University of Virginia Library

The Life and Work of Fredson Bowers
by
G. Thomas Tanselle

In every field of endeavor there are a few figures whose accomplishment and influence cause them to be the symbols of their age; their careers and oeuvres become the touchstones by which the field is measured and its history told. In the related pursuits of analytical and descriptive bibliography, textual criticism, and scholarly editing, Fredson Bowers was such a figure, dominating the four decades after 1949, when his Principles of Bibliographical Description was published. By 1973 the period was already being called "the age of Bowers": in that year Norman Sanders, writing the chapter on textual scholarship for Stanley Wells's Shakespeare: Select Bibliographies, gave this title to a section of his essay. For most people, it would be achievement enough to rise to such a position in a field as complex as Shakespearean textual studies; but Bowers played an equally important role in other areas. Editors of nineteenth-century American authors, for example, would also have to call the recent past "the age of Bowers," as would the writers of descriptive bibliographies of authors and presses. His ubiquity in the broad field of bibliographical and textual study, his seemingly complete possession of it, distinguished him from his illustrious predecessors and made him the personification of bibliographical scholarship in his time.

When in 1969 Bowers was awarded the Gold Medal of the Bibliographical Society in London, John Carter's citation referred to the Principles as "majestic," called Bowers's current projects "formidable," said that he had "imposed critical discipline" on the texts of several authors, described Studies in Bibliography as a "great and continuing achievement," and included among his characteristics "uncompromising seriousness of purpose" and "professional intensity." Bowers was not unaccustomed to such encomia, but he had also experienced his share of attacks: his scholarly positions were not universally popular, and he expressed them with an aggressiveness that almost seemed calculated to

encourage resistance. Anyone who is innovative and rigorous can expect that opposition will come as readily as praise; and Bowers's career fascinatingly illustrates the interplay between ideas and personality in intellectual history. Furthermore, the "professional intensity" that Carter alluded to did not circumscribe Bowers's life; his extraordinary energy allowed him to engage in, and enjoy, a wide variety of activities besides the ones with which (as he knew) his name would permanently be linked. Scholars, like other artists, create in their work a version of the world, and their creative activities can never be divorced from their experience of life. Bowers's life was one of controversies, and one of satisfactions. The details of that life are of interest not only as the story of a great scholar but also as an account of a life lived to the full.

I

Fredson Thayer Bowers was born in New Haven, Connecticut, on 25 April 1905, the son of Fredson Eugene Bowers and Hattie May Quigley. He was the only child of this couple, but he had two half-sisters, Ruth and Rita Brownell, from his mother's previous marriage. The Bowers name belonged to one of the oldest Connecticut families. A John Bower (or Bowers) moved to New Haven in the 165os from Massachusetts (where the family went back to the 163os) and became in 1672 the first minister in Derby, Connecticut; "Bowers" was therefore regarded as one of New Haven's "ancient" names (as in the first volume of Donald Lines Jacobus's Families of Ancient New Haven, 1923). In later life Bowers took some interest in his family's history but never investigated it, and he lamented the fact that the results of his uncle Thomas's genealogical researches had apparently not been preserved. He was unable to connect his family to the early one with certainty; but because his father was born in Derby, he liked to believe that the connection existed. His middle name, Thayer, figured in his paternal grandmother's family, and he was proud of its being "a good New England name, among the best in fact" (as he put it in a letter of 1 April 1988 to his eldest son, Fredson Thayer Bowers, Jr.—whose son, Fredson Thayer Bowers III, he hoped would in turn carry on the tradition).

At the time of Bowers's birth, the family lived in the shadow of Yale at 161 Whalley Avenue, and his father was president (and his uncle Thomas secretary-treasurer) of the Gilbert Manufacturing Company, one of a half-dozen corset-manufacturing companies in New Haven. It was a family business, Gilbert being his paternal grandmother's maiden name; but his father and uncle were early enthusiasts for automobiles and seemed to care more about cars than corsets. In 1904 or 1905 they

added to the company's products such fabric items for automobile passengers as aprons, covers, and leggins, and about 1906—07 his father established the F. E. Bowers Company, Inc., as a manufacturer of carburetors and motor parts. Bowers was only one year old when the automotive activities of his father and uncle were publicized in a local magazine under the heading "Big Autos of the Town" (Saturday Chronicle, 28 July 1906)—a brief article illustrated with photographs of the brothers in their cars. Thomas G. Bowers was shown in the 30-horsepower machine that had been constructed to his specifications from parts he had purchased on a trip; and Fredson E. Bowers was pictured in his 25-horsepower Rambler, which had a "French grey" body of his own design and was "One of the handsomest and speediest high powered runabouts seen about the city." F. E. Bowers and his mechanic could be observed "nearly every night burning up the roads in New Haven county," and one is tempted to think that he sometimes took his son for rides and that this early acquaintance with automobiles was the origin of Bowers's lifelong devotion to sports cars. (He owned a succession of them, including a Jaguar, an Alfa-Romeo, and a Mercedes; and his many nonstop drives to distant places were—whether intentionally or not—in the tradition of his father's fondness for long automobile trips.) Bowers was not quite six when his father died (on 9 February 1911, at the age of thirty-nine, while attending the Chicago Automobile Show), bringing the brief existence of the F. E. Bowers Company to an end; but the aura of automobile enthusiasm continued as a presence in his life through his uncle and the fact that the ongoing Gilbert Manufacturing Company had by 1909 switched exclusively to automobile-related fabrics (the corset business being set up separately as the Gilbert Corset Company).

Just before F. E. Bowers's death, the family had moved to West Haven, but Hattie Bowers, as a widow, soon went back to New Haven and then, in late 1913 or 1914, married Charles K. Groesbeck, a stenographer at the Winchester Repeating Arms Company. Bowers thus had a stepfather during all his high-school and college years (in fact, Groesbeck's death on 13 June 1925 came just four days before Bowers's graduation from college; his mother later took a fourth husband, George Bassermann). At this time the family lived at 111 Brownell Street, within walking distance of New Haven High Public School, which—at York Square—was adjacent to Yale and the old New Haven cemetery. In high school Bowers took—besides the usual courses in composition, literature, chemistry, and geometry—two years of French, three of German, and two and a half of algebra (the latter perhaps foreshadowing his interest in bibliographical collation formulas). In the summers he enjoyed outdoor

activities at camp, and he worked in a camp the summers before and after his senior year (as he described in a letter of 10 March 1980 to his oldest son): Bowers graduated from New Haven General High School (as it was then called) in 1921 and decided on Brown University as the place for his college work.

In the autumn of 1921, at the age of sixteen, Bowers entered the freshman class at Brown, where he majored in English; following an introductory survey of English literature, he studied contemporary novels with Kenneth O. Mason, Romantic literature with Percy Marks, Shakespeare with George Wyllys Benedict, the English novel with Albert Knight Potter, and modern English drama with Thomas Crosby, and in his senior year he was one of the undergraduates admitted into Walter C. Bronson's special graduate seminar. He also took basic courses in biology, astronomy, philosophy, history, economics, music, Latin, Greek, and Spanish, as well as more advanced courses in mathematics and French. The year-long music course that he attended in his junior year is worth noting because it no doubt played some role in causing music, and the detailed analysis of it, to be an important element in his later life; this class, taught by Gene Wilder Ware, the university organist, was designed (in the words of the catalogue) for students "who wish to acquire an intelligent understanding and enjoyment of good music." Bowers's marks were sufficient to bring him scholarships, "preliminary honors," and junior-year election to Phi Beta Kappa. In his first three years he received all As in his English courses (with a few lower grades in some of the other subjects), but his marks were distinctly less good in his senior year, no doubt because of his many extracurricular activities.

In that year he was editor-in-chief of the Daily Herald (the student newspaper), leader of the Glee Club (and thus co-director of the program for concert tours through New England and a larger tour that included Detroit, Kent, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Atlantic City, New York, and Hartford), vice president of the Sphinx Club (a small faculty-student

group that met for discussion), and a member of the Varsity Quartet (as a bass), the Banjo Club (and its Hawaiian Trio), the Cammarian Club (a student governing board), and the editorial boards of the Brown Jug (the student humor magazine, which sold widely outside Brown) and Casements (the student literary magazine, which also contained work by established writers and which was distributed nationally through certain bookstores and newsstands). From his sophomore year on, he had been active in the campus musical clubs and in the English Club (a small group of a dozen or so that met every few weeks to discuss literary matters and hear papers, such as his 15 October 1924 paper on Vanity Fair), as well as in several other clubs and his fraternity, Alpha Delta Phi. To earn money for living expenses, he also led a small jazz band, playing saxophone and Hawaiian guitar himself. (The difficulties of putting together sufficient money at this time may in part underlie the thriftiness that was one of his lifelong characteristics.) The student yearbook, Liber Brunensis, offered this assessment of him at the end of his senior year: Those who knew him later in his life will not be surprised by these comments or by the energy level reflected in his college record.

The most important extracurricular activity of his senior year was not mentioned in the yearbook: in the fall of that year, at the age of nineteen, he got married. On 11 November 1924, at St. Ignatius (Protestant Episcopal) Church in New York, he wed Hyacinth Adeline Sutphen, a 1924 graduate of Smith College (a French major) and a member of a New York Social Register family that was descended from Dirck van Zutphen, a seventeenth-century Dutch settler in New Amsterdam. She was two years and four months older than Bowers (born 18 December 1902), the youngest of four children of John Schureman Sutphen and Mary Tier Brown, and had lived with her parents at their place in Ormond, Florida, as well as at 311 West 72nd Street in New York (not far from St. Ignatius Church, at West End Avenue and 87th Street). Perhaps because of her social standing, the marriage was written up in the New York Times (13 November 1924), in an article headed "Brown Senior Weds Hyacinth Sutphen: F. T. Bowers, Rhodes Scholarship Candidate, and Smith College Student Marry Secretly." Some of the

circumstances of the secrecy, though not the background of it, were described: After a brief honeymoon at Hot Springs, Virginia, Bowers was again immersed in his hectic round of activities at Brown.

Aside from his marriage, the most notable aspect of his undergraduate life, particularly in light of his later career, is the large amount of writing he produced. In addition to an introductory composition course, he took a year-long intermediate course in his sophomore year and a year-long advanced one in his senior year, the former taught by Percy Marks and the latter by George Wyllys Benedict. Under Marks's encouragement, the students in his class brought out an anthology of their classwork in late May 1923. Bowers was one of three editors of The Anthology of English 3,4, and the piece of his included in it was a short story called "Release," about the suicide of a young opium addict, whose life had always been in a world of dreams and whose final dream was of a "grinning idiot" who "sang the idle tale of life" and pulled "the gossamer strings that made men love and hate, kill and destroy," wailing futilely as the universe "plunged to destruction through icy aeons of space."

Marks, a popular young professor, was at that time working on his first novel, The Plastic Age, which after publication in early 1924 became a best seller (and later a film), famous for its portrayal of jazz-age college life and its emphasis on alcohol and sex. Everyone at Brown assumed that the novel depicted the local scene (the review in Casements said that it "tells the truth"), and it apparently cost Marks his job. (An editorial in the Herald on 26 May 1924—after Bowers had become editor on 3 May—called the loss of Marks "a decided blow to the many men who have taken courses with him.") However much "Sanford College" in the novel was in fact based on Brown (or on Dartmouth, where Marks had previously taught), the book probably did reflect the literary situation at Brown in Bowers's time, as in passages like the following:

This assessment is supported, from various sources, by Jay Martin in his 1970 biography of Nathanael West, who was in the Brown class of 1924: "Between 1922 and 1924," he says, "Brown was genuinely invaded by modern ideas," producing a "literary awakening" (p. 66). That Marks showed this element of Ivy League college life along with the partying and the snobbishness makes his account considerably more subtle than Upton Sinclair's characterization of Brown—in another contemporary book, The Goose-Step (1923)—as an institution ("almost as snobbish as Princeton") "catering to the sons of the plutocracy" with "a regime of intellectual dry-rot" (pp. 309-310). Although Bowers was one of the students with whom Marks was familiar while the novel was in progress, there is no character in it that seems obviously based on him. The hero, who plans to go to Harvard for graduate work, makes the "long trip" to New York just before graduation to propose marriage to the woman he had taken to the prom the year before, and he is rejected; Bowers's very different excursion to New York to get married occurred ten months after the book was published.

Bowers, however, did use the widespread knowledge of Marks's book as the background for twenty-six lines in heroic couplets, entitled "The Plastic Age," which he published in the Brown Jug in February 1925. The opening and closing went as follows:

The "headache" no doubt reflected Bowers's own experience, for in later life he told stories about his special recipe for bathtub gin in college. Although he apparently contributed unsigned items (as a "Juggler") to six issues of the Brown Jug, his only other signed piece was a free-verse poem, "A Coat of Arms for Prom Hosts" (May 1924), in pseudo-antique English.

In his junior year Bowers appeared three times in Casements, the second appearance causing a considerable sensation. His piece in the January 1924 number (published in December 1923), entitled "The Passing Show," consisted of brief parodies of Frederick O'Brien, Theodore Dreiser, Amy Lowell, and D. H. Lawrence. In the Lawrence parody (based on the rabbit scene in Women in Love, the trade printing of which had been published in America fourteen months before), a man and a woman, standing by a rabbit pen, look at each other "sensually," and "the white arctic snow in him was lit with a rosy flush of passion, like fingers of sunset glow creeping across barren, white wastes." Then they watch a male rabbit "vigorously trying to overtake his frailer paramour," chasing her into "the dusky, dark gloomness" of the rabbit house:

This kind of writing was unacceptable to city officials in Providence, and on 22 December the Assistant City Solicitor, declaring the parody to be "clearly obscene and unfit for public reading," ordered that copies of the issue be withdrawn from sale and that uncooperative booksellers and newsdealers be prosecuted (as the Boston Globe reported in some detail the next day).

Bowers suspected that his piece was called to the attention of the authorities by his classmate S. J. Perelman as a prank. Many years later Bowers wrote to Dorothy Herrmann, while she was working on her biography of Perelman (1986), describing the episode:

Certainly Bowers and Perelman knew each other well at that time, being fellow members of the English and Sphinx clubs and fellow contributors to the Herald, and their college careers continued to intersect. A few months later, when Bowers was chairman of the committee for the 1924 St. Patrick's Day Vaudeville Show (in part a parody of The Plastic Age, and one of the "bawdiest productions ever to be staged at Brown," according to Herrmann), Perelman was the set designer for it—and Quentin Reynolds one of the writers, and Nathanael West an actor in it. (The Herald on 27 March called it "undoubtedly the greatest single theatrical production and the finest example of histrionic art ever seen on the campus.") The following year, when Bowers edited the Herald, Perelman was editor of the Brown Jug; and Bowers, perhaps in retaliation for the Casements affair, attacked Perelman's handling of the Jug (on 22 November 1924 and 6 January 1925) and initiated an editorial feud between the two publications. (The Herald's [i.e., Bowers's?] criticism of the Jug for being imitative of H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan reinforces Percy Marks's later recollection of his students' papers: "A bundle of themes turned into an American Mercury in my hand" [The Craft of Writing, 1932].)

Bowers's other contributions to Casements, in the numbers for November 1923 and March 1924, were less controversial than his parodies, but perhaps more revealing. The earlier one, "The Street That Ends in the Sea," was a short allegorical piece describing the movements of people roaming a street of shops, with its "crooked bylanes," that led to a "shimmering blue" sea ("promising rest"), which some people glanced at "furtively" and others seemed not to notice at all. The other piece, "Whitney Warren," was a five-page story describing the thoughts going through the mind of a man as he was being hanged for murder. (The naming of the title character suggests that architecture was not one of the arts Bowers followed closely; otherwise he would presumably not have used the name of one of the prominent architects of the day, a partner in the firm of Warren & Wetmore and designer of the facade of Grand Central Terminal.) Whether Warren's thoughts were Bowers's own is difficult to say, but the story can plausibly be seen as an undergraduate's proclamation of his rejection of conventional religion and morality. The title character had "felt no desire" to talk to the chaplain but "had gone through with the interview as an inescapable part of the

necessary rigmarole"; his philosophy "had finally matured and hardened into a strange mixture of materialism and individualism." As he died, he Like Whitney Warren, Bowers may also have "often tried to imagine the beginning of the whole colossal system of the universe"; and he perhaps sympathized with Warren's feeling that he "had loved words and their magic power almost as well as he had loved life itself."

At any rate, words were the subject of the one undergraduate piece of Bowers's that reached a sizable national audience. The 14 March 1925 number of the widely circulated Literary Digest, under the heading "College Slang a Language All Its Own," reprinted an article that Bowers had written, "as summarized by the Providence Journal and the Brooklyn Eagle." In the article as printed there, Bowers wrote that college "slanguage" was "like a foreign tongue even to the graduate of a few years ago, and entirely unintelligible to the outside public." One of the examples he provided was an imaginary conversation beginning, "Why, hello Jim, you're looking pretty smooth to-night. Where'd you get the doggy scarf? Old Joe Brooks himself, aren't you." Whether this article derived from one of Bowers's editorials in the Daily Herald is not certain, but there was an editorial on 23 February 1925 entitled "Diction on the Campus," complaining about college slang, which is "unintelligible to the average man," and lecturing its readers rather pompously on their "responsibility for the precious heritage of the English tongue" (it did not, however, give examples of slang).

Bowers must have written many of the editorials during his senior year, and many news stories during his four years on the staff. But most Herald articles were unsigned, and his have not been identified, except for a series of five reviews signed "F.T.B." In a review of Casements, he noted that "S. J. Perelman contributes a divagation in his best manner" (6 May 1924); another review judged May Sinclair's Arnold Waterlow to show "a psychological intuition and perception almost unrivalled among modern authors" (30 September 1924); Anne Douglas Sedgwick's The Little French Girl was "one of the best novels of the present age" (7 October 1924); Ernest Brace's Commencement achieved "a real and interesting picture of life" (10 November 1924); and Sarah Gertrude Millin's God's Stepchildren contained "a breadth of life which can almost

be said to be complete" (24 March 1925). Even without knowing more of his Herald pieces, one can nevertheless say that the fluency Bowers gained from all his undergraduate writing, as well as the discipline of meeting deadlines and administering a periodical, proved valuable to him later on.

Bowers graduated from Brown with a Ph.B. on 17 June 1925 and turned his thoughts to graduate school at Harvard. He and his wife moved into 10 Dana Street, Cambridge, and he began his coursework in the fall of 1925. It was natural, given his English major at Brown and his interest in writing, that his graduate work would be in English; what led him to concentrate on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in his first year, however, is not as evident. But after taking George Lyman Kittredge's Shakespeare course and J. Tucker Murray's pre-1642 non-Shakespearean drama course that year, his direction was set. Kittredge made a deep impression on him, and he eventually wrote his dissertation under Kittredge's direction. More than half a century later Bowers recalled with admiration the characteristics of Kittredge's teaching. In the preface to his collected essays on Shakespeare (1989), he said that the essays "share a common background from the active teaching of a relatively few plays in the Kittredge manner of close analysis although with a different focus from his":

Murray's teaching was also influential: Bowers said in the preface to his dissertation that the topic "would never have been undertaken had not I among so many others fallen under the spell of Professor John Tucker Murray's enthusiasm for the Elizabethan drama"; and a term paper for Murray, growing out of A. H. Thorndike's 1902 PMLA article on "The Relations of Hamlet to the Contemporary Revenge Play," became the germ for the dissertation.

Other glimpses of Bowers's study at Harvard occasionally crop up in later writings—as when, in an obituary of Greg (1959), he said, "In the United States of the late 1920's my generation cut its teeth on McKerrow's

Introduction." Another time (in a letter on 18 April 1976), he commented on one of his critics by saying that "he does not know of the philological training one got at Harvard in my day!" This training consisted, in Bowers's case, of a year of Anglo-Saxon (under Kittredge, F. N. Robinson, and Kenneth G. T. Webster), two years of Middle English (one on Chaucer and one on other literature of the period, both taught by Robinson and John S. P. Tatlock), a year of Old French ("Phonology and Inflections" taught by J. D. M. Ford), and a half-year of "Gothic—Introduction to the Study of German Philology" (under R. M. S. Heffner)—the latter a course he postponed taking until the fall of 1931.

The other major influence on him at Harvard, besides Kittredge and Murray, was Hyder Edward Rollins, whose year-long course in Elizabethan nondramatic poetry he took in 1927-28, his third year. (Howard Mumford Jones later said that Rollins, "in many minds the successor of Kittredge, was the idol of the graduate students" [An Autobiography, 1979, p. 204].) At the end of this course, on 3 May 1928, Bowers submitted a remarkable paper of 338 typed pages bound in hard cover—bound at the time he turned it in, for Rollins's comment is on the front free endpaper. Entitled "The Authorship of A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres," the paper argued against B. M. Ward's suggestion that some of the poems were by other persons than Gascoigne. In his ten-line comment, Rollins said, "A very remarkable study for a mere course-thesis. . . . Congratulations on your interest and industry and intelligence!" Not surprisingly, he gave the paper a grade of A; less expected was his final comment, "Gratifying, too, to see that you write much more carefully since the December jolt!" Presumably the jolt was a severe criticism from him (and perhaps also from Kittredge, with whom Bowers was taking an independent-study course at the same time). Bowers's facility in writing sometimes resulted in a diffuseness that was to be a problem throughout his life, and apparently he was warned about it at this point. The Gascoigne paper is of particular interest for its focus on authorship (which naturally has bibliographical and textual implications) and for such bibliographical knowledge as it reveals—the use of title-page transcription and signature reference notation, for instance. It also contains what is probably the earliest surviving indication of his awareness of W. W. Greg's work: in criticizing Ward's theory of an Oxford code, he said, "Now I protest, even though Greg thinks it good, that this is not an honest cipher" (p. 299).

Most of his course-related writing during these years obviously dealt with Elizabethan and Jacobean literature and no doubt underlay his

earliest scholarly publications, which began in 1930, while he was engaged in writing his dissertation. His first scholarly article, in the March 1930 number of Modern Language Notes, argued that the anonymous poetic satire Machiavells Dogge (1617) was in fact by Nicholas Breton; the argument used no physical bibliographical evidence but instead relied entirely on the existence of many borrowed passages from an established Breton work and on similarities of tone and style. One of Rollins's editions was cited in a footnote, and an acknowledgment of Rollins's help was made in Bowers's next publication, "Kyd's Pedringano: Sources and Parallels" in Harvard Studies and Notes in Philology and Literature for 1931. Bowers appeared twice more in Harvard Studies, in 1933 and 1934, both articles dealing with attribution of authorship: the earlier ruled out Chapman as author of Alphonsus, and the later was a condensed version of the Gascoigne paper he had written for Rollins (who was one of the editors of Harvard Studies as of 1934). He also published twice more at this time in Modern Language Notes (in 1932 and 1933), referring on the second occasion to Kittredge's assistance, and he placed a substantial article in Studies in Philology (1934).

These three pieces dealt with revenge tragedy and were offshoots of his dissertation, "A History of Elizabethan Revengeful Tragedy." (In his preface he credited the origin of his title to a mistaken footnote in Allardyce Nicoll's Restoration Drama, citing a nonexistent book supposedly called "History of Revengeful Drama.") He pursued this topic with the same thoroughness he had displayed in the Gascoigne paper; and in January 1934, after some five years' work, he presented his committee with an 1100-page study (bound in three volumes), dedicated "gratefully" to Kittredge, and was officially awarded his Ph.D. degree in February. His primary acknowledgments (besides the one to Murray) were naturally to Kittredge ("for his unfailing interest, his multitude of valuable suggestions, his careful reading of my manuscript, and for the stimulating hours I have spent in discussion with him") and Rollins ("for reading part of this thesis, for various valuable suggestions, and for his constant inspiration to me as a model of modern scholarship"). At the end of his list he added, "my deepest gratitude is due my wife who undertook, during years of listening to an idée fixe, the arduous work of typing this thesis." The main text consisted of two large sections, one on "The Theory and Practice of Revenge" (a third of the whole), tracing the concept back to antiquity, followed by one on "The Elizabethan Tragedy of Revenge" (some 650 pages), containing (after a discussion of "Antecedents") separate treatments of sixty-five plays. His own four-page epitome of the dissertation appeared in the Summaries of Theses, but an

even more condensed statement in his own words can be found in a footnote to his Studies in Philology article: "I am at present completing a history of Elizabethan revenge tragedy from the particular point of view of its relation to the life and ethics of the time and their effect upon its structure, characterization, and ethics." Six years later a shortened version of this work became his first scholarly book.

During his nine years of graduate study, he taught at Harvard every year but the first and the last two; while taking courses his title was Assistant in English, and while writing his dissertation he was Instructor in English and Tutor in the Modern Languages. He stayed on in the latter position for two years following the award of his degree and traveled to England in the summer between them (1935) on a Charles Dexter Scholarship (he had also been a Dexter Scholar in the summer of 1928, when he had done research for his dissertation at the British Museum, the Bodleian Library, and the libraries of Emmanuel and Trinity Colleges, Lambeth Palace, and the Guildhall). The Bowerses' first son, Fredson Thayer Bowers, Jr., was born on 7 April 1927, and in mid-1927 the family moved from Dana Street to 5 Concord Avenue. The next year they moved again, to 987 Memorial Drive, where a second child, Joan Sutphen Bowers, was born on 28 February 1931. She later remembered that her father put her to sleep at night by reading Old English poetry to her. One more move, to 110 Forest Avenue in West Newton, came in mid-1931, and on 3 April 1934 twin sons were born, named Peter Dirck Sutphen Bowers and Stephen Hyder Gilbert Bowers (the latter obviously named for Bowers's Harvard adviser Hyder Rollins and his paternal grandmother's family). (The four children made their careers, respectively, in insurance, accounting, finance, and counselling, and they eventually provided Bowers with a total of twenty-two grandchildren.) The move to the suburbs not only accommodated the growing family but allowed Bowers to indulge his love of dogs: the first dog was just a pet for the children, but soon he acquired pure-bred hounds to display in shows. His wife enjoyed golf, tennis, skating, and skiing, and he joined her in these activities and took pictures of her and the children on their various outings. (He later claimed that he gave up golf after he broke par and it no longer seemed a challenge.) His oldest son recently recalled Bowers's enthusiasm for moving pictures:

The pleasures of family life were not destined to continue, however, for the Bowerses began to have marital problems, and they separated in 1935 and were divorced on 29 January 1936. Bowers had moved back into Cambridge, and his wife and the children stayed on in the West Newton house, where she continued to live until near the time of her death from arteriosclerosis on 13 May 1967. (She was married again on 17 October 1940, to Edward Bass Hall, and was divorced from him in 1946.) For the 1936-37 academic year, Bowers accepted an instructorship at Princeton; his move in the summer of 1936 ended an eleven-year association with Harvard, and with an area that held many family memories.

