Anxious over Peasants: Textual Disorder in Winner and Waster.

Argues that the uneasiness of the connection between the first fitt of Winner and Waster and the other two is related to a puzzling transformation in the nature of one of two armies in the first fitt and to an alternation of genres throughout the fitt. The explanation of the transformation is that the poem is motivated by an anxiety about peasant violence. This explanation covers both the generic alternation and the narrative movement beyond the first fitt. The first half of the essay follows what Aristotle would have called mythos, the structure of the poem in movement, or plot. The second half argues for a certain dianoia, the structure of the poem in its simultaneity, the relation of an allusion to events of August 1353 to the earlier source of anxiety that this allusion screens.