Proportion, Perspective, and Number in The Parlement of the Thre Ages

However the problem is defined, the critics agree. The knitting together of conventional elements in the Middle English Parlement of the Thre Ages lacks unity, or a proper sense of proportion, or stylistic consistency. Its poet's awkward manner of combining sections is always called its most confusing and least successful aspect, even while readers generally agree that the alliterative poem possesses many charming bits as it works its way toward a message of life's pleasures inevitably ending in death. In themselves, the poem's dream-vision structure and plot are simple and uncomplicated. Parlement opens with a hunt in the month of May. A solitary narrator stalks a magnificent stag, royal in bearing; kills it with a well-aimed arrow; and then formally brittles the creature in the aristocratic manner also detailed in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (providing a valuable analogue to the greater poem). After hiding his conquest, the narrator feels the sun's direct warmth, falls asleep, and envisions in his "saule" (l. 103) the numerically aged Three Ages in personified form: Youthe, 30; Medill Elde, 60; Elde, 100.1 Youthe, a splendid Pride of Life figure, exudes a perpetual springtime of vigor, accoutered with fashionable clothes, beautiful things, love, romance, and carefree leisure. Autumnal Medill Elde, a sterner, more avaricious figure, frets over keeping what he has gained in life—property, lands, livestock, profits. They engage in debate, with Youthe speaking more, celebrating falconry in a beautiful passage, and "winning" simply by being so glowingly attractive in his moment of life.Then Elde, a decrepit figure, halts the squabble of Youthe and Medill Elde by launching into a historical discourse on the Nine Worthies: the pagans Hector, Alexander, and Caesar; the Jews Joshua, David, and Judas Maccabeus; and the Christians Arthur, Godfrey of Bouillon, and Charlemagne. Here is where most modern readers feel Parlement's disunity begin to set in, because the first two Ages now withdraw, never to speak again, and Elde talks on and on, not merely recounting his uneven tales of the Worthies, but also adding more rosters of model humans: the freshly invented Four Wisemen (Aristotle, Virgil, Solomon, Merlin) and Sixteen Lovers. Elde starts and ends his long speech by naming a fourth personification, Death, who hovers marginally behind a figurative door: "Dethe dynges one my dore" (l. 654; also l. 292). When Elde finally falls silent, the blast of a horn startles the narrator awake; whether it sounds in the dream or in the waking world is ambiguous. The narrator hastens out of the forest and back to town, now in a prayerful mood and aware of life's vanity and brevity. His adventure began just before dawn and now the sun has set.2 The action of hunt and sleep occupies a day under the sun—a figurative lifespan as implied by Elde's sign-off, "haues gude daye" (l. 653), and the narrator's closing prayer, "dere Drightyne this daye dele vs of thi blysse" (l. 664).Parlement sports conventions that were richly enjoyed by late medieval aristocratic audiences: a springtime setting, a hunt, an expert carving of the game, a dream with personifications, an allegorical dispute, the Nine Worthies.3 Despite these contemporary crowd-pleasers, Parlement has not garnered the ongoing scrutiny or steady cycles of fresh critical response that would mark it as a great Middle English poem by modern standards. In this, it differs markedly from comparable works in its unrhymed alliterative meter, poems such as Gawain, Piers Plowman, Morte Arthure, Saint Erkenwald, and Wynnere and Wastoure. Parlement's history of criticism has always proceeded slowly, with little appearing after its first edition in 1915 by Sir Israel Gollancz, and the pace picking up only gradually after M. Y. Offord's 1959 EETS edition.4 Its critical heyday began around 1966, peaked in the 1970s and 80s, but after 1989 has slowed to a mere dribble.5 In 1930, well before Offord's edition, the first substantial assessment of Parlement appeared (notably) in the pages of this journal. Initiating the common refrain of later critics, Henry L. Savage applauded Parlement's "cheerful inviting prologue" of "exact and sure" detail but lamented the poet's shift to a "lugubrious major theme of 'Ubi sunt.'"6 The next expansive comment came in 1957 from John Speirs, whose fulsome appreciation of Parlement was somewhat punctured when he noted how the Nine Worthies section is "disproportionately long," "of decidedly less merit," and "interferes with the symmetry of the poem." He added that the final message delivered by Elde "is not quite the note of the poem as a whole. . . . We must continue duly to allow for the positive values of life in Youth (so unforgettably presented) and in Middle Age."7 This recurring critique of the structural damage wreaked by Elde's long speech has severely dampened the poem's modern