having spoken first, and probably incoherently, he can now be spoken to: Will’s error was to want to be the first to speak. And Patience also deftly redefines what Will is to ask about, deflecting the issue of “penaunce” to a subordinate and nonconfrontational position in the question (though Will will manage soon enough to deliver his challenge directly). to take and to appose: to begin to challenge, a phrase a little like our saying “go ahead and challenge” instead of just “challenge”; this is a similar filler, and provides the poet with an alliterating stave. The phrase “take and” is used by L only here, and not treated by either OED, MED, or Kane, Glossary; but see MED, s.v. take, meanings 37–39a. Yf dobest be eny penaunce: i.e., Isn’t the best life one of suffering and self-denial?
Will questions the doctor, then challenges the answer (106–18, B.13.99–111)
107 (B.13.100) As rody as a rose: Whiting R200, though not commonly used for the flush of overindulgence, as it is here.
108–9 (B.13.101–2) Cowhede and capede (B carped), and consience … trinite: All B mss. read carped(e), as do all but five C mss. Skeat and Schmidt have carpede in both versions. RK-C include capede on p. 80 as part of a very long list of “small lexical and rhetorical differences” between B and C that may be scribal but may also be L’s “minute revision” and so are “accepted as features of the revised version” (78). Ms. X of C very clearly reads capede. If L indeed wrote capede, he forgot that Patience’s prediction obliges him to have the doctor speak. If he merely coughs and gapes, the prediction looks foolish; if he speaks, we can assume, as we do in B, that he drivels in some way more or less like what was predicted. And consience hym herde: Heard him cough? Surely he heard him speak.
Note that it is Conscience who opens the dialogue with the doctor, not Patience, who is after all at this point nothing but Will’s tablemate; Conscience is the host, and thus the right person to speak. But we have to assume that he has overheard Will and Patience’s conversation.
109 (B.13.102) tolde hym of a trinite: Apparently with ironic reference to the self-serving trinite (101, B.13.94) Patience has predicted that the friar will cite to justify his indulgence, Conscience brings up a trinity with real moral import. We might think of him as saying, “Will here has a trinity on his mind that he would like to ask you about.”
109 (B.13.102) and toward me [B vs] he lokede: The scene is alive to the decorum of the dream vision: a threatening opponent is wisely softened by the guide before the protagonist confronts him. Cf. Inferno 29, in the tenth bolgia, where Vergil first speaks to Griffolino and Capocchio, propped against each other and scraping their scabs, but when he finds they are Italian, draws close to Dante and says, “Say to them what you want.” Similarly, in the eighth bolgia, Cantos 26 and 27, Vergil has spoken to Ulysses and Diomede, because “being Greeks, they might disdain your speech,” but has let Dante speak to Guido da Montefeltro: “He touched me on the side and said, ‘You talk; he’s Italian.’” Cf. also Wit silently gesturing to Will to speak to Study, B.10.140–46. Cf. B.13.86 and note, and C.15.119–20 and note.
110 (B.13.103) “What is dowel … is dobest eny penaunce?”: Will, perhaps after all a little cowed, truncates his question, in the second part merely parroting what Patience said in line 105 (B.13.98); the doctor will ignore that part. The question is a mere trap, designed to enable Will to retort with the charge that the doctor does not practice what he preaches. Conscience takes it seriously, though, and will rephrase it at 122 (B.13.115) to include Dobet—and get a fuller answer.
111–13 “Dowel? … avowe” (B.13.104–5 “Dowel … power): If the friar’s answer is put in what may seem to us (and seemed to Robertson and Huppé, 1951:162, Middleton 1972:180, and many others) a curiously negative way, it may be only because the language is poor in n-words to alliterate with neyhebore. (In B.13.105 the alliteration is also on n: “þyn euencristen” is to be pronounced “þy neuencristen.”) Pearsall aptly cites Piers’s similar formulation at 7.211, “ʒoure neyhebores nexst in none wyse apayre.” Both places are free translations of Ps 14:3, “Qui … non fecit proximo suo malum.” Ps 14 has an honored place in the poem (see 2.42n), and will be cited soon by Clergie. The rhetorical situation, indeed, requires an orthodox answer, so that Will can retort with the charge that the doctor fails to practice what he preaches. Nevertheless, the fuller answer in C, adding not harming oneself (after which the doctor does himself a favor by taking a drink, as if to remind everyone of his selfish conduct at dinner), even though we are enjoined to love our neighbor as ourselves (see B. 13.141 and note below), sounds more than a little arrogant. B.13.105 nouʒt by þi power: not if you can help it.
114–18 “Sertes, sire” … in die iudicij” (B.13.106–11 “By þis day, sire doctour … I am in point to dowel”): Probably the doctor is satisfied with his peremptory reply, as he says at 123 (though that line has no counterpart in B), but it is possible that Will interrupts him here. In any case, Conscience thinks he deserves a chance to speak further.
To take C first: ʒe passeth means “you fail in respect to” (Kane, Glossary), “you evade”; the doctor “walks right past” dowel. Et visitauit & fecit redempcionem &c: Luke 1:68, (with et for quia) from Zachary’s song of joy at the birth of John the Baptist: “(Blessed be the Lord, God of Israel, because) he hath visited and wrought the redemption (of his people).” God has performed the redemption he promised; and he has also restored Zachary’s speech, as Gabriel promised (Luke 1:20). Altogether, he practiced as he preached. However, by making the omitted subject of the Latin verbs appear to be 116 oure lord, that is, Christ, L appears not to be invoking the actual context of the phrase but using it instead as an emblem of the ministry of Christ to set before the friar, a hands-on way of redeeming, visiting, and doing—including visiting the sick and sharing food—not just teaching, and certainly not just eating. And having failed to feed Will, the doctor failed to feed Christ, as he will learn in die iudicij: “As long as you did it not to one of these least ones, neither did you do it to me” (Matt 25:45); see Matthew’s whole account of Judgment Day, 25:31–46. Verse 43, “I was … sick … and you did not visit me,” perhaps accounts for the reference to sick friars in the infirmary, and the repeated verb “visitastis/non visitastis” echoes visitauit in the citation from Luke. The friar in Chaucer’s Summoner’s Tale visits a sick man, but without compassion. Finally, cf. Everyman (ed. Bevington 1975:962): as Everyman approaches death and judgment, “All fleeth save Good Dedes,” i.e., dowel.
Here Dowel is implicitly defined in terms of the “seven corporal works of mercy,” developed from this passage in Matthew (and is also equated with Christ, the “enditer” on the day of judgment and the major worker of mercy). The works of mercy emerge here and there in the poem, most fully in Scripture’s definition of Dobet at A.11.188–95 (where to “seken out þe seke” is placed, as it is here, in the context of brotherhood). On visiting the sick, see also 9.34–35 (B.7.30), 7.21 (B.5.405); on providing for them, see Reason’s challenge to Will, that he has no useful craft, “Hem þat bedreden be byleue to fynden” (5.21); and on caring for them, see above all the Good Samaritan, 19.46–93 (B.17.50–126; also, the account of Christ as healer, 18.138–49 (B.16.103–18), and the false physic offered by Friar Penetrans-domos in passus 22: by the end of the poem, ministry to the sick has become perhaps the major form of love in action.
B.13.109–10, without the reference to Judgment Day to evoke Christ’s words in Matt 25, is murkier: the infirmary seems to come out of nowhere—as do the yonge children. Clearly the charite that sholde be is precisely this ministry to the sick. The cheeste in the convent that replaces it recalls
