Видение о Пирсе Плугмане: Среднеанглийская аллегория

Middle English poem by William Langland

Piers Plowman (written 1370–86; possibly c. 1377) or Visio Willelmi de Petro Ploughman (William's Vision of Piers Plowman) is a Middle English allegorical narrative poem by William Langland. It is written in un rhymed, alliterative verse divided into sections called (Latin for "step"). Like the Pearl Poet's Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Piers Plowman is considered by many critics to be one of the greatest works of English literature of the Middle Ages, preceding and even influencing Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Piers Plowman contains the first known reference to a literary tradition of Robin Hood tales. There exist three distinct versions of the poem, which scholars refer to as the A , B , and C texts. The B text is the most widely edited and translated version; it revises and extends the A text by over four thousand lines.

The poem, a mix of theological allegory and social satire, concerns the narrator/dreamer's quest for the true Christian life in the context of medieval Catholicism. This journey takes place within a series of dream visions; the dreamer seeks, among other things, the allegorical characters Dowel ("Do Well"), Dobet ("Do Better"), and Dobest ("Do Best"). The poem is divided into passus ('steps'), the divisions between which vary by version. The following summary is based on the B version of the poem.

Piers Plowman is considered to be one of the most analytically challenging texts in Middle English textual criticism. There are 50–56 surviving manuscripts, some of which are fragmentary. None of the texts is known to be in the author's own hand, and none of them derive directly from any of the others. All modern discussion of the text revolves around the classifications of W. W. Skeat. Skeat argued that there are as many as ten forms of the poem, but only three are to be considered authoritative—the A, B, and C texts—although the definition of "authoritative" in this context is problematic. According to the three versions hypothesis, each version represents different manuscript traditions deriving from three distinct and successive stages of authorial revision. Although precise dating is debated, the A, B, and C texts are now commonly thought of as the progressive (20–25 years) work of a single author. According to the three versions hypothesis, the A text was written  1367–70 and is the earliest. It breaks off, apparently unfinished, at Book 11, and Book 12 is written by another author or interpolator. The poem runs to about 2,500 lines. The B text (Warner's ur B text) was written  1377–79; it revises A, adds new material, and is three times the length of A. It runs to about 7,300 lines. The C text was written in the 1380s as a major revision of B except for the final sections. There is some debate over whether the poem can be regarded as finished or not. It entails additions, omissions, and transpositions; it is not significantly different in size from B. Some scholars see it as a conservative revision of B that aims at disassociating the poem from Lollardy and the religious and political radicalism of John Ball during the Great Rising of 1381. (Ball appropriated Piers and other characters in the poem for his own verses, speeches, and letters during the Rising.) There is little actual evidence for this proposal, and much against it. Skeat believed that the A text was incomplete and based his editions on a B text manuscript (Oxford, MS. Laud Misc. 581) that he wrongly thought was probably a holograph. Modern editors following Skeat, such as George Kane and E. Talbot Donaldson, have maintained the basic tenets of Skeat's work: there were three final authorial texts, now lost, that can be reconstructed, albeit imperfectly and without certainty, by rooting out the "corruption" and "damage" done by scribes. The Kane, Kane Donaldson, and Russell Kane editions of the three versions, published by the Athlone Press, have been controversial, but are considered among the most important accomplishments in modern editorial work and theory in Middle English. A. V. C. Schmidt has also published a parallel edition of A, B, C and Z; the second volume containing a full critical apparatus indicating his editorial decisions was finally published in 2008, long after the first volume fell out of print. A. G. Rigg and Charlotte Brewer hypothesized the existence of a Z text predecessor to A which contains elements of both A and C. The Z text is based on Oxford MS. Bodley 851, which Rigg and Brewer edited and published. It is the shortest version, and its authenticity is disputed. Ralph Hanna III has disputed the Rigg/Brewer approach based on codicological evidence and internal literary evidence; consequently, the Z text is now more commonly viewed as a scribal corruption of A with C elements. More recently, Lawrence Warner has shown that what was thought of as B in fact incorporates matter produced as part of the C revision: if B circulated before C, it looked nothing like what previous editors had assumed.

John Ball, a priest involved as a leader in the Great Rising of 1381 (also known as the Peasants' Revolt), included Piers and other characters in his writings. If Piers Plowman already had perceived associations with Lollardy, Ball's appropriations from it (assuming he was not referring to a folk character also appropriated by Langland) enhanced his and its association with the Lollards as well. The real beliefs and sympathies at work in Langland's poem and the revolt remain, for this reason, mysterious and debatable. New evidence suggests that in Norfolk the rebels of 1381 had access to the B version of the text and that they used the author persona's name Will Long Will as a pseudonym. The first recorded owner of a copy of Piers Plowman was the Irish judge Walter de Brugge, who died in 1396.

