Langland

Piers Plowman - Prologue and Passus 1-7 Langland

Publisher Marketing: LANGLAND, PIERS PLOWMAN - PROLOGUE AND PASSUS -- PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION. . THIS book is intended primarily for university students. It does not, however, presuppose any deep knowledge of Middle English on the part of the reader while it seeks to provide the means for a detailed literary and linguistic study of Piers Plowman, it also aims at supplying the grammatical groundwork, the full annotation, and the comprehensive glossary needed by those who have, perhaps, no acquaintance with any Middle English except a little Chaucer. Thus both the beginner and the fairly advanced student will, it is hoped, find here all that they require. This edition has been revised by Miss E. S. Olszewska, B. A. Every effort has been made to take advantag - e of the considerable volume of research work carried out on the subject in recent years. In particular, Professor Manlys theory of multiple authorship and the controversy which it aroused are summarised and discussed in the Introduction. CONTENTS. I. Texts of the Poem ... IT. The Author . . . . . . 111. Criticisms of the Poem IV. Analysis of the Poem V. Middle English Dialects VI. Grammatical Forms in Plowman . . . . . . VII. Metre of the Poem ... ... The ... . . . . . . . . . Vision of Piers . . . . . . . . . PAGE ix ... Xlll xvii xxii xxvi xxviii xxxi INTRODUCTION. I.-TEXTS OF THE POEM. As no contemporary writer has made mention of the author of the poem or the date of its composition, we have to turn for information to any evidence we can find in the MSS. Of these there are at least forty-eight in existence, and they differ greatly in length and contents, and in their allusions to historical events. As Professor Skeat showed in 1866, there arethree principal versions which were composed at different times. For the sake of convenience, these versions have been named the A, B, and C texts, and the divisions and length of each may be represented in the following table -1 Visiorz of Piers the Plowman. Prol. A. 2 Prologues and and 8 Passus. l1 Passus .. . Visiolz of Dowell, Dobetter, and Dobest. Prol. and 3 Passus. B. 4 Prologues and 17 Passus . . . Visiorz of Piers the Plowmalz. Prol. and 7 Passus. Visiorz of Dowell. Prol. and 6 Passus. Visw. n of Dobetter. Prol. and 3 Passus. Visiogt of Dobest. Prol. and 1, Passus. r Visiorz of Piers the Plowman. 10 I Passus. C. 23 Passus . . . Vision of Dowell. 7 Passus. Vision of Dobetter. 4 Passus. Vision of Dobest. 2 Passus. . As printed in this Volume. Full texts of the A, B, and C versions are given in Professor Skeats William Langlands Piers the Plowman and Richard the Redeless 2 vols., Clarendon Press. The division into Prologues and Passus is fairlyuniform, but sometimes a passus in one version appears as two or three in the other versions, or part of it may be included in one passus and part in the next. Of the three forms of the poem, A is the shortest and contains about 2,570 lines B is nearly three times as long, as there are additions throughout and nine new Passus are added at the end C is a detailed revision of B without the addition of any new Passus, and is just over one hundred lines longer than B. There are also minor differences between the MSS. of each class. As well as the three general versions there are several MSS. which contain combinations of A and B, B and C, and even A and C texts...