A Literary Dude’s Apologia and an Interrogation by Officer Reason: Piers Plowman the C Version: Passus 5, lines 35-62

Abstract

While the question of who authored Piers Plowman is no longer a controversial topic, a ques-tion still lingers: who was William Langland? In his fifth passus of his third version of his poem, known as the C-Text, Langland offers his readers a clue. By way of adaptation, I use the allusion of “The Dude,” the hip radical Los Angelino character as seen in the 1998 detective comedy The Big Lebowski. Together, I compare the character traits of the film’s protagonist with the poem’s protagonist, Will, a name that alludes to the human will as well as to the poet’s real name. Langland scholars have been thrilled to discover this passus in the C-Text, which appears neither in the A- or B-Text, because it reveals a possible interview with the author himself. We enter Passus 5 after Will wakes up from dream in which a King, representing government authority, is counseled by his two advisors, Conscience and Reason, regarding how the government must handle fiscal corruption, personified by a woman named Lady Meed.