During the Harvard years Bowers developed an interest in Irish wolfhounds and pursued this interest with great intensity, fitting it into a life already crowded with family activities, graduate studies, and teaching. This avocation is the best documented early instance of his drive toward professionalism, or at least mastery and authority, in any field that captured his attention. No doubt this trait of his personality had shown itself previously (and was in part responsible for his energetic undergraduate writing career), but it left its earliest permanent mark in connection with dogs, for his first book was on this subject. In late 1932, at a dog show in Boston, he saw some of the Irish wolfhounds belonging to Charles D. Burrage, Jr. (who was to become one of the prominent breeders of these hounds, at his Rathain Kennels in Needham Heights, not far from where Bowers lived); and as Bowers said in his earliest writing for the American Kennel Gazette (March 1934), "It was a case of love at first sight." He received expert advice both from Burrage and from Frank T. Eskrigge, a veteran dog-show judge and dog-magazine writer who also lived nearby (in Newton Centre); and under their tutelage he made—in the spring of 1933—an impeccable entry into the world of pure-bred dogs by importing a male, Sulhamstead Gala, from Florence Nagle, whose Sulhamstead Kennels (near Reading in

Berkshire) were to become as celebrated a source of champions as she herself was to become a colorful and outspoken figure among dog- and horse-fanciers. A few months later, in the summer of 1933, he bought another male, Whippoorwill Major Kilkelly, bred by Mrs. Amory L. Haskell at her Whippoorwill Kennels in Red Bank, N.J., and at the end of the year he imported a bitch, Sulhamstead Kiora, from Mrs. Nagle. In the March 1934 article he described these three hounds in detail, emphasizing Gala, whose "head has been rather generally admired": "He is a light cream color, with just a suspicion of grey brindle on the underthroat and a tail which darkens to black at the tip." Bowers broke off his description with the comment, "He's so much my favorite that I can't say anything more about him without going into a rhapsody."

The same article provides some delightful glimpses into Bowers's life at this time:

Although one wonders how Bowers could have had "some leisure" during this period, he obviously enjoyed walking the dogs and making them good pets as well as show dogs. His reference here to taking them on sidewalks anticipates another article of his in the American Kennel Gazette a few months later (October 1934) on "Training Dogs for the Street," which is accompanied by six wonderfully evocative photographs of Bowers's dogs, the West Newton neighborhood, Bowers's oldest son (then seven years old), and Bowers himself. Anyone who knew Bowers, or his writings, later can easily imagine that he was good at disciplining his dogs: "I have never," he says in this article, "found the necessity of punishing my dogs, except with a scolding."

By early 1934 Bowers had worked out his plans as a breeder:

Kiora was not in whelp (though Bowers had already advertised for sale "a few Irish Wolfhound puppies imported in utero"), and Bowers's program changed slightly. He bought Top Lady of Ambleside from Mr. and Mrs. L. O. Starbuck's famous Ambleside Kennels of Augusta, Michigan, and bred her to a dog called Brian Boru (owned by Mrs. Randolph C. Grew); on 6 September 1934, Top Lady produced a litter of seven, which Bowers named Ban, Brian, Deirdre, Graysteel, Juno, Morhault, and Shaun, each one with the suffix "of the Fen" attached ("Ban of the Fen," etc.). Early in 1935 he bred Top Lady to his own Sulhamstead Gala, and a litter of five resulted on 12 March 1935—named Cabal, Dark Rosaleen, Degare, Hodain, and Yseult (again, "of the Fen"). To announce the availability of these puppies, he took a full-page advertisement in the 1934-35 volume of Annual Reports of the Irish Wolfhound Club of America (IWCA), headed "The Irish Wolfhounds of the Fen," showing a picture of Kiora and noting that Bedlington terrier puppies were "occasionally available." Meanwhile he had shown Gala extensively (and Kiora somewhat less so), beginning with the Bridgewater (Massachusetts) Kennel Club show on 2 September 1933. By mid-1934 Gala had been shown sixteen times in seven states and on 20 July 1934 earned the last of the requisite points to become a champion of American Kennel Club record (the thirty-fifth Irish wolfhound to achieve this status). Although Bowers showed Gala several more times, he began to be asked to judge Irish wolfhounds and in 1935 appeared at two shows as judge rather than exhibitor—the beginning of what was to be a long association with dog-show judging.

Bowers became well known in dog circles not only because he possessed a champion but also because he wrote about dogs with some frequency.

Besides his article on training dogs for the street, he published a piece entitled "Novices All Need the Sympathetic Judging of Their Dogs" (American Kennel Gazette, April 1935)—full of eminently sensible advice that suggests how thoughtfully Bowers approached his own duties as a judge. When he returned from his summer in England in 1935, he wrote for the Annual Reports of the IWCA a fascinating account of the various kennels he had visited abroad (he was also a member of the Irish Wolfhound Club in England) and the shows he had attended there ("English Notes and Comments"). His love of dogs showed through clearly in everything he wrote about them, as in this concluding sentence of that essay: In addition to submitting articles to the American Kennel Gazette, he was assiduous in sending accounts of his activities to L. O. Starbuck, who conducted the column on Irish wolfhounds, and several of his letters were quoted there. The August 1935 column consisted entirely of Bowers's description of the Irish Wolfhound Association of New England, which he had been instrumental in forming the previous November; he wrote the June 1936 column on the subject of coursing; and in the September 1936 column Starbuck quoted Bowers's description and analysis of the stuffed specimens he had seen the previous summer in London at the Museum of Natural History. In that same column Starbuck said, "I have to credit Fredson Bowers with the most marked loyalty to the breed in helping to furnish something of interest from time to time."

His principal writing on dogs while still at Harvard was a book-length general introduction to all breeds, which he dedicated to his dog-world mentor Frank Eskrigge and which Houghton Mifflin published as The Dog Owner's Handbook in October 1936 (just after he had begun teaching at Princeton). The front of the dust jacket was labeled "A Guaranteed Dog Book," and the flap explained, "Any purchaser who is not satisfied with it may return the book within five days for refund." In the preface he stated his qualifications for producing a work "squarely intended for the average pet dog owner or the person thinking of buying a dog":

This combination of "theory" with "practical experience" was to be a hallmark of his writing from then on: he was not temperamentally attracted to theory for its own sake, as he often pointed out, and his works are filled with illustrative examples drawn from his own experience. He vowed in this preface to eschew "windy generalities" and to speak frankly about the merits and demerits of individual breeds, risking "the charge of personal prejudice" in order "to be of as great help as possible" through his own "experience with several breeds, a fairly intimate acquaintance with many, and observation of the rest." In a straightforward, serviceable style (addressing the reader in the second person), he covered all the expected topics, from selecting dogs to training and showing them; the heart of the book was a long chapter on "The Dogs Themselves," describing the history, uses, and characteristics of forty-two breeds and offering advice about each. Bowers's partiality for the Irish wolfhound came through in his account of it as a "thoroughly satisfactory dog in every way. No owner ever changes to any other large breed" (p. 69). Another similar—and similarly titled—book (but more technical and more suited for the kennel owner), Josephine Z. Rine's The Dog Owner's Manual, was brought out by Coward-McCann at almost precisely the same time. Frank Dole reviewed both books (and five other more specialized ones) in the book section of the New York Herald Tribune on 20 December 1936, praising them both but treating Bowers's first and calling it one of the better of the Christmas books "for the person not very well acquainted with the field." He found Bowers's book "capably done" and "written so that the reader incurs a natural desire to learn more of the intricacies of dogdom." The book had some success, for it was reprinted by the Sun Dial Press in 1940 and was still mentioned in the 1950s in some of the lists of recommended books that appeared in the American Kennel Club's magazine.

During 1935 Bowers sold many of his puppies, and in March of 1936, following his divorce and in anticipation of his move to Princeton, he sold his remaining hounds. (Both Sulhamstead Kiora and Top Lady of Ambleside became champions later that year.) Bowers's oldest son recently

recalled, "When the dogs and puppies were sold, I more or less inherited the dog house, and a dozen or so of us neighborhood children used it as a clubhouse"—the structure being "eight or nine feet long" and "six feet wide and six feet high," with "two levels, a door and window high up at each end for ventilation." From time to time after that, Bowers considered owning some hounds once more: Alma J. Starbuck (L. O. Starbuck's widow) said, in her November 1947 report on the Specialty Show held two months earlier, "It was good to see Fredson Bowers again, looking quite the same and letting us know it's just a question of a little time before he will again have a Wolfhound on the lead." But he never did; from 1936 on, his activities in the dog world were limited to writing and judging, though he did a considerable amount of both. After writing two more columns for the American Kennel Gazette (in January 1937 a thoughtful piece on the relative popularity of Irish wolfhounds among American dog owners, and in July an account of the latest Morris and Essex Kennel Club show, the first major show that he had judged), Bowers was chosen by Alma Starbuck as her successor to handle this column. In the December 1937 number Bowers wrote: After asking for contributions, he warned his readers, "My main business is mounting the lecture platform, and if you all don't combine to keep me off it here, on your own heads be it"; and he then reported on the Richmond show that he had attended on his visit to England in the summer of 1937, recognizing that the English level "is still way and above ours." For the next three years, through the December 1940 column (when Bowers wrote, "And, Santa Claus, give us a new columnist"), Bowers conducted the column vigorously, missing only September and October of 1938 (because of his move to Virginia), July through October 1939 (because of a trip to England), and July 1940.

These thirty columns, totaling about 30,000 words, covered such topics as current shows (e.g., January and April 1938 and March 1940, the latter dealing with a show he judged), the formation of a Mid-Atlantic Irish Wolfhound Association (July 1938), coursing (August

1938), Irish wolfhound history (June 1939, a column that links Bowers's literary and canine interests with its report of a previously unnoticed reference to the breed in Wycherley's The Gentleman Dancing Master of 1672), the hardiness of the breed (November 1939 and January 1940), and the economics of wolfhound-raising (December 1939, where Bowers says that the hound "still remains the best of all the large breeds, but he simply has not been sold to the public as the Great Dane has been"). (Bowers also treated the history of Irish wolfhounds in a major article in the May 1939 number.) The subject that came up most often, however, in about a dozen of the columns, was the possible revision of the official standard of excellence for Irish wolfhounds. Bowers's view (February 1938) was that, although the sixty-year-old standard was out of date, it should probably be retained "as an historical document" and should be provided with "a series of supplementary notes which can be printed with the standard as a fuller and more complete guide to the ideal of the Irish wolfhound." That Bowers should have involved himself actively in this matter is not surprising, for his mind was attracted to categorization and systematization, and the problem was not unlike the bibliographical question he later addressed concerning the description of "ideal" copies of books, abstracted from the idiosyncrasies of actual surviving copies. In one of his most thoughtful columns on the wolfhound standard (January 1939), he wrote that "it is of the utmost importance that a clear and reasonably definite set of rules be laid down for judging any breed if the great benefit which dog shows confer upon improving the breed is not to turn into a boomerang by reason of such diverse judging that no practical ideal can be ascertained." He continued his analysis of points not adequately covered in the old standard through three more columns in the spring of 1939 (March, April, May); a year later (April 1940) he was glad to report that a committee had been formed to look into this question ("a project very close to my heart"), and he made additional comments throughout that year, especially on the need for cooperation (May) and the treatment of the size of wolfhounds (September, October). Even after he gave up his column, he still pursued the subject: in the volume of Annual Reports of the IWCA for 1939-40 (published 1941), he included in his list of desiderata for the Club the impatient statement, "it is time that we took some definite action or decided definitely to take no action"; and after the war, when new standards of weight and height were adopted, he wrote some "Random Notes on the Standard" (Annual Reports, 1946-47), in which he made further specific suggestions for revision and advocated that an interpretive section be added.

From then on, the only writings on dogs that Bowers published were the occasional accounts of shows that he judged. Although he was not a particularly active judge, his judging career spanned a thirty-year period, from the mid-1930s to the mid-1960s (he was one of the first six judges approved by the IWCA, and he was included in the official lists of American Kennel Club licensed judges from 1936 through 1973—qualified to judge borzois, Great Pyrenees, and Scottish deerhounds, as well as Irish wolfhounds). Among the shows he judged were the Greenwich in 1936 and 1938 (the presence of Raymond Whitney's Silver making the latter "a sentimental occasion," he said in his August 1938 column, "as I afterwards found he is a son of my now deceased Ch. Sulhamstead Gala"), the Morris and Essex and the Philadelphia in 1937, the Westminster in 1940, the IWCA Specialty in 1948 and 1954, and the Long Island in 1964 and 1966. In the 1940s his influence was also felt through his service on the Governing Committee of the IWCA.

Even though the period of Bowers's intense activity in the dog world was relatively brief, he made a lasting place for himself in the annals of Irish wolfhounds through the calibre of the hounds he owned and bred, the attention his writings and opinions received, and the length of his career as a judge. Alma J. Starbuck, in The Complete Irish Wolfhound (1963), devoted a paragraph to Bowers in her historical section:

When in 1976 the IWCA celebrated its fiftieth anniversary with a special number of its journal, Harp & Hound, five pages of excerpts from Bowers's writings were included—an honor accorded to no one else. Besides several other scattered quotations from him and a picture of him at the 1954 Specialty Show, this number contained, in its account of "The First Decade" by Mrs. Kelly Fox, an informative assessment of his contribution: Bowers's position at the center of controversy in the dog world of the 1930s and 1940s, as described here, foreshadowed his position in the world of textual scholarship in the 1960s and later. Most of the scholars who debated textual issues with him, however, had no idea that he had also played an authoritative role in a very different field.

Bowers moved into 50 University Place, Princeton, in the summer of 1936. In his two years at Princeton, his course load consisted of two classes of freshman English (actually literature), three sophomore preceptorials, and a section of English A, the noncredit remedial course. Despite this heavy schedule, and his dog columns and dog-show judging, he accomplished a considerable amount of research, notably some of the early stages of the work leading toward his edition of Dekker. (In the first volume of that edition, when published in 1953, he thanked the Princeton University Library staff for acquiring microfilms of copies of early Dekker editions for his use.) One sign of his concentration on Dekker at this time was a journalistic piece on The Shoemaker's Holiday that he wrote for the Sunday arts section of the New York Times (26 December 1937), as well as three scholarly articles on Dekker. (In the Times piece, he asserted that "Dekker is among the select few [of Shakespeare's contemporaries] who can boldly face the glare of modern foot-lights.") Altogether nearly a dozen (mostly short) scholarly articles of his appeared in print during the two Princeton years (eight in 1937 alone), though many of them had of course been written at Harvard. (Legend has it that Bowers filled his Princeton colleagues' mailboxes with more offprints than they perhaps desired.) These articles came out in major journals, like Journal of English and Germanic Philology and

Studies in Philology, and dealt largely with revenge tragedy (and duelling), Gascoigne, and Thomas Randolph (to whom Bowers attributed The Fary Knight, the manuscript of which he had examined in the Folger Library, decided to edit, and described in a paper called "A Long Lost Elizabethan Play" at the Modern Language Association convention on 29 December 1936). Most of these pieces illustrate what he said of his early writings in a 1957 account of his career (written to accompany grant applications): "Before the late 1930's . . . I was chiefly interested in the sociological background of Renaissance English Drama and in the artistic forms of its tragedy."

The most important of his articles at this time, in terms of his future career, was "Bibliographical Problems in Dekker's Magnificent Entertainment," his first truly bibliographical article and his first appearance in The Library, the journal of the Bibliographical Society in London. The date of the number in which it was published, December 1936, shows that it had been written while he was still at Harvard, and it provides the best evidence that his mind had begun turning toward analytical bibliography at that time. In his 1957 autobiographical statement, he recalled that "in the late 1930's, coincidental with my starting on post-doctoral research leading to an edition of the Plays of Thomas Dekker, my work in large part switched towards discovering new techniques in analytical (critical) bibliography to apply to problems of textual criticism." Clearly one of his projects as a Dexter Scholar in England in the summer of 1935 was the examination of multiple copies of The Magnificent Entertainment, for he reported having collated the copies in the Bodleian, the British Museum, and the Victoria and Albert Museum. Whether he saw W. W. Greg on that trip or simply corresponded with him is not clear, but his first footnote began, "Dr. W. W. Greg has pointed out to me. . . ." The article (seven short pages) recorded the places where the two 1604 London editions show the same setting of type and conjectured that, in order to speed the production of the second edition, the type that remained standing had been transferred from the shop of Thomas Creede (the printer named on the title page of the first edition) to that of Edward Allde (the printer named on the title page of the second).

This reasoning is unconvincing, as Greg was quick to point out. The next number of The Library (March 1937) printed his three-page letter to the editor showing that "Mr. Bowers's analysis of the bibliographical problems involved in the two London editions can be carried somewhat further and the results presented in somewhat simpler and more significant

form." The key point that Bowers had missed was stated by Greg at the outset: "it is clear that neither edition was the work of a single press." On the basis of an examination of the types in the headlines, Greg could divide the first edition into the work of five printers and the second edition into the work of four of those five. He also explained why the evidence supports the view—contrary to Bowers—"that the sheets were printed in the houses where the type was set, and that it was the printed sheets and not the formes of type that were collected in one office." With his usual severity—but with good reason—Greg called Bowers's arguments for the transfer of the type "wholly irrelevant." And he was right to question this extraordinarily careless sentence of Bowers's: "With sig. C1, which is reprinted page for page but not wholly line for line, the text of the two editions is finally joined signature for signature" (to which Greg responded, "I am not at all sure that I know what this means"). Greg's letter was simpler, clearer, and more plausible than Bowers's article, and its masterly handling of bibliographical evidence was unquestionably seen by Bowers as an object lesson (despite the fact that he thought Greg had not been entirely fair in dealing with the situation). Bowers's inauspicious debut as a bibliographical writer was, given his temperament, a stimulus to learn more: from the point of view of bibliographical history, Greg's criticism was the most significant event of Bowers's two years at Princeton.

In his second year at Princeton, Bowers was offered a position for the following fall as Acting Assistant Professor at the University of Virginia by James Southall Wilson (Dean of the Department of Graduate Studies), who apparently had in mind that Bowers might succeed John Calvin Metcalf, then in his early seventies (and scheduled to retire in 1940). Bowers accepted the offer and in the summer of 1938 moved to Charlottesville, which was to remain his home for the rest of his life. Bowers had liked Wilson immediately; they became close friends and had many occasions to work together until Wilson's retirement in 1951 (at the age of seventy). One mark of Bowers's fondness and respect for Wilson was his assuming the editorship of a festschrift for Wilson in 1951; another was his preparing the official memorial resolution when Wilson died in 1963. At that time (28 June 1963) he wrote Wilson's widow, "I have always loved and revered him. He was the cause of my coming to the University, and he was an important reason why I stayed, perhaps the most important reason. I have always said that he was one of the three or four authentically great men whom I have known in my

lifetime." (In 1969 Bowers was one of the people who caused the new English department building to be named "Wilson Hall," and at the dedication ceremony Bowers was visibly moved.)

Bowers's first address in Charlottesville was 27 University Circle, and after a year he moved to Fontaine Avenue—both locations near the university. In addition to freshman English, the first courses he taught were the undergraduate survey of the seventeenth century and the graduate course in the eighteenth-century novel. During his second year (after the summer of 1939 in France and England), he arranged to have a course in bibliography announced for the succeeding year, and the university bulletin for 1940-41 duly listed him as the teacher of an advanced graduate-level course entitled "Introduction to Bibliographical Research," with the following description, undoubtedly written by Bowers himself:

In the next year, when "Acting" had been dropped from his title, he offered this course again, but the bulletin announced that henceforth he would teach it in alternate years, with an advanced course on pre-1642 non-Shakespearean drama in between ("either course," it added, "will be offered in the off-year at the request of five or more students"). The drama course had formerly been taught by Metcalf (though Bowers modified its description by including as one topic the "transmission of dramatic texts"), and Bowers was now officially assigned to three more of Metcalf's graduate courses—on Spenser and Milton, on Elizabethan poetry and prose, and on seventeenth-century literature. He also was listed for a new introductory research methods course, in which one element was "Study of the history of the printed book from the incunabula period to the present day, with some consideration of principles of textual criticism." Within his first four years at Virginia, therefore, he taught, or was scheduled to teach, most of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century courses, excluding Shakespeare, and had the opportunity to discuss textual criticism in them, as well as in two methodological courses of his own creation.

During these same years several significant scholarly publications of his appeared. The most substantial was the revised version of his dissertation,

published by Princeton University Press in 1940 as Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy, 1587-1642. The 300-page book was appropriately dedicated to his dissertation adviser, Kittredge, whom Bowers further acknowledged in his preface (dated 20 January 1940) for "the searching criticism and the numerous suggestions which he lavished on the earliest version of this work." Bowers also thanked Rollins and two former Princeton colleagues, Hoyt Hudson and Thomas Parrott, among others, for having "read and criticized" the manuscript "in various stages," and he noted that his former wife ("Mrs. Sutphen Bowers") had "typed several early drafts." The book followed the same general plan as the dissertation, but with all the discussions considerably condensed; as before, the examination of individual plays was the heart of the study, and the book managed to consider all but eight or nine of the sixty-five plays discussed in the dissertation. Bowers's treatment began with the code of blood-revenge and the influence of Seneca; he then examined the Hamlet story and Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy and detailed their progeny in four periods (the focus moving from moral hero to villain to propaganda and back to revenge, but now without an ethical dimension); and he ended with the decline of the tradition in the "empty ingenuity and worn-out tragic conventions which had lost all touch with the problems of human life and ethics, and all interest in the human soul." (These closing words of the book are practically the same as those of his dissertation and of its published summary in 1935.)

Although the categorization underlying the structure of the book was criticized by M. C. Bradbrook in an unfavorable assessment in Review of English Studies (1941), and although Una Ellis-Fermor (in Modern Language Review, 1941) felt that Bowers had neglected English scholarship, the book was greeted with enthusiasm by a number of reviewers. Willard Farnham, for instance, commenting in Modern Language Quarterly (1940), felt that such a book "was waiting to be written"; and Hazelton Spencer called it "a better outline of the subject and a better description of its principal features than has hitherto been available" (Modern Language Notes, 1940). One part of Spencer's praise probably gave Bowers particular pleasure: the book, Spencer said, besides being necessary for "every specialist," is one that general readers interested in Shakespeare "should find rewarding and much less difficult than academic monographs are popularly supposed to be." It has indeed continued to have an audience: the Peter Smith firm reprinted it in 1959, and Princeton brought it out in paperback in 1966, at which time John Lawlor called it "a classic contribution to the study of Elizabethan drama" (Critical Quarterly, 1968). More recently George

L. Geckle said that the book "has done as much as any single work of dramatic criticism in this century to establish the 'great tragic theme' of those earlier centuries." For the 1959 reprint Bowers had a note (dated September 1958) printed in the lower margin of page 9, issuing a "warning" to the reader that his discussion had been written before "the derived nature of the First Quarto Hamlet text" was established; for the Princeton paperback (which went through several printings), he appended to the preface a postscript (dated November 1965) noting that he had made minor changes on five pages (those on pages 85-86 handled the Hamlet matter) and declaring that he could not "disown" the book, "however much one may wish to treat one's early ventures in publication as by-blows."

A second notable publication of these years was the edition of The Fary Knight, a previously unpublished play attributed to Thomas Randolph, that Bowers published in 1942 as the second monograph in the series of "University of Virginia Studies." He had begun work on the edition while still at Princeton, for his letter in the Times Literary Supplement on 17 April 1937 stated that he was "engaged on a critical edition of this play," and he had published five articles on Randolph since then. In working on Randolph, Bowers was following in Rollins's foot-steps (Rollins had edited Randolph's The Drinking Academy in 1930, while Bowers was at Harvard), and Bowers dedicated his edition to Rollins. (He also acknowledged the help of Kittredge and Greg, among many others.) The text of the Folger manuscript, as he described it, was a revised version (revised by someone other than Randolph) of what "probably represents Randolph's earliest known attempt at the dramatic form"; and in endnotes he provided numerous parallel passages from other works of Randolph and other writers. Although he had described his project in 1937 as a "critical edition," the text as it was completed four years later (the preface is dated May 1941) was "a word-for-word and line-for-line transcript," with "necessary corrections" placed in footnotes, along with a record of the revisions on the manuscript.

This edition, the first in what would eventually be a long series of editions from Bowers, was uncharacteristic of his later work in presenting a diplomatic reprint as its main text, rather than a critical text incorporating his own emendations. But it did adumbrate his later concerns in its attention to the description of manuscript alterations: the footnotes recording cancellations and interlineations display the earliest stage in an evolving system for dealing with the problem. J. B. Leishman, who reviewed the edition unfavorably in Review of English Studies (1944), regarded the attribution to Randolph as "both improbable and

unnecessary" and found the play itself to be of "no literary value" and to hold "little interest of any kind"; the diplomatic transcription, he believed, was carried out with "unnecessary scrupulosity." Alfred Harbage (in Modern Language Notes, 1944) was less severe, but he also was not entirely convinced by the attribution; he was willing to believe, however, that Bowers's "earnest conviction doggedly presented" did establish a "possibility," and he found the editing "meticulously" carried out.

Among Bowers's nine other contributions to scholarly periodicals during these years (besides those on Randolph), two are particularly important for the history of bibliography: his article in The Library of December 1938 on running-titles as bibliographical evidence and his paper on headlines (of which running-titles are a part) read before the English Institute at Columbia University on 9 September 1941. The former was his first major contribution to the methodology of analyzing the physical evidence in books, and the two together, along with a paper by his student Charlton Hinman (also delivered at the 1941 English Institute), established the examination of running-titles as a tool of bibliographical analysis. Running-titles had to be set in type several times in order to be placed at the heads of the several type-pages that would be on the press simultaneously, and sometimes several more were set for use with the type to be printed on the other side of the sheet; but once set, these running-titles were normally reused throughout the printing of a book, and patterns in the recurrence of individual running-titles can reveal facts about the printing process, as Bowers showed. Although the reuse of running-titles had been noticed by A. W. Pollard by at least 1909 (in Shakespeare Folios and Quartos) and had been referred to by several other bibliographers in the intervening years (as Bowers noted), there had been no extensive treatment of its value as bibliographical evidence before Bowers's. Headline analysis has since become one of the basic techniques of bibliographical investigation.