reception. It has left us, today, with a consensus view that, despite certain skilled and memorable passages, the Parlement ranks as merely "a good but undistinguished representative of the alliterative revival in Northern England."8Is there a better way to account for the seeming imbalance in Parlement—a way that could bring us closer to the poet's purpose? In my view, what has been blindly absent from critical explanations is a consideration of how Parlement could be meaningfully constructed by number. Like the number 12 in Pearl—which recurs in 101 twelve-line stanzas and is squared and multiplied by 1000 in the Dreamer's climactic vision of the New Jerusalem—the Parlement poet broadcasts a specific set of numbers and their permutations. The most obvious are 1 and 3: a single, solitary narrator and the sudden revelation, unfolded in the dream, that three Ages belong to his essential being. This clarification of his mortal existence, his sequenced immersion in time and its processes, arrives by means of sharpened vision in sleep, where mystical truths are rendered visible via his soul. The numbers 1 and 3 hold unmistakable trinitarian resonance. Three-in-oneness ignites in a dream because the narrator's soul is itself triplicate, created in God's image. As Joel Rosenthal has observed, the classic scheme of three ages of life (youth, maturity, age) goes back to Horace and has "a simple if pagan symmetry," while its "trinitarian overtones were certainly not least among the reasons to commend this explanatory framework."9I propose that Parlement's unusual proportions and varying styles stem from the poet's conceiving of its form and meaning according to symbolic number. He wanted the poem to demonstrate and imitate, by artful measurement and proportion, time's inexorable passage during an individual life and in human history. The Parlement poet presents the world—as does the poet of Gawain and Pearl—in meaningful signs and patterns, some numerically designed, others inverted as if viewed in a mirror. The effect is strangely disorienting, as it seems meant to be.In basic structure a dream vision has three parts: prologue, dream, epilogue. Parlement follows this standard circular pattern, yet its narrative by number spins a countervailing linear thread, also of three elements but with each adopting a new style and growing in length: the narrator's detailed, sensory experience as deer hunter; an allegorical dream inhabited by abstract disputants; and a long historical-memorial discourse on the Nine Worthies. Even though this second tripartite structure unspools in linear fashion, its sections' uneven lengths, changing styles, and abrupt disjunctures have disturbed modern readers, who judge the poet sometimes a skilled storyteller, sometimes a failure.In 1989 Donald K. Fry wrote about the challenge of finding Parlement's meaning within its dream-allegorical manner: The most vexing interpretive problems in dream vision scholarship always seem to concern the relation of the frame and the dream, especially the closing of the frame and the ending of the poem. What scholar has not secretly wished that the author would step to the footlights and tell us what the dream meant and how the audience should act? . . . Parlement has especially perplexing difficulties because the dreamer does not appear in his own dream, nor does he seem to react to it at the end.10Years before Fry's perplexity, R. A. Waldron had proposed a striking model by which to understand Parlement's odd proportions. He invented the term "pendant structure" to explain the apparent incongruity of parts, defining it as "each section after the first being suspended from the previous one by a seemingly tenuous, ad hoc, narrative thread."11 To understand the poem as a pendant, however, introduces a new image of incongruity: a vertical object of suspended orbs. Dennis Moran scoffs at the metaphor, calling it "a euphemism intended to accommodate us to the poem's obvious structural unevenness."12 The section that most offends is the narratively deadening account of the Nine Worthies, which enters late and overtakes half the poem. Speirs had earlier suggested that this digression is the interpolation of a less skilled poet—another idea that Moran refutes by pointing out the poet's slowed pace elsewhere, as in the brittling scene and Youthe's description of falconry.13 He asserts, plausibly, that such meanderings reflect the leisure activities and preoccupations of an aristocratic audience.Writing about Gawain and its alliterative cousins, and responding to the strong desire in 1960s criticism to find "organic unity" in all good literature, Larry D. Benson memorably asserted thatWhile not directly about Parlement, this statement has been occasionally invoked in critical attempts to deal with how "babirlippede" (l. 158) Elde seems to hijack the poem. If Benson's dictum might profitably apply to Parlement's challenging structure, then the poem's message must accrue as much or