The Construction of Piers Plowman

Extract

Many strikingly divergent views have been advanced as to the structural integrity or looseness of Piers Plowman. Its early critics, to be sure, had little to say upon the subject but there seemed to be general agreement in the view that the work is loosely put together. The long summaries by Morley and others, for example, give small evidence that the critics had detected any strong organizing elements in the design. With the strenuous attack by Professor Manly, a new epoch in the criticism of the work began. Scholars who favored multiple authorship naturally agreed that the poem lacks a well defined plan, and even advanced the view that we have in fact not only from two to five authors but from two to five poems, all upon themes in important respects dissimilar and more or less loosely constructed. While Professor Manly tore Piers' seamless coat asunder, the advocates of a single authorship—somewhat less emphatically, to be sure—found relative coherence in the poem as a whole and discounted the view that the style is excessively digressive. Throughout the controversy the critics dealt largely with textual problems, only occasionally turning to consider the primary subject-matter of the work. The articles of Mensendieck furnished the most important contributions to an interpretation of an underlying plan, especially in regard to the most difficult section, the Vita de Do-Well. His chief concern, however, was with a few theses relating to special passages, so that his studies hardly deal with the larger problem of the enveloping thoughts of the poem, if indeed such thoughts exist. Thus far investigation has resulted in many contradictory views but in no detailed statement upon the cardinal problem in the interpretation of Piers Plowman.