The background of that 1938 article offers some insight into Bowers's bibliographical education—and, indeed, into the passion of his later advocacy of bibliographical research. What happened was that, while still at Princeton, he had published a second brief piece in The Library ("Thomas Dekker: Two Textual Notes," in the December 1937 number), concluding that the Dyce copy of Dekker's The Roaring Girle (1611) contained the later state of the inner forme of sheet I. His conclusion was based on what seemed to be "corrected" readings in the Dyce copy; but it was shown to be faulty by James G. McManaway of the Folger Library in the September 1938 number of The Library, which appeared shortly after Bowers's arrival in Charlottesville. Using running-title

evidence, McManaway demonstrated that, contrary to what the textual evidence seemed to suggest, sheet I in the Dyce copy was in the earlier state. McManaway, six years older than Bowers, was clearly the mentor here, as his first footnote suggested: Bowers learned his lesson and, in his 1941 paper on headlines, said that he still remembered "with considerable ruefulness" his earlier treatment of The Roaring Girle: When Bowers collected this piece in his 1975 Essays, he added a further recollection: "it was this salutary correction of my error (which had been printed) coming on top of W. W. Greg's correction of another bibliographical mistake I had made about Dekker's Magnificent Entertainment that first suggested to me I had better learn something about bibliography if I were going to edit Elizabethan plays" (pp. 205-206). (McManaway's article relayed an additional criticism from Greg—that "Mr. Bowers was ill advised to offer as bibliographical evidence" the long dash on 4 in the Dyce copy, since long dashes and rows of hyphens were used indiscriminately throughout.)

The lasting impression that these corrections made on Bowers is suggested by his commenting on the matter another time in his collected volume: he added a new footnote to the opening essay, referring to the correction of an error he made using "pseudo-critical evidence" in his "first fumbling approach to the text of Thomas Dekker" and concluding, "This and another salutary shock of the same nature assisted me to become a bibliographer" (p. 8). It seems fitting, in the light of Bowers's subsequent major achievement in editing Dekker, that his serious entry into the bibliographical world was occasioned by his earliest publications on Dekker; and it was characteristic of him, feeling rebuked for overlooking bibliographical evidence in his first two appearances in the premier bibliographical journal, to proceed promptly to make himself into an authority on the subject. He did not hesitate to use these two episodes as an example of how easily one can be misled by neglecting physical evidence; and this personal experience no doubt underlay the strength of his drive to promote a broader awareness of analytical bibliography.

Another early instance of such promotion, besides the two articles on headlines, occurred in a 1942 omnibus review of eight books for Modern Language Notes. In the course of discussing Clare Howard's edition of The Poems of Sir John Davies, Bowers wrote,

This passage, significant for its date, shows Bowers's early perception of neglected bibliographical issues; the problem of the variant forme in a facsimile edition was a subject that he and Charlton Hinman were to confront in detail later on. The early 1940s may have seemed to him at the time as "these bibliographical days"; but after the war the days would become much more bibliographical, in no small part because of his own activities.

In these early years in Charlottesville, Bowers became acquainted with Nancy Hale, another New Englander transplanted to Virginia.

She was a member of an illustrious family: Nathan Hale, the Revolutionary patriot, was the great-uncle of her grandfather (she later said—in New England Discovery [1963]—that as she grew up the American Revolution seemed "almost a family affair"); Harriet Beecher Stowe was her great-great-aunt; Edward Everett, president of Harvard, was her great-great-uncle; Lucretia Peabody Hale, author of The Peterkin Papers, was her great-aunt; Edward Everett Hale, prominent minister and author of "The Man without a Country," was her grandfather; and her parents, Philip Leslie Hale and Lilian Westcott Hale, were both well-known painters (her mother was a particularly successful portrait painter; her father, whose work was included in the 1913 Armory Show, also wrote art criticism and taught at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts). By the time Bowers met her, Nancy Hale (who was three years younger than Bowers, having been born on 6 May 1908) had already published two novels and a collection of short stories, and she was trying to finish a long third novel while raising two sons and dealing with the deterioration of her second marriage, a situation that led to a breakdown and a period of Jungian analysis. (Both her marriages had been to Virginians, first to Taylor Hardin in 1928 and then to the novelist Charles Wertenbaker in 1937, though her years with Hardin were spent in New York, where she worked for Vogue, Vanity Fair, and the Times—her few months on the Times in 1935 making her only the fourth woman in fifty years to be hired as a city-room reporter there.) She and Bowers had more in common than their New England background and the brevity of their residence in Charlottesville: both had experienced marital difficulties recently, and both were passionately dedicated to their writing. They were married on 16 March 1942 (by Bowers's landlord, a minister), and the marriage proved to be a perfect, and lifetime, match. They respected one another's work, and their relationship provided the kind of mutual support that enabled them both to be productive.

The year 1942 was eventful for both of them, and not only because of their marriage. Her ambitious novel so long in process, The Prodigal Women, was published to great acclaim and became a best-seller; and he entered into military duty. Before Pearl Harbor, Bowers had been given secret instruction as a cryptanalyst in a naval communications intelligence group being formed at the university, and he was now asked to supervise an intelligence unit working on deciphering enemy codes. As a Lieutenant (junior grade) in the United States Naval Reserve, he moved to Washington (a hundred twenty miles away)—to 3727 McKinley Street, N.W.—with his new family that included Nancy Hale's two sons, Mark Hardin (born 1930) and William Wertenbaker (born 1938).

(During their Washington years she wrote promotional pieces for the Treasury Department.) Bowers threw himself into the work with characteristic enthusiasm and energy, and he was eventually promoted to Lieutenant Commander. One story of his wartime activity has been well recounted by E. D. Hirsch (in his memorial resolution for Bowers at the University of Virginia faculty meeting on 23 April 1991): A concern with sleep was understandable, since the work was scheduled on a twenty-four-hour watch system, in which the time of each individual's eight-hour shift changed every three days. For Bowers the excitement of the search made up for the disruptive effects of this plan; and after the war he would describe the exhilaration that came when the solution of a code with scrambled five-digit sets finally fell into place and he realized that he had learned the location of a Japanese warship.

The group assembled in the Naval Communications Annex at Ward Circle was remarkable—a "dismayingly bright bunch," in the words of William H. Bond (who said that in odd moments they would engage in such activities as "playing blindfold chess"). The unit included Archibald Hill and William Weedon from the University of Virginia (English and philosophy), Richmond Lattimore (the classicist from Bryn Mawr), Samuel Thorne (the legal historian, then at Northwestern), Walter Rideout (then a teaching assistant at Harvard), and Stephen Parrish (who had just graduated from the University of Illinois), among others. But from the point of view of bibliographical history, the most important fact is that the group also included Giles Dawson and Ray O. Hummel of the Folger Library staff, and William H. Bond and Charlton Hinman, who had been Folger Research Fellows together in 1941-42. Bond, later to head the Houghton Library, was then a student of Rollins's at Harvard; he had become interested in bibliographical analysis while at the Folger and had written a pioneering article on half-sheet imposition (published in the September-December 1941 number of The Library). Hinman had been Bowers's first dissertation student (earning

a Ph.D. in 1941) and had "with great originality pushed ahead" in developing techniques for analytical bibliography (to use Bowers's words at the 1941 English Institute). The method followed in the intelligence unit for comparing successive photographs of enemy fortifications, to see whether changes had been made, gave Hinman the idea for a machine to facilitate collating the texts of copies of books from the same typesetting—a machine put together, as Bond described it, "from bits taken from Giles Dawson's son's Erector set, two slide projectors, and sundry electric motors, mirrors, etc." After the war, he developed into a more sophisticated form what came to be known as the Hinman Collator and used it to compare copies of the Shakespeare First Folio at the Folger Library.

It seems appropriate that several of the scholars interested in analytical bibliography after the war, including the two leaders of the field (Bowers and Hinman), spent their wartime years performing cryptanalytic work together, for the goal of both activities is to find meaningful patterns in what at first seem to be chaotic data, and the bent of mind required for both is obviously similar. (Indeed, in a letter of 22 October 1985, Bowers referred to "breaking the code of the two different systems of compositor marking" in two of Hawthorne's books.) Bowers's wartime training doubtless gave stimulus to his postwar bibliographical research, and it certainly showed him the excitement that can reward the indefatigable analysis of details. When the war was over, in 1945, to returned to Charlottesville and began the steady building of what was to become one of the most distinguished and influential careers in the history of American scholarship.

II

Bowers was forty at the end of the war, and was almost at the midpoint of his life. The four preceding decades had been preparatory, on both a personal and a professional level, for the extraordinary fulfillment—on both levels—that came to him in the following four decades. Once back from Washington, he wasted no time in making a new beginning, pushing ahead in the bibliographical studies that had captured his attention before the war; and in 1948 and 1949 he was responsible for two publications that permanently altered the course of bibliography. The first was a volume of bibliographical essays and notes, edited by him, called Papers of the Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia. The Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia had been formed in February 1947, with the collector Chalmers L. Gemmill as

president, Bowers as vice-president, and the University's rare-book librarian, John Cook Wyllie, as secretary-treasurer, in order "to foster [in the words of its constitution] an interest in books (including books in manuscript), maps, printing, and bibliography." Bowers had himself read the first paper before the Society at its inaugural meeting on 26 February 1947, a paper entitled "Some Problems and Practices in Bibliographical Descriptions of Modern Authors"; in it he stressed the need for a more scholarly approach in this area and praised the work of Michael Sadleir, Percy Muir, and Jacob Blanck. By late 1948 a dozen papers had been read by speakers from Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, and Washington, as well as from Charlottesville (and many of the papers had been published in mimeographed form). Among the speakers were Charlton Hinman (on why the Folger Shakespeare Library has so many copies of the Shakespeare First Folio), Harold Tribolet (the Chicago bookbinder), C. William Miller (later the bibliographer of Benjamin Franklin), and Giles Dawson and James G. McManaway of the Folger.

The Society had also published eight numbers of a newsletter (called Secretary's News Sheet), and in the seventh (dated June 1948) this announcement appeared:

At about the same time a flyer was widely distributed, advertising the new publication: a two-leaf fold of Strathmore Pastelle, it showed the title page on its first page and a sample page of text on its third (a handsome layout in Goudy's Monotype Garamont), with a listing of the contents on its second page and an order blank on its fourth.

The volume that appeared at the end of the year (two hundred pages, printed in December at the William Byrd Press, Richmond, and bound in heavy white paper) contained eleven articles and six "notes" and set the pattern for the volumes that were to follow. The pieces ranged widely (from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century) and were contributed

both by established scholars (such as Curt F. Bühler, the incunabulist of the Pierpont Morgan Library) and by young assistant professors (like C. William Miller and Allan H. Stevenson) and even graduate students, including several from Virginia (such as James S. Steck, George Walton Williams, and Philip Williams). Bowers was clearly not concerned with the stature of the contributors, as long as their articles met his standards, and through this group of articles he was making the statement that he was particularly interested in work that explored new areas of analytical bibliography. The volume contained the first of Allan Stevenson's brilliant expositions of the uses of paper as bibliographical evidence (two years Bowers's senior, Stevenson had published four previous articles, all on James Shirley); Curt Bühler's piece was an experiment in applying Bowers's and Hinman's recent work on headlines to incunabula; and there were three forward-looking analytical studies dealing with the Renaissance—Philip Williams's examination of spelling to identify compositors, James Steck's statement of the usefulness of center rules as bibliographical evidence, and Bowers's own explanation of the role of headline evidence in determining half-sheet imposition. The volume was enthusiastically reviewed (in Modern Language Quarterly, 1951) by R. C. Bald, who accurately assessed the significance of its publication: He added—also correctly as it turned out—that the volume "is almost certainly the forerunner of a distinguished series."

Although The Library had already shown its hospitality to the kind of analytical article that characterized Bowers's publication, there was no doubt that Bowers was staking out this area as a particular concern, and succeeding volumes confirmed the fact. The second one, bearing the now familiar title Studies in Bibliography (the original title remaining as a subtitle), contained as its lead article an investigation by William

B. Todd of the early editions and issues of Matthew Lewis's The Monk. This article (deriving from a talk before the Society on 17 December 1948, while he was writing a pioneering University of Chicago dissertation) was Todd's first publication, the first of his many new applications of analytical bibliography to eighteenth-century English books. The volume also included another analytical piece by Philip Williams (who had just received his Ph.D. under Bowers's supervision) and an essay by Bowers himself on the use of type-page width as a reflection of the compositor's stick and therefore as an initial test for identifying the stints of different compositors. The Times Literary Supplement (London) declared (on 14 July 1950) that, with this volume, the Society "firmly establishes its sponsorship of a journal which should be on the shelves of every great reference library."

It was the next volume, however, that really made Studies (or "SB," as it was also called) a force in the scholarly world. The third volume, dated 1950 and labeled as for "1950-1951" (and consisting of over three hundred pages), presented a dozen major articles by a roster of contributors that in retrospect appears an honor roll: R. C. Bald (then at Cornell), W. W. Greg (just knighted the previous June), Archibald A. Hill (who had been at Virginia during Bowers's early years there), Curt F. Bühler, Ernst Kyriss (the great German scholar of bookbindings), Philip Williams, Charlton Hinman, C. William Miller, William B. Todd, Rollo G. Silver (who was to become the most distinguished historian of American printing), J. Albert Robbins, and Bowers himself (with an important essay on "Some Relations of Bibliography to Editorial Problems"). Bowers's energetic and astute solicitation of articles, demonstrated so often in the ensuing years, was illustrated here by the presence of four significant papers from the English Institute of 1949—those of Bald, Greg, and Hill, as well as his own. Contemporary readers could not have known that Greg's essay, "The Rationale of Copy-Text," would become one of the most seminal papers in the history of English scholarship, the point of departure, and also sometimes of contention, for textual critics throughout the next half-century. But surely those early readers shared with the anonymous reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement for 23 March 1951 (in fact, John Carter) the view that this volume "must take its place in the first rank of such publications anywhere in the world."

With the fourth volume (1951), appearing in hard cover (paper-covered boards) with paper labels on the spine and front cover, Studies assumed the elegant look that was to continue through 1966 (when stamping replaced the labels). With more work by Stevenson, Todd,

Bühler, and Bowers himself, and with articles by G. I. Duthie, James G. McManaway, and Giles E. Dawson, this volume continued to feature bibliographical analysis and textual criticism, especially as applied to Renaissance books; and the reputation of Studies in this area was reinforced by the repeated appearances, over the next fifteen years, of John Russell Brown, I. B. Cauthen, Jr., Charlton Hinman, Cyrus Hoy, Harold Jenkins, Robert K. Turner, Jr., Alice Walker, and George Walton Williams, among others—though there were also distinguished contributions in other fields. The sense one had in examining these early volumes was effectively caught by Philip Edwards in his review of the fifth volume: "Professor Fredson Bowers has created a new aristocracy in the world of bibliography, and the works he has here collected (so often revealing his own inspiration) have that kind of energy and sense of discovery which moved the Bibliographical Society in the days of Pollard, Greg, and McKerrow" (Shakespeare Quarterly, 1953).

Allusion to illustrious English precedents was again present when Studies reached its twentieth volume (dated 1967). Frank Francis, director of the British Museum and immediate past president of the Bibliographical Society in London, contributed a foreword that recognized the inspiration drawn by Bowers from the work of the English society. The Virginia organization, he said, had been formed by "a group of dedicated individuals banded together"—wording reminiscent of his phrase "a sense of common adventure," which he had used (in the London society's 1945 jubilee volume) to describe the early days of the older society. But "in this case," Francis added, a journal "sprang into being full-grown and fully armed, like Minerva from the head of Jupiter, whose thunderbolts she wielded from time to time." The identity of Jupiter was obvious: "the Society with the prestige it now enjoys and the great success it has had is substantially the image of its Editor, whose industry and monumental achievements in analytical bibliography are the admiration of bibliographers." Another foreword by Edgar F. Shannon, Jr., president of the University of Virginia, showed that the renown of Studies was celebrated at home as well as abroad. And the fame of Studies prompted a full-page anniversary notice in the Times Literary Supplement headed "Bibliography and Dr. Bowers" (27 April 1967), recalling the time when the first volume "came forth to astonish all the bibliographers of Europe."

The centrality of Studies, evident from its continued publication of pioneering work, was further suggested by the inclusion, beginning with the third volume, of a series of annual checklists of bibliographical scholarship; and, in turn, those lists—with major sections entitled "Printing,

Publishing, Bibliographical and Textual Scholarship"—helped to promote one of Bowers's goals for the journal by taking for granted the integral relationship among conventional studies of printing and publishing history, the newer and rapidly developing approaches of analytical bibliography, and investigations of textual problems. (Bowers discontinued these checklists with the one covering 1972 because of the duplication that would theoretically have resulted from the expansion of the Dutch publication ABHB: The Annual Bibliography of the History of the Printed Book and Libraries to include American scholarship as of 1973; but ironically much of the analytical and textual work of the kind that had been listed in Studies was not regarded by the editors of ABHB as within its scope—an indication that Bowers's view of bibliography as a field was not yet widely understood.)

One glimpse behind the scenes in the early years of Studies is afforded by Bowers's reply to the Times Literary Supplement's review of the fourth volume (on 7 March 1952): the reviewer lamented the paucity of contributions dealing with the post-1800 period in all bibliographical journals, and Bowers replied (on 9 May 1952) that he was conscious of this "imbalance," that the five articles and ten notes on this period thus far published in Studies "represent the total number submitted to us," and that he had not been able to secure more "by personal solicitation." The solicitation of material for Studies was one of Bowers's dominant preoccupations for the rest of his life: he never missed an opportunity to ask the authors of papers he heard and admired at conferences if they would let Studies print their work, and when he met or learned of scholars whose research sounded promising, he not only encouraged them to think of Studies but also often gave them detailed suggestions. His continuous solicitation of articles is amusingly epitomized by a note in his 1975 volume of collected essays: in a new footnote appended to a sentence (written in 1941) on the possibility of using headlines to detect page-by-page (rather than forme-by-forme) printing, he wrote, "For reasons that escape me, I never have pursued this promising lead. Perhaps some interested bibliographer will have a look at the problem (and let me publish his results in SB . . .)" (p. 207). Even in his collected essays, he could not resist the urge to stir up contributions. For good reason, Studies was close to his heart, and he knew that the maintenance of a first-rate journal requires the editor's unceasing attention. As one thinks about the progress of his life, and the many projects that he was involved in at any given time, one should remember that a constant in the background, from 1948 on, was all the activity connected with the annual production of Studies.

The other major bibliographical event of the late 1940s, besides the inauguration of Studies in Bibliography, was the publication by Princeton University Press in 1949 of Bowers's Principles of Bibliographical Description, one of the great books in the history of bibliography (indeed, of scholarship generally). Many years later he wrote (in a letter on 22 October 1985) that "the Principles was, or now seems, almost an accident." The reason was that it emerged as a by-product of his major research endeavor at this time (one that he continued to work on, whenever time allowed, for the rest of his life)—a descriptive bibliography of the English printed drama from 1660 to 1700. The first volume of W. W. Greg's magisterial A Bibliography of the English Printed Drama to the Restoration had been published in 1939; whether Bowers before the war conceived the idea of extending Greg's work through 1700 is not clear, but after the war (at least by early 1946) he began research for the project. He identified himself in the first volume of Studies in Bibliography as "writing a descriptive bibliography of the post-Restoration English Drama 1660-1700" (one should note that at this early date he was speaking of "writing" a bibliography, for he continued to emphasize that the kind of bibliography he was concerned with was a genre of writing, not something that one "compiles"—as he specifically pointed out in a footnote to his 1948 article in the Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America [PBSA]). His pieces in the first two volumes of Studies (1948-49) drew their examples from Restoration drama, and in a footnote in the second volume he acknowledged grants for this undertaking from the Research Council of the Richmond Area University Center and the Research Committee of the University of Virginia. One of the first results of his work on Restoration drama was A Supplement to the Woodward and McManaway Check List of English Plays 1641-1700, which he published as a 22-page pamphlet through the Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia in 1949. If he was to write a descriptive bibliography, he had to decide on the principles and procedures to be followed; as he said in 1985, "The state of affairs was a mess, and from starting the play examinations and recording, I began to see that I could learn enough, with some special reading, to begin to put some order into a mushy situation."

The required reading at that time, besides R. B. McKerrow's Introduction to Bibliography for Literary Students (1927), was Greg's "A Formulary of Collation" in The Library for March 1934, slightly supplemented by his "Provisional Memoranda" in the 1939 volume of his Bibliography. The first published results of Bowers's thought about the situation were published in PBSA in 1947 and 1948: the first essay

(in the Fourth Quarter 1947 number), "Criteria for Classifying Hand-Printed Books as Issues and Variant States," attempted to clarify McKerrow's discussion by emphasizing the importance of cancel title-leaves as determinants of "issue"; in the second (Third Quarter 1948), called "Certain Basic Problems in Descriptive Bibliography" (read before a meeting of the Bibliographical Society of America on 5 June 1948 in Philadelphia), he talked about the necessity for examining multiple copies of every edition to be described and suggested the standards and procedures that he believed were entailed in such examination (as they had evolved in his own research for the Restoration bibliography). The depth of Bowers's feeling about the kind of work he was embarked on is suggested by the final words of this second article: It was the previous article, however, that aroused more comment. In the Times Literary Supplement for 4 September 1948, John Carter discussed it with his characteristic sympathy for any advance in bibliographical rigor, but he also shrewdly noted that "Professor Bowers will seem to withdraw too far into bibliographical purism for some readers."

One such reader was Paul Dunkin, senior cataloguer at the Folger Shakespeare Library, who responded with an article entitled "The State of the Issue" (PBSA, Third Quarter 1948), largely a defense of the more pragmatic approach of library cataloguers and a plea that the practice of bibliographers should not drift away from that of cataloguers through the adoption of "intricate philosophical distinctions." (Dunkin was to be a persistent critic of Bowers over the next two decades.) Bowers's reply, a three-page letter in the next number of PBSA, is notable, first, for its statement of a principle that he generally adhered to: "one has one's original say in print and should not feel that a formal reply is necessary for every disagreement with one's views which thereupon develops." But he did wish to use the occasion to emphasize the difference between a catalogue and a bibliography, and the letter is a good early example of his firmness in controversy: "I cannot as a bibliographer," he said, "accept the complacent notion that issue is something everybody knows but nobody can define. . . . I feel myself obliged to disagree with any professional cataloguer who argues that descriptive bibliography must

conform to cataloguing standards. . . . such standards are wholly inadequate for the purposes of rigorous bibliographical research." There can be no doubt that Bowers's argument was far more logical than Dunkin's, but this kind of blunt statement was not calculated to promote mutual understanding.

That the practice of bibliographical description was a topic much in the air is further suggested by the fact that the Rosenbach Lectures at the University of Pennsylvania in the spring of 1947 took up the subject, with Curt F. Bühler speaking on incunabula, James G. McManaway on early English literature, and Lawrence C. Wroth on early Americana. Although the published volume of these lectures (entitled Standards of Bibliographical Description) did not appear until about the same time in 1949 as Bowers's Principles, there was some interchange of ideas among the four scholars. Bowers noted in his foreword that he had been given typescripts of the three lectures; McManaway, in turn, read parts of the Principles in typescript, and Bühler acknowledged in print his "deep gratitude" to Bowers, whose "kindness in making his notes readily available" was "an example of scholarly coöperation all too rarely encountered" (p. 45). Bowers and Bühler did not agree on the description of incunables, however. Bühler thought that the Greg-Bowers style of signature collation was not suitable for incunabula; as a result, he said, "the most recent exposition of the Gregian bibliographical shorthand, which it was my privilege to read in manuscript, has left me very dissatisfied" (p. 26). Bowers's third appendix to the Principles specifically set out to respond to Bühler's objections and to show how the formulary could be applied to fifteenth-century books. Bowers was also in touch with Greg at this time. Greg's full statement of the method he employed in his Bibliography had been drafted in 1942, even though it was not published until 1959 (in the fourth volume of his Bibliography), and he was therefore able to read Bowers's typescript in the light of what he had already written. He chose not to insert references to the Principles in his final version, however, and simply noted that "Professor Bowers and I do not always see eye to eye" (p. iv). If his brief public acknowledgment of "helpful criticism and correction" from Bowers was not particularly magnanimous, he was nevertheless privately generous to Bowers in making detailed suggestions; and Bowers handsomely recorded his gratitude in his foreword:

Bowers had clearly by this time come to regard Greg as a model, and he dedicated the book to Greg.

The Principles, as it finally emerged out of these discussions at the end of 1949 (officially published on 30 December), was a 500-page book that concentrated for its first three hundred pages on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century books and then, after relatively short sections on the application of the same procedures to fifteenth- and eighteenth-century books, devoted about a hundred pages to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the major sections, a thorough discussion of classification (into editions, impressions, issues, and states) was followed by recommendations for title-page transcription, signature collation, statements of pagination and contents, and descriptions of typography, illustrations, and (for the later books) paper and publishers' bindings. The book was by far the most detailed treatment the subject had ever received, serving in matters of rationale as well as of procedure to draw together the developments of the previous hundred years and to provide a coherent framework within which to proceed. Any careful reader of this book must be struck by the rigorously logical and powerfully synthesizing mind that it reveals. It takes for granted that descriptive bibliography is a branch of historical scholarship, and it works through in great detail the various situations that bibliographers may have to deal with, illustrating in the process the relevance of artifactual evidence to intellectual history.

In the foreword, Bowers stated one of the aims of descriptive bibliography as providing "an analytical investigation and an ordered arrangement of these physical facts which would serve as the prerequisite for textual criticism"; and in the first section, he explained the relation of physical details to textual and literary criticism, pointing out that the "investigation of the text of a book as it passed through the printer's hands may produce facts of considerable critical importance, particularly as the evidence may turn on the relation of the printed text to the manuscript copy" (p. 15). The interrelations of descriptive bibliography with analytical bibliography and textual criticism underlie everything that is said (and are implied by the statement on the dust jacket that the book "is intended to supplement and act as a companion piece to McKerrow's well-known Introduction to Bibliography"). The book fully deserves to be called magisterial, but its author took a more limited satisfaction in it than one might imagine. "It was done," he said (in that 22 October

1985 letter), "under intense time-pressure from Princeton and could have been better if I had not been so pushed. At the time I was reasonably satisfied with most of it as the best I could do at that moment. It is only of late that I have been truly surprised that it turned out to be something of a seminal work." There is no question about its stature: despite a few deficiencies, which Bowers knew were present and which have become more evident in hindsight, it is the basic book in its field, and it is not likely ever to be supplanted. It may have been a by-product of his work on Restoration drama, but it was the book that made him famous in the scholarly world, and deservedly so.

