social disruptions, broadly associable with “simony,” and can claim, albeit through some witty transformations, to fulfill gospel precepts (see 86–88n, 98Ln). His response earns Reason and Conscience’s grudging acceptance; they leave him alone, encouraging him to go to church, where he falls asleep (to create more of his poem).
In his second dream, Will sees (as he had in the earlier versions) a sermon designed to bring the realm to contrition, delivered by Reason (in A, Conscience). This address, which fills the remainder of the C passus, consists of a series of directives enjoining appropriate behavior on various estates and statūs: laborers, women, husbands and fathers, the clergy (particularly regulars), the king and pope, pilgrims. In C, Reason’s sermon is significantly expanded, for the figure speaks a large section of A 11/B 10 (146–79) originally assigned to the figure Clergy. This material partially answers Will’s earlier outrage at recent social dislocations (notably 76–79), attacks abuses by the regular clergy, and concludes with a prophecy of royal correction. Other additions unique to C address unity, class cohesiveness within the kingdom, and peace throughout Christendom (182–90, 192–96).
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1–108 The dreamer’s defense of his life: Among relevant discussions, one should single out Donaldson 1949:199–226, who interprets the passage as if fully autobiographical (a view re-enunciated by Burrow 1981:38–39 and 1993:83–86). Later commentators suggest that this meeting with Reason and Conscience should be viewed within contemporary systems of self-representation; see Kane 1965b:esp. 7–11; Bowers 1986:165–89; and instructive parallels adduced in Thornley 1967.
Pearsall, following Donaldson 1949:78 etc., sees the passage as as much an “apologia pro vita sua” as a confession—which certainly aligns it with the subsequent portraits of the Seven Deadly Sins; see further 11n. Skeat aptly compares the passage with B 12.16–28, removed in C, since, as Day first suggested (1928:1–2), it has in many ways been subsumed into this expansion (cf. B 12.20 “somwhat me to excuse” and 5n). However, C 5 differs from Imaginative’s flat rejection of Will’s poetry in B. Here L takes up the dreamer’s problematic “biography” as putting in question his relation to any legitimate status. In spite of his informing interests in the most basic socioreligious problems (voiced at 1.76–80), his self-created status (mentioned in the poem’s opening four lines) may well qualify any hope of valuable discoveries, since these may be predicated merely upon such personal enthusiasm.
Yet most obviously, this waking interlude disrupts the poem as it had stood in AB and significantly changes how one might read it. Through this intrusion, the entire standing text is completely reconfigured. No longer can one read C altogether profitably in parallel with AB; the waking interlude introduces new terms of engagement, with projective effects throughout the second vision—and extending into the third (cf. 9.293n). For differing views, see Kane 1998 and Wittig 2001 (and 6.Headnote at the end, 6.2n).
Most important, this episode writes the poem into a mode familiar from earlier Continental dream visions, with their emphasis on the dreamer’s contact/dialogue with figures of authority (cf. 6n). Rather than a largely observational, third-person account, like the first two visions in AB, the “autobiographical passage” recenters the poem upon its dreamer. His person, his opinions, and his contact with other figures become a frame that governs what the poem can accomplish. A purported “biography” defines its interest, most trenchantly as the restoration of apostolic fervor to the Christian, and thus contemporary social, state of England.
Equally, because the passage introduces “a life,” this interlude potentially dissolves what is always seen, on the basis of the B version, as a major divide in the poem. This falls between C passūs 9 and 10 (traditionally designated parts of the “Visio” and the “Vita,” respectively). This feature also acknowledges dialogue as the ground-form of the poem, accommodating C to already standing materials in the later portions of AB. Further, an outstanding feature of the C revision, its “frontloading” of materials from the third and fourth visions, not simply limited to B 12.16–28, testifies to this greater integration (as well as indicating that views highlighted early in C had, for its poet, always been at least tacit in the poem, if differently disposed and developed). One prominent example of such materials advanced in the argument is provided by a later meditation on proper poetry, the discussion of minstrelsy at 7.81–118L.
In addition, the C dreamer much more readily intrudes in the second vision than he had done in the comparable portions of AB. At such moments, most notably 9.71–280, he enunciates views that follow from and echo his self-portrayal here, thereby appearing in some sense a clearly defined “character” (or more precisely, figure with established discursive interests). Not so coincidentally, these are materials associated with “nonsolicitousness”—and in the earlier versions with Piers Plowman and his tearing of the pardon. Implicitly from a very early point (perhaps first at 7n), the dreamer appears as a figure programmed to seek and to imitate a Piers, a figure of charisma deserving of grace and mercy.
In contrast to AB, with their careful unity of time and place (see 1–11n), the C movement past the first vision to the second might better be described as “rupture.” The narrative moves directly from “court” to “cote,” from the guiding social pinnacle to one of London’s seedier enclaves. Simultaneously, attention shifts to, not the constructors of law, but those subject to the law (a movement answered in the interchange between Piers and the knight; see 8.19–55n).
Simultaneously, this abrupt turn might be construed as an implicit redefinition of the poetic task, associable with a different social locale. In leaving court, the poem moves from a site poetically associated with lyric complaint, the song of the despairing courtly youth. Such a figure cannot actually “vision”: “Nihtes when Y wende and wake—| Forþi myn wonges waxeþ won” (Brown XIII, no. 77/22–23, a Harley lyric). The poem’s substitutions for such lyric “wanhope” are provided by such utterances, discovered in vision, as Ps. 6:7 (cf. “penaunce discrete” 84n) or 41:4 (cf. B 7.128L).
In the dreamer’s interrogation by Reason and Conscience, biography comes to be defined as the investigation of “moral character.” In a broad sense, this emphasis guides the entire second vision, which continuously emphasizes the submission to guiding authority, most particularly penitential authority. However, as was explicit in the now-canceled B 12.16–28, the poem is more prone to speak the fervor of spiritual renewal than to enact it, to exist as nonpenitential discussion while always enjoining the activity. This keynote is struck early on in Will’s allusion to his “romynge in remembraunce” (see 11n), attempting the memorial reconstruction of the confessional, but with no abiding sense of a constructive procedure to follow.
However, as Will’s inquisition makes progressively clearer, the most visible alternative to the actual practice of a “penaunce discrete” is poetic metaphor. Throughout the second vision, the poem describes, on any number of occasions, the replacement of the socially accepted yet uninspiring vehicle with an unfamiliar but vital alternative. As the poem moves from “court” to “cote,” inherent in Will’s self-defense is a redefinition of “aristocracy” itself. This term no longer strictly refers to those landholding magnates who do not have tasks but impose them on tenants (one focus of a second variety of courtly “complaint” here rejected, the social satire derived from alliterative tradition and W&W; see my 2005:247–48, 259–62).
Rather, in the waking interlude Will, now the focus of his poem, reconceptualizes “estate.” Instead of magnate properties, he offers the gospel terms of a spiritual heritage (“hereditas”). Thus, the biographical episode subsumes into a speaker (and thus “maker”) the most general poetic effect associated with the second vision in all versions (see Burrow 1965, and further 5.111–200n, 7.Headnote, 7.108n, 7.161n, and 7.182–204n). Poetry here presents, in dubious garments, a “vocation” that seeks to return gospel possibility to a world where it is currently lacking. For the dreamer’s antitypes, perpetual creators of metaphors parodying the gospels, cf. 9n, 28n, and the later
