EDITING "PIERS PLOWMAN"

Abstract

EDITING PIERS PLOWMAN With the publication of this strikingly handsome parallel-text edition of Pier Plowman, textual study of the poem seems to be as far as ever from reaching a state of equilibrium. It was Skeat who first identified and named the A-, Band C-Texts of Piers Plowman, building on a suggestion made by Richard Price in 1824. Skeat took on an overwhelming task, sifting through a vast mass of largely unread manuscripts to produce three `best-text' editions (of A in 867, of B in 1869 and of C in 1873) that were to act as landmarks by which subsequent editors (and textual critics) of the poem could orientate themselves and further map out Piers Plowman territory. The dust was given a few years to settle, but was then blown away by J. M. Manly's theory of multiple authorship in 1906. Skeat's effective successor, R. W. Chambers, responded to this challenge by pointing out that Skeat's texts and collations, on which Manly's hypothesis was based, were less than satisfactory. Chambers embarked on a new edition of the A-Text, only to realize that editing A was impossible without editing B, and that in turn editing B was impossible without editing C. This is because, over many lines in the poem, all three texts read roughly the same, but many converging variants are found in manuscripts of different versions. Under these circumstances, it seemed foolish to try to determine the original reading for one version without examining the pattern of variation in the other versions, and attempting to explain the relation between the versions/manuscripts in terms of authorial revision, or scribal contamination, or scribal error. Chambers's edition, begun in Igog, progressed very slowly indeed, despite his enlisting various graduate students (including A. G. Mitchell and George Kane) to help with the B- and C-Texts. At his death in 1942 it passed into the hands of his dilatory co-editor, J. H. G. Grattan, proceeding thence (at Grattan's death) to Mitchell, and thence to Kane. Kane set aside the work of his predecessors and started editing A from scratch, publishing his substantial and acclaimed edition of this version (for the Athlone Press) in 196o. But it was not until he edited B with E. T. Donaldson, for the Athlone edition published in 1975, that he returned to Chambers's principle that the editing of the three texts must proceed side by side. This was admirable, except that the two editors did not re-think Kane's earlier editing of A in order to make it square with this new approach. This means that the Athlone A- and B- Texts rest on uncomfortably incompatible bases: A is edited on the evidence of A variants alone, while B is edited with a constant eye to the readings of (Kane's) A and of C (the text and variants as assembled by George Russell). Three years later, in 1978, the market was seized from these two formidably scholarly volumes by A. V. C. Schmidt's Everyman paperback of the B-Text (hereafter Ev 1), another critical edition, heavily based on Kane-Donaldson's theories but bodying them forth far more moderately in an accessibly sized and priced little volume. In the same year Pearsall's edition of C appeared, edited by an entirely different method. Unlike Schmidt, Pearsall could not draw on an existing edition of his text which gave a full conspectus of variants together with a thorough-going theory as to how to interpret them. So he produced a `best-text' edition based on Hm I43 (unknown to Skeat), by general agreement the most authoritative of the C manuscripts, describing his work as an interim volume to serve the student and scholarly public until such time as the Athlone C-Text should be published (an enterprise embarked upon by A. G. Mitchell before 1939, passed on to George Russell by Ig62, and apparently due for publication, under the joint editorship of Russell and Kane, in 1997). The Z-Text of Piers Plowman, edited by A. G. Rigg and myself, then followed a few years later in 1983; its claim to represent an Ur-Text of the poem, pre-dating A, has provoked strong reactions and has badly shaken one of the basic premises of all the above-mentioned editions, that Langland wrote three versions of the poem and three versions only. …