One might expect such a work to have been eagerly welcomed, as it indeed was by some reviewers, but others were repelled by its quantity of technical detail and its unrelenting emphasis on extensive investigation. The reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement (29 September 1950) said concisely what many people apparently believed—that Bowers "seems inclined at times to make a comparatively easy matter difficult by over-elaboration." Herbert J. Davis, not an unsympathetic reader by any means, raised a similar point much more thoughtfully (in Year's Work in English Studies for 1949): Bowers, he said, "bravely" attempted to answer all questions, but the "danger of such elaboration is that it may so widen the division between the bibliographer and the student of literature that it will be impossible even for the textual critic to use without difficulty some of the technical devices now employed in the analysis of the physical make-up of a book." On his third page, Bowers acknowledged, "I am conscious of attempting to set a standard for descriptive bibliography which is not customarily thought to be necessary and hence has been seldom observed." The system he set forth was actually not very complex, not nearly as formidable as people often seemed to think; but the sheer size of his book, the result of his thoroughness, unfortunately encouraged the perception of descriptive bibliography as an arcane specialty.

When Bowers wrote, descriptive bibliography was at least taken seriously for books from the first few centuries of printing, and the Principles was the culmination of the English tradition of studying book structure, a tradition that stemmed from Henry Bradshaw, librarian of Cambridge University from 1867 to 1886. But another English tradition had grown up in the late nineteenth century, as collectors began to consider the literature of their own century worth collecting: the production of "author bibliographies" that were actually simple listings intended to enable collectors to identify the "first editions" of the authors they wished to pursue. Although by 1949 several of the bibliographies of

nineteenth- and twentieth-century authors were somewhat more elaborate, there was still a prevalent feeling that the detail required for older books was not necessary for machine-printed books: there was still a split between the scholarly description of the structure of the artifacts called books and the identification of "modern first editions" for collectors. Bowers addressed this problem in the introductory chapter to his discussion of nineteenth- and twentieth-century books: in no uncertain terms, he pointed out that for books of these centuries "little has been done of a quality which can bear comparison with work devoted to books printed on the hand press" (p. 356). "Bibliographical study," he said, "is essentially a continuous operation, and truly scholarly investigation of modern books can be engaged in only by those writers who are conversant with the methods of research developed for earlier books" (p. 365). He went on to say, "The requirements of collectors cannot be neglected, but these are fully met as by-products of the work and should not be its sole reason for existence" (p. 366). A few earlier bibliographers, notably Michael Sadleir, had understood this point, but in general the treatment of modern books was dominated by a tradition that did not recognize the relations between collecting and scholarship.

It is not surprising, therefore, that Bowers's approach and style provoked a considerable amount of resistance. John Carter, generally sympathetic with Bowers's aims, put the matter astutely in his 1951 Windsor Lecture at the University of Illinois (printed in Nineteenth-Century English Books, 1952): "here is a powerful—indeed an autocratic—intelligence, addicted to formula and impatient of imprecision, at large in an area whose bibliography is still in a highly fluid, and therefore vulnerable, state" (p. 80). (Eighteen years later, when presenting Bowers with the Bibliographical Society's Gold Medal, Carter called him "the first man to adapt McKerrovian principles to those bibliographically complex centuries which McKerrow himself never tackled.") The most famous episode illustrating this situation is Geoffrey Keynes's delivery of his Presidential Address before the Bibliographical Society in London on 17 March 1953 (printed in The Library the same year). At that time Keynes had published the first eight of his well-known bibliographies, but he did not greet the Principles as a helpful guide; rather, he announced that the book was responsible for "the shadow which seems in recent years to have descended over our amiable bibliographical discipline as we have conceived it to be." The publication of the Principles (a "remarkable and, indeed, splendid book") was, he said, "an event of shattering importance to the little world of bibliography, because it brought home to our consciousness the fact that what we had thought

in our innocence was a pleasant, if sometimes exacting, pastime, was in fact a prime example of 'pure scholarship', to be pursued with the mind of a detective, the spiritual temperature of an iceberg, and the precision of a machine."

Nothing could have revealed more dramatically the state of descriptive bibliography than for the president of the society that had been responsible for establishing bibliography as a scholarly field to complain about the Principles for being too scholarly. In his autobiography, The Gates of Memory (1981), Keynes described the event:

What Keynes did not say is that the discussion period had begun with the silence of embarrassment and that Bowers (who was sitting between John Crow and William B. Todd) spoke only after Crow had whispered to him that everyone was waiting for him to break the silence. Bowers's own version of this episode (in a letter to his former student Matthew J. Bruccoli on 7 February 1970) was that John Hayward gave Keynes "an almost embarrassing going over at his Presidential Address . . ., at which I was present smiling like a Cheshire cat, but keeping my mouth shut except to compliment Keynes on the felicity of his title." (Bowers, who was in England the entire year of 1952-53 on a Fulbright Fellowship, had actually presented his views from the same platform four months earlier, on 18 November 1952, when he addressed the Society on "Purposes of Descriptive Bibliography, with Some Remarks on Methods," elaborating the implications of his thesis that "bibliography is properly an advanced form of independent scholarship.") The graciousness of Bowers's remark following Keynes's address was typical of his courtesy in social situations; but he expressed his real opinion on other occasions, as when, nearly six years later, he called the attitude represented by that address "the very reverse of scholarly" (in his Kansas lecture "The Bibliographical Way").

Keynes's odd belief that an emphasis on rigor and precision was somehow anti-humanistic and his fear that bibliography was tending to become an end in itself are two concerns that, illogical as they are, Bowers's book has continued to provoke, for the reluctance to see descriptive bibliography as a branch of historical study has been curiously persistent. Thus the Principles, though now an established classic to which many people turn with some knowledge of what they will find there, still has the power to startle other people, revealing to the open-minded the relevance for cultural history of examining books as artifacts. Within a year of its publication, according to Lewis Leary (in his review in South Atlantic Quarterly in 1951), the book was "an inspired revelation for a crusading band of young converts," and this process continues. Leary presciently stated that the book was "one of the most important and, implicitly, one of the most provocative volumes produced by literary scholarship within our generation."

During the writing of the Principles, Bowers was working on a descriptive bibliography of George Sandys, the seventeenth-century English verse-translator and travel-writer who was an official of the Virginia colony in the early 1620s. He had been drawn to Sandys by Richard Beale Davis, who was preparing to write a biography of Sandys (Davis had received a doctorate from Virginia before Bowers's arrival but had taught there in the summers from 1938 through 1942). Bibliographical details from Sandys's books are cited as illustrations about a dozen times in the Principles, and full descriptions of two editions of Sandys's translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses are included among the sample descriptions at the end of the book. The complete Sandys bibliography appeared in print, as a collaboration between Bowers and Davis (although Bowers wrote the descriptions), just a few months after the Principles,

first in the April, May, and June 1950 numbers of the Bulletin of the New York Public Library and then as a separate pamphlet of fifty-four pages.

Bowers thus put his ideas about descriptive bibliography into practice in a full-scale bibliography almost simultaneously with the Principles; but this fact has often gone unnoted because of the modesty of the title, George Sandys: A Bibliographical Catalogue of Printed Editions in England to 1700. In the introduction Bowers explained that "bibliographical catalogue" was chosen for the title rather than "descriptive bibliography" ("which the fullness of the descriptions would ordinarily warrant") because "certain editions were available in too few copies for anything approaching a definitive examination which would reveal all possible variants" and because "a control copy of each edition was not used for direct page for page comparison of the typesetting in each copy examined." Bowers was obviously obliged to follow the stringent standards set forth in the Principles, where he recommended the term "bibliographical catalogue" for "elaborately conceived and executed descriptions . . . when the high requirements of bibliographies have not been completely met either in the number of copies compared or in the method of examination" (p. 5). In the Sandys he said, "It is our hope that the descriptions in this present work are actually definitive, but we cannot speak with the absolute authority which would justify the title of a descriptive bibliography." Stressing this point was a natural element in Bowers's campaign to elevate the status of bibliographical research; but the resulting title has, I think, caused many people seeking a model of bibliographical description not to look into the work. What we actually have in it is Bowers's explicit use of "the full system" set forth in the Principles. As Herbert Davis said in the Year's Work in English Studies (1950), the Sandys exemplified the "fullest requirements of a modern bibliography." It is not only a companion-piece to the Principles but the most extensive work in the genre of bibliographical description that Bowers published in his lifetime (though he did include descriptions in some of his critical editions).

With the Principles off his hands, Bowers was able to concentrate in the early 1950s on two editorial projects—a long-standing one, on Thomas Dekker, and a new one, on Walt Whitman—that were important in their own right and significant in their anticipation of his later work. During 1949, before the Principles was published, he had become convinced of the value of a new approach to Elizabethan editing set forth in an essay Greg was writing on "The Rationale of Copy-Text."

Bowers had solicited the paper for the English Institute conference to be held in September; and, as revised on the basis of Bowers's suggestions, it was read for Greg on that occasion by J. M. Osborn. Besides securing this paper for Studies in Bibliography, Bowers wrote a commentary on it, expanding and clarifying certain points and showing the relevance of the approach to Restoration literature as well. (This piece, "Current Theories of Copy-Text, with an Illustration from Dryden," in fact came out in Modern Philology for August 1950, before Greg's essay had appeared.) From then on, Bowers was the champion of Greg's approach, publicizing it in his lectures and using it as the basis for his own editorial practice.

The essence of Greg's position was that, when there are two or more potentially authoritative editions of a work, the authority for variants in wording ("substantive variants") may well lie in a later edition (if it incorporated revisions by the author), whereas the authority for variants in punctuation and spelling ("accidentals") may well lie in the earliest edition (which is the closest one to the author's manuscript and thus may preserve more of these features of it than any later edition does). Greg was therefore encouraging editors to use their judgment (informed by bibliographical analysis as well as literary sensitivity) in combining features from different documents to produce texts that could be defended as closer to what the authors intended than were the texts of any of the surviving documents. In emphasizing the exercise of editorial judgment, Greg was coming round to an attitude that had been elegantly advocated for classical literature by A. E. Housman half a century earlier. Editors of the modern languages had been more insistent on limiting the role of judgment, though by 1939 McKerrow, in his Prolegomena for the Oxford Shakespeare, had taken a tentative step in the direction that Greg finally moved with decisiveness. (In a rare excursion into bibliographical history, Bowers published in Shakespeare Quarterly in 1955 an essay on "McKerrow's Editorial Principles for Shakespeare Reconsidered," in which he placed McKerrow's position in its historical context and showed how McKerrow was moving to the position that Greg enunciated.) The time was ripe for this kind of move, and conceivably Bowers would have made it without Greg's lead; there is no question, however, that Greg's paper came at the right moment to help Bowers formulate his own position, and there is little doubt that Bowers, in turn, caused Greg's ideas to spread faster than they would have without such energetic support.

By June of 1952 Bowers had completed his work on the first volume of The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, and it was published in

1953 by Cambridge University Press. Its historic status as the first edition to employ Greg's "Rationale" is not proclaimed in the volume itself, and Bowers's quiet and succinct statement of his procedure (ten pages on "The Text of This Edition") does not suggest how momentous it was. For the two Dekker plays that have authoritative second editions, Bowers stated, "I use the methods of recent textual theorists" (citing in a footnote Greg's essay and McKerrow's Prolegomena, along with his own Modern Philology article): In line with this policy, he indicated that he would follow his judgment, and no mechanical rule, in the choice between variants from so-called corrected and uncorrected states of sheets, preferring the "uncorrected" states when the "corrected" variants appeared to be alterations made by a printing-house reader without recourse to the manuscript; and he would alter the accidentals of the first-edition copy-texts sparingly, allowing inconsistencies to remain. (This general statement of editorial rationale was supplemented by textual introductions to the individual plays, setting forth their textual and printing histories, with the help of bibliographical analysis of multiple copies of the original editions.)

The other notable aspect of this edition, besides its use of Greg, was its presentation of the apparatus. Traditionally in scholarly editions a single record of variants and emendations had been placed at the foot of the page, with discursive notes sometimes appended to that listing and sometimes placed at the end. Bowers's thinking about the implications of Greg's rationale and about the convenience of the reader led him to alter this plan: at the foot of the page he noted only his substantive departures from the copy-text, moving the rest of the apparatus to the end of the text and arranging it in several sections (discursive notes, press-variants, alterations of copy-text accidentals, and a "historical collation" of substantive variants in pre-1700 editions—employing throughout two symbols, the wavy dash and the caret, that had been suggested by McKerrow to stand for a repeated word and the absence of punctuation). The importance of the copy-text, and its accidentals, in Greg's

rationale is reflected in this arrangement by the segregation of the two listings of copy-text emendations from the record of other variants, thus making it easier for the reader to focus on the editor's judgments, and indeed to concentrate at will on either the substantives or the accidentals. As Arthur Brown later said of the Dekker, in surveying the research on Renaissance drama since 1900 (Shakespeare Survey, 1961), "Bowers's methods differ in almost every important respect from those of previous editors. He is quite deliberately putting into practice the accumulated theory of fifty years of textual scholarship in this field."

This innovative plan was followed in three more stately volumes, appearing in 1955, 1958, and 1961. In the 2100 pages of the Dekker edition, Bowers provided a model for the twentieth-century editing of Elizabethan drama, illustrating the application of the latest developments in analytical bibliography and editorial thinking. This achievement naturally brought him praise; but there was criticism, too, largely occasioned by his decision to confine his introductions and annotations strictly to textual matters. In the first volume, he announced, "The explanatory notes in these volumes are not intended as elucidations of the text but only as discussions of specific emendation, or of refusal to emend." Many readers may not have grasped the full import of this statement at first, accustomed as they were to find historical and literary annotation in editions. The absence of such notes led a number of people (including Greg in Review of English Studies in 1959) to describe the edition as "austere." Arthur Brown, reviewing the first volume for The Library (1954), said, "Austerity is perhaps the keynote of the work." Recognizing that "this is really the first time that a major Elizabethan dramatist other than Shakespeare or Jonson has been edited with present-day disciplines," Brown felt it "desirable to consider what interests are best served by these methods." He questioned whether bibliographically minded scholars would not wish to have more details than were provided, while general readers might prefer to exchange some of those details for historical commentary.

Bowers replied in a lengthy letter published the following year, making clear that from the beginning Cambridge had planned to publish one or two volumes of critical introductions and commentary by another scholar. (Although he did not say so here, that other scholar was John Crow. Robert K. Turner, Jr., later conjectured that the Syndics of Cambridge University Press may have been reluctant to publish an edition by "a relatively unknown American" without a British scholar involved. In any case, the decision—whoever made it—to include only textual commentary in the text volumes set a pattern for Bowers's later

editions. Four volumes of commentary for the Dekker were eventually published in 1980 by Bowers's former student Cyrus Hoy.) Bowers also took the occasion to restate the functions of a critical edition (which, as he pointed out, do not include serving as a substitute for original editions or facsimiles), and in the process he showed his skill in debate: Seven years later, after publication of the fourth volume, Brown praised the whole edition for having set "a new and very high standard for future work of this kind"—but added, "however much an editor may dislike the principles upon which Professor Bowers has worked" (The Library, 1962). A bibliographer such as Allan Stevenson, on the other hand, naturally liked the approach and found that the "total effect" of Bowers's textual introductions was "a fuller view of printing-house practice" (Shakespeare Quarterly, 1956). And John Crow (remarking that Bowers's "practical work is as good as his theoretical") felt that the textual statement could be "taken as model by all future editors of early plays" (Year's Work in English Studies, 1953). In retrospect it is surprising that so little immediate attention was paid to the implications of Greg's rationale (which favored dramatists' private intentions over the texts of performances) and that the absence of explanatory commentary proved such a stumbling-block. But it is easy to see why the Times Literary Supplement (27 October 1961) called the edition "a major achievement."

Bowers's other editorial project of the fifties began in early September 1951 when C. Waller Barrett, the great collector of American literature who lived in the country not far from Charlottesville, showed him "a thick leather case packed full with autograph manuscripts by Walt Whitman" (as Bowers put it in his second Sandars lecture). These papers (the largest surviving block of Whitman manuscripts) consisted of the final handwritten drafts of some eighty poems prepared for the third edition of Leaves of Grass in 1860, including a large proportion of the new poems to be added to that edition. Bowers admitted the "drudgery" involved in working through the physical evidence and transcribing the texts, but he found it "fascinating" because he was able—through an analysis of the paper and its treatment—to shed light on the dating of these poems. He called his analysis "chiefly 'bibliographical,' with only

occasional notice of literary and critical matters outside of textual considerations"; the purpose of the volume, published by the University of Chicago Press in 1955 and dedicated to James Southall Wilson, was to offer "full texts," leaving to others the pursuit of "the critical possibilities which these manuscripts open up for the study of Whitman as a conscious artist" (although he explored a few of them himself two years later in his second Sandars lecture). After an extensive analytical and historical introduction (called "a masterpiece of its kind" by H. Lüdeke in English Studies, 1958), the edition consisted of parallel texts: the left-hand page of each opening presented a "diplomatic" (i.e., literal and unaltered) transcription of the final manuscript texts (with footnotes recording the manuscript revisions that preceded those texts), and the right-hand page printed the corresponding texts as they appeared in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass. Bowers's description of the manuscript revisions, consisting of straightforward statements that do not entail symbols, follow essentially the same pattern as those he had used in The Fary Knight and was to employ in the Hawthorne edition. He kept thinking about the problem of recording manuscript alterations throughout his career and later developed a different plan; but the Whitman volume represents the full working-out of his original approach and foreshadows—both in this respect and in its nineteenth-century American subject—his extensive editing of American authors in the last three decades of his life. It was as important in its way as the Dekker edition, for it brought a new level of editorial scholarship to the study of American authors—and at a time when there were stirrings of interest among scholars of American literature in the organizing of full-scale editions of major American authors. Gay Wilson Allen, whose biography of Whitman appeared the same year as Bowers's edition and with whom Bowers had a mutually beneficial correspondence, was correct to say (in Modern Language Quarterly, 1956) that Bowers's work "initiates a new stage of Whitman scholarship and is likely to have far-reaching consequences."

By the early 1950s, with the Principles published and with Studies in Bibliography and the Dekker edition well launched, Bowers was recognized—in the words of John Carter's 1951 Windsor Lecture—as "the most energetic and wide-ranging of contemporary bibliographical theorists" (p. 79). He was accordingly invited, during that decade, to deliver the three most prestigious series of bibliographical lectures in the English-speaking world. First came the lectures presented under the A. S. W. Rosenbach Fellowship in Bibliography (founded 1930) at the

University of Pennsylvania on 21 and 28 April and 5 May 1954, entitled "On Editing Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Dramatists." Then the two English series, the Sandars (founded 1894) and the Lyell (founded 1952) came in successive years at the end of the decade: he was Samuel Sandars Reader in Bibliography at Cambridge University in 1957-58 and delivered three lectures under the title "Textual and Literary Criticism" on 20-22 January 1958 (he was abroad for only two weeks, 18 January to 1 February 1958, between semesters); and in Trinity Term 1959 (he was in England from 5 March to 17 July) he delivered six lectures (on six consecutive Tuesdays: 28 April; 5, 12, 19, 26 May; 2 June) on "Bibliography and Textual Criticism" as the fourth James P. R. Lyell Reader in Bibliography at Oxford (following Neil Ker, W. W. Greg, and Stanley Morison). (One intriguing souvenir of that occasion was a piece of printing produced in Bowers's honor by Herbert Davis's bibliography class on 12-13 March 1959, using the Daniel press at the Bodleian; the text chosen was "The Apologie of William Iaggard," as published in Augustine Vincent's A Discoverie of Errours, 1622, and the class put together two copies of a volume showing various stages in the production of this piece, with a title page reading The Transmission of a Text: An Example Prepared by the Members of the Bibliography Class at the New Bodleian for Fredson Bowers, James P. R. Lyell Reader in Bibliography. This item of Bodleian printing was included in the 1969-70 traveling exhibition "The Bodleian Library and Its Friends" and was described as entry 106 in the published catalogue.) The texts of these three series of lectures resulted in three major books—the last books (other than editions and a students' guide to Hamlet) that he was to publish until he collected his essays in 1975 and 1989. These books provided the theoretical underpinning for his editing, and once he had them in print, making their rationale available for others to use, he concentrated on applying the principles and procedures they set forth to specific editorial tasks.

On Editing Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Dramatists (1955) began with a survey of "The Texts and Their Manuscripts," and the opening paragraph of this first lecture made clear Bowers's emphasis on a reasoned approach to editing. What he opposed was "thoughtless imitation" of method, which "marks the road to sterility"; instead, editors should understand the reasons underlying any prescribed principles and then develop a procedure from "the particular kind of problem" confronting them. Although he specifically dealt with the routes by which Elizabethan plays reached print, his clear insistence on the need for independent thinking (epitomized by his example of Greg, "the

greatest textual critic of our time" [p. 32], being led into "logical difficulties" by conventional assumptions about the role of Shakespeare's foul papers) had applications for all editors. The second lecture, on "The Function of Textual Criticism and Bibliography," dealt with "the kinds of evidence that may be granered from the printing process" and "the problems when multiple documents are preserved for the same text" (p. 34). Textual criticism and bibliography must be joined together in editing, producing what "may be called the biblio-textual method": bibliography, which attacks textual problems "from the mechanical point of view," and nonbibliographical textual criticism, which "works with meanings and literary values," must operate as counter-checks. "Bibliography endeavors to take as much guesswork as possible out of textual criticism, and the literary method endeavors to inform bibliography with value judgments as a check on mechanical probability" (p. 35). The bulk of the lecture, following several pages of these general observations, offered supporting examples from Shakespeare; but the aim of the lecture, like the first one, seems as much to set forth a sound approach for all editorial tasks as to instruct Shakespearean editors in particular.

In the final lecture, "The Method for a Critical Edition," Bowers sketched the recent history of attempts both to restrict and to liberate editorial judgment and took his stand beside Greg:

This passage not only expresses a principle in which Bowers deeply believed but also illustrates his promotional efforts on behalf of the status of editorial work. He went on to elaborate the ways in which his and Greg's emphasis on critical judgment was different from the unprincipled eclecticism of eighteenth-century editors. The demanding new requirements, he realistically observed, were time-consuming enough that "what may be called a definitive text of Shakespeare" (p. 100) was not likely to appear in his lifetime; but he was confident that the piling up of bibliographical facts and the incorporating of them into critical evaluation would bring the editor "as close as mortal man can come to the original truth" (p. 101).

These lectures, though early in his editorial career, foreshadowed the essence of his mature position, and they contained his characteristic mixture of scholarly rigor and promotional enthusiasm. There had been no previous general book-length introduction to the postwar bibliographical approach to editing, and some reviewers welcomed the book as such. J. C. Maxwell, for instance, reviewing it in the Review of English Studies (1957), said, "Few recent books give the reader a comparable sense of being right on the frontier of knowledge." Herbert Davis's review, in Modern Language Notes (1956), was typical of many that Bowers was to receive over the years in that it mentioned "his usual vigor and thoroughness," found his prose style difficult (the lectures are "written by an expert who does not always follow the more plain and easy way"), and combined admiration for Bowers with a trace of suspicion about bibliography ("There is a dangerous fascination in the very pursuit of these elaborate investigations and he is to be congratulated in the way he preserves his critical sense and good judgment"). A similar hint of disapproval is present in C. J. Sisson's generally respectful treatment of Bowers as "the central figure in the present energetic school of research which is represented in the admirable series of Studies in Bibliography" (Modern Language Review, 1956). The most severe criticisms of the book were made by Greg in Shakespeare Quarterly (1956). He objected to Bowers's minimizing of the importance of "foul papers," but he reserved his strongest invective for an attack on Bowers's style, which he regarded as "a parade of technical and pseudo-scientific language" and "a fog of verbiage." After giving numerous examples of "pretentious writing" and of the "shaky syntax" that results from a "lack of precise thinking," he noted that clear writing comes at "the price of constant vigilance and revision" and suggested that Bowers "has taken no less pains to write obscurely." (These comments were no doubt still in Bowers's mind four years later when he wrote, in his obituary of Greg for the American Philosophical Society, that Greg's "sense of outrage at violations of proper standards, and of clear English, could result in devastating criticisms.") When the book was republished in a new printing eleven years after the first (in 1966), with two subsequent lectures

(from the 1962 Shakespeare Jahrbuch and the 1966 SB) added, T. H. Howard-Hill wondered (in Shakespeare Studies, 1968) why some revision to accommodate Greg's strictures had not been undertaken. And E. A. J. Honigmann used the occasion to lament (in The Library, 1968) what seemed to him Bowers's excessive attention to popularizing: "In so far as he writes as a salesman, or a prophet, to convert the unfaithful to 'the bibliographical way', one can applaud. But, since he also happens to be the most influential man in his field, I regret that he is more interested in the hard sell than in the harder reading." Bowers himself saw no difficulty in being both a bibliographical evangelist and a productive scholar, but his reviewers frequently did question the combination. This issue, having surfaced with his first book on editing, refused to go away.

It may in fact have been reinforced by Bowers's choice of subject for his next series of lectures, because the gist of his Sandars Lectures in 1958 was substantially the same as that of the earlier series. The principal differences were the greater range of illustrative examples (since the nominal topic was no longer exclusively Shakespeare) and the greater attention to the role of textual concerns in literary criticism. The first lecture, "Textual Criticism and the Literary Critic," is a most effective polemic, an expert weaving together of instances—from the literature of four centuries—that show how literary critics (and editors) have been misled by failing to investigate the textual history of the works they were concerned with. It deserves to be considered a classic essay: it remains an ideal introduction to the need for textual criticism in the study of literature, if one is approaching literature from the point of view of authorial intention. Bowers's own sense of its effectiveness may be reflected in the fact that he chose it (but not the other two Sandars lectures) for his 1975 volume of collected essays. When the Times Literary Supplement reported on the Sandars series two weeks later (on 7 February 1958), this was the lecture that seems to have influenced most of the comments—such as the title "The Critics Criticized" and the statement that "in spite of the urbanity of approach which one would expect from a visitor from Charlottesville the critics came in for some rough handling." A further sense of the occasion can be gleaned from another comment that remarks on Bowers's "formidable artillery" in criticizing critics:

Bowers's own version of the latter point appeared in his preface to the published volume, Textual and Literary Criticism, which Cambridge University Press published on 28 February 1959, scarcely more than a year after the lectures were delivered: "A few excisions made in deference to the patience of my hearers have been restored for the more leisurely reader."

