Abstract
While Crowley’s biography of Langland emphasizes his supposed theological affiliations, Whitaker’s Introductory Discourse focuses more on Langland’s poetry than his theology, as Whitaker offers an explanation of Langland’s crafting of Piers Plowman. Whitaker describes Langland’s compositional process using particularly visual terms: “[s]ometimes I can descry him taking his staff, and roaming far and wide. . .storing his memory with hints for future use. I next pursue him to his study, sedate and thoughtful, yet wildly inventive, digesting the first rude drafts of his Vision.”1 The narrator here is a privileged observer at multiple points in Langland’s poetic process: Whitaker imaginatively observes Langland’s peregrinations as well as his private labors. Given that this was written in an era long before the motion picture, such a description of spectatorship (if not voyeurism) deserves attention. Despite Whitaker’s use of a language suggesting physical observation, and even physical action (“I next pursue him to his study”), his narratorial perspective does not truly reproduce that of a real historical eyewitness, for no colleague of Langland’s would have access to such solitary scenes.
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Notes
Thomas Dunham Whitaker, Visio Willi[am] de Petro Plouhman, Item Visiones ejusdem de Dowel, Dobet, et Dobest.. .(London. John Murray, 1813), vi.
Lee Patterson, “The Logic of Textual Criticism and the Way of Genius: The Kane-Donaldson Piers Plowman in Historical Perspective,” in Textual Criticism and Literary Interpretation, ed. Jerome J. McGann (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 58–59. Patterson rejects the alternative approach, conservative editing, as “not editing” or editing incompletely (88).
Elizabeth Cooper, The Muses Library A Series of English Poetry from the Saxons to the Reign of Charles II (London: J. Wilcox, T. Green, J. Brindley, and T. Osborn, 1737), 8, as discussed in chapter 3.
Thomas Warton, History of English Poetry from the Close of the Eleventh to the Commencement of the Eighteenth Century, vol. 1 (London: J. Dodsley, 1774), 278 n. Warton innacurately describes this scene a satire on “[t]he artifices and persuasions of the monks” (1.278).
Theophilus Cibber, The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland to the Time of Dean Swift, 5 vols., second ed. (London: R. Griffiths, 1753), 1.18.
Thomas A. Prendergast, “Chaucer’s Döppelgänger: Thomas Usk and the Reformation of Chaucer,” in Rewriting Chaucer: Culture, Authority, and the Idea of the Authentic Text, 1400–1602, ed. Thomas A. Prendergast and Barbara Kline (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1999): 264.
T. R. Lounsbury, “Fictitious Lives of Chaucer, II,” Atlantic Monthly 40 (1877): 592–600.
Geoffrey Chaucer, Workes (1598), fol. biiir–biiiv. 16. William Winstanley, England’s Worthies: Select Lives of the Most Eminent Persons of the English Nation, from Constantine the Great, Down to These Times (London: Obadiah Blagrave, 1684), 122–123.
This version of the “Anecdote of Chaucer” is edited from Chatterton’s manuscript note and printed in Thomas Chatterton, The Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton, a Bicentenary Edition, ed. Donald S. Taylor and Benjamin B. Hoover, 2 vols. (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1971), 1:442–443. Taylor and Hoover date the anecdote to January 1770. Caroline Spurgeon also cites a published version in The Town and Country Magazine 2 (January 1770): 16 (500Yrs, I, 434). Chatterton himself republished the anecdote in his Miscellanies in Prose and Verse (London: Fielding and Walker, 1778), 137.
Chatterton is not the only later writer to amplify the terms of Chaucer’s assault of the friar. In 1841, Thomas DeQuincey recounts that Chaucer was fined “for kicking a Franciscan friar in Fleet Street.” DeQuincey’s reference to Chaucer’s conflict with the friar first appeared in “Homer and the Homeridae,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 1 (1841): 747–749 (cited in 500Yrs, II, 229).
Thomas J. Heffernan, “Aspects of the Chaucerian Apocrypha,” 160. Such a notion of Chaucer as proto-Protestant survives until well into the twentieth century. Some vestige of it is visible in Matthew Arnold’s assertion that “[Chaucer’s] poetry transcends and effaces, easily and without effort, all the romance-poetry of Catholic Christendom”; “Introduction” in The English Poets: Selections with Critical Introductions By Various Writers and a General Introduction by Matthew Arnold, ed. Thomas Humphrey Ward. vol. 1 (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1924), xxxiv.
Carolyn Dinshaw, “Rivalry, Rape, and Manhood: Gower and Chaucer,” in Violence Against Women in Medieval Texts, ed. Anna Roberts (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998), 141.