more by juxtaposition and variation than by explicit narrative development.Those who argue for Parlement's poetic unity have shown (persuasively, I think) that the theme of inevitable death pervades each of its three narrative parts, emerging most forcefully in Elde's discourse when he reaches his summation from Ecclesiastes 1:2: "Vanitas vanitatum et omnia vanitas" (Vanity of vanities, all is vanity) (l. 639). The emphasis on life's transience and vanity is clear, but equally important is the attention given to the value of life and its pleasures. The Parlement poet balances vitality against mortality to achieve a progressive recalibration that imitates the process of life itself. The hunting prologue, palpably detailed—down to the gnats that bite at the eyes of the stealthy hunter (l. 50)—gives the feel of life being lived and of mastery over events and environment. Even so, the stag's death presages the enumeration of the Worthies: noble prowess brought low. In the debate proper, before Elde silences the two younger disputants, the prize would seem to go to Youthe. Up to this point, the poet has stressed vitality over mortality, with the narrator becoming closely identified with Youthe.15 Youthe's digression upon falconry and dalliance with ladies quite outshines the fusty utterance of penurious Medill Elde, and the subject of death remains largely latent, overshadowed by a heedless enjoyment of life. The only death is that of an animal. Elde's speech shifts the balance toward a pressing awareness of human death, wherein life's pleasures retain value but persist largely in the past as deeds to be commemorated. The overt theme is now the inevitable submission to death. Strangely enough, though, Elde often ignores this message in favor of reliving the valor of history's famous men. Inside the formal Ubi sunt set piece that calls death to mind, then, men's deeds are glorified, in direct counterbalance to Parlement's opening hunt, which had celebrated sportive life even as it dealt in death.While there is general consensus about this delicate balancing of a dual theme—the exquisite beauty of life weighed beside its vanity and limits—critics differ in how they gauge the poet's final message, some seeing vitality and mortality in equilibrium (as I do), and others seeing Elde's message as final. Philippa A. Tristram eloquently explains the perspectival balance, noting how ParlementTristram's phrase "as in life" stresses how the perspectival balance changes as one ages. The poetry reenacts an objective and subjective process in time.17In general, when critics have argued in this manner for Parlement's unity, they have tended to focus on only one of its elements: the prologue and hunt (Waldron, Russell Peck), the debate (David Lampe), the Three Ages (Beryl Rowland, Thorlac Turville-Petre), the Nine Worthies (Moran); or its final spokeman Elde (Lisa Kiser, Fry, Will Rogers).18 Anne Kernan's analysis works through each section to produce an evaluation of the entire poem. Her conclusion represents the collective view on how Parlement's unity resides in its oppositional themes: The progression of the poem is essentially thematic rather than narrative, the story of the dreamer's experience being presented through a highly artificial pattern of traditional set pieces which constitute a series of variations on the theme of mortality. . . . The Parlement is constructed on principles of balance and thematic patterns as much as on the temporal progression of the narrative core.19In this assessment, the narratives of hunt and dream and Worthies join to serve a thematic pattern that permeates each part. The apparent disjunctures actually produce, then, the kind of unity based on variation that Benson described, a structural method that exists in other alliterative poems. This view still ignores, however, the parts' widely variable lengths and the dismay they generate over how the "central part of the poem forgets the beginning."20 As I will argue, finding the balance in Parlement requires an attention to its numbers as well.Robert Thornton, gentleman scribe from Yorkshire (ca. 1397–ca. 1465), set The Parlement of the Thre Ages at the end of one of his two big miscellanies, placing it just before Wynnere and Wastoure.21 He obviously wished to pair them as alliterative dream visions and debates. In addition, Youthe and Medill Elde exude by their nature heedless wasting versus avaricious winning. But it has been shown conclusively that they are not by the same author. Wynnere is one of the earliest alliterative poems known, composed at least a hundred years before Thornton copied it, while Parlement cannot be precisely dated except to say that Youthe's extreme male fashions suggest Richard II's reign.22 Perhaps most significantly, Thornton used one of Parlement's main elements—the Nine Worthies—as a kind of framing paradigm when he compiled two massive manuscripts, beginning the Lincoln manuscript first with the alliterative Morte Arthure, and