is not a criticism of Kane’s methodology or conclusion, simply a reminder that his point was local: where manuscripts that otherwise attest the A version have passages in common with C, and where the inclusion of many of those passages results in inconsequence, repetition, broken sense and the like, it is fair to conclude that these manuscripts’ shapes are the results of scribal rather than authorial behavior. He was not arguing that all conflations bear signs of officiousness. No student of the poem’s production can dismiss conflation from consideration just because a passage is smooth. After c. 1390, conflation is always a possibility. It comes to its fullest fruition in the appearance, a few decades later, of Huntington MS Hm 114 (Ht), which combines matter from all three major textual traditions,12 but there is no reason to exclude Bx from consideration of its workings.
Shapes and Versions
Ever since Walter Skeat divided Piers Plowman’s manuscripts into three authorial “versions,” editors and critics have followed suit, assuming that each version comprised an integral body of manuscripts. It was clear that later texts combined matter from two or even three of these textual traditions, but no one seems to have considered the possibility that this could have occurred at the earlier stages as well. The versioning of the poem reached its apogee in the Athlone edition, which defined the A, B, and C texts by process of elimination followed by a leap of faith: once the editor identified the officious intrusions of the W, N, and K traditions, he would be left with “uniformity,” assumed to equate to authorial integrity: “Among the more than fifty manuscripts preserving the work called Piers Plowman two distinct versions are handsomely attested by substantial numbers of copies of uniform shape. The remaining manuscripts have various shapes, but seventeen of them are distinguished by the common possession of some 400 lines not found in the other two versions.”13 The “two distinct versions of uniform shape” are of course B and C, while the 400 lines shared by the remaining manuscripts identify them as witnesses to A, which take “various shapes” via acts of conflation and the additions of C conclusions in W, N, K, and the TH2Ch group.
Although the classification of any given witness to the poem by its “shape” appears to be merely preliminary to the more rigorous work of critical editing, it is in fact a compromised pre-determiner of that editing’s outcomes. The “uniform shape” attested by B and C manuscripts is very broadly defined: B manuscripts feature a Prologue and 20 passus; C manuscripts, a Prologue and 22 passus; and each, a series of passages not in the other. But given that the surviving B tradition did not assume its current “shape” until conflation had already begun, and that conflation did not always leave signs of its presence, it remains unclear on what grounds Kane assumes that the shape of B is solely the product of authorial activity. On the one hand, “shapes” are determined by the character of a manuscript’s passages; on the other, “shapes” predetermine the character of a manuscript’s passages. Here is a major dilemma that has not figured in Langland criticism precisely because that criticism’s methodologies bury the evidence that shows it to be so deeply misleading.
The prior classification of the evidence into three independent groups produced some decidedly odd results, which perhaps should have raised the alarm a while ago. For these “versions” interfered directly with the editors’ own presentation and analysis of the surviving evidence. They stress, for instance, that with regard to Piers Plowman B 19–20 and C 21–22 “the manuscripts of the two traditions were treated as constituting two great families with an exclusive common ancestor, a single scribal B copy.”14 Yet such an approach calls for a single edition of those passus, with full display of collations, in the B edition. As it stands, that edition does not indicate whether Kane and Donaldson weighed or even had access to all the C readings, or to what degree C-editor George Russell bore responsibility for the readings printed in their B text. The famous conclusion to their Introduction claims:
The apparatus supporting that text [sc. their B text] contains all material evidence for determining its original form afforded by the known B manuscripts other than S and Ht. How we have interpreted that evidence, and the evidence of the A and C versions bearing on it, has been laid wholly open to scrutiny in the preceding stages of this Introduction. Whether we have carried out our task efficiently must be assessed by reenacting it.15
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