In that preface he described the contents of the volume as "something of a mixed bag" but stated a unifying "rationale": "Literary criticism is viewed as directly dependent upon expert textual criticism." The second lecture was devoted to Whitman's revisions for the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass (and was based on Bowers's research for his 1955 edition of Whitman's manuscripts); this lecture was called by John Carter, in the Gold Medal citation mentioned earlier, a "fascinating detective story" that "no one who heard it or has read it will forget." And the third lecture, "The New Textual Criticism of Shakespeare," traversed the same ground as the Rosenbach Lectures, though with more detailed coverage of the techniques of compositor analysis (by this time there were more to be covered). The salutary insistence that editing is a form of criticism again had pride of place, as in a notable sentence near the end, in which he aligned himself with his old Harvard teacher: "I should prefer the taste and judgement of a Kittredge (wrong as he sometimes was), and of an Alexander, to the unskilled and therefore unscientific operation of a scientific method as if it were the whole answer to the problem and automatically relieved an editor of the necessity to use his critical judgement in any way" (p. 116). The published volume included a fourth lecture, delivered before the Bibliographical Society in London on 23 January 1958, the day after the last of the Sandars Lectures in Cambridge. "Principle and Practice in the Editing of Early Dramatic Texts" explained the rationale for critical old-spelling editions (that is, those with eclectic unmodernized texts), offering a spirited argument for regarding old-spelling texts not as "specialised scholarship" over the heads of students, but rather as "the normal means of reading the literature of an earlier period." The lecture, and thus the book, ended on this note:

This sentence is a fair example of the Bowers style—impassioned, colorful, blunt, flowing, even breathless.

The polemical tone repeatedly troubled reviewers, as it had earlier bothered some members of the audience. Alice Walker (whose work Bowers respected, as he indicated by publishing it in Studies and by conducting extensive correspondence with her in the 1950s) said in the Review of English Studies (1960), "This book . . . is not, as a whole, agreeable work. The status of bibliography is not increased by belittling other studies which play an essential part in textual criticism and it will fall into disrepute if the claims made for it are exaggerated or ill-founded. . . . it is because the latter part of this book seems to jeopardize the status of bibliography that I must join issue with it." She was herself a skillful user of analytical bibliography, but she felt that it "should not be so much all over the place as in these chapters." Similarly, D. F. McKenzie, who was later to express in detail his distrust of analytical bibliography, complained about the tone: "the manner here adopted towards critics seems more calculated to arouse resentment than to encourage patronage" (The Library, 1959). And Joseph S. M. J. Chang, reviewing the 1966 paperback reprint of the book, believed that "One might find his withering contempt for critics who are not particular about the editions they use less objectionable if it was not so singularly aimed at the students of imagery and ambiguity" (Modern Language Journal, 1968). Chang's own critical predilections made him particularly alert to slights directed at formalist critics, but he was right to call attention to a key passage that revealed Bowers's seeming eagerness to attack the New Criticism:

Although these lines are indeed weakened by the bias they reflect and by the superficiality of the contrast between the literary "act of love" and the New Criticism, they are notable for showing Bowers's sense of literary values; his emphasis on physical evidence sprang from—and was not divorced from—his love of literature and his understanding of the place of literature in human life. Several reviewers emphasized such strengths in the lectures while glancing at what they regarded as shortcomings: Herbert Davis, who thought it "a little odd" that Bowers would need to defend textual criticism at Cambridge, nevertheless considered the defense "splendid and impassioned" (Book Collector, 1959); R. A. Foakes, who quarrelled with Bowers's double advocacy of old-spelling editions for scholars and modernized editions for a general audience, believed that Bowers here "puts compendiously into perspective the significance of his own work, and that of the school of bibliographers he has fostered through his editorship of Studies in Bibliography" (Shakespeare Quarterly, 1960); and Bowers's former student Cyrus Hoy, who found the lectures "polemical in tone," also regarded them "as the definitive account of the function of textual bibliography at the present time" (PBSA, 1959)—a judgment that in retrospect seems correct.

Bowers's ability to disturb his audiences continued unabated in his third series of lectures, the Lyell in 1959—judging from John Crow's comments (in the Spring 1965 Book Collector) on the book that derived from them, Bibliography and Textual Criticism (1964). Crow was an ardent admirer of Bowers's approach, and he therefore was disappointed by adverse audience reaction: "I was mystified," he said, "when, at times during the giving of the lectures, I saw eminent heads being shaken." Even Crow, like almost everyone else, felt that Bowers "seems at times to argue too forcibly" and "to be so anxious to prove the value and virtue of Bibliography that he claims too largely for the good woman"; but he nevertheless found the book "admirable and enthralling," "often difficult" but "never dull." Bowers had worked on these lectures—before and after delivery—as one of his activities during his Guggenheim Fellowship of 1958-59. (He later reported to the Foundation that, in addition to making substantial progress on his major project, his Restoration drama bibliography, he had gone "much deeper" into the text of Dryden, used a fortnight to go over galley proof for the last volume of his Dekker edition, and written the "first draft of a book . . . based on a series of lectures at Oxford." He added, "I think I can say that I was not idle.") But he took a considerable time to complete his preparation of the lectures for publication: the foreword is dated 23 February 1963,

four years after they were delivered (and the book did not come out for another year). He made clear, however, that he did not substantially revise them but added nineteen pages of discursive notes as well as many footnotes referring to recent scholarship. One of the reasons for the delay may have been a desire to make specific page citations of Charlton Hinman's The Printing and Proof-Reading of the First Folio of Shakespeare (1963), but in the end he let his book go to press before published copies of Hinman's book were available. He referred to Hinman's work frequently, however, having read the typescript of it in 1957-58 and, indeed, having followed Hinman's exciting research since the days when Hinman was his student. (He recalled "the various discussions we had . . . about the import of the evidence that he was to consider with such superb originality and clarity"; and thirteen years later, in his obituary of Hinman for the Book Collector, he called Hinman's book "the supreme example in this century of analytical bibliography.") The appearance of Hinman's and Bowers's books in two consecutive years symbolizes their status as the linked monuments of the flourishing postwar period of analytical bibliography.

If Bibliography and Textual Criticism is not the masterpiece that Hinman's book (or Bowers's own earlier Principles) is, it nevertheless has a significant place in bibliographical history. That Bowers himself thought highly of it is suggested by his selecting it (rather than either of the two preceding books) to dedicate to his wife. (The Rosenbach volume had been dedicated to Philip Williams, his former student, who had died on 15 March 1955, while the book was in press; and the Sandars volume carried no dedication.) He later referred to the book as "misunderstood" (in a letter to me on 12 December 1972), and the reason is perhaps not far to seek. Those who wished that Bowers would spend more time on original research were naturally not receptive to what may have seemed a rehashing of points made twice before in book form. Bowers acknowledged in the foreword, "I have made no effort to offer fresh original research except in the final lecture," and he stated explicitly that the lectures "were designed for an informed general audience such as is found in a university." The subject was "method alone," and the examples were "discussed only as illustrations of method." The two preceding series of lectures could be described the same way, and both of them could be said to deal with "the nature of bibliographical thinking." Thus one might uncharitably conclude that this book was mere repetition and fail to understand its different focus.

Bowers reported that his original plan had been a "fuller survey" of

the relationship between bibliography and textual criticism, but what came to interest him more was "the nature of bibliographical evidence as applied to textual problems," his feeling of a need to examine "the way in which the bibliographical mind works." As a result this book is more abstract than the preceding two. One might say—oversimplifying to suggest the general tendencies of the three books—that the earlier two are driven by the illustrative examples, whereas in this one abstract concepts are the driving force; and although all three are concerned with the bibliographical basis of editing, the focus of the first two is clearly on editing, whereas the third one is really about analytical bibliography and its role in working out textual genealogy. What it sets out to do is to explore "the nature of the evidence on which textual bibliography operates, the logical forms of its reasoning, the techniques it uses, and the results it can achieve" (p. 7). The first two lectures treat the first two of these topics (and contain the famous, or perhaps notorious, sentence, "When bibliographical and critical judgement clash, the critic must accept the bibliographical findings and somehow come to terms with them" [p. 29]); the next three lectures take up the third topic by examining "The Interpretation of Evidence" under the heads of "three orders of certainty" ("the demonstrable," "the probable," and "the possible"); and the sixth lecture, offering a case study of "The Copy for the Folio Othello," illustrates the results of bibliographical analysis. The book does not attempt to provide for analytical bibliography what the Principles did for descriptive bibliography, and it is thus not a systematic guide to the techniques of analytical bibliography (as Hinman's work in many ways is, though not intended as a textbook). But what it tries to do is even more basic: to furnish a model for thinking about physical evidence and a framework for evaluating conclusions based on such evidence.

The most searching criticisms this book received came from J. K. Walton and Trevor H. Howard-Hill. Walton (in Shakespeare Survey, 1966), besides responding in detail to Bowers's disagreements with his work on the copy for folio Richard III, complained that Bowers "overrates the role of bibliography in establishing genetic relationship." Although Bowers's enthusiasm did sometimes result in overstatements, I think he would not disagree with Walton's point that "we cannot study the history of a text as we would, say, the history of a fossil," because the transmission of a text from one edition to another requires the intervention of a compositor's mind. Bowers was certainly not claiming to eliminate literary judgments from the analysis of textual relationships,

but the insistent tone of his emphasis on those instances in which physical evidence precluded or limited literary arguments does make understandable the kind of response Walton engaged in, which tended, in its turn, to concentrate on the limitations of physical evidence. Howard-Hill (in Shakespeare Studies, 1968) showed himself to be one of those not entirely happy with Bowers's tendency to spend more time as a spokesman for the field than as a research scholar. His two principal criticisms were that Bowers's interest in discussing bibliographical evidence led him to neglect other kinds of evidence and that his treatment of the logical processes of bibliographical method was "simplistic." In regard to the first, Howard-Hill recognized that Bowers's concern was "only with those problems for which bibliographical analysis has, or pretends to have, some relevance." It is the second criticism that is more serious, because many readers may have shared Howard-Hill's "difficulty in deciding whether a simple text-book of logic would not better have served the novice in these studies, for although Professor Bowers writes of 'bibliographical logic,' reflection assures us that there is nothing peculiar to bibliographical evidence which demands a logical treatment different from that of other disciplines in order to obtain valid conclusions." Bowers's rhetoric was no doubt—as in so many other instances—the culprit, for he obviously knew that he was not proposing a distinct kind of logic. His discussion may indeed seem simplistic to those who are experienced in bibliographical analysis; but he was addressing his remarks to the vast majority of literary scholars (including many editors) who did not (and still today do not) understand what "bibliographical evidence" is or know how to think in terms of such evidence. Bowers's lectures attempted to explain how to apply logic—ordinary logic—to an unfamiliar category of evidence, and therein lies their importance.

When, five years later, D. F. McKenzie published his influential article "Printers of the Mind," he was raising questions that Bowers in these lectures had provided the framework for answering. After citing instances of incautious generalizations based on bibliographical analysis, McKenzie reported "a feeling of mild despondency about the prospects for analytical bibliography." Bowers's open-mindedness is shown by his printing this article in Studies, when he had in effect already replied to it. His Lyell Lectures are founded on an understanding of the risks of inductive reasoning and, at the same time, a recognition of the necessity for it, if the great body of physical evidence hidden in books is to be tapped. That such evidence is sometimes incorrectly interpreted, or inappropriately applied to textual criticism, offers no reason for being

any less excited over the prospects for its use; Bowers's book conveys that excitement while outlining a cautious and responsible approach to bibliographical evidence and its place in scholarly editing.

Bowers's campaign to promote bibliographical and textual studies was carried on in a number of other lectures during the 1950s, in addition to the three major series. Although his lectures were adjusted to fit audiences with varying degrees of bibliographical knowledge, nearly all of them were general treatments of the importance and methodology of bibliographical work, bolstered with numerous illustrations. For example, in one of his earliest bibliographical lectures outside Charlottesville, he spoke on "Bibliography and the University" at the University of Pennsylvania on 13 May 1949; in the fall of that year (9 September 1949) he chose the topic "Some Relations of Bibliography to Editorial Problems" for the English Institute at Columbia University; on 9 May 1952 he addressed a joint meeting in Charlottesville of the Bibliographical Society of America and the Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia on "Bibliography, Pure Bibliography, and Literary Studies"; six months later (18 November 1952), in London, he took up "Purposes of Descriptive Bibliography" before the Bibliographical Society; in the spring of that 1952-53 Fulbright year he delivered a lecture at Bedford College, University of London, on "Shakespeare's Text and the Bibliographical Method" (4 March 1953); in the spring of 1954 he gave the Phi Beta Kappa address at Randolph-Macon College on "Scholarship, Research, and the Undergraduate Teacher"; on 17 September 1954 he addressed the English Institute on "McKerrow's Editorial Principles for Shakespeare Reconsidered"; at the 1957 Modern Language Association meeting in Madison, Wisconsin, he read a paper on "Old-Spelling Editions of Dramatic Texts" (10 September 1957); when the Grolier Club met in Charlottesville (with the Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia) on 25 October 1958, he spoke on "Textual Criticism and the Literary Critics"; and on 14 November 1958 he delivered, at Charlton Hinman's university, the sixth University of Kansas Annual Public Lecture on Books and Bibliography, entitling it "The Bibliographical Way" (published as a pamphlet the next year). Several times during the 1950s he also came to the aid of his own Bibliographical Society, at Virginia, delivering not only the inaugural paper in 1947 but such later ones as "Textual and Literary Study" (9 April 1957) and "The Growth of Whitman's Leaves of Grass as Shown by Its Manuscripts" (10 April 1958).

Most of these lectures were later published, and altogether in the

fifteen years after the war he published some five dozen bibliographical articles, along with nearly two dozen reviews. Among the most significant were two of the earliest, his "Notes on Standing Type in Elizabethan Printing" in Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America in 1946 and "An Examination of the Method of Proof Correction in Lear," in The Library the next year (a paper extended into "Elizabethan Proofing" for the 1948 festschrift for Joseph Quincy Adams and regarded as standard for some years and as "ingenious"—to use Peter Blayney's 1982 adjective, in The Texts of King Lear and Their Origins—even when questioned). Another important piece was "The Problem of the Variant Forme in a Facsimile Edition" (The Library, 1952), which underlay his highly critical review (Modern Philology, 1955) of the Yale facsimile of the Shakespeare First Folio and which set forth questions first addressed in a facsimile in Hinman's Norton Facsimile of the First Folio (1968). One other article that attracted considerable attention was "Hamlet's 'Sullied' or 'Solid' Flesh: A Bibliographical Case-History" in Shakespeare Survey for 1956. Bowers entered the tangled debate over this famous crux in order to point out that the Second Quarto's "sallied" (1.2.129) and "sallies" (2.1.39) were set by different compositors and printed on different presses and thus to "prove on physical evidence" that no connection between the two existed—allowing for the conclusion that both words are correct (i.e., that the meaning in each case is "sully" and that "sally" is an acceptable variant spelling). The article did not end the controversy but from then on played a prominent role in it. His short piece on The Wits in Strickland Gibson's A Bibliography of Francis Kirkman (1949) deserves brief mention as an indication of some of the work that Bowers was doing in connection with his bibliography of Restoration drama: Gibson's preface noted that Bowers was engaged in an examination of Kirkman's piracies and that his chapter on The Wits was a part of an uncompleted larger study.

Although Bowers was primarily recognized for his bibliographical and textual work, he continued to write critical essays and published during this period a dozen of them. One that became particularly well known was "Hamlet as Minister and Scourge" (read in December 1954 at the Shakespeare Section of the Modern Language Association convention and published in PMLA in 1955), which took Hamlet's self-assessment as "scourge and minister" to be his "clearest analysis . . . of his own predicament"; Bowers explained Hamlet's procrastination through an examination of the Elizabethan understanding of "scourge" (the damned agent of private revenge) and "minister" (the divinely appointed agent of public benefaction). Three years later, in the issue of PMLA celebrating

the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Modern Language Association, this article was named as one of the eight most "outstanding and influential" PMLA articles on Shakespeare: one of three anonymous Shakespeare specialists called on for reports named it, describing it as "both very learned and very sensible." Even Greg, who had severely criticized Bowers's style in the Rosenbach Lectures, said that this article "can be read with pleasure." And David Bevington represented many others when, years later, he testified to how "deeply" the essay had influenced his thinking (he is quoted on the jacket of Bowers's 1989 volume of Shakespeare essays).

On 4 March 1959, the day before Bowers arrived in England on his first Guggenheim Fellowship, Greg died at the age of eighty-three, and from that moment Bowers was unquestionably the most prominent bibliographical and textual scholar in the English-speaking world. Bowers's obituary of Greg in The Library was full of warm praise for his "Logical thinking, great thoroughness, and . . . original turn of mind operating on the frontiers of knowledge":

This moving tribute offers an insight into the influence Greg had on Bowers; it can also be taken as a fair statement of the way many scholars since then have felt about Bowers's own presence. As the 1950s ended, Bowers was the leader of his field, having earned that position by a remarkable fifteen years' work that included the writing of a classic book, the founding and editing of a seminal journal, the delivery of three major lecture series, and the production of two landmark editions.

III

As the 1960s began, several changes were about to occur in the routine of the Bowerses' lives together. That routine, as it had developed over the postwar decade and a half, was of course primarily structured by the academic year—though professional duties, inside and outside the university, did not prevent his finding time to judge dog shows, write a column on classical recordings, and participate actively in a stamp club. In the summers Nancy Hale went to live with her mother on Cape

Ann, north of Boston, and Bowers taught at the University of Chicago. Otherwise they generally traveled together, both on trips abroad (usually biennial in the 1960s and 1970s, often lasting only a week or two in the 1960s and three months in the 1970s) and on short excursions for research or lecturing in the United States. A charming photograph of the two of them at one of the Bread Loaf Writers Conferences—where she was an instructor in fiction-writing from 1957 to 1965 and delivered as lectures some of the sprightly and perceptive essays later collected in The Realities of Fiction (1962)—indicated what a striking couple they made. Both were epitomes of graciousness and urbanity, with commanding presences, and seemed taller than they actually were (he was 5'10'', and she was two or three inches shorter); her graying hair was swept upward to form a coiffure that contributed to the regality of her bearing, and his nearly permanent smile, early balding, and rather full and ruddy face, together with his notably erect posture, conveyed an air of authority and of amused worldliness. His flair for the dramatic is suggested by two vignettes of the late 1960s and early 1970s: his entry into a committee room, flinging off his cape and taking snuff in the correct manner (snuff being at this time his substitute for the previously ever-present cigarette in a long holder); and his arrival at an important faculty meeting, fresh from the Farmington Hunt, wearing his riding habit (whereupon his impassioned speech favoring the retention of the foreign-language requirement carried the day). The Bowerses handled themselves with style and were a memorable couple not only on the Charlottesville scene (where they regularly attended the university concert series and participated in social events) but also in academic circles abroad (where they were welcome guests, always remarkably informed about the local cultural and culinary situation). What most altered the pattern of their lives at the beginning of the 1960s were their building a house and his taking on the chairmanship of the English department; a similarly notable shift in the middle of the decade was his giving up his Chicago teaching in favor of summers on Cape Ann.

Through the 1950s the Bowerses' Charlottesville residence was at 2016 Minor Road, a short walk west of the university grounds and north of the football stadium. Glimpses of life there crop up in Nancy Hale's wonderful autobiographical writings. In A New England Girlhood (1958, dedicated to Bowers), she reported, "I live in a house that has no view at all, since our Virginia town is set in a cup in the mountains. . . . However, the inside of my house is charming to look at—dark-green walls downstairs, with white woodwork, and upstairs, lighter

colors. In one bedroom I have a blue paper that reminds me of the paper in my old nursery" (p. 7). A later chapter depicted a typical evening: And in The Life in the Studio (1969), a recollection of Minor Road led to further reflection:

In 1960 the Bowerses decided to build a house in the country, on the land they had purchased over a decade earlier—some fifty acres in the wooded hills about five miles north of the university, a tract that later, when the South Fork Rivanna River Reservoir was created, had over a thousand feet of waterfront. The spot they cleared for building was carefully chosen so that the house—unlike the one on Minor Road "with no view at all"—would have a magnificent prospect of tree-covered rolling terrain, leading the eye onward to the Blue Ridge Mountains in the distance. The two-story stucco house that was constructed had a formal and symmetrical interior, later furnished in dissimilar ways by the two occupants. A central front door led through a vestibule into a large living room, decorated in beiges, golds, and pinks and dominated by the dramatic view, seen through a floor-to-ceiling bay window. At the left end was a fireplace, with two facing sofas in front of it, and beside it a door led to Bowers's study; at the right end was the entrance to the dining room, flanked by folding doors that could be opened to reveal twenty-eight speakers for Bowers's record player, along with

shelves for housing his record collection. Bowers's small bedroom opened off of his study, and over the living room was a suite (sitting room, bedroom, and bath) for his wife. The cell-like appearance of his bedroom (enlivened only by two Cruickshank-style prints) and his congested but relatively colorless study contrasted with her suite, bright with chintz and filled with family mementos and her parents' artwork, as well as her own cluttered desks. The spaces were designed for two writers to work in: as Doug Kamholz, a local reporter, once said, "New stories are written there. Old ones are restored to authors' original intentions."

This house, which the Bowerses named "Woodburn" (but which some of the graduate students—and others—called "the pink palazzo"), was described by Roy Flannagan, Bowers's student in the early 1960s, as "an open neoclassical house that overlooked a vista that would have made Capability Brown proud to have designed it," a place where one could live "an Horatian ideal." One of the early visitors to the house was William Faulkner, who had come to the university in the spring of 1957 under the Balch Program for visiting writers (administered by a committee of which Bowers was a member). Although Faulkner served as writer-in-residence for only two spring semesters, he continued to spend considerable time in Albemarle County until his death in 1962, in order to be near his daughter Jill's family and engage in foxhunting. During the last two years of his life he was present at a number of gatherings at Woodburn and apparently got on well with Nancy Hale—"Miss Nancy," as he called her. (She had supposedly based on him the character Harrington in her 1959 novel, Dear Beast, a book that he read and respected; and she later wrote a revealing memoir of him for the 1 August 1963 number of Vogue.) Well suited to entertaining, Woodburn became the scene of annual departmental picnics and many black-tie dinners as well as a port of call for bibliographers from all over the world.

Shortly after the house was finished, Bowers had more obligation than before (as well as facilities) for professional entertaining, since in the fall of 1961 he became chairman of his department. By that time he had established himself as the mainstay of the Renaissance faculty, a dynamic teacher and a tireless participant in departmental affairs. When he had returned from his wartime service, resuming his teaching in the spring term of 1946, he picked up the courses he had previously taught (in Spenser and Milton, seventeenth-century literature, and non-Shakespearean Renaissance drama, plus the graduate-methods and the bibliography courses) and was made Associate Professor. Promotion to

Professor came only two years later. Throughout the 1950s he taught those same courses, adding from 1953-54 onward the Shakespeare seminar formerly conducted by James Southall Wilson (who retired in 1951) and from 1956-57 the Shakespeare survey. In his memorial resolution for Wilson, Bowers said that Wilson "made Shakespeare live" for "generations of students." But Bowers's own Shakespeare seminar became even more famous, and in his 1989 volume of essays on Shakespeare he described it in detail, beginning with some thoughts on his relationship to Kittredge: Some of the ideas on Hamlet expressed in this class were given a wider audience through the book-length introduction to the play, containing scene-by-scene analyses, that he prepared for 1965 publication in Barnes & Noble's series of "Outline-Guides" for students. His Shakespeare and other literature and bibliography courses won him many followers among the graduate students, including a number who wrote dissertations with him and later became prominent scholars in their own right.

One of those from the early 1950s, Irby B. Cauthen, Jr., has recalled that Bowers's students thought of him as a "master teacher." His clarity in explaining details was all the more effective, Cauthen believes, because he "knew when to switch from a movement through particularities to the larger general intellectual history that would provide the imaginative concept for the passage"—and could show "how literature fit within the vast universe of art and life." His respect for his students was shown in his thoughtful comments on their papers and in his repeated statement, reported by Cauthen, "that what really mattered was not the number of cards bearing his name in the library's card catalogue but his students." This concern for students was well expressed by another of his former dissertation students, George Walton Williams:

Roy Flannagan, still another dissertation student, recently summed up the demands made by Bowers's courses this way: "In his course on Shakespeare's tragedies, I needed to be so sharp for the examination I stood on my head in the hall outside the classroom, just in order to get the blood circulating in my brain, only to get the second-highest grade in the class (after Barbara Mowat): that was the kind of performance he inspired." George L. Geckle, a dissertation student at the same time, remembers Bowers's challenging instructions for the term paper in his Milton course—a six- to seven-thousand-word paper that was "to be original and to solve a problem." Bowers himself met both goals in his Milton lectures, which Geckle describes as "an impressive display that exuded both mastery of his material and true critical authority."

Until his retirement in 1975, he continued—even during his chairmanship—to

teach the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century and the bibliographical courses in varying combinations. In the bibliography course (which, as of 1962-63, came to be called "Introduction to Textual Criticism and Bibliography for the Literary Student"), the range of detailed examples increased to reflect his editorial projects; in 1966-67, for example, it dealt with "textual problems in Marlowe, Fielding, Hawthorne, and Stephen Crane." A memorable picture of Bowers during his chairmanship, as seen by a student in his Shakespeare class, was contributed by Clive Probyn to the group of tributes gathered in 1991 by the Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand: Bowers's considerate attention to students is illustrated—from the same period—by his encouragement of Alexander Theroux. Martin Battestin, who has written an account of Theroux's Charlottesville years for the Review of Contemporary Fiction (1991), reports, "It was Bowers, then in the third year of his famous chairmanship, who saw the promise in Alex, not only admitting him to the graduate program but, by some ingenious creative financing, scraping together money enough to help pay his way" (p. 51).

Bowers's critical reading of dissertations was similarly undiminished during his chairmanship: in the seven years between 1961 and 1968, ten of his students received their doctoral degrees. All told, he directed (or co-directed) dissertations by twenty-eight students at Virginia: Charlton J. K. Hinman (1941), William D. Hull (1941), Irene Mann Rinehart (1942), Alexander W. Allison (1949), John W. McCutchan (1949),

Lawrence G. Starkey (1949), Philip Williams, Jr. (1949), Irby B. Cauthen, Jr. (1951), Marion Hope Hamilton (1952), Dora Jean Ashe (1953), Cyrus H. Hoy (1954), Wallace S. Sanderlin (1955), Elizabeth Brock (1956), George Walton Williams (1957), Robert Kean Turner, Jr. (1958), Matthew J. Bruccoli (1961), Francelia Butler (1963), Brewster S. Ford (1964), Jeanne Addison Masengill (later Roberts, 1964), George L. Geckle (1965), Roy C. Flannagan (1966), Clauston L. Jenkins (1966), William S. Kable (1966), Albert C. Labriola (1966), Herbert R. Blackwell (1967), Joseph L. Simmons (1967), Paul L. Gaston (1970), and Sidney W. Reid (1972). Fifteen of these writers dealt with textual criticism or analytical bibliography (mostly of Renaissance books, but in five instances Restoration, eighteenth-century, or American books were treated), and the other thirteen wrote critical-historical studies, all on Renaissance literature except for one on Dryden and one on Poe.