then later attaching a new first text: the prose Life of Alexander. Defining his romance collecting by the lives of these two Worthies, Thornton went on to add the Awntyrs off Arthure, the Charlemagne-centered Duke Roland and Sir Otuel of Spain, and The Siege of Jerusalem.23 Against such a backdrop of determined collecting, Parlement, set near the close of Thornton's London manuscript, looks remarkably as if it were meant to serve as his capstone text on the impressive subject of the Nine Worthies.Thornton's Parlement is one of just two copies to survive. Thornton's text is clearly the better one, and his Northern dialect matches the poem's provenance. Offord prints it side by side with the fragmentary text from the Ware manuscript (London, British Library MS Addit. 33994, fols. 19r–26v). Ware lacks Thornton's first 225 lines, and elsewhere it omits eleven lines that Thornton preserves. Thornton never leaves out any line found in Ware. Hence, Ware is clearly defective, while Thornton appears whole. The Thornton text opens with a title, "The Parlement of the Thre Ages," and closes with a colophon, "Here ends the Thre Ages."It seems a rarity—even a marvel—that number symbolism in an alliterative poem should use line count, but that is what I will here argue (in part) for The Parlement of the Thre Ages, with the Thornton text used as evidence. The Thornton Parlement is 665 lines in total length. While one cannot be entirely certain that Thornton never omitted a line, the evidence points to little corruption and no losses. Offord asserts that the text seems "not to be far removed from the original."24 Kernan argues for the poet's stylistic use of bracketing, a compositional manner that could facilitate attaining desired line counts.25 Several lines open with large red capitals, and these markers generally signify transitions, that is, changes in speaker, new sections, and so on. Where Thornton and Ware agree on the placement of these initials, they likely derive from the original poem.26 The ones at lines 104 (beginning of the dream) and 332 (the midpoint) are important markers in the numerical analysis I will present.The evidence I adduce from the Thornton text of Parlement does not rely solely on intriguing instances of line count. Number is everywhere bound to the poem's meanings—not just 1 and 3, as already mentioned, but also in the two obvious series 1 3 9 (narrator, Ages, Worthies) and 30 60 100 (Ages' ages). Before I lay out the evidence, however, it is important to note how Parlement is situated in a context of similar expressions of form by number in alliterative poetry. In Pearl and Gawain, whole line counts seem to matter greatly (1212 and 2525 + 5, respectively), given the formal twelve-ness of Pearl and pentangular five-ness of Gawain. Both of these alliterative works utilize the implied circularity and numerical exactitude of 101 stanzas (100 + 1), verbally reinforced by closing lines that echo opening lines. In Gawain, at the end of the thirty-second stanza, the distressed and freezing Sir Gawain utters a prayer, "Cros Kryst me spede!" (l. 762), and a turning point appears: Bertilak's castle, giving him warm shelter (the thirty-third stanza).27These examples are familiar, and there are more instances pertinent to Thornton's other texts. The alliterative Morte Arthure, known only by Thornton's copy of it in the Lincoln manuscript, offers a tragic-heroic narrative of considerable symmetry and patterning—a remarkable formal achievement across 4,346 unrhymed alliterative long lines.28 Is it planning or coincidence that sets Sir Kay's death-blow at the exact center of the poem? Line 2173 reads: "At the turnynge that tym the traytoure hym hitte." The phrase seems to consciously denote this moment as the start of Arthur's downfall, that is, a crucial "turnynge" point. The Morte Arthure also closely parallels Parlement in depicting a sequence of the Nine Worthies who appear in Arthur's dream as riders on the Wheel of Fortune (ll. 3250–3337)—a sequence prefaced by a menacing woods filled with wild animals (ll. 3230–35).29Another poem preserved by Thornton is The Four Leaves of the Truelove, a work with overt numerological fashioning based in 1 and 3. Its number symbolism signals how it and other works composed in thirteen-line alliterative stanzas should be counted as analogues to Parlement's resounding three-ness. The Truelove poet brilliantly superimposes form and meaning, crafting a forty-stanza devotional poem as a work to be conveyed on four parchment leaves, to mimic its internal conceit of a four-leaf herb, representative of the Trinity's bond with Mary (3 + 1). Thornton's copy of the poem faithfully retains traces of the original layout.30Other works in thirteen-line stanzas create, together with Truelove, something of an alliterative tradition of one-plus-three-ness. The stanza form appears to inspire numerological structures. These poems belong in the company of Parlement because their number-enhanced themes