The most conspicuous omissions from William Caxton's press were the Bible and Piers Plowman. Robert Crowley's 1550 editions of Piers Plowman present the poem as a proto Protestant goad to the reformation of religion and society. In the passus summaries in the second and third editions, Crowley emphasizes material in the poem warning of political instability and widespread corruption when the king is a child (as was then the case). Crowley may have made small attempts to remove or soften single references to transubstantiation, the Mass, purgatory, and the Virgin Mary as a mediator and object of devotion (although almost a dozen references to purgatory remain, as well as three significant references to Mary). He actually added a line to his second and third editions that clearly refers to Marian intercession (F1r). After 1550, it was not printed again until 1813 except for Owen Rogers' 1561 edition—a cheap knock off of Crowley's text. The few people who mention Piers Plowman before 1700 usually attribute it to someone other than Langland, and often it is unclear whether they are referring to Langland's poem or one of the many other texts circulating in print as part of the Piers Plowman tradition, particularly The Ploughman's Tale. Since Piers was conflated with the author and dreamer narrator of the poem at an early date, "Piers Plowman" or a Latin equivalent is often given as the name of the author, which indicates unfamiliarity with, or disbelief of, Crowley's preface. When Langland's poem is mentioned, it is often disparaged for its barbarous language. Similar charges were made against Chaucer, but he had more defenders and was already well established as a historical figure and "authority." Despite the work of Bale and Crowley, Langland's name appears to have remained unknown or unaccepted since other authors were suggested after Crowley's editions. Sometimes "Piers Plowman" was referred to as the author of the poem, and when writers refer to a list of medieval authors, they will often mention "Piers Plowman" as an author's name or a substitute for one. One gets the overall impression that Langland and Piers Plowman had less existence as author and text than did the fictional figure of Piers, whose relationship to a definite authorial and textual origin had been obscured much earlier. Samuel Pepys owned a copy of Piers Plowman. Milton cites "Chaucer's Ploughman" in "Of Reformation" (1641) when he is discussing poems that have described Constantine as a major contributor to the corruption of the church. The end of Piers Plowman, Passus 15, makes this point at length—but it is also made briefly in one stanza in The Ploughman's Tale (ll. 693–700). In "An Apology for a Pamphlet  " Milton refers to The Vision and Crede of Pierce Ploughman, which might mean one or both of these texts. Perhaps it refers to Rogers' 1561 edition which put them together. Henry Selden (1622) appears to have read the poem closely enough to admire it for its criticism of the church as well as its judgment and invention. John Weever (1631) also names Robert Langland, as does David Buchanan (1652). Buchanan, however, makes Langland a Scot and attributes other works to him aside from Piers Plowman. Thomas Fuller (1662) bases his remarks about Langland on Selden and Bale, emphasizing Langland's putative proto Protestant status. Fuller also notes that The Praier and Complaynte of the Ploweman unto Christe was "first set forth by Tindal, since, exemplified by Mr. Fox." Since the language of this text is similar to that of Piers Plowman, Fuller attributes it to Langland as well. Thomas Dudley, father of Anne Dudley Bradstreet (1612–72), brought a copy of Crowley's Piers Plowman to America. Alexander Pope (1688–1744) owned a copy of Rogers' reprint of Crowley's edition of Piers Plowman with the Crede appended, and Isaac D'Israeli (1766–1848) wrote in his Amenities of Literature that Pope had "very carefully analyzed the whole" of the latter text. D'Israeli also mentions Lord Byron's (1788–1824) praise for Piers Plowman.

With its old language and alien worldview, Piers Plowman fell into obscurity until the nineteenth century. Barring Rogers, after Crowley, the poem was not published in its entirety until Thomas Whitaker's 1813 edition. It emerged at a time when amateur philologists began the groundwork of what would later become a recognized scholarly discipline. Whitaker's edition was based on a C text, whereas Crowley used a B text for his base. With Whitaker, a modern editorial tradition began, with each new editor striving to present the "authentic" Piers Plowman and challenging the accuracy and authenticity of preceding editors and editions. Then, as before in the English Reformation, this project was driven by a need for a national identity and history that addressed present concerns, hence analysis and commentary typically reflected the critic's political views. In the hands of Frederick Furnivall and W. W. Skeat, Piers Plowman could be, respectively, a consciousness raising text in the Working Man's College or a patriotic text for grammar school pupils. Piers Plowman has often been read primarily as a political document. In an 1894 study, J. J. Jusserand was primarily concerned with what he saw as the poem's psychological and sociopolitical content—as distinct from the aesthetic or literary—in a dichotomy common to all modern humanistic studies. In "Le temps des laboureurs. Travail, ordre social et croissance en Europe (XIe XIVe siècle)" (Albin Michel 2012) historian of medieval labour Mathieu Arnoux devotes particular attention to "Piers Plowman" in a breakthrough attempt to identify theological causes for the growth of agricultural production from the 11th century to the 14th century. According to the historian Christopher Dawson, the poem represents “a precious and almost unique record” of medieval religious culture in the minds of the masses as opposed to that of the courts or of the schools and universities. Langland’s poem “is a voice from the underworld of the common people, speaking their language, using their imagery and sharing their ideals”.

Many subsequent texts – at least 14 – use characters from Piers Plowman, most often Piers himself. Many more texts were written with similar themes and characters, though not directly borrowing from Piers Plowman, until around the end of the 16th century. Conversely, Piers Plowman was preceded by and contemporary with a number of similar works in the 14th and 15th centuries. Together, these are referred to as the "Piers Plowman tradition".

Kane, George, gen. ed. Piers Plowman: The A Version (Kane, ed. ; rev. ed. London: Athlone, 1988); Piers Plowman: The B Version (Kane and Donaldson, eds. ; rev. ed. London: Athlone, 1988); Piers Plowman: The C Version (George Russell and Kane, eds. ; London: Athlone, 1997). Pearsall, Derek, ed. William Langland. Piers Plowman: A New Annotated Edition of the C Text (Exeter, UK: University of Exeter Press, 2008) (Exeter Medieval Texts and Studies). Schmidt, A. V. C., Piers Plowman: A Parallel Text Edition of the A, B, C, and Z Versions (3 vols. ; Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, 2011). Vaughan, Míċeál F., Piers Plowman: The A Version (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011).

In 2017, a UK theatre production of the poem was developed by Tom Chivers, under the moniker 'Fair Field'. It included an exhibition at the National Poetry Library and a series of podcasts published by the Guardian.