A-, B-, and C-texts:
The first, about twenty-four hundred lines long, breaks off at a rather
inconclusive point in the action: the second, a revision of the first plus
an extension of more than four thousand lines; and the third is a revision
of the second. The entire work conforms with the notion that its author
was a man who was educated to enter the church but who, through marriage
and lack of preferment, was reduced to poverty and may well have wandered
in his youth like those "hermits" he scornfully describes in the prologue.