are often based in life's processes over time, often hinting at trinitarian ideas. Somer Soneday begins with a hunt, succeeded by the narrator's encounter with Lady Fortune, who spins a wheel with three kingly riders (future, present, past) and an unfortunate fourth who is crushed dead under it (3 + 1). Beginning also with a symbolic hunt, The Three Dead Kings deploys eleven intricate thirteen-line stanzas to give verbal form to a macabre vision: the Three Living and the Three Dead in a mirror-image encounter of present and future, living and dead. The poet of The Pistel of Swete Susan uses symbolic number in a paraphrase of Daniel 13, embellished to show God working as the Trinity in support of marital fidelity.31What follows in the next two sections of this article are my several thoughts about numbers and their meanings in Parlement. Admittedly, numerological criticism is now somewhat out of fashion, and some of my conclusions may be met with healthy skepticism. Knowing this, and being myself cautious about large claims, especially on something so potentially subjective as the "meanings" of numbers, I have worked to restrict my observations to straightforward facts about number in Parlement—those I judge verifiable, readily detectible, and worthy to be isolated, examined, and assessed for their operation across the whole poem. Within my listing of points of numerical data, there are surprisingly many not previously noted in Parlement commentary. If we wish to fully hear a poet who so clearly developed a work about Three Ages on narrative forms of three-ness, number symbolism is a route that needs to be tread.I present in this section a set of simple axioms about number and form in The Parlement of the Thre Ages. What I list are either straightforward textual facts or else interpretive observations with a good level of critical consensus. Some of the numerical axioms have not been assimilated into our thinking about the poem because number has not played much of a role in Parlement commentary. Number symbolism in Parlement, is, however, overt and not at all arcane. What I present here does not stretch beyond common medieval schoolroom knowledge and basic pastoral lessons on the soul's tripartite nature in the image of God.32 Fundamental understandings hold sway, such as how two-ness denotes worldly materiality, while three-ness denotes unity and spirit. The axioms are as follows: *1.The ages of the Three Ages are 30, 60, 100. Mathematically observed, the Ages reflect the sequence 3 6 10, the triangle numbers of the decad, which, by their figural shape (dots as equilateral triangles) might be thought to image the Trinity.33 The number 1 belongs, too, to the mathematical sequence, so it technically includes the dreaming narrator: 1 3 6 10. To present "realistic" human ages, each triangle number is multiplied by 10, and the series ends in 100, a perfect number, the square of 10.*2.The numerical progression of three categories of protagonists—Narrator, Ages, Worthies—is 1 3 9. This series also ends with a perfect number, the square of 3. This separate progression offers a second instance of "three-ness" with distinct echoes of the Trinity (1 becomes 3) and perfection (32).*3.Perfect numbers—the squares of 3, 2, and 4—represent three types of past human exemplars: Nine Worthies, Four Wisemen, Sixteen Lovers.34 The poet seems to invent the two additional lists in order to contextualize the traditional Worthies beside two other exemplary human qualities, setting up a triad of Power, Wisdom, and Love, which imitates the triune attributes of the Deity.*4.The dream explicitly emanates from the narrator's soul: "whate I seghe in my saule the sothe I schall telle" (l. 103), and the initial vision is of three temporal entities. Evidently, the dream reinforces the trinitarian doctrine of the soul.*5.As a personification, each Age is its name, frozen in time and incapable of change. Being fully itself, each Age is at its peak, hovering at the ultimate instant before it potentially shifts into the next Age (which it can never actually do). In this regard, it is notable that Elde's long speech occurs seemingly suspended in time, at the point of imminent entry through a door upon which Death knocks (ll. 292, 654).35*6.Liminality is a recurrent structural device. A good portion of the poem is uttered by Elde as he reclines before a door, Death poised on the other side (*5). The narrator, too, is in a liminal state when he falls asleep and then enters the dreamscape. His passage is bright, dreamt under the sun; Elde's is dark, headed into death's void. The idea of passage through a "door" is forecast when the stag, hunted and killed, is declared "dede als a dore-nayle" (l. 65), its crossing sealed shut.36*7.As a dream vision, the poem is circular. Phrasal repetitions reinforce a neat cyclic temporality, beginning and ending the poem in the space of a day's daylight hours. Renewal is possible: another day, another adventure, another dream. This pattern is diurnal, not linear.37*8.A second temporal movement, reinforced by the dream's content, is linear and looks to the future. The first personification, Youthe, is like the dreaming narrator in his present Age. The dream foretells the narrator's destined process through three life stages (present, future, more future).38 It moves forward in time, that is, the narrator figuratively experiences his own stages of aging up to Death's door. Repetitions of "haues gud daye" at the poem's close identify the narrator at that point with Elde (ll. 653, 664).