A Game of Heuene: 7

A Game of Heuene is a stylistic study of word play in the B-version of the Middle English narrative poem, Piers Plowman. In a close reading of Passus I, IX, XI, and XVIII, Davlin shows the frequency of word play and its effectiveness in multiplying meaning, developing themes, and suggesting relationships. Like other notorious `shifting, unstable' elements of style in Piers Plowman, its word play is enigmatic and demands of the reader intense attention and play of mind. Davlin argues that such demands are a way of involving the reader in the text as `a game of heuene' (Langland's phrase for language, IX, 104), which teaches how to read experience as well as words in order to find Treuthe. The difficult form of Piers Plowman,is thus mimetic of its protagonist's struggle to experience Treuthe, and also ludic, requiring the reader to share aesthetically in Will's experience by playing the `game of heuene', learning `kyndeli to knowe Treuthe'through deciphering its enigmas. A Game of Heuene advocates and demonstrates close reading with attention to word play, and should be useful to beginning students of Piers Plowmanas well as to scholars; its explication opens the meaning of particular passages and proposes a new understanding of the meaning of the entire structure and style of the poem .