figures of authority (cf. 6n). Rather than a largely observational, third-person account, like the first two visions in AB, the “autobiographical passage” recenters the poem upon its dreamer. His person, his opinions, and his contact with other figures become a frame that governs what the poem can accomplish. A purported “biography” defines its interest, most trenchantly as the restoration of apostolic fervor to the Christian, and thus contemporary social, state of England.
Equally, because the passage introduces “a life,” this interlude potentially dissolves what is always seen, on the basis of the B version, as a major divide in the poem. This falls between C passūs 9 and 10 (traditionally designated parts of the “Visio” and the “Vita,” respectively). This feature also acknowledges dialogue as the ground-form of the poem, accommodating C to already standing materials in the later portions of AB. Further, an outstanding feature of the C revision, its “frontloading” of materials from the third and fourth visions, not simply limited to B 12.16–28, testifies to this greater integration (as well as indicating that views highlighted early in C had, for its poet, always been at least tacit in the poem, if differently disposed and developed). One prominent example of such materials advanced in the argument is provided by a later meditation on proper poetry, the discussion of minstrelsy at 7.81–118L.
In addition, the C dreamer much more readily intrudes in the second vision than he had done in the comparable portions of AB. At such moments, most notably 9.71–280, he enunciates views that follow from and echo his self-portrayal here, thereby appearing in some sense a clearly defined “character” (or more precisely, figure with established discursive interests). Not so coincidentally, these are materials associated with “nonsolicitousness”—and in the earlier versions with Piers Plowman and his tearing of the pardon. Implicitly from a very early point (perhaps first at 7n), the dreamer appears as a figure programmed to seek and to imitate a Piers, a figure of charisma deserving of grace and mercy.
In contrast to AB, with their careful unity of time and place (see 1–11n), the C movement past the first vision to the second might better be described as “rupture.” The narrative moves directly from “court” to “cote,” from the guiding social pinnacle to one of London’s seedier enclaves. Simultaneously, attention shifts to, not the constructors of law, but those subject to the law (a movement answered in the interchange between Piers and the knight; see 8.19–55n).
Simultaneously, this abrupt turn might be construed as an implicit redefinition of the poetic task, associable with a different social locale. In leaving court, the poem moves from a site poetically associated with lyric complaint, the song of the despairing courtly youth. Such a figure cannot actually “vision”: “Nihtes when Y wende and wake—| Forþi myn wonges waxeþ won” (Brown XIII, no. 77/22–23, a Harley lyric). The poem’s substitutions for such lyric “wanhope” are provided by such utterances, discovered in vision, as Ps. 6:7 (cf. “penaunce discrete” 84n) or 41:4 (cf. B 7.128L).
In the dreamer’s interrogation by Reason and Conscience, biography comes to be defined as the investigation of “moral character.” In a broad sense, this emphasis guides the entire second vision, which continuously emphasizes the submission to guiding authority, most particularly penitential authority. However, as was explicit in the now-canceled B 12.16–28, the poem is more prone to speak the fervor of spiritual renewal than to enact it, to exist as nonpenitential discussion while always enjoining the activity. This keynote is struck early on in Will’s allusion to his “romynge in remembraunce” (see 11n), attempting the memorial reconstruction of the confessional, but with no abiding sense of a constructive procedure to follow.
However, as Will’s inquisition makes progressively clearer, the most visible alternative to the actual practice of a “penaunce discrete” is poetic metaphor. Throughout the second vision, the poem describes, on any number of occasions, the replacement of the socially accepted yet uninspiring vehicle with an unfamiliar but vital alternative. As the poem moves from “court” to “cote,” inherent in Will’s self-defense is a redefinition of “aristocracy” itself. This term no longer strictly refers to those landholding magnates who do not have tasks but impose them on tenants (one focus of a second variety of courtly “complaint” here rejected, the social satire derived from alliterative tradition and W&W; see my 2005:247–48, 259–62).
Rather, in the waking interlude Will, now the focus of his poem, reconceptualizes “estate.” Instead of magnate properties, he offers the gospel terms of a spiritual heritage (“hereditas”). Thus, the biographical episode subsumes into a speaker (and thus “maker”) the most general poetic effect associated with the second vision in all versions (see Burrow 1965, and further 5.111–200n, 7.Headnote, 7.108n, 7.161n, and 7.182–204n). Poetry here presents, in dubious garments, a “vocation” that seeks to return gospel possibility to a world where it is currently lacking. For the dreamer’s antitypes, perpetual creators of metaphors parodying the gospels, cf. 9n, 28n, and the later confessions of Gluttony and Sloth. See also Scott 2004:164–74.
1–11 The dreamer wakes in London: The London locale both accords with and complicates the geographical shape of the “Visio.” The first two dreams mirror one another in terms of geographical movement. The first begins with the dreamer on the Malvern Hills and viewing, in the main, an indeterminate but possibly East Midland (cf. 2.114, more explicit materials at A 2.72–76, B 2.108–12) rural locale; from this, the action passes to the central court, Westminster, at 2.148–203. The second vision reverses this movement: Reason’s sermon takes place “byfore þe kyng” (113), but the pilgrims to Truth eventually move out to the provinces again at 7.155–60, 182. And a symmetrical reference to the dreamer on Malvern, inherited from AB, occurs at 9.296. Thus, waking in a London neighborhood corresponds to the movement of the narrative. But simultaneously, this new passage disrupts the single Malvern scene inhabited by the dreamer in the AB “Visio” (not to mention the temporal unity of AB, in which the two dreams occupy but a single morning). This disruption may be responsible for the additional (and awkward) reference to Malvern unique to C (5.110). See further Prol.5n, 9.296n.
This geographical placement helps to establish one of the two discursive frameworks within which L constructs the scene, statute law. Ample evidence, signaled by the use of whan (which implies a temporary residence), implies that Cornhill is not the dreamer’s proper locale. Not only does the remainder of the “Visio” occur during a Malvern morning, but, as M. L. Samuels argues (1988:201–12), L’s speech reflects the dialect of the same area, southwestern Worcestershire. Will is not in his home country, as Middleton (1990:55–59) trenchantly demonstrates. Indeed, the C Version, as she notes, pays tribute to this out-of-placeness by disrupting the B dreamer’s anagrammatic signature Wille Longe-Londe (B 15.152); cf. the replacement line “Ich haue yleued in londone monye longe ʓeres” (16.288; cf. 5.24n). As a wanderer, and (as he admits; see 7–8n) an able-bodied one, he is potentially subject to all the strictures enshrined in successive promulgations of the Statute of Laborers (see especially 35–44n).
1 Thus y awakede: The boundary between the poem’s first and second dreams differs in C and in AB. In the earlier versions, the first dream ends within this passus (at A 5.3, B 5.3), and the dreamer manages only five or six lines awake before succumbing again. But in C, the final line of the preceding passus announces the dreamer’s waking, and this line only reiterates the fact, while beginning to establish