Middle English Literature: A Critical Study of the Romances, the Religious Lyrics, and Piers Plowman (Routledge Library Editions: The Medieval World)

273 Pages·2019·12.212 MB·English

by  George Kane

ROUTLEDGE LIBRARY
EDITIONS:
THE MEDIEVAL WORLD
Volume 24
MIDDLE ENGLISH
LITERATURE

MIDDLE ENGLISH
LITERATURE
A Critical Study of
the Romances,
the Religious Lyrics, and
Piers Plowman
GEORGE KANE
Firstpublishedin1951byMethuen&CoLTD.
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IntroductIon TO THE REISSUE
George Kane was of the generation who served in the
Second World War. He arrived in London in the autumn
of 1938 to take up a graduate place in university college
London, but in August 1939, on his supervisor’s insist-
ence, saw his interrupted PhD thesis, on the final three
passus of the B-text of Piers Plowman, placed in storage
in vaults in Aberystwyth. As he relates in his memoir,1 he
enlisted in the British Army once war was declared. He
took part in the stand at calais, where he was wounded.
From late in May 1940 to the end of March 1945 he was
a prisoner of war, and he returned to civilian life only in
March 1946. With his thesis complete, he moved into an
Assistant Lectureship at university college that autumn,
to teach medieval literature. Wisely, he got hold of a uni-
versity finals exam paper, and worked out that he was to
provide background for the explication of set texts. His
north American training had not prepared him for teach-
ing the university of London syllabus. He hadn’t ‘read,
or heard, except as sources of instances of phonological
change, of Ancrene Riwle, or Handlyng Synne, or The
Ayenbit of Inwit or even Havelok the Dane’, and he knew
that he had found Gawain and the Green Knight ‘very
IntroductIon TO THE REISSUE
difficult’, as indeed ‘many passages in Piers Plowman’.
He had not, of course, come across r. M. Wilson’s Early
Middle English Literature or renwick and orton’s Begin-
nings of English Literature, published in 1939 and 1940
respectively (p. 186), nor other recent secondary literature
about the field. His first two post-war long vacations he
spent in the round room of the British Museum, reading
his way steadily through a great deal of Middle English
literature, making notes for his first series of lectures and
what turned into his first book.
Middle English Literature was complete and with the
publishers in 1947. there was still a paper shortage, so it
had to wait its turn for publication in 1951. (In a footnote,
Kane points out that it was written before the 1949 pub-
lication of talbot donaldson’s analysis of the c-text and
his ‘most illuminating treatment’ of the poem’s three ver-
sions (p. 186 note).) once it appeared, an early reviewer
pronounced it to be ‘one of the best books so far written on
any aspect of Middle English literature’.2 the book’s read-
ability and usefulness meant it was quickly reprinted. For
undergraduates, here was an introduction that expected
them to engage critically with reading whole texts for
themselves and in admirably brief footnotes directed them
to editions. Kane’s purpose was to assess the literary value
of a body of texts defined in the subtitle ‘A Critical Study
of the romances, the religious Lyrics, Piers Plowman’.
In 1970, Kane refused to attempt to ‘revise it, let alone re-
write it’, asserting in a note added to the original preface
that it had already become ‘a period piece, such as librar-
ians might wish to include in their documentation of the
history of medieval studies’, and towards the end of his life
he described it as ‘elementary and impressionist’.3 never-
theless, readers today will welcome the present reprint just
IntroductIon TO THE REISSUE
because it is elementary and even more because through-
out it asks them to react to Kane’s impressions of Middle
English romances by chaucer, the Gawain poet and many
others, to a wide range of religious lyrics and to a reading
of Piers Plowman, whether A, B or c version, as the work
of a single author. In particular, they will find, in the last
of these three essays, as good a short introduction to the
poem as is available anywhere.
This 1951 essay is the first of Kane’s major publications
on Langland.4 Here he points out that Piers Plowman was
written for ‘a much wider public than were most of the
