Associated With Chaucer and Piers Plowman From 1500-1700
The king's antiquary (under Henry VIII), John Leland (c. 1506-52), seems to have confused Piers Plowman and The Plowman's Tale, referring to Petri Aratoris Fabula (Peter/Piers Plowman's Tale) as a Canterbury tale. John Bale similarly included Arator Narratio (Plowman's Tale) in his list of the Canterbury Tales in his Scriptorum Illustrium Maioris Brytanniae . . . Catalogus (Basle, 1557, 1559). Corroborating Francis Thynne, Leland's remarks on The Plowman's Tale are as follows: "But the tale of Piers Plowman, which by the common consent of the learned is attributed to Chaucer as its true author, has been suppressed in each edition, because it vigorously inveighed against the bad morals of the priests" (Commentarii de Scriptoribus Britannicis ed. Anthony Hall. Like Bale's Chaucer, Leland's Chaucer is a reformer and follower of Wycliffe.
John Foxe praised The Plowman's Tale in his first (1563) and second (1570) editions of the immensely influential Acts and Monuments. Foxe implies that Chaucer was a proto-Protestant Lollard and assumes he was the author of The Plowman's Tale. (The Testament of Love and Jack Upland are also mentioned.) The Plowman's Tale was again printed by itself in 1606 by Anthony Wotton. The full title of Wotton's edition reads: "The Plough-mans Tale. Shewing by the doctrine and liues of the Romish Clergie, that the pope is AntiChrist and they his Ministers. Written by Sir Geffrey Chaucer, Knight, amongst his Canterburie tales: and now set out apart from the rest, with a short exposition of the words and matters, for the capacitie and understanding of the simpler sort of Readers."
Edmund Spenser's The Shepheardes Calender (1579) makes references to and borrows from The Plowman's Tale (attributing it to Chaucer), possibly Pierce the Plowman's Crede, and, more obscurely, perhaps to Piers Plowman. Gabriel Harvey's copy of the Speght 1598 edition of Chaucer's Works (BL Additional 42518) summarizes The Plowman's Tale with the note "Ecclesiastical abuses."
Sir William Vaughan's Golden Fleece (1626) presents Chaucer as Wycliffe's master and the author of The Plowman's Tale, which is used to give lines to Duns Scotus and Chaucer in a debate between them that that centers on the Pope (Is he Antichrist?) just as in the 1606 Wotton edition. This is a fascinating work that promotes the colony at Newfoundland over against the vices of contemporary England. Famous historical figures, including Chaucer and Scotus, are brought to the court of Apollo to discuss English society. Apollo ultimately proclaims that all the problems that are exposed will be cured by the Golden Fleece, which is in Newfoundland.
Other seventeenth-century citations of The Plowman's Tale are: Anthony Wotton's A Defense of Mr. Perkins Booke, Called a Reformed Catholike (1606), Simon Birkbeck's The Protestant's Evidence Taken Ovt of Good Records (1635), John Favour's Antiquitie Trivmphing Over Noveltie (1619), and John Milton's Of Reformation (1641) and An Apology Against a Pamphlet (1642).
John Dryden remarks in Fables Ancient and Modern (1700) that Chaucer had "some little Byas toward the Opinions of Wycliff . . . somewhat of which appears in the Tale of Piers Plowman : Yet I cannot blame him for inveighing so sharply against the Vices of the Clergy of his Age: Their Pride, their Ambition, their Pomp, their Avarice, their Worldly Interest, deserv'd the lashes which he gave them, both in that, and in most of his Canterbury Tales." The phrase "inveighed . . . against the clergy" is possibly derived from Leland; similar synopses appear in the editions of Chaucer's Works starting with Thynne. Another eighteenth-century commentator, John Dart, rejected The Plowman's Tale as Chaucer's but still agreed that Chaucer "bitterly inveighs against the Priests and Fryars", although he "expresses his regard for the secular clergy who lived up to their profession".
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Famous quotes containing the words chaucer, piers and/or plowman:
“With us ther was a doctour of phisik;
In al this world ne was ther noon hym lik,
To speke of phisik and of a surgerye,
For he was grounded in astronomye.”
—Geoffrey Chaucer (1340?–1400)
“Three miles long and two streets wide, the town curls around the bay ... a gaudy run with Mediterranean splashes of color, crowded steep-pitched roofs, fishing piers and fishing boats whose stench of mackerel and gasoline is as aphrodisiac to the sensuous nose as the clean bar-whisky smell of a nightclub where call girls congregate.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)
“When the plowman fled,
having left a highborn woman
in the throes of ecstasy,
thinking her dead,
the cotton plant
bobbed with the weight
of new bloom on its stalk
as if laughing.”
—Hla Stavhana (c. 50 A.D.)