At the time Bowers assumed the departmental chairmanship in the fall of 1961, he had already come to play an influential role in the department. He had been a force behind the scenes during the chairmanship of his predecessor, Floyd Stovall, and was particularly instrumental in the hiring of new assistant professors. During the summer of 1961 he consulted with the three who were to begin in the fall—Martin C. Battestin, David M. Bevington, and Francis Russell Hart—and worked out new courses for them. At his first meeting in the fall he persuaded the tenured members of the department to allow the nontenured ones to vote, and the new courses were then approved by the larger voting group. He set the tone for his chairmanship at this first meeting by showing not only that he had a vision for the department's future but also that he had the skills of administrative strategy to make it a reality. (Furthermore, he knew how to foster a sense of community: he wrote frequent and detailed letters, for example, to Robert Langbaum, who had joined the department the previous year but was on leave in 1961-62, and he regularly stopped by professors' offices for visits.)

During the next seven years he proceeded to build the department, not previously considered important in the academic world, into one of the top few English departments in the United States. This achievement is testimony to his astute diplomacy in dealing both with the first-rate scholars he wished to attract and with the university administrators from whom funds were needed. (He always paid credit to the president, Edgar Shannon, for selecting English as one of the departments to receive federal funds then available for improving the faculty.) David Levin remembers Bowers's recruiting letters as conveying "in every line" the image of "a decisive man who knew what he wanted for Virginia,

the best faculty he could get. He would try pre-emptive offers, but he did not, like Maynard Mack of Yale at that time, require a firm answer before the first of November." Recently E. D. Hirsch has recalled, The stunning roster of faculty recruited by Bowers included (besides Hirsch) Ralph Cohen, Douglas Day, Hoyt N. Duggan, William Elwood, Irvin Ehrenpreis, Alan Howard, George Garrett, Arthur C. Kirsch, Harold H. Kolb, Jr., V. A. Kolve, Cecil Y. Lang, J. C. Levenson, Peter Taylor, Charles Vandersee, and Anthony Winner. One can understand why Douglas Day called the department "better than excellent . . . superb" and said of it, "There's a kind of electricity in the community . . . something that encourages writing"—a statement chosen by Virginius Dabney for inclusion in his history of the university, where credit is given to Bowers for bringing the situation about (Mr. Jefferson's University [1981], p. 464).

The acquisition of outstanding scholars was not, however, the only aspect of the department's welfare to which Bowers gave energetic attention; one of his primary concerns was the relation of teaching to a graduate program (a subject on which he was becoming increasingly vocal on a national level), and he oversaw the department's successful 1966 application to the Danforth Foundation for the institution of a program for "College Teaching Career Fellows"—a program that (in the words of the proposal) "should serve as a model that will influence educational theory in this country." The achievements of Bowers's chairmanship came at the price of some hard feelings, for his decisiveness was not always seen in a favorable light: George Garrett, for instance, has depicted him running the department with "a heavy hand, if not an iron one" (Whistling in the Dark [1992], p. 155). But to most people the benefits of his chairmanship far outweighed such drawbacks. Testimony to Bowers's lasting influence on the department came in 1980 when the department decided to name its library in his honor; on that occasion V. A. Kolve, then the chairman, wrote to him, "You are not only the Founding Father, so to speak, of what we collectively are; but you remain an important source of the energy and good sense that continues to hold us together."

After seven years in the chairmanship (1961-68), Bowers agreed to

accept the position of Dean of the Faculty. ("A relief, in fact, to be rid of the emotional involvement with building a department," he wrote to Jo Ann Boydston on 24 September 1968.) He brought to this position the same abilities and the same concentration, as many have testified. One of the professors he hired at this time, David Rubin of the French department, remembers his interview well, not merely because Bowers wore riding clothes but because Bowers seemed to have read his mind, understanding precisely why he wanted to move and what he would like to have at Virginia. To those he recruited, Bowers made clear his own belief in the importance of a faculty strong in both research and teaching, and first-class scholars could see—from Bowers's own impressive record of publication and teaching as well as from his conversation—that they were dealing with a kindred spirit. Among his accomplishments during 1968-69 were the expansion of the Religious Studies department (though he had no personal interest in religion) and the establishment of the Environmental Sciences department. Despite his skill at the deanship, he did not have his heart in the job as he did when he was constructing the English department. His energy, though phenomenal, had its limits, and he was increasingly feeling the need to find more time for his editorial projects. Although he had provisionally consented to hold the deanship for two years, he decided to give it up after a single year. E. D. Hirsch has said, "Those who dealt with Dean Bowers—department chairmen and professors alike—soon learned two things about him, that he had tough, demanding standards, and that he was completely fair and disinterested." The same would also be said by most of the hundreds of students who passed through his courses.

One evidence of Bowers's love of teaching was his desire to teach in the summers at the University of Chicago, despite his heavy academic-year schedule and his many extracurricular activities. With Allen Hazen's departure for Columbia in 1948, the University of Chicago English department was left without a bibliographical specialist, and Bowers filled that gap in the summer quarter of 1949 as the Frederic Ives Carpenter Visiting Professor in English. He liked the arrangement, and he returned there for the following fifteen summers, his title changing to Professorial Lecturer in English. Over that long period, he taught much more than bibliography. Besides a course in "Bibliography and the Techniques of Literary Scholarship" and a seminar called "Problems in Bibliographical Analysis," he gave courses at various times in Spenser and pre-1642 English drama and a seminar in the textual criticism of Elizabethan drama. According to Gwin Kolb, who received his Ph.D.

from Chicago and joined the regular departmental faculty the same year as Bowers's first teaching there, his courses were "brilliant triumphs": "Students who came to scoff at his brand of bibliography remained to admire—and to become converts." He undoubtedly saw his Chicago teaching as an opportunity to spread the bibliographical word, and his principal bibliography course was indeed influential, in part because one of the prominent library schools was on campus and a number of future rare-book librarians enrolled in his course. Bowers's influence also traveled through other faculty members: Bernard Weinberg of the Romance Languages department, for example, was interested in Bowers's approach, which thus came to play a role in a series of editions that Weinberg supervised.

The key moment for bibliographical history in Bowers's Chicago summers, however, occurred in the very first one. William B. Todd had just completed his dissertation, entitled "Procedures for Determining the Identity and Order of Certain Eighteenth-Century Editions," and the defense was scheduled for that summer. Bowers was already familiar with the direction of Todd's work from a talk Todd had given in Charlottesville the previous December, and he had scheduled an article of Todd's for the 1949 volume of Studies in Bibliography; but he had not read Todd's detailed study until asked to serve on the examining committee. He naturally recognized the extraordinary importance of Todd's application of analytical techniques to eighteenth-century books; and after an excited reading of the dissertation, he arrived at the defense with many scribbled pages of questions. Bowers's debut at Chicago, in effect, was thus his participation in an animated dialogue with Todd, while the other members of the committee listened in largely uncomprehending silence. When the committee moved into private session, Bowers explained how truly pioneering Todd's work was, opening up a whole area of research, and insisted that Todd's degree be awarded with honors. He then hastened to a telephone and called his editor at the Princeton University Press in order to make a last-minute addition, based on what he had just learned about press figures from Todd's dissertation, to his forthcoming Principles of Bibliographical Description. The "Addendum" on page 321 of the published volume was the result: it referred to Todd's dissertation as the most comprehensive demonstration of the "high value" of press figures in distinguishing impressions, announced that portions of the dissertation would appear in the third volume of Studies in Bibliography, and asserted that henceforth press figures would have to be recorded in descriptive bibliographies.

Over the years Bowers himself directed two dissertations at Chicago,

those of Frederick O. Waller (1958) and Shirley Strum Kenny (1965), both critical editions of plays; and he participated in other departmental affairs as well. His contributions to the department prompted on three different occasions the offer of a full-time position there, and each time he turned it down. But he clearly enjoyed those summers, and his presence in Chicago is memorably described in a letter (10 January 1992) from Gwin Kolb, who with his wife saw Bowers frequently: Among the acquaintances Bowers would have seen in Chicago was Allan Stevenson, whose work he had included in the first volume of Studies: in those years Stevenson was living in the University of Chicago neighborhood. Bowers managed to accomplish some bibliographical research in Chicago, but he rarely traveled up to the Newberry Library, though he did pay occasional visits there to Gertrude Woodward (whose checklist of Restoration drama he had supplemented in 1949). Despite the satisfactions of his Chicago summers, he decided after sixteen years to bring them to an end: as he wrote me (on 25 June 1965), "I have decided to give up my arrangement there and maybe live a few years longer and get a little more work done. Summers are about the only time I have to do my own work these days." The University of Chicago recognized his role in the life of the university, and in the world of scholarship generally, by awarding him the honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters in 1973.

Beginning with the summer of 1965, then, Bowers was free to spend more time with his wife on Cape Ann, and for the next quarter-century their summers together at Folly Cove, Rockport, were a major element in the rhythm of their lives. The stone house, Howlets, which had belonged

to Nancy Hale's aunt and then her mother, came to mean a great deal to Bowers, though it did not have the childhood associations for him that it did for his wife. (In a letter of 9 October 1987, he wrote, "I have grown very fond of the place but wish the water were warmer for swimming. It's too cold for me except maybe 3-4 days a summer.") The house and its setting high on a wooded hill are affectionately described in a number of passages in Nancy Hale's writings. Perhaps the loveliest account of the surroundings occurs in The Realities of Fiction (1962): The house itself, built in 1911 of granite quarried from its own cellar, was constructed by a Swedish mason to look like a northern European farmhouse. (Bowers often said it was colder and damper than it should have been because the mason did not leave an air space in the walls.) After Philip L. Hale's death in 1931, his sister, Ellen Day Hale, who had built the house as her summer studio, presented it to his widow, Lilian Westcott Hale, who for the next three decades used it as her summer studio. Although in her later years she lived in Charlottesville (2004 Lewis Mountain Road) to be near her daughter Nancy, the two of them always summered at Howlets.

Upon Lilian Westcott Hale's death in 1963, the house passed to Nancy Hale, whose experiences in sorting through the accumulated objects there underlay the moving essays that make up The Life in the Studio (1969)—a marvelous meditation on the relation of past and present, and a book that has become a cult classic. By the time Bowers began spending entire summers at Folly Cove, she had made minor changes to transform the studio into a living room:

Still other relics of the room's former use remained, for one of the many visitors to Howlets, John Frederick Nims (the poet who contributed a parody of textual and explicatory criticism to the twentieth volume of SB), remembered the "comfortably sprawling two-storied studio still a repository for the easels and oil paintings of her celebrated mother" (Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook 1988). Bowers's oldest son, too, recalls "some half finished paintings, an easel together with brushes and partially used paints and other furnishings, not one of which ever changed its place." On many occasions the family gathered for picnics on the rocks overlooking the cove, the Bowerses "cooking hot dogs over a fire built in the crevice of one of the rocks." Another visitor was the neighbor Leon Kroll, who as a painter appreciated what he called the Greek classicism of the cove. (Bowers—in a letter to his oldest son on 8 August 1983—described Kroll as "a salty egoistic firstclass painter, with whom we used to play bridge summers once in a while"; Kroll had known Nancy Hale since she was an adolescent.) In 1983 the Bowerses edited Kroll's reminiscences for the University of Virginia Art Museum (where a large collection of Kroll's work is housed); and Nancy Hale's prefatory "An Appreciation" (from 1980) gave her another opportunity to reveal her feelings about the Folly Cove area, where she was "ravished by the scents, the pristine light, the secret morning conversations between birds." With the Bowerses in residence, Howlets became a writers' study rather than a painter's studio. Packing into the car all the papers they would need at the house each summer was an annual ritual, and they accomplished a satisfying amount of work within its calming and restorative atmosphere.

Many of Bowers's students were aware of his love of music, for he regularly met with students in the evenings to play records and comment on them. This interest, which had been evident when he was himself a student, no doubt predated his college years; but Ware's course in music appreciation at Brown may have played a role in the development of his serious interest in classical music. In any event, he certainly attended concerts of the Boston Symphony Orchestra while at Harvard. From then on music was—if, indeed, it had not always been—one of the great passions of his life, and its importance to him is symbolized by the vast amount of writing he did on the subject. His thoughts on music are even more fully available to us than those on dogs and stamps as

a result of a weekly column on records that he contributed, during a period of more than a quarter-century, to the Sunday editions of the Richmond Times-Dispatch. It first appeared on 19 November 1939 (when he was still writing a monthly piece on Irish wolfhounds for the American Kennel Gazette), and the last one was published on 6 November 1966. (He once told David Vander Meulen that he quit when he ran out of adjectives.) In between those dates he wrote 1162 columns, each one averaging about eighteen column-inches in length and all of them together totaling approximately a million and a quarter words. During this long period, in which he commented on more than five thousand recordings, there were only three sizable gaps in his nearly invariable weekly production of columns: from June 1942 through February 1946 his military service coupled with the curtailed production of records allowed him to write only fifty-six columns, and he wrote none at all during two periods abroad, the first on a Fulbright Fellowship (7 September 1952 through 7 June 1953) and the second on a Guggenheim Fellowship (5 April through 2 August 1959). (He did, however, write a report on the London music scene for the issue of 26 April 1953.) His record after his return in 1953 was particularly impressive: except for the 1959 gap of four months, he missed only three columns in thirteen and a half years. The feat seems amazing, when one considers that he did make other (though brief) trips abroad during this time and spent the summers in Chicago: it is testimony not only to his energy and perseverance but also to his love of music, for writing regularly about music was not a burden to him.

His column—originally called "Music on Records" (with minor variations), then "Music Off the Records," and finally, from 1950 on, "Music Off Records"—usually followed the pattern of concentrating on what he regarded as the major release of the week, assessing the performance it reproduced and the quality of the reproduction, and then commenting briefly on some other new recordings or recounting some trade gossip. He did not consider it his function to discuss the music itself in detail, but the breadth of his familiarity with music (and with other recordings of the pieces under review) was evident through the allusions and comparisons he made, and his attitudes inevitably emerged in some of his observations on individual performances. These characteristics (along with his concern for advising the reader) are neatly combined in a statement in his first column: commenting on a Columbia recording of Bach's Sonata No. 3 in G Minor for harpsichord and viola da gamba, he asserted that it "is the best of the three that he wrote for these instruments,

and beautifully played here [by Ernst Wolff and Janos Scholz], but to an extent it is best appreciated by a full-fledged lover of Bach. For the ordinary listener there are more important Bach recordings."

Sometimes he did make outright judgments about the music, as when on 15 February 1942 he proclaimed William Walton's work "brilliant, intense, complex in mood, and warm in feeling," or when on 31 December 1950 he claimed that Samuel Barber's music is "usually thin in content for the form chosen," or when on 8 July 1962 he said, "Mahler's Symphony No. 9 is the greatest symphony of the twentieth century." He felt that "Mostly one can take or leave medieval music" (6 November 1966); the "Haffner" Symphony he considered "the most thoroughly delightful of all Mozart's symphonies" (7 April 1940); regarding the first movement of Brahms's Piano Concerto No. 1, he said, "I feel often that Brahms is lifting himself by his own bootstraps and that the emotional violence is . . . a bit hollow and labored" (14 July 1940); and in Dvorak's Symphony No. 2 he found the composer "still assimilating the Brahms influence," though it "has gone past the stage of imitation" (22 May 1960). Steady readers of the column would have noticed Bowers's developing tastes: on 1 January 1950, for example, he advised only "hardy souls" to "plunge" into the first movement of Charles Ives's Piano Sonata No. 2, since the idiom "takes some listening to penetrate," though after "about 15 hearings the sonata is really fun"; ten years later (3 January 1960) Ives was described as a "talented" composer, and the finale of his New England suite was "one of the most ecstatic pieces of nature music written in America"; and on 16 January 1966 Bowers called Ives "quite simply . . . the best composer that America has produced."

His judgments of performers were not normally severe, but he did not hesitate to warn readers about flawed performances: the "comparatively inexperienced" Mildred Miller, for instance, was "most disappointing" in Das Lied von der Erde because she possessed "a voice of insufficent body" and had "little idea of Mahler style" (20 November 1960); and Eleanor Steber's vibrato was "distressing" in a recording of selections from Verdi (17 December 1950). Bowers had certain bêtes noires that came in for regular criticism, such as Leopold Stokowski and Leonard Bernstein (e.g., 1 February 1942, 25 August 1957); but there were others who repeatedly earned high praise, such as Thomas Beecham ("the greatest living conductor of Mozart," 7 April 1940), Bruno Walter ("the great Mahler conductor," 20 November 1960), and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau ("incomparable," 27 March 1966). He made discriminations even among those he admired (on 12 November 1950 he asserted

that Arthur Rubinstein's "virtuoso" performance in Schumann's Quintet in E Flat for Piano and Strings lacked "the tenderness and intimacy which Serkin displays"), and he was always glad to recognize new talent, such as Daniel Barenboim ("a new young pianist who is sure to make his mark," as he said in his last column).

In the prewar and postwar years, when Bowers was writing, there were many technical developments in the recording industry (not least the shift from 78 rpm to 45 and 33⅓ rpm and the effect of frequency-modulation broadcasting), and he often devoted considerable space to discussing them and advising his readers on how to deal with them. (He regarded the subject of postwar advances in the production of records and record-players important enough for two feature articles on 10 and 17 April 1949, in addition to his regular columns.) His attention to the technical side of record-making, and its effect on the fidelity of the reproductions that result, is of particular interest in view of his work in analytical bibliography and his thorough understanding of the effect of physical media on the texts of the works transmitted by them. Recordings are "editions," and Bowers's approach to them was analogous to his approach to editions of verbal works. Their goal, he felt, should be fidelity to the composers' intentions, and he judged both performance and reproduction from this point of view. In the process he sometimes undertook such experiments as playing the same record on different phonographs (e.g., 1 February 1942) or comparing different copies. Variations among copies of a single printed edition are a fact of life for analytical bibliographers, and Bowers, obviously recognizing the analogy, warned his readers (on 25 April 1943) that "they should play each record side before purchase," since one cannot assume that the pressing is unflawed in all copies. Bowers himself certainly listened to every side before writing a review, noting in the case of one multi-record set that only sides 2 and 10 were "free from some fault." His willingness to invest time in his column is further illustrated by his playing a record one hundred times in order to report on the "wearing qualities" of plastic (30 December 1945) or his standard offer in the 1940s to reply to readers' letters.

These columns, taken together, are fascinating as an extended chronicle of the tastes and techniques of the recording industry over a quarter-century, viewed from the uniform perspective of a single lively, sensible, cultivated, and tenacious intelligence. In their authoritative sweep, interrupted occasionally by confessions of the subjectivity of taste, they suggest the depth of Bowers's feeling for music. But for a direct statement

of that feeling one must look outside the columns, to a lecture, "The Ideal Record Collector," which Bowers delivered at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond on 5 March 1961, as part of the third series of lectures called "The Eager Listener." This talk, buttressed with thirteen excerpts from recorded music, ranging from Bach and Mozart to Mahler and Bartok, amounted to a mini-course in music appreciation. His aim was to explain how the novice collector of records can gradually develop musical taste and enjoyment and, instead of becoming discouraged and abandoning music, can become an enthusiast for whom music is an essential part of life. He emphasized the importance of beginning with what one naturally likes, not what one is supposed to like, and learning to listen carefully to the language of each instrument before moving on to other pieces. ("Just go ahead," he said, "and learn the musical language from the composers you like to hear tell you stories." Later he added, "Musical tastes cannot help changing, as well as deepening and refining, when music on records becomes a part of one's daily life.")

The comparison between the "languages" of music and literature recurs throughout; the language of music can "communicate an emotion, even something of an idea—certainly some form of transferred experience—as much as words can, and oftentimes better than words can":

Just as "relatively cultivated people do not necessarily curl up in a chair every night with Virgil's Aeneid or Milton's Paradise Lost in their laps," so one is not always in the mood for the complexity of a symphony. "In this connection," he said, "I want to deliver a strong plug for chamber music on the phonograph as one's usual day-to-day form of music on records, leaving symphonies for special occasions"—not only because of the demands of the two genres ("chamber music invites, whereas symphonic music commands"), but because of the limitations of record-players and living-rooms.

Anyone in his audience following his common-sense step-by-step approach would inevitably gain some insight into what music appreciation

involves and, more importantly, would witness a case study in what musical enthrallment means. He describes how, with active listening, When one participates in music in this fashion, it gives "a pleasure that no other art can provide"—it gives a "shiver" up the spine and makes one's "back muscles squinch up with pleasure." Although Bowers admitted that, for him, "Mozart is the prince of composers on records as one's constant companion," he revealed deep admiration for a great variety of styles and genres, from Beethoven's late quartets to the piano concertos of Bartok ("a very great composer"), including operas and songs.

This lecture conveyed in concentrated form the breadth of musical knowledge and the depth of musical experience that underlay the columns. In stressing enjoyment—enjoyment that increases, the more one learns—he was in fact expressing his approach to literature as well as to music. But he perhaps felt freer to express his passionate devotion to music, since it was not his professional field and since—on the occasion of this lecture—he was speaking to a similarly nonprofessional audience. At a literary conference he would probably never have stated that "pleasure and culture are NOT antagonistic," but he could say it here. From time to time in his professional writings, his love of literature did get expressed with some explicitness, but such opportunities did not occur frequently. Given the chance, he would certainly have applied to books what he said about records at the beginning of his Richmond lecture: "To have music at one's fingertips is almost life's greatest blessing."

Another passion of the same years was stamp collecting. It is likely that more of Bowers's scholarly acquaintances outside of Charlottesville knew about his interest in stamps than were aware of his other avocations, because his envelopes were usually plastered with old stamps and he always asked correspondents to return them to him. Contributors to Studies in Bibliography were accustomed to seeing their proofs arrive in large reused brown envelopes covered with spectacular displays of unfamiliar stamps—the denominations so small that it was necessary for the stamps to be overlapped in order for the required number to fit on the envelopes. (Bowers once told me that he had obtained special permission

from the Charlottesville Post Office to overlap the stamps.) Once back in his possession the stamps would be steamed off, none the worse for the overlapping. Correspondents could assume that they had become part of an inner circle when Bowers took for granted that they would return the stamps without being reminded.

Bowers did not write as much about stamps as he did about dogs and music, nor was he as well known among philatelists as among record collectors in Virginia and Irish-wolfhound lovers nationally. But he always became knowledgeable about any field he was involved in, and he kept abreast of developments in the stamp-collecting world. In a 1961 history of the first quarter-century of the Charlottesville Stamp Club, prepared by Bernard P. Chamberlain, Bowers was named as one of a small number of members "who keep up better than most with national and international philatelic news and keep the club pretty well informed as to what is going on in the stamp world." Bowers had become a member of this club in 1951 and of the American Philatelic Society in 1954, and the height of his activity in the field of stamps came in the 1950s. He served as vice-president of the club in 1955 and as president in 1956—a significant year in which to be president because on 13 April, Jefferson's birthday, the Charlottesville Post Office was the site for cancellation of first-day covers for the twenty-cent Monticello stamp. The cancellation in fact read "Monticello Rural Station," but because the Rural Station at Jefferson's estate was in a small gift-shop, the covers were canceled by machine in Charlottesville. Bowers and the other members of the club felt, however, that some covers should be canceled at the actual location, and they supervised the canceling of a small number of covers with the hand stamps in use there, one of which carried the misspelling "Montecello." In order to distinguish those with the correct spelling canceled at the Rural Station from those canceled in Charlottesville, Bowers placed his authentication and signature on the reverse of all copies of the former. He also wrote an account of this situation (describing as well the variations in cancellation produced in Charlottesville) for distribution to the philatelic world, and it was printed in the Western Stamp Collector on 19 May 1956.

In the same year he wrote articles on highway-post-office postmarks and covers. His interest in this subject may have had a local connection, since the first trip of a highway-post-office bus (on 10 February 1941) was between Washington and Harrisonburg, Virginia, not far from Charlottesville. In any case, he became a member of the National Highway Post Office Society in early 1956 and served on its board of directors for the next several years. He published a general article on highway-post-office

cover collecting in Linn's Weeky Stamp News on 26 March 1956: after setting up eight criteria for cover collecting, he showed why this form of cover collecting "scores 100 per cent in a manner unmatched by any other form." For HPO Notes (the journal of the National Highway Post Office Society) he wrote a series of detailed articles, involving considerable research and serving as a basic reference source. One (in three parts, February-April 1956) was a historically annotated checklist of the changeover postmarks in the twenty or so instances between 1952 and 1956 in which highway-post-office buses were operated by railroads and continued to use the railway-post-office postmarks until required to change at the beginning of 1956. This list was followed in succeeding months by a closely reasoned definition of provisional postmarks (July-August 1956) and a consideration of variant provisionals (June and October 1957)—along with a general article on provisionals for Linn's (29 July 1957). Most interesting from a bibliographical point of view, however, was his list of "Current HPO Steels" (January and November 1957, February 1958), in which he worked out a system for describing postmarks—an analogous problem to title-page transcription in bibliographical description. In each of some ninety entries the measurement of the diameter of the postmark in millimeters is followed by a transcription of the circular legend, an indication of the style of killer (canceling bar), and a classification and measurement of the trip indicator. That this list was based on envelopes sent to, and returned by, the foremen of the lines suggests the effort he was willing to invest in amassing philatelic data; and in each of these articles he drew on information from some collections other than his own and asked readers to send him further details. Another specialty of his was British colonials, of which he developed a fine collection as well. In keeping with the Charlottesville Stamp Club's program for encouraging members to collect "topicals," he also collected stamps depicting books and printing; and when the Alderman Library at the University of Virginia mounted an exhibition celebrating the club's twenty-fifth anniversary (22 April-15 May 1961), Bowers's contribution to the show was a set of United Nations stamps.

That Bowers should have been interested in stamps is not surprising, since—like books—they are printed artifacts that require, for their study, a detailed knowledge of the process by which they are produced and an understanding of the kinds of variation in the finished product that can result from it. He chose not to collect books, but his collecting of stamps shows that he did have the collecting urge. When he was listening to Geoffrey Keynes's address in 1953—the one in which Keynes criticized Bowers's approach to descriptive bibliography—Bowers had further reason

to be annoyed when he heard Keynes say, "Stamp collecting is an amusing game, but it is essentially sterile." Bowers would have seen the shallowness of this statement, for his extended study of the physical evidence in books had given him a profound knowledge of how the details of artifactual evidence contribute to cultural history, and he recognized the application of this insight to all artifacts. Eventually, however, he sold his collection (keeping the United Nations series until 1987) and filled the spring binders in which he had housed it with the notes for his bibliography of Restoration drama—a move that was symbolic of his increasing concentration on that project in his later years. But this kind of shift did not become a general one: Bowers's life of scholarship was always set in a rich backdrop of other enthusiasms.