G. H. Kingsley, ed., Animaduersions uppon the Annotacions and the corrections of some imperfections of impressiones of Chaucer’s workes.. ., by Francis Thynne, Early English Text Society, o.s. 9 (London: N. Trübner and Co, 1865), xi, quoted in 500Yrs, 3:77 (part three of Spurgeon’s work is printed in vol. 2).
William Godwin, Life of Geoffrey Chaucer, first ed., 2 vols. (London: Richard Phillips, 1803). The second edition was produced in four smaller volumes (London: Richard Phillips, 1804). 27. Godwin, Life, first ed., 1.ix and 1.xi.
Sir Walter Scott, The Miscellaneous Prose Works of Sir Walter Scott, vol. 17 (Edinburgh: Robert Cadell, 1835), 57–64.
Scott, “Review of Godwin’s Life of Chaucer,” in Miscellaneous Prose Works of Sir Walter Scott, vol. 17 (London: Robert Cadell, 1835), 57.
Rowland Weston, “Politics, Passion and the ‘Puritan Temper’: Godwin’s Critique of Enlightened Modernity,” Studies in Romanticism 41 (2002): 445–470.
Godwin, 2.417. The Court of Love was first added to the Chaucer canon in Stow’s 1561 edition of Chaucer’s Works, and it remained in the canon until the nineteenth century. Even when it was no longer seen as Chaucerian, it remained an adjunct to the agreed upon canon; in W. W. Skeat’s 1878 revised edition of Robert Bell’s Annotated Editions of English Poets, Skeat moved The Court of Love and other poems now jugded spurious to a separate section, “Poems Attributed to Chaucer” (BibMan, 141–143, 417–418).
The dialogue is reprinted in Walter Savage Landor, Selected ImaginaryConversations of Literary Men and Statesmen, ed. Charles L. Proudfit (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1969), 93–154.
The textual history of the Griselda story is briefly surveyed in RivCh, 880. For an argument that Chaucer might have known Boccaccio’s version of the story, see Leonard Michael Koff, “Imaginary Absence: Chaucer’s Griselda and Walter without Petrarch,” in The Decameron and the Canterbury Tales: New Essays on an Old Question, ed. Leonard Michael Koff and Brenda Deen Schildgen (Madison and Teaneck, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2000), 278–316.
J. A. W. Bennett, “Chaucer’s Contemporary,” in “Piers Plowman”: Critical Approaches, ed. S. S. Hussey (London: Methuen, 1969), 323.
Florence Converse, Long Will, a Romance (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin and Co, 1903). Long Will was adopted as an Everyman edition in 1908 and was reprinted several times in the first quarter of the century. Long Will and its relationship to the contemporary reception of Piers Plowman are discussed by C. David Benson, Public “Piers Plowman,” 13–14; and by Paul Hardwick, “ ‘Biddeth Peres Ploughman go to his Werk’: Appropriation of Piers Plowman in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” Studies in Medievalism 12 (2002): 182–189.
On the other hand, Chaucer does choose to follow Langland: “Chaucer indeed, in the Plowman’s Tale seems to have copied from our author” (Thomas Warton, Observations on the Fairy Queen of Spenser. 2 Vols. Second edition [London: R. and J. Dodsley, 1762. Reprint, New York: Greenwood Press, 1968], 2.217). Warton does not connect Chaucer’s satire in the Summoner’s Tale to Piers Plowman until the later History of English Poetry, on which see note 7 above. 77. Warton, Observations, 2:215.
Robert Henry, The History of Great Britain from the First Invasion of It by the Romans under Julius Caesar, Written on a New Plan, fifth ed., 12 vols. (London: Cadell and Davies, 1814), 4:174. The first edition of Henry’s History of Great Britain was published in 1789.
Although it is controversial to claim the existence of “nationalism” in the medieval period, a recent collection of essays does just that: Kathy Lavezzo, ed., Imagining a Medieval English Nation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004). An earlier assertion of the applicability of this allegedly modern notion to fourteenth-century England was made by Thorlac Turville-Petre in England the Nation: Language, Literature, and National Identity (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1996). 91. Converse, 256.
The poem certainly was known by name or extract in earlier periods, as the preceding chapters have shown, but readers of the poem in anthologies, or readers of later texts that used the name of Piers Plowman, were not likely to have read the poem in full. Anne Hudson concludes her survey of the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century responses to the poem: “Regretfully one must conclude that, at least after the immediate and usually Lollard imitations, Piers Plowman in the two and a half centuries after its composition was more honoured in the name than in the reading”; Hudson, “Epilogue,” 263. 95. Seth Lerer, “The Endurance of Formalism in Middle English Studies,”
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© 2007 Sarah A. Kelen
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Kelen, S.A. (2007). Fictions of Authorship, Fictions of English Literature. In: Langland’s Early Modern Identities. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230608764_6
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