I turn to consider my take on the elephant that still remained in the committee room, largely a consideration of what “the commentable” might consist of. For it remained variously clear to all of us that what we were undertaking was imbedded within an essentially Victorian model of textual practice that had grown up with Philologie, in the process of recovering and presenting pre- and early modern texts. This, like the foundational textual studies of that period, had developed within a “scientistic” model, predicated upon the presumption that it was the job of the textual sciences to present “objective information” so that others might have a text on which to practice “interpretative” activities. The edited text had to be presented, it was argued, in a form arrived at through logical rigor and a scientific process (Lachmann’s recension preferred). Correspondingly, as the accompaniment to such an “objective” document, the annotator should offer only objective information—linguistic data culled from fruits of Philologie, references to specific source-texts, relevant bits of historical data (what was a friar?).
As we argued about this issue, at least some of us were forced to see this procedural mode as rather a misstep—or one insufficiently theorized. Leaving aside editors’ claims to “objectivity,” any analogous claim on the part of commentators should have always been deeply suspect. Annotators had always been subject to some selective principle that defined the “needs-to-be-explained.” All had made choices concerning (a) what was in need of annotation (some standard of obscurity or difficulty, or some judgment about an implicit audience); (b) what information was to be provided; (c) how extensive a search should be undertaken in its pursuit. One of us pointed out that in even the clearest case, a direct quotation, one could fairly easily find more than one example of the same words elsewhere (a prospect now turned multiform with the possibility of online searches), and that all examples were not equally relevant to a single citation within a particular textual context.
This view posed the issue pretty neatly. If the annotator cited every identical thing, s/he would achieve something approximating “objective completeness.” But if the annotator realized that not all instances of the same words were equally relevant, s/he would be engaged in an act of judgment, not “objectivity” at all. (And always providing one limit on the entire procedure was the fact that it could never be final or definitive, because there might always have been another identical evocation that one had missed.) Somehow the interpretative and the provisional and supersessible quality of all annotation had to be recognized.
Commentary always assumes the plenitude of the text. This, for us, is not simply a function of “language languaging,” or that Langland could not constrain the text to mean as he wished (although the frequency of revision indicates his fleeting hope that he might). Rather, like medieval commentators, we assume the capacity of the author to generate multiform meanings, that he is more intelligently capacious than we, more widely read in a rich range of materials (many perhaps closed to us), and considerably more verbally adept. Thus, what we provide, however extensive, is always partial, and completeness of presentation a goal we cannot achieve. Moreover, we remain aware that only naïve readings have ever seen commentaries as complete, or utterly authoritative; to cite merely one example, the most frequent medieval citations of the glossa ordinaria appear within sermons, where they serve, not simply as statements of the commonplace, but—just as Langland’s appropriations from a range of texts—as sites for individual rhetorical invention.
These lucubrations suggested to us that all commentative practice responds in some way to a sense of “relevant context,” however that might be defined. Clearly, commentators have always strived to reduce anomaly, to “smoothe” [render coherent] ongoing sense. But this goal may only be achieved by a prior perception of what the sense ought to be, which depends, in turn, on the annotator’s reading of the enigma in question within some surround, and very likely one larger than the immediate line.
For us, this raised a familiar, if ancient, distinction, that between the art of grammar and the art of commentary. Compare Leofranc Holford-Strevens’s passing comment, “Lacking comprehension of a poem as a whole, to which each passage, line, and word is subordinate, Gellius is at one with the despised grammatici” (2003: 213). Traditional commentaries on Piers are, in this account, “grammatical” (and there’s nothing wrong with it: the greatest commentator on Virgil, Servius, was resolutely so). But their fragmentation, the attention to the bit, while it supports the cause of objectivity, resolutely avoids the knowledge—the broader sweep of the poem—that had enabled the helpful comment in the first place.
Not all the “Gang of Five” would accept the way in which I attempted to move past this impasse and construct the commentative stance I assume through what follows. I will try to illustrate this, again with an example—and some explanation of the thinking that underlies it. Although, in jumping to the very end of this volume, it prejudges a very long developing argument (unlike a grammarian, I strive to enunciate a view of the whole), I would contrast my predecessors’ and my own handling in the notes to 9.305 and subsequent lines. There Will discusses Joseph’s dreams and their outcomes.
What we all came to call “normative [or grammatical] annotation” can unpick the issues here relatively automatically. There were, in the Middle Ages, standard ways of talking about dreams, quite familiar to all readers on the basis of Chaucer’s persistent invocation of the topic (at least one of which, at CT VII.3123–35, takes up Langland’s examples here). These my annotation notes, although not to the profusion of my predecessors.
But, in my reading, these discussions might be described as resolutely inattentive to what is to be annotated here. In turn, this only emerges by engaging with the text of Piers Plowman as poem, as a continuing and situated argumentative procedure. As I argue below, Langland’s point is quite other than the conventional annotation, at a certain level rather less sophisticated and considerably more instrumental. As C 9.299 (A 8.133, B 7.150) “if hit so be myhte” [if what I saw sleeping might actually be/exist] indicates, the issue is not the truth value of dreams, the customary subject of discussion, which past annotators have attended to very well. Rather, the discussion here arises as a wish to actualize as an achieved event what has occurred only as a recollected dream. And the conventional examples here have been chosen (and “tweaked”) with that end in view.
This annotative bit provides a classic (and easily repeated) example of Middleton’s “set-texts out of place” (cf. 2010:109). The poem can only be comprehensible by relying upon a surround of accepted discourses; but it can only have an argument of its own—something thus meriting annotational attention—by adapting, rereading these inherited materials in a newly imagined context. As a consequence, what is at work in Piers Plowman is not the familiarities uncovered by the conventional annotational regimen but what Middleton describes as “the difference or dislocation of the refound or reused fragment from its primary site of production.” In discussing Joseph’s dreaming, “normative annotation” recognizes the “set-text” or “primary site,” but ignores why, as all annotators note, Langland chooses here to “mis-emphasize” conventional biblical loci. The text means differently from the expected—here a signal that the dreamer has decided to make his dream real by trying to perform Piers, in the waking interlude of C 10. There, like Piers in his confrontation with the priest over the pardon-text, the dreamer will assert his untutored knowledge against that of clerical authority.
Thus, this commentary is particularly conscious of a global form of such misprision endemic in past practice. While past commentaries have tended to follow the standards of nineteenth-century Philologie, they have equally made contextual assumptions about the poem that might well be queried. These are more than forgivable, because ultimately the assumptions answer what one might consider The Big Question, “What is Piers Plowman?” Annotation has to seek a way to situate the extraordinarily sui generis character of the poem, to define a field in which it makes some sense. This task has, of course, absorbed every critic of the poem—always with a sense that there are “pretty good” but far from absolute fits. For example, although Piers is clearly an alliterative poem, it rarely fits neatly within the
