Langland’s Fictions by J. A. Burrow

Abstract

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER century works. The more than 300 pages of her book certainly give us our money's worth in information that is not brought together in any other place. For the Chaucerian and general student of Ricardian poetry the book is of limited value because it is weakest where the debt to the French was greatest, in the form and substance of the lyric. While there is certainly much to be praised in Boulton's book, including individual fine insights throughout, there is also a general unevenness in judgment as well as treatment. I found especially misleading, for instance, her concluding estimate of Froissart and Granson. Boulton finds a disintegration of the mode in the work of these poets, with Christine making a new start. She judges, "If Froissart was uncertain of the power of his poetry, Oton de Grandson lost heart altogether; not only were his poems despairing, but his narrative was unable to reach a conclusion, and finally dissolved into a series of songs" (p. 277). The analysis is quite unfair to Froissart, who was as proud of his verse as of his Chroniques, as witness his ceremonial presentation ofa manu­ script of his complete love poems to Richard II when he as an old man revisited England. The work supports his pride. And what the statement says about Granson is even more off the mark. Better medieval poets than Oton failed to "complete" the work they began, notably Chaucer. It would not be hard to defend the Livre Messire Ode as a work brought to the closure the poet desired. In any event, the notion that Granson's poems were de­ spairing, or that this brave knight who in his late fifties died in a judicial duel "lost heart" in his poetic composition, is completely at odds with what we know of the man and find in the poems themselves. Christine herself praised Oton enthusiastically. Manifestly, he was an admirable knight who liked Chaucer and his work and had a good amateur's ability to compose verse. The Complaint ofVenus shows that Chaucer liked him too and thought well ofhis poetry. Granson could not have a better supporter. )AMES WIMSATI University of Texas J. A. BURROW. Langland's Fictions. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. Pp. viii, 130. $29.95. This revision of J. A. Burrow's Alexander Lectures at the University of Toronto in 1989 presents energetic, and compact yet detailed, readings of 182 REVIEWS various "fictions" in Piers Plowman. Organized topically, the chapters ad­ dress controversial topics and episodes (mostly from the B version), provid­ ing nuanced introductions for early readers of Piers, and fresh stimulation for mature (or decaying) critics.Eschewing any search for a "single, contin­ uous narrative" (p.3) in the poem, he is concerned with links between and among dreams and repeatedly looks to contemporary French dream poems and allegories for comparison. Declaring that he is an "unbeliever" (p.1), interested in Langland more as a poet than as a Christian, Burrow examines "the imaginary worlds of Piers Plowman" (p.2).His carefully detailed readings give substance to Langland's varied fictions and delineate a "fictive imagination ...power­ fully at work" (p.2) in this fundamentally Christian poem. "A Gathering of Dreams" discusses the freedom from literal fact attained by the dream poem and identifies as a "radically original development" (p.8) the poem's comprising a series of dreams.Here, and in a suggestive appendix (pp.113-18), he guardedly concludes that if Langland did not come up with the idea of a series of dreams on his own, his source was probably a manuscript containing the three Pelerinages of Deguilleville, which he identifies as the one possible antecedent for such a sequence of dreams.Emphasizing the various discontinuities that mark the "strange centrifugal poly-narrative" (p.17) of Piers, he argues that the very incon­ clusiveness of individual dreams enables the series to continue without insisting on linear development or progress.He coordinates the poem's "unprogressive nature" (p.27) with its inwardly pointing toward "a single spiritual centre ...suggested ...by the figure of Piers Plowman" (p.27). In "Fictions of the Divided Mind" he locates...