alliterative poems’ (p. 188), many of which he had already
discussed in his chapter on romance, and he demonstrates
‘the greatness of both the poem and its author’ (p. 248)
through short quotations, taken, ‘where any one of them
will do equally well’ (p. 182 note), from the B-version in
Skeat’s edition, based on oxford, Bodleian Library, MS
Laud Misc. 581. For example, a line he cites twice, ‘How
fele fernȝeres are faren and so few to come’ is for him ‘at
least as apt as eheu fugaces’ (p. 211 and cf. p. 233). Arguing
that the ‘relation of a man’s personality to his poetry is sel-
dom as strikingly revealed as in Piers Plowman’ (p. 191),
he presents its author as ‘stern’ and ‘fiercely outspoken’
(p. 193), a writer with ‘an unusually powerful visual im-
agination . . . stronger and clearer even than chaucer’s’
(p. 236), yet capable of a tenderness that is ‘the source
of some of his most moving poetry’ (p. 196). curiously,
at no point does he give the author a name,5 contenting
himself with an oblique reference: ‘By his own account
he was tall to the point of deformity, and conscious of his
abnormality’ (p. 192). In later publications Kane did give
the name Langland to the poet, but he came to find the at-
tribution William (de) rokele attractive, and in his ODNB
IntroductIon TO THE REISSUE
biography he pointed out that the hunt for just who the poet
was would continue.6
With Middle English Literature at press, Kane set about
editing the B-version of Piers Plowman, thinking ‘it
would not take long’.7 It soon became clear that before a
B-text could be edited there must be a new edition of the
A-version, to which he should first turn his attention. The
A-text went to press early in 1956, appearing in 1960. In
the 1950s donaldson joined Kane on work towards edit-
ing the B-version, and together they took the controversial
decision to change the base text. there was, after all, ‘the
trinity college B copy [cambridge, trinity college, MS
B.15.17] in best fourteenth-century London English: Piers
Plowman would have been more easily accessible and, for
all we know the poet might have written in that dialect,
whatever regional form Langland had learned in child-
hood’.8 their edition of the B-version appeared in 1975.
the c-version, edited with George russell, was published
in 1997, followed by Kane’s invaluable Piers Plowman
glossary in 2005. Questions of authorship and of the pro-
gressive revision of the poem’s three versions are still de-
bated, and Kane himself entered into such discussion from
time to time, most devastatingly with a blistering response
to the proposition ‘that the short or A form of Piers is a re-
daction, probably by Langland himself, made after he had
revised B to c’.9 nevertheless, the three volumes edited
by Kane and his colleagues, in which collations from the
manuscripts are scrupulously recorded, remain the stand-
ard editions for Piers Plowman.10
Jane roberts
Institute of English Studies, university of London
IntroductIon TO THE REISSUE
Notes
1 Kane from Canada, ed. Mary Kane and Jane roberts
(tempe, Arizona: Arizona center for Medieval and renais-
sance Studies, 2016), pp. 77−78.
2 A. I. doyle, The Review of English Studies, nS 4 (1953),
69–70.
3 Kane from Canada, p. 234.
4 For a full list, see ‘George Kane 1916–2008’, in Biograph-
ical Memoirs of Fellows of the British Academy, XI (2012),
420−45, at <https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/sites/
default/files/11_14-George_Kane.pdf>.
5 In his review, J. r. Hulbert, Modern Philology 49.3 (Feb.,
1952), 206, points out that the name Langland appears no-
where in the book or its index’
6 ‘Langland, William (c.1325–c.1390)’, Oxford Dictionary of
National Biography (oxford: oxford university Press, 2004)
<http://0-www.oxforddnb.com.catalogue.ulrls.lon.ac.uk/
view/article/16021>. Cf. Kane from Canada, p. 271. the
Rokele identification has gathered a great deal of discussion
in recent years.
7 Kane from Canada, p. 248.
8 ibid., p. 263.
9 ‘An open letter to Jill Mann about the sequence of the ver-
sions of Piers Plowman’, The Yearbook of Langland Studies
13 (1999), 7–33 at 7.
10. For digital editions and the new work under way of the ‘Piers
Plowman Electronic Archive’, see <http://piers.chass.ncsu.
edu/>.