IV

Bowers's scholarship during the decades of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s was largely devoted to editorial projects. As a result, his career, in retrospect, displays a neat and logical pattern: in the first fifteen years following the war, he worked out basic principles and approaches for bibiographical and textual work and wrote major statements setting them forth; in the thirty years after that (exactly split by his formal retirement from Virginia), he applied those principles to the editing of a broad range of writers from the sixteenth century through the twentieth century. He did, of course, produce significant editions of Dekker and Whitman before 1960, but editorial work bulked far less in his activities of that period than did his writing of general discussions of rationale; after 1960 the proportions were dramatically reversed, for his important theoretical statements of these years—a few essays, not books—were overshadowed by the dozens of edited volumes that emerged from his study. This pattern reflects his temperamental preference for the empirical and critical over the theoretical; it also is a manifestation of his love of literature, of his desire to work closely with great pieces of writing—for critical editing (as he well knew and frequently proclaimed) entails the most minute familiarity with and comprehension of the nuances of the material to be edited.

This new phase of Bowers's career was inaugurated at the very beginning of the 1960s by his association with The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne. The origins of this edition (and of other editions of American authors soon to follow) can be traced back to a Committee on Definitive Editions set up in 1947-48 by the American Literature Group of the Modern Language Association of America (MLA); over the next fifteen years tentative plans for several editions of

major American authors were formulated (and initial research in some cases actually begun). With this stimulus, three American literature scholars at Ohio State University—William Charvat, Roy Harvey Pearce, and Claude M. Simpson—took on the responsibility for Hawthorne and invited Bowers to become the "Textual Editor" of the new edition. (A link between this group and Bowers was Matthew J. Bruccoli, who in 1961 had just completed his dissertation under Bowers's direction and taken a job in the English department at Ohio State and who then became Bowers's assistant on the Hawthorne project.) By agreeing to undertake the Hawthorne work, Bowers initiated a new era in the editing of writings of recent times, for his presence (and, in short order, his practice) announced to the scholarly world that the editing of nineteenth-century literature required the same rigorous bibliographical investigations as did the literature of the hand-press period.

In 1962, with remarkable promptness, the first volume of the Hawthorne edition appeared, containing The Scarlet Letter, and this volume soon became the same kind of landmark for the editing of modern literature that the first volume of the Dekker edition was for the editing of Renaissance literature. In its editorial rationale and its presentation of apparatus, it set a pattern that strongly influenced the work of a whole generation of editors. The approach was essentially the same as that of the Dekker edition, but Bowers made a full new presentation of the case in a nineteen-page essay, "A Preface to the Text" (designed to be supplemented, as the general textual essay in the Dekker was, by separate textual introductions to individual works). At the beginning he stated that the text of the edition was "a critical unmodernized reconstruction"—a phrase with momentous implications, for it indicated that, even for nineteenth-century literature, the retention of authorial forms of spelling and punctuation was an issue and the production of a reliable text necessitated the critical activity of emendation (drawing readings from various documentary texts and from the editor's own mind). That the aim of the "reconstruction" was an authorially intended text became clear in a later restatement of the "purpose" of the edition: "to establish the text in as close a form, in all details, to Hawthorne's final intentions as the preserved documents of each separate work permit"—by "synthesizing the evidence of all manuscripts and authoritative printed editions" (pp. xxxv-xxxvi).

According to this "Preface," after the documentary variants had been recorded and the relationship among the documents determined, the "editorial procedure"—in instances where a final manuscript does not survive—"follows the principles laid down by Sir Walter Greg"

(p. xxxiii). In some cases, however, Hawthorne's final manuscripts do survive, and the principal difference between applying Greg's "Rationale" to Dekker and using it for Hawthorne lies in determining how to treat those manuscripts, since Greg had addressed himself to situations in which the only authoritative texts were printed. Because Greg's choice of a first or early edition as copy-text was based on its proximity to a final manuscript and because one class of emendations to such a copy-text was meant to eliminate printing-house alterations of manuscript readings, Bowers reasoned that when a final manuscript survives it should be the copy-text. Although Hawthorne in some sense accepted (or expected) printers' or publishers' alterations, he did not, in Bowers's view, actively authorize them, and they sometimes had a "cumulative effect on Hawthorne's own modes of expression" that was "very serious indeed." Thus "the printing-house style imposed on the authoritative manuscript has been rejected" (p. xxxiv). This decision was a perfectly logical extension of Greg's line of reasoning, and it was accepted by many editors that followed. But it also became one of the most controversial decisions Bowers ever made, for not everyone agreed that Greg's line of reasoning was the most desirable one, and opposition to it gradually developed from two positions: that authors did "intend" the changes they authorized others to make (sometimes tacitly), and that uninfluenced authorial intention is less important than the combined intentions of all those responsible for bringing a work to the public. These positions deserve respect as alternative approaches, and they certainly merited more discussion than they had received at the time Bowers wrote, but they do not invalidate Bowers's reasoning: he was carrying to its logical conclusion an interest in literary works as the products of individual creative minds.

The other most influential aspect of the Hawthorne edition was its treatment of apparatus. Just as the Dekker edition set a new style in apparatus for Renaissance drama, so the Hawthorne edition provided a model (adapted from the Dekker) in a field that had no established tradition. The annotation, as in the Dekker, was limited to textual matters, but—unlike the Dekker—the pages of text were kept free of all annotation. At the back of the volume there were—in addition to discursive textual notes—four kinds of lists: variants within and between the first and second editions, editorial emendations to the copy-text, substantive variants in the collated editions ("historical collation"), and line-end word-division. The first of these was of course not always necessary (and when a manuscript existed, another list was needed to record revisions present in it); but the other three lists were standard

for succeeding volumes of the Hawthorne edition and (with minor variations in conception and form) for many later editions, edited both by Bowers and by others. The section on word-division was a notable innovation, addressing a textual problem that had apparently never been thought about before, given the lack of serious attention formerly paid to the editing of prose. Line-end hyphens in some words pose a problem for editors, who must decide whether to retain them, and readers of the new text in a scholarly edition similarly need to know whether to retain certain hyphens in making quotations; the word-division lists were Bowers's response to these previously unasked (but obviously logical) questions. Furthermore, his concern for recording editorial decisions about hyphens followed from a cardinal rule of his (expressed emphatically in the "Preface"): that, except for features of the layout and design of the copy-text document, all editorial departures from the copy-text must be reported, so that "the interested reader at any point can reconstruct the copy-text" (p. xxxviii).

In the same year as his edition of The Scarlet Letter, Bowers generalized on his experiences thus far in editing Hawthorne for a paper he delivered at the South Atlantic Modern Language Association meeting (22 November 1962). Entitled "Some Principles for Scholarly Editions of Nineteenth-Century American Authors," it made the same points as the Hawthorne preface, arguing the applicability of Greg's approach to a period in which books were routinely plated (and from which authors' manuscripts frequently survive) and advocating the kind of apparatus he was using in the Hawthorne edition, separating the listing of emendations from the historical record of variants. It was clearly a call to action, asking scholars of American literature to "bring to their task the careful effort that has been established as necessary for English Renaissance texts." Because of this paper, Bowers is properly to be regarded as the architect of the great coordinated effort to edit American literature that soon followed. But before this paper was published (in Studies in Bibliography in early 1964, causing the Times Literary Supplement on 14 May to recognize that Bowers's "conclusions apply equally to English authors"), another basic essay of his, one that was given far greater exposure, appeared. James Thorpe had asked Bowers to write an introductory exposition of textual criticism for a pamphlet commissioned by the MLA on The Aims and Methods of Scholarship in Modern Languages and Literatures; this pamphlet came out in 1963, and Bowers's essay thus became the most accessible and comprehensive statement of the applicability of Greg's "Rationale" to all periods of modern English, with examples drawn from Shakespeare, Dekker, Dryden,

Fielding, Sheridan, Shelley, Hawthorne, Whitman, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Sinclair Lewis, among others. By 1970 (when a revised edition of the pamphlet was published, including Bowers's expansion of his essay to incorporate examples from Stephen Crane), there were 30,000 copies of the pamphlet in print, and 15,000 more of the second edition were sold; Bowers's ideas on editing undoubtedly reached their largest audience through this essay. Two of its phrases, indeed, became bywords in the ensuing editorial debates: "inferential authorial fair copy," a compact way of stating what text, in Bowers's view, the critical editor was striving to reconstruct; and "all his [the editor's] textual cards on the table—face up" (the final words of the essay), an attempt to emphasize the importance of a comprehensive apparatus.

It was also in 1963 (following two Conferences on Editions of American Authors in June and October 1962) that the MLA set up the Center for Editions of American Authors (CEAA) as a standing committee (directed by William M. Gibson) to coordinate the various editorial projects then being formed; its functions were primarily to establish editorial standards for participating editions and (after 1966) to allocate National Endowment funds. Its editorial standards, as published in a Statement of Editorial Principles (1967), were the ones Bowers had already outlined; and this Statement, with the subtitle A Working Manual for Editing Nineteenth-Century American Texts, became another means by which Bowers's extension of Greg's ideas was given wide circulation. A great burgeoning of American editorial activity followed: by 1972, when a revision of the Statement appeared, fourteen editorial projects were involved and seventy-five volumes had been published (and over the ensuing two decades the number of projects doubled and the total number of volumes more than tripled). Bowers was never a member of the CEAA committee (or its successor, the Committee on Scholarly Editions), but his approach was the acknowledged foundation of the whole enterprise, and his advice played a role in the operation of the CEAA, especially during Matthew Bruccoli's directorship (1969-76).

As Bowers's work on successive volumes of the Hawthorne edition progressed, he gave increasing amounts of time to several other editorial projects that he had taken on. The most limited was a 1963 paperback edition of The Merry Wives of Windsor for Alfred Harbage's Pelican Shakespeare series (it was gathered six years later into the one-volume Penguin Complete Works). This was the only edition of Shakespeare Bowers ever published—though a decade later he made substantial progress on the texts of I Henry IV and All's Well That Ends Well

for a projected South Carolina edition (and at the end of his life he was in correspondence with Cambridge University Press about undertaking Othello for a series devoted to the Shakespeare quartos). The Pelican Merry Wives presented (by the dictates of the series) a modernized text and a three-page introductory essay not concerned with textual matters (which A. L. Rowse, in a letter to Bowers in August 1982, called "the best thing written about it"); but Bowers did include an appendix discussing the quarto and folio texts, with a list of his departures from the folio.

For Cambridge University Press he was serving as general editor of The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon, a series of volumes he had proposed in 1960, with individual plays assigned to separate editors—Bowers himself (he edited at least one play in every volume), L. A. Beaurline, and four of Bowers's former students who had written relevant dissertations in the 1950s, Irby B. Cauthen, Jr., Cyrus Hoy, Robert K. Turner, Jr., and George Walton Williams. (Later Hans Walter Gabler was added to the list of editors.) Each play was handled "according to editorial procedures set by the general editor and under his close supervision in matters of substance as well as of detail," in the words of the foreword to the first volume, which was completed at the beginning of 1965 and appeared in 1966. Bowers's sixteen-page general textual introduction held no novelties for anyone accustomed to his style of edition: it provided a clear statement of what editing in accord with Greg's "Rationale" meant and described an apparatus like the Dekker, with substantive emendations in footnotes and the rest of the textual record at the end. (A difference from the Dekker, however, was the silent modernization of the Elizabethan use of i, u, and v.) The assiduity of the search for press variants was suggested by Bowers's assertion that collation of quarto copy-texts included "all copies in the great libraries of Great Britain and the United States."

Whereas the Beaumont-Fletcher was an ongoing project, which in fact extended to the end of Bowers's life, another editorial undertaking of the mid-1960s, a two-volume selection of Dryden's plays edited in collaboration with L. A. Beaurline, was completed for 1967 publication. These volumes, John Dryden: Four Tragedies and John Dryden: Four Comedies, were published by the University of Chicago Press as part of the "Curtain Playwrights" series, established by Bowers and R. C. Bald to make available, in convenient format, selected works by English dramatists before 1700. Each volume contained a single-page explanation of textual policy, referring the reader to the Beaumont-Fletcher

edition for fuller discussion; the texts of this self-styled "reading edition" were established with the same thoroughness as those of Beaumont and Fletcher, but the simplicity of the textual histories (except for The Indian Emperour) led to the decision to limit the apparatus to emendations and stop-press variants. The editorial problem for The Indian Emperour was whether to choose the 1665 Trinity manuscript (not in Dryden's hand) or the first quarto of 1667 as the copy-text. Bowers chose the manuscript on the grounds that it preserved more of the archaic spellings present in the surviving early holograph letters of Dryden, features that were modernized by the compositors of the 1667 edition. The play had just appeared (1966) in the California edition of Dryden's works, where Vinton Dearing (who believed in the same editorial goals as Bowers) had chosen the quarto as copy-text; Phillip Harth, in a remarkable review in Modern Philology (1970), concluded (on the basis of his independent investigation of the evidence) that Bowers's choice was the proper one to retain as many of Dryden's own spellings as possible. Bowers was naturally pleased by Harth's conclusion, but he must also have taken satisfaction in Harth's notice of his long attention to Dryden, going back to a 1949 article on variants in the plays and the historic 1950 article on copy-text: Harth pointed out that "Bowers has become a unique authority on the textual aspects of Dryden's plays" and that the Chicago edition "offers a fitting climax to these studies."

Still another editorial project with which Bowers had become associated by the mid-1960s was The Wesleyan Edition of the Works of Henry Fielding under the executive editorship of W. B. Coley—a particularly pleasant undertaking for him because it allowed him to work with his Virginia colleague and good friend Martin C. Battestin. He agreed to serve as General Textual Editor, setting up the textual policy and writing textual introductions and bibliographical descriptions. (In this edition, there was to be only one textual essay in each volume, combining an exposition of the general textual principles with an account of the textual histories of the works in the volume.) The Fielding edition had individual volume editors, and Bowers accepted the additional task of editing the text for the Tom Jones volumes. The first volume of the series, Battestin's edition of Joseph Andrews, came out in 1967, and in 1972 Henry Knight Miller's edition of the first volume of Miscellanies was published, both with Bowers's textual introductions, representing his first detailed consideration of the editing of eighteenth-century texts. His own edition of Tom Jones (completed in 1971) appeared in 1974 in two volumes, with a historical introduction and commentary by Battestin;

Coley's edition of The Jacobite's Journal and Related Writings was also published in 1974, and Battestin's Amelia and Malvin R. Zirker's An Enquiry into the Late Increase of Robbers followed in 1983 and 1988, all three volumes again containing Bowers's textual essays.

In the Tom Jones volumes, Bowers's textual introduction provided a notable example of the place of bibliographical analysis in determining textual history. Whereas earlier editors had relied on the text of the third or fourth edition, Bowers showed that the striking variants in the third edition were limited to one bibliographical unit and that Fielding's revisions in the fourth edition were mixed with unauthoritative readings repeated from the third. In this situation, he said, "Greg's classic theory of copy-text must hold" (p. lxx), with the first edition carrying the authority for punctuation and spelling and the fourth providing many authoritative emendations of wording. Bowers firmly rejected the idea that, in marking up the third edition for the printer, Fielding sanctioned any third-edition readings not explicitly revised: "The day has long since passed when anyone could seriously argue that these had been 'approved' by Fielding since he failed to alter them back to the first-edition readings" (p. lxxi). (Although Bowers's position is entirely logical, given his concept of authorial intention, the day is by no means "passed" when the contrary argument may be heard.) Bowers's now famous handling of Fielding's revisions in the Man-of-the-Hill section (rejecting what were thought to be third-edition revisions not carried into the fourth) rested not only on bibliographical evidence but also on a large element of critical judgment—which Bowers, as always, was eager to acknowledge. Separating the authorial from the non-authorial readings of the fourth edition, he said, "is a critical process almost exclusively in which the editor shoulders his proper responsibility" (p. lxxi). Shortly after the publication of Bowers's edition, Hugh Amory disclosed evidence, found in a Harvard copy of the first edition of Tom Jones, leading to the conclusion that the Man-of-the-Hill story had been revised during the printing of the first edition and that the text of it in the third edition was actually the original (canceled) version (see Harvard Library Bulletin, 1977). Although this inference results in a textual history at variance with the one drawn by Bowers (who took Amory's findings into account in the 1977 paperback reprint of his edition and the 1985 Modern Library reprint), Amory acknowledged that Bowers "has settled the bulk of the edifice." Bowers's textual essay on Tom Jones remains a fascinating demonstration of his mastery in handling complicated textual situations.

While involved with work on all these editions, Bowers was generous of his time in encouraging and advising other editors. The most important instance of his direct role in an edition for which he did not edit any individual texts is his association with the John Dewey edition. In June 1965 Jo Ann Boydston, who was to become director of the Center for Dewey Studies at Southern Illinois University, asked Bowers for assistance in formulating an editorial rationale for a complete edition of Dewey's writings. Since 1961 she had been assembling the materials for editing and studying Dewey's life and works, and by 1965 she had decided that any serious editing of Dewey's texts should be conducted in conformity with the new textual approaches to American literature then receiving considerable publicity. ("I had had an almost mystical, not to say religious, experience upon first reading Bowers [in the MLA pamphlet]," she said in a 1984 article in Scholarly Publishing.) Bowers readily agreed to visit Carbondale (characteristically adding that there would be time for him to give a Shakespeare lecture, if one were desired), soon accepted the position of Consulting Textual Editor for the edition, and in April 1966 wrote a ten-page essay, "Textual Principles and Procedures," for inclusion in the published volumes. Bowers and Boydston worked well together, and their collaboration is important in editorial history in two ways: it marked the entry of Greg-Bowers editing into the field of twentieth-century writings, and it also resulted in the first application of this approach to the work of a philosopher (as Boydston noted in her preface to the 1967 volume, Psychology, which was designated Volume 2 of the series but was the first to appear).

What Bowers's consultative role entailed, after the initial planning, was described in a letter he wrote to the editor of the Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America in 1974: "Occasionally she may consult me about the import of the evidence for complex textual transmission and the effect of the transmission on the choice of copy-text and its treatment, and I am likely to read over her textual introductions and notes to see if I have any suggestions about the presentation of the problems treated there." (Boydston herself believes that Bowers understated his contribution here.) Bowers's textual essay for the Dewey edition was a cogent explanation of critical editing and its relevance to twentieth-century texts, and it was addressed (rightly) to an audience unfamiliar with bibliographical analysis, as this passage shows:

The preference for manuscripts over printed editions as copy-texts, argued in the Hawthorne edition, was set forth with particular emphasis here: By addressing the text of Dewey in the same way he had approached the texts of literary figures from earlier centuries, Bowers was publicizing an important point (one that Boydston obviously had in mind in seeking Bowers's help): that all verbal works, whether "literary" or not, require the same kind of textual investigation if readers are interested in having texts as intended by their authors. The association with Boydston afforded Bowers great satisfaction: as he wrote her on 29 March 1985, "It has always given me pleasure that we have had such a happy relationship, always with a meeting of minds."

By the end of the 1960s, with the Hawthorne and the Beaumont-Fletcher series still in progress, Bowers had embarked on a third multivolume edition, The University of Virginia Edition of the Works of Stephen Crane, two volumes of which reached publication in 1969. What constituted a "Bowers edition" was well known in textual circles by this time, and the nineteen-page essay on "The Text of the Virginia Edition" in the first volume (Bowery Tales) carried no real surprises (with many passages, indeed, repeated verbatim from the Hawthorne textual essay)—though a few more unreported alterations were allowed here. One point of considerable theoretical interest did emerge in the essay, but it was mentioned so unobtrusively that most readers probably did not recognize its importance. At the end of a paragraph, Bowers stated that "an editor may be bolder in experimental mixing of the accidentals in two substantive texts when they radiate from a lost archetype than when, as in a revised edition, one derives from another" (p. xvi). Then, near the end of a long footnote to this sentence, he observed, "Radiation is also found in various newspaper articles and sketches that would have been set by various compositors from proof copy furnished by Crane's syndicate employer."

Bowers had to give further thought to this matter when he came to

concentrate on Crane's stories and reports that were syndicated in newspapers. He recognized that, in the absence of the master proof sent out by the syndicate office, no one of the newspaper appearances carried more authority than the others, since all of them "radiated" from the lost proof and stood in the same relation to it. The editor therefore could do nothing but conflate the radiating versions (generally adopting the variants that appear in the largest number of witnesses), in an attempt to reconstruct the text of the lost proof. Since in this procedure no one of the surviving texts would be serving as a "copy-text" in Greg's sense, Bowers's thinking on the matter offered a supplement to Greg's "Rationale," covering a situation that Greg did not deal with. Bowers explored the subject in a brief paper at the December 1971 MLA convention in Chicago and expanded his treatment greatly for publication in The Library the following June as "Multiple Authority: New Problems and Concepts of Copy-Text" (having in the meantime read a shortened version of the final paper before the Bibliographical Society in London on 18 April). This magisterial essay—which examined the concept of "copy-text" in detail and explained why "Greg's linear-derived rationale" was "inappropriate" for instances of "immediate and equidistant" radiation—is one of the half-dozen most important essays of Bowers's last thirty years. Although Bowers was the person responsible for the influence of Greg's "Rationale," he was not hesitant to expose areas that Greg had not considered.

In the 1970s Bowers added three more editions to the already burdensome roster of his projects (in addition to a 1973 two-volume facsimile edition—the first facsimile to receive a CEAA seal of approval—of the manuscript of The Red Badge of Courage, with a fifty-page analytical essay and extensive apparatus, for the Bruccoli Clark imprint of NCR/Microcard Editions). The first was The Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe in two volumes (1973) for Cambridge University Press (the publisher of the Dekker and the Beaumont-Fletcher as well). A four-page preface to the Marlowe (dated 15 July 1971) replaced the usual introductory essay on textual principles because the "editing of critical old-spelling Elizabethan texts seems to have been sufficiently codified as not to require here an extended description." It was "codified," of course, by Bowers himself, and the "concerned reader" was referred to the textual introduction in the Beaumont-Fletcher edition. Tackling Marlowe took Bowers into territory already explored by Greg, for one of Greg's major books was his parallel-text edition of Doctor Faustus (which Bowers, in a 1952 review in Modern Philology, called a "really

unique scholarly achievement," emerging from a task that "could have been undertaken so successfully by no other living scholar"). Bowers stated that the "one novelty" in his own edition was his investigation of the "notorious problem of Doctor Faustus." In an article (SB, 1973) published just before the edition came out, as well as in the edition itself, Bowers effectively questioned Greg's argument that the additional passages in the 1616 text (those not in the 1604) reflected Marlowe's original manuscript rather than the extra stage material paid for by Henslowe. Yet in the end Bowers accepted as a fact Greg's idea that the 1604 was a "memorial reconstruction," and he therefore, though with some reluctance, followed Greg in using the 1616 as copy-text—a decision now generally regarded as unwise. (At the end of the decade Bowers revised the Marlowe for 1981 publication, recollating all copy-texts, reconsidering all emendations and potential emendations, and augmenting the historical record, but not switching copy-texts.)

The second new edition Bowers embarked on in the 1970s was The Works of William James (on which his concentrated work began in January 1974). As the first unit in the American Council of Learned Societies' long-term plan to sponsor editions of major American philosophers, the edition was organized by Frederick H. Burkhardt, the general editor, for publication by Harvard University Press, with support for editorial costs from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Bowers had sole responsibility for establishing the texts of all James's writings (except the letters, for which he was "Consulting Textual Editor") and for seeing them through the press, an enormous task that eventually resulted in the publication of nineteen volumes (the largest of all Bowers's editions, with the most extensive textual apparatus, and the edition that he believed represented his best work). His general textual essay for the James, "A Note on Editorial Method," as it appeared in the first volume, Pragmatism (1975), was relatively brief (seven pages), but it contained two points of particular interest. The first was its discussion of copy-text. For those writings of James that appeared first in periodicals and were then collected in book form, James often allowed the magazine editors' styling of punctuation to stand for initial publication but was "more seriously concerned with the forms of certain of his accidentals" when marking magazine sheets and galleys for book publication. In such instances, Bowers suggested, the book texts contain the more authoritative punctuation and should be chosen as copy-texts, even though they are two steps removed from the manuscripts. The usual statement of preference for the text closest to a missing manuscript is here replaced with the explanation that the

choice of copy-text "will vary according to the circumstances of 'accidental' authority as superior either in the early or in the late and revised forms of the text" (p. 180). Despite what some people believe, this approach does not contradict Greg, who never claimed that a first edition should be selected as copy-text when there is evidence of an author's careful attention to the accidentals of a later edition; more important, Bowers's handling of the James texts showed his flexibility and openmindedness in meeting new situations and his readiness to modify a long-standing procedure under differing circumstances.

Another innovation in the James edition was the manner of recording manuscript alterations. Because James's numerous manuscripts generally contain extensive revisions, Bowers felt the need to construct a concise system for recording the intricacies of these revisions. In the textual essay he said only that "special provision" had been made "for the analysis and description of every variant between the initial inscription and the final revision within each manuscript"; but in the headnote to the list of manuscript alterations he outlined his system, and he explained it fully in one of his major late essays, a fifty-page article published in the 1976 Studies, "Transcription of Manuscripts: The Record of Variants." One may lament the substitution of the complexities of this system for the simple straightforward approach used in the Hawthorne edition; but Bowers's mind delighted in working out schemes for recording data (as in the Principles), and a number of editors have since found the system helpful. The wealth of material preserving James's revisions—which gave rise to the development of this system in the first place—was emphasized at the end of Bowers's essay. Of "equal ultimate importance" with the established text, he believed, were "the apparatuses and appendixes devoted to the facts about the progress of James's thought from its earliest known beginnings to final publication in journal and book, and continuing to annotation in his private copies"—"this living historical record of the development of James's philosophical ideas and their expression" (pp. 182-183). (This point was repeated emphatically in a lecture on "Editing a Philosopher: The Works of William James" given by Bowers at the University of South Carolina on 25 October 1978 and at Northern Illinois University on 19 March 1979 and then expanded into an article for Analytical & Enumerative Bibliography in 1980.) Bowers was struck by the copiousness of the genetic record, which he had not encountered in his work on other editions, and he knew that most readers (including professional scholars) were unaccustomed to extracting a "living" story from apparatuses.