*9.A third temporal movement, reinforced by the Nine Worthies section, is retrospective and looks to the past. It figuratively moves the narrator backward to the beginning of human history, then treads forward through the chronicled past to the present moment. This movement sets the narrator as the descendent of a long lineage of all humanity. In other words, he is temporally set in relation to his individual future in *8 and to humanity's collective past in *9.*10.Medill Elde's allegorical role is abbreviated compared to Youthe and Elde because he serves as a pivot between their two extremes. But a wider view is also operable: as the Age in the middle, Medill Elde represents the present experience of all who are suspended between past and future—that is, everyman, including (and especially) the reader. Elde clarifies this fact when he directly addresses "Thou man in thi medill elde, have mynde whate I saye!" (l. 649).39*11.The moralizing of Elde—"be prepared for death; repent and confess in time"—is conventional in the context of seigneurial tastes and orthodox religion. When Elde intones the famous Latin phrase from Ecclesiastes—"Vanitas vanitatum et omnia vanitas" (l. 639), the poet leans into the moral lesson dominating the second half of the poem, and uses the triple vanitas to insert a new instance of three-ness in the closing lines.40*12.The prologue numbers 100 lines + three-line coda. The first 100 lines (a perfect number, like Elde's perfect age) conclude with the sun warming the narrator, leading him to sleep. The three-line coda, wherein the narrator drifts off and sees the vision in his soul, reflects the trinitarian ambience. The major transition at line 104, the appearance of the dreamscape, opens with an enlarged initial in the Thornton manuscript.*13.The 100-line prologue divides into three equal parts with meaningful divisions at lines 32–33 (the stag admired, then seen as prey to conquer) and 65–66 (the stag "dede als a dore-nayle," then made a carcass for brittling). The transitions occur just as line 32 shifts to line 33, and as line 65 shifts to line 66, as if the thirds divide at 32/33 and 65/66—and then, perhaps, 98/99, till the whole reaches the "perfection" of 100 (the warming sun).*14.The Thornton Parlement numbers 665 lines. The midpoint is significant: "Aftir this Sir Alysaunder alle þe worlde wanne / Bothe the see and the sonde and the sadde erthe" (ll. 332–33). Alexander's conquest exceeds the scale of any other Worthy's deeds. In the Parlement poet's worldly terms, Alexander's achievement was "perfect." Line 332 opens with a large capital in both manuscripts and provides a clue about the poet's desire for symmetry.*15.A symbolic number—65—flashes like a sign in the stag's magnificent antlers, where a seigneurial audience, lovers of the hunt, would be alert to such a prize statistic: "With auntlers one aythere syde egheliche longe. / The ryalls full richely raughten frome the myddes, / With surryals full semely appon sydes twayne; / And he assommet and sett of vi and of fyve." (ll. 28–31).41 The number 65 denotes 2/3 of a perfect 100. The terms royal and surroyal for the antlers add to the stag's symbolic regality.*16.Within Elde's narrative of Charlemagne, a significant line invokes the Passion: "When he with passyoun and pyne was naylede one the rode" (l. 555). The Passion is not mentioned elsewhere. The line count (a triple 5) may be numerologically important because five is symbolic of the cross, Christ's wounds, and the Passion. Correspondingly, in the prologue, the dying stag bleeds at line 55: "yat þe blode braste owte appon bothe the sydes."42*17.A ratio of 3:6:10, reflective of the Ages' ages, can be detected in the number of lines allotted to each of the poem's main elements: prologue, Ages (dream and debate), and Worthies (plus Wisemen and Lovers). The lengths are 100, 200, and 333 lines, respectively. That the poet uses the triangular series 3 6 10 as a proportional measure provides a numerical rationale for the long length of Elde's discourse.*18.Elde's long speech on the Worthies (ll. 300–583) bears an intriguing internal balance by number of lines. The three sections—pagan, Jewish, Christian (ll. 300–421, 422–461, 462–583)—have 122, 40, 122 lines, respectively, an approximate ratio of 3:1:3. The pattern gives pagans and Christians equal space, while the middle epoch has roughly 1/3 their lengths. The passage concerning t