21 - The Athlone B-Text

Summary

GEORGE KANE AND E. T. DONALDSON

As we have seen, E. Talbot Donaldson became involved in the Piers Plowman project in 1951, at the invitation of George Kane. He was to be partly responsible (with Bloomfield) for volume V, the ‘Annotations’, and for volume VI, the ‘discussion of the background, interpretation, authorship, etc. of Piers Plowman’. By 1955 he was established as co-editor of B, had together with Kane made complete collations of all the B-MSS, and was working in detail on B-MS relationships. As early as 9 March 1960, the text and apparatus of the Athlone B-Text were in typescript; but the final version was not delivered to the Athlone Press until March 1973. The resulting volume – a substantial 681 pages, to process which the Press engaged the services of an extra proofreader – was published in 1975. 2,500 copies were printed, at an estimated cost of £8,500, and the book was priced at £20 a copy.

As mentioned above, Donaldson's cast of mind was essentially different from Kane's. Kane's writing is magisterial, its constant appeal to the dictates of logic sometimes bullying, certainly wearying the reader. Donaldson by contrast writes more lightly, with an intellectual flexibility which comes across as dispassionate, exploratory, and often suavely ironic.