The final multi-volume edition that Bowers undertook was of the

lectures of Vladimir Nabokov. This opportunity came his way through Matthew Bruccoli, who proposed the edition to Bowers in 1978 and planned to publish the lectures under the Bruccoli Clark imprint of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. With this project, Bowers was given a new editorial challenge: to fashion smooth reading texts out of lecture notes existing "in very different states of preparation and polish, and even of completed structure"—as he put it in the foreword to Lectures on Literature, published in 1980. Bowers felt that "it would be impractical to offer these manuscripts to the reading public in verbatim form," and his approach was to incorporate any disconnected comments (including those from the margins of the books Nabokov used as teaching copies) at appropriate places, creating bridging phrases where necessary but reproducing Nabokov's own wording "with fidelity." Although Bowers could exercise a creative freedom here that he would not have considered appropriate in his other editions, he no doubt saw the task as similar to the others in an important way: he was still in the position of judging how far to alter the documentary record in an attempt to produce a text that better reflected the writer's intentions. His respect for Nabokov was evident throughout his comments, and he was under no illusion that his text represented "what would have been Nabokov's language and syntax if he had himself worked them up in book form"; but it was, he could be sure, closer to what Nabokov said in class than a literal transcription of the notes. Two more volumes came out in quick succession (belying the difficulty of the task), Lectures on Russian Literature in 1981 and Lectures on Don Quixote in 1983. (The Nabokov editions have since been translated into French, Italian, Spanish, and German.)

During the rest of the 1980s Bowers took on no new editions (except, with his wife, an edition of the transcripts of their friend Leon Kroll's oral memoir, recorded in 1956-57 by the Columbia University Oral History Research Office), though he did assist Matthew J. Bruccoli in working out a detailed editorial plan for the Cambridge University Press edition of F. Scott Fitzgerald (and was named as "Textual Consultant" on the title page when the first volume, The Great Gatsby, appeared in 1991). What he concentrated on in the late 1980s was finishing the James and Beaumont-Fletcher editions. The James, indeed, had been his primary ongoing project since the mid-1970s, for he had published the last of his ten Hawthorne volumes in 1974 (he was not involved in the notebooks and letters) and the last of the ten Crane volumes in 1976. Once the James was completed, the Beaumont-Fletcher was his only unfinished editorial project; he had seen two volumes through the press in 1985 and 1989, and in his final years he completed

most of his work for the three remaining volumes (the first of which appeared a year after his death).

His phenomenal production of editions resulted in a total of sixty volumes between 1960 and his death (not counting revised reprints or the two 1987 anthologies he edited—on Elizabethan and Jacobean-Caroline drama—for the Dictionary of Literary Biography), with at least one volume appearing every year from 1961 through 1989:

• 1961 Dekker 4 [i.e., volume 4]
• 1962 Hawthorne 1
• 1963 Pelican Merry Wives of Windsor
• 1964 Hawthorne 3
• 1965 Hawthorne 2
• 1966 Beaumont-Fletcher 1
• 1967 Dryden (2 vols.)
• 1968 Hawthorne 4
• 1969 Crane 1, 7
• 1970 Beaumont-Fletcher 2; Crane 5, 6; Hawthorne 5
• 1971 Crane 4, 9
• 1972 Hawthorne 6, 7
• 1973 Crane 8; Crane facsimile (2 vols.); Marlowe (2 vols.)
• 1974 Fielding, Tom Jones (2 vols.); Hawthorne 9, 10, 11
• 1975 Crane 2, 10; James [1], [2]
• 1976 Beaumont-Fletcher 3; Crane 3; James [3]
• 1977 James [4]
• 1978 James [5]
• 1979 Beaumont-Fletcher 4; James [6], [7]
• 1980 Nabokov [1]
• 1981 James [8] (3 vols.); Nabokov [2]
• 1982 Beaumont-Fletcher 5; James [9]
• 1983 James [10], [11]; Kroll; Nabokov [3]
• 1984 James [12]
• 1985 Beaumont-Fletcher 6; James [13]
• 1986 James [14]
• 1987 James [15]
• 1988 James [16], [17]
• 1989 Beaumont-Fletcher 7

Anyone who understands how time-consuming the procedures of scholarly editing are will find this record amazing—and all the more so in view of the other activities in which Bowers was simultaneously engaged, especially in the 1960s. His energy and intelligence repeatedly produced path-breaking editions, illustrating the imaginative handling of a great variety of textual situations and leaving their mark on the future study of authors from five centuries.

The story of the reception of Bowers's editions is a fascinating index of the shifting issues that confronted editors—and, indeed, all literary scholars—in the last thirty years of Bowers's life. His voluminous and steady output of editions during this time meant that he was always being reviewed, both in popular and in scholarly journals. Furthermore, other scholars in greater numbers were producing editions as well: it was an age of editing, shaped in many ways by Bowers's own activities. Because his presence was so strongly felt, any review of any edition might well refer to "the Bowers school" or "the Bowers type of edition" even if it did not engage in some discussion of the merits or demerits of Bowers's approach. Practically everything that has been written since 1960 about the scholarly editing of writings in English (and more recently about writings in other modern languages) has commented in one way or another on Bowers's work. Whether or not he is explicitly mentioned, his principles or the results of his influence are inevitably a significant part of the subject.

Bowers's editions and the position they represent have been accorded a great deal of praise, and a great deal of criticism as well. They have been controversial, at first because they were innovative and later because—such was the growth of his stature—they seemed traditional. Some of the praise his editions have received has in fact been meaningless, for many reviewers of editions—even in academic journals—do not know how to evaluate editorial scholarship; and after commenting on the literary work that has been edited, they may add a sentence or two of perfunctory praise for the labor involved in what they regard, all too often, as a mechanical task. (Bowers wrote to David Vander Meulen on 12 November 1985, "When I was young I used to feel outrage myself at reviews that were praising but ignorant and missed the point of what I was trying to do.") Similarly, some of the criticisms of Bowers's approach cannot be taken seriously, for they spring from personal biases rather than from an open-minded engagement with the issues. The most famous instance is probably Edmund Wilson's article "The Fruits of the MLA," published in the New York Review of Books on 26 September and 10 October 1968 and then as a pamphlet. In the course of this incoherent attack on the whole CEAA enterprise, he focused briefly on Bowers:

Although nothing could be farther from the truth than the claim that Bowers did not have a love of literature, the main points to be made about Wilson's discussion are, first, that it gave no evidence of serious thought about the central issues of scholarly editing and, second, that it was clearly motivated by anger—over the decision of the National Endowment for the Humanities to favor the MLA editorial project rather than his own scheme for a series of American classics similar to the French Pléiade volumes.

It is perhaps not surprising that Bowers's emphatic manner, coupled with the official sanction his position had received from the MLA, would automatically trigger some resistance. The very idea of an institutional committee (the CEAA) that inspected scholars' work and decided whether to award it an emblem of approval was anathema to some people, who as a result could not evaluate objectively the standards involved. They were likely to say that no one standard could be appropriate for all situations—without having examined Greg's rationale carefully enough to see that it was not a restrictive "standard" but a framework useful for thinking about textual problems. His rationale did assume that the goal of editing was the establishment of an authorially intended text; but for those who agreed with that goal, it did not place restrictions on individual judgment. A considerable number of reviews and articles, however, did raise serious issues (one of which was indeed whether authorial intention was an appropriate goal). They were not always coherently argued, but taken together they constituted an unprecedented outpouring of debate on the textual criticism of post-medieval literature. And Bowers's editing was always at the center of the discussion.

On 29 December 1959 at the MLA convention in Chicago, Leo Kirschbaum issued an attack on "the Bowers school" that foreshadowed some prominent strands in the debates of the following decades. One of his charges was that Bowers and his followers treated plays as literature for reading, with "no sense of the theatre": "One would think that there had never existed a theatre in Virginia, that no one in Charlottesville had ever seen a play," and so on. A playwright's final manuscript, which Bowers aspired to reconstruct, did not, in Kirschbaum's view, represent

a final intention, since the play had not at that point undergone the process of staging. "It is incumbent on a modern editor," he said, "to present a text in terms of the Elizabethan playhouse." (When Samuel Schoenbaum printed Kirschbaum's paper in the fifth number [1959-60] of Opportunities for Research in Renaissance Drama, Bowers wrote to him in protest, particularly of Kirschbaum's tone; but when Schoenbaum replied that his policy was to print the papers that had in fact been read at the MLA Renaissance Drama Conference Group meeting, Bowers immediately conceded the justice of Schoenbaum's position.) This particular point of Kirschbaum's was actually a questioning of the supremacy of uninfluenced authorial intention; in pointing out that what a playwright wrote "could not have been sacrosanct under the pressure of actual theatrical demands," he was saying that drama is unavoidably a collaborative effort and that the collaborative result is what we should be interested in. Although the intentions of authors as individuals had been the focus of textual criticism since antiquity, a growing doubt about the emphasis on individuals has been a mark of recent decades.

Drama obviously raises the issue in acute form, but it has been raised in connection with all kinds of writing. Morse Peckham, for instance, in a 1971 essay in Proof entitled "Reflections on the Foundations of Modern Textual Editing," argued that it is "pure hagiolatry" to focus on authorial intention rather than on the passage of a text through an endless series of encounters with individuals. (Peckham appended a note to his essay, declaring that "Nothing in this paper should be construed as an attack on Professor Bowers. As a hagiolator myself, I have a tendency to canonize great scholars. . . . As a man of achievement and as a human being built on the grand scale, he is necessarily the object of the free-floating resentment which seems to be more prevalent in the academic world than elsewhere.") James Thorpe (Principles of Textual Criticism, 1972) and Philip Gaskell (From Writer to Reader, 1978), among others, tended to believe that authorially intended punctuation was in fact likely to be honored by choosing first editions (containing changes expected by authors) rather than manuscripts as copy-texts. By the 1980s a "social" approach to textual criticism, emphasizing the collaborative nature of the publication process and the influence of book design on readers, had become a prominent alternative to what was perceived as the Greg-Bowers orthodoxy of authorial intention. The leading statements of this position were Jerome J. McGann's A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (1983) and D. F. McKenzie's Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (1986), both of which—to use McGann's

phrasing—conceived of "the process of literary production" as "far more socialized" than Bowers did. The specific application to drama—in a much more thoughtful way than Kirschbaum's—came in T. H. Howard-Hill's "Modern Textual Theories and the Editing of Plays" (The Library, 1989); but his argument, like the others', suggested that a concern with uninfluenced authorial intention was wrong, rather than recognizing that it and the social approach were two alternative routes to the past that must always be with us.

Another complaint of Kirschbaum's 1959 paper was what he perceived as Bowers's "Platonic bias," the view that "some place, somewhere, a substantive text has existed, exists, or will exist." This criticism was an attempt to deal with the fact that authors revise their works and that there may be distinct versions of their works embodying different "final" intentions. Greg and Bowers both understood that some acts of revision produce what are in effect new works, demanding separate treatment; but Bowers did not find, in the authors he edited, any instances of revision that precluded his focusing on a single final intention. The eclecticism involved in his constructing single intended texts from multiple documentary witnesses was criticized—often indirectly—from more than one point of view. The most basic was the belief that versions of works (including early drafts) deserved to be studied in their own right and that the proper emphasis for textual study was on development rather than stasis. A genetic school of textual criticism became prominent in France and Germany and was increasingly recognized in English-speaking countries through Bowers's openness to diverse points of view in his own journal, Studies in Bibliography (which published Hans Zeller in 1975 and Louis Hay, Klaus Hurlebusch, Gerhard Neumann, and Siegfried Scheibe in 1988). A related movement in English literary study was most prominently represented by a group of scholars who advocated the printing of discrete versions of certain Shakespearean plays (as in the 1983 anthology The Division of the Kingdoms, edited by Gary Taylor and Michael Warren). Although these various studies did not usually make Bowers a specific target, their general tendency was to cast doubt on approaches that elevated final authorial intention over the multiple intentions reflected in successive revisions.

Textual evolution was approached in a different way by Hershel Parker, who had the notion that an examination of the creative process enabled one to locate authorial intention as it emerged from the heat of composition and to disqualify some chronologically "final" authorial revisions as being incoherent tamperings that postdated this period of organic revision. To his mind, the Greg-Bowers tradition neglected the

creative process, and he believed that Bowers was guilty of many additional faults as well, enumerated in his book Flawed Texts and Verbal Icons (1984), which documented his persistent campaign, from 1974 on, to expose what he saw as the deficiencies of Bowers's editorial practice. (A measure of the strong feelings that Bowers aroused is offered by Morse Peckham's 1987 review of this book in Analytical & Enumerative Bibliography: although Peckham dismissed Parker's main argument, he nevertheless was "vastly" entertained "to watch Hershel Parker blow that grand panjandrum, that imperial bow-wow, Fredson Bowers, right out of the water." Bowers used the occasion of this review to deny—in a letter published the next year—the implication that he "blackballed" Parker from the Committee on Scholarly Editions.) Parker's most detailed criticisms of Bowers were directed at the Crane edition. He considered the textual essay in the volume containing Maggie (Bowery Tales) "to be argued with bewilderingly specious pedantry," and he "found the editorial apparatus so badly conceived and error-ridden as to be quite unusable" (p. 148); he had even demanded (unsuccessfully) that the CEAA rescind the seal of approval awarded to the volume. His 1976 review (most of which he reprinted in his book) of the volume containing The Red Badge of Courage accused Bowers of a "misleading account of Crane's revisions," the "related decisions to emend the novel excessively," and "failures to consider the full range of textual and critical evidence" (pp. 153-154). (The evidence, in his view, led to the conclusion that Crane was forced by the publisher to alter the novel, and thus that Bowers should not have accepted so many of the first-edition readings.) Parker's student Henry Binder wrote an article entitled "The Red Badge of Courage Nobody Knows" for a special Crane issue (edited by Parker) of Studies in the Novel (1978) and produced a text, retaining manuscript readings whenever possible, for the first edition of The Norton Anthology of American Literature (1979), of which Parker was one of the editors; when Norton was about to bring out the Binder text as a separate edition three years later, Herbert Mitgang wrote a front-page article for the New York Times entitled " 'Red Badge' Is Due Out as Crane Wrote It" (2 April 1982).

Despite this fanfare, the determination of Crane's "intention" remains a matter of critical judgment (and Binder's edition, in its turn, came in for criticism). Parker's comments were like those of many other reviewers of editions in seeming to regard errors of fact and errors of judgment as equally certain. David J. Nordloh, for example, in what is probably the harshest criticism that any of Bowers's editions has received (in the Crane number of Studies in the Novel), first discussed

inaccuracies in the Crane volumes and then tried to explain, as an equally definite matter, why the new texts were "muddles of editorial synthesis and intervention," combining "an insensitivity to what Crane was doing with an unwillingness to leave Crane as he was" (pp. 103-104). For Nordloh, the "introduction of imagination where evidence fails" (p. 115) was a fault; but of course critical editing, like other attempts to reconstruct the past, inevitably relies on informed creativity. The difficulty that many people have in coming to terms with this point is epitomized in Leon Howard's review of two of the Crane volumes in Nineteenth-Century Fiction (1970): he recognized that "aesthetic judgments" can be "desirable in editorial work," but he concluded (since to him Bowers's approach resulted in "a grossly 'eclectic' edition") that Bowers's text of Maggie "cannot be recommended for the use of serious students and critics." Donald Pizer was similarly unprepared to accept even "the best possible coalescing of the 1893 and 1896 editions" of Maggie as anything other than "a bibliographical curiosity" (Modern Philology, 1970). Thomas L. McHaney took a more reasoned position (in American Literary Realism, 1971) when he explained why he personally would have preferred a "more conservative," less emended, text of Maggie but could still say that "one must lean in Bowers' direction even there, so persuasive are his arguments."

Although the Crane edition, particularly Bowers's handling of Maggie and The Red Badge of Courage, stirred up more debate than any of Bowers's other editions, the Hawthorne edition came in for considerable criticism. As the first scholarly edition of its kind in American literature, it was frequently met with bewilderment and misunderstanding. For some people, Bowers's tone was an additional obstacle to a fair examination of the scholarship involved. Richard Harter Fogle devoted nearly half of his chapter on Hawthorne in American Literary Scholarship for 1965 to an explanation of his preference for Hyatt H. Waggoner's Riverside edition (1964) of The House of the Seven Gables over Bowers's Centenary edition—the faults of the latter including Bowers's apparent dismissal of the Waggoner edition in a footnote and his use of his "undoubted talents largely in praise of his own vocation of bibliography" (p. 26). And Roy R. Male, three years later in the same publication, objected to Bowers's The Marble Faun for "making Hawthorne merely an interesting case study for textual bibliographers"; he regarded the whole Centenary Edition as a monument that "pays tribute to Fredson Bowers, not to Hawthorne" (p. 21). But some serious and detailed discussions of real textual questions did appear, and the issue they repeatedly touched on was the regularization of spelling. Thomas

L. McHaney felt that "the editors of Hawthorne's work have sought more consistency than is necessary" (Studies in the Literary Imagination, 1969); John Freehafter concluded that Bowers's text of The Marble Faun contained "too many textual emendations" as a result of excessive normalization and "inattention to linguistic evidence" (Studies in the Novel, 1970); and O M Brack, Jr., questioned Bowers's assumption, as a basis for emending Fanshawe, that the lost manuscript was "relatively consistent within itself" (Proof, 1971). There is, indeed, good reason to question Bowers's judgment on this matter; but, since judgment is involved, it is hard to see how one can claim, as Freehafter does, that Bowers's own emendations in The Marble Faun are "usually incorrect."

Commentary on the other editions was less agitated and even at times indifferent. The Beaumont-Fletcher, not unexpectedly, prompted reviewers to lament, as they had with the Dekker, the lack of explanatory annotation. Kenneth Muir, in Shakespeare Studies (1967), spoke for many when he said that "the same editors should provide the annotation, since no text can be established on bibliographical principles alone"—and he continued to wonder, in reviewing the next volume in 1974, whether one can edit a text "without being able to explain every line of it." Comments such as these, naïvely implying that Bowers and his co-editors did not take "meaning" into account, show how little scholarly editing is understood, even by some persons who have engaged in it. Clifford Leech was wiser, in his more thoughtful review (University of Toronto Quarterly, 1967), to say simply, "We need a commentary." The Dryden edition, praised by Phillip Harth in the important review mentioned earlier, was questioned by O M Brack, Jr., in Philological Quarterly (1968) not only for what he surprisingly considered an "unusual procedure" in handling The Indian Emperour (taking accidentals from the 1665 manuscript and some of the substantives from an edition of 1670) but also for its preservation of "minutiae" in a readers' edition with simplified apparatus. Several distinguished reviewers of the Marlowe edition—Kenneth Muir in Journal of English and Germanic Philology (1974), Roma Gill in Review of English Studies (1974), and Mark Eccles in Modern Philology (1975)—noted numerous errors in it (as did correspondents to the Times Literary Supplement in April, May, and June 1974), but Muir and Eccles also found much to praise. Gill (whose 1965 edition of Faustus had anticipated Bowers's critical view of the 1616 text and whose 1989 edition was to use the 1604 as copytext) felt constrained to conclude, "Those of us who in the past have admired Mr. Bowers's work, in both the theory and the practice of textual criticism, can only be saddened by the present production." As

for the Tom Jones edition, both Don L. Cook (Review, 1979) and Peter Miles (The Library, 1979), in sensible and balanced reviews, expressed admiration for Bowers's achievement but also pointed out a disconcerting number of errors in the apparatus.

In contrast, the textual accomplishment of the James edition was rarely recognized by reviewers, because philosophers were not accustomed to textual study and often in fact were contemptuous of it. John Passmore, reviewing three volumes of the edition in the Times Literary Supplement (24 June 1977), claimed to see the value of lists of variants for literary study but did not regard them as important in "an edition for philosophers"—since philosophers "go to James because they are interested in, let us say, truth or meaning or experience" (which, one can only conclude, are unrelated in philosophers' minds to nuances of expression). Similarly Jeffrey Barnouw believed that the "overwhelming textual apparatus" might serve a purpose for "some few readers" (Review of Metaphysics, 1981); and Carl P. Duncan, after noting the "massive amount of bibliographic detail and textual analysis," added (with a significant "but"), "But there are some things of interest to historians of psychology" (American Journal of Psychology, 1982). One has to turn to The Library—where Peter H. Nidditch, editor of Locke, reviewed the first volume of the James—to find the textual work taken seriously. The Nabokov volumes, as one might expect, were reviewed widely, but (like the James) in journals where the editing was scarcely noticed. (As Bowers wrote to his oldest son on 20 November 1980, about a month after the first Nabokov volume had appeared, "The midwife gets no credit for the baby.")

Of the hundreds of reviews Bowers's editions received, those dealing with the Hawthorne and Crane editions produced the liveliest controversy and engaged the most interesting issues. Their most incontestable, if unfortunate, contribution was the demonstration that these editions contained a substantial number of errors. But the reviewers revealed their own limitations when, after theoretically accepting the value of critical judgment in editing, they attacked as flawed those editions that embodied critical judgments not in accord with their own. Bowers was charged both with violating Greg's principles and with carrying them out too rigidly (Parker, for instance, made both charges [pp. 62, 66]); it was not easy for some reviewers to accept the multiplicity of results that Greg's emphasis on editorial judgment could lead to. Nevertheless, even some of Bowers's most severe critics could acknowledge the uniqueness of his attainment. Nordloh, before enumerating the "excruciating details" of his criticism, summarized the difficulties inherent in the

editing of Crane and called Bowers "the only person with the skill, the powers of mind, the patience above all, to have attempted it alone" (p. 107). Many of the reviewers were not deferential to Bowers, nor would he have wished them to be; but the debates that swirled around his editions, even in instances when they revealed unquestionable flaws, were testimony to the comprehensive strength, imaginative daring, and critical intelligence of his editorial vision.

During the last three decades of his life, Bowers produced, in addition to those sixty volumes of editions, nearly a hundred essays, lectures, and reviews. A dozen or so of the articles were of the utmost importance, ranking with the most significant of his earlier writings, and six or seven of the reviews will stand as classic examples of what long, detailed scholarly reviews can accomplish. All these essay-length pieces constitute a body of work that a scholar who had done nothing else could be proud of; when one considers his prodigious output of editions during the same years (to say nothing of his other activities), the record seems astounding. His concentration on bibliographical and textual investigations did not prevent him from writing essays of literary criticism on Renaissance drama and poetry, and some dozen and a half pieces—on Herbert, Vaughan, Milton, and particularly Shakespeare—appeared in these years. The bibliographical studies were frequently offshoots of his editorial work, some of them dealing with specific problems (in Crane's The O'Ruddy, Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, and Beaumont and Fletcher's Beggars Bush, for example), but most of them treating general issues, sometimes recapitulating for different audiences what he had said before and in a few instances offering important new observations.

Among his most influential essays of this period (many of them originating as lectures) are several that have already been mentioned—his basic introduction to textual criticism for the MLA pamphlet (1963), his statement of the application of Greg's "Rationale" to the editing of American literature (1964), his essential supplement to Greg in the treatment of "Multiple Authority" (1972), and his exposition of a new system for recording manuscript alterations (1976). Of his other major general pieces, the three most remarkable ones are probably "Bibliography Revisited" (an address to the Bibliographical Society in London on 17 October 1967 as part of its seventy-fifth anniversary celebration, and published in The Library in 1969), which is Bowers's most significant supplement to his Principles of Bibliographical Description, concentrating on the issue of "degressive bibliography" (the practice of reducing the quantity of detail for certain entries); "Remarks on Eclectic

Texts" (a paper read in abridged form at the Villa Serbelloni in September 1973, and published in Proof in 1975), which must be regarded as the classic explanation of the value of producing texts that bring together readings from different documentary witnesses; and "Greg's 'Rationale of Copy-Text' Revisited" (SB, 1978), which is the most trenchant examination of Greg that has been written. The latter piece was a distinguished meditation on Greg's applicability to later periods, meaningfully (in view of Bowers's position as Greg's champion) expressing caution in making such application (Bowers himself called this essay, in a letter of 4 January 1984, "one of the most important articles I have tried to write about textual criticism").

Five other notable statements can perhaps be singled out. In 1966 his Zeitlin-VerBrugge and Howell Lecture at the University of California (both Los Angeles and Berkeley), "Bibliography and Modern Librarianship" (published as a pamphlet the same year), dealt with the implications of bibliographical scholarship for the practices (wittily criticized) of librarians. His Ohio State lecture, "Practical Texts and Definitive Editions," on 16 February 1968 (published in a pamphlet the next year with a lecture of Hinman's), celebrating the publication of The Marble Faun in the Centenary Edition, responded to critics of the Hawthorne edition and coined the term "practical edition" (for editions that rest on "information that may be procurable through normal scholarly channels and thus without more special research than is economically feasible"). A summation of his approach, "Scholarship and Editing," was delivered before the Bibliographical Society of America on 23 January 1976 (and published in the Society's Papers the same year). And a thorough reconsideration of historical records of variants ("The Historical Collation in an Old-Spelling Shakespeare Edition") and of the practice of regularization ("Regularization and Normalization in Modern Critical Texts") appeared in Studies in Bibliography in 1982 and 1989.

Bowers wrote considerably fewer reviews in the thirty years after 1960 than he did in the fifteen years from the end of the war through 1960 (twelve as opposed to twenty-one—even the latter figure not being particularly large). He was not drawn to reviewing, even though he recognized (in both of his obituaries of Greg) that Greg's reviews had played an important role in the history of bibliographical scholarship. His attitude toward reviewing was stated unequivocally in a letter to David Vander Meulen on 12 November 1985:

His reviews, therefore, when he chose to write them, were special occasions; and at least six or seven of his dozen post-1960 reviews will not be "forgotten," for they are extended investigations of major works. They are, indeed, performances of the kind that practically no one else would have been capable of—and certainly no other single person could have written all of them, so great is their range of subjects. The earliest is one of his best-known writings, his unfavorable review (Modern Philology, 1964) of the second volume of the Yale Johnson edition, which cogently objected to its policy of "partial modernization." (Five years earlier he had severely reviewed the first volume in the Journal of English and Germanic Philology, complaining about misleading transcription and silent alteration: "'We have supplied punctuation silently,' remark the editors and thereupon fall silent themselves. This is not at all a satisfactory statement of procedure.") He went on to deal at length with Kathleen Tillotson's edition of Oliver Twist (fourteen pages in Nineteenth-Century Fiction [1968], taking a critical look at her choice of copy-text and her policy of emendation); Arthur Golden's edition of Walt Whitman's Blue Book (five pages in the Journal of English and Germanic Philology [1969], constituting an important evaluation of the methods for recording manuscript alterations, looking forward to his long 1976 article); Philip Gaskell's A New Introduction to Bibliography (sixteen largely unfavorable pages in Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America [1973], lamenting in particular Gaskell's distrust of analytical bibliography and criticizing his generalizations about Elizabethan printing); Peter Nidditch's edition of Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (eleven pages in The Library [1976], praising Nidditch for "true intellectual effort" in dealing with a situation in which there is "evidence for authorial control of the accidentals in a series of revised editions"); Philip Edwards and Colin Gibson's five-volume edition of Massinger (sixteen pages in the Yearbook of English Studies [1979], admiring the edition in general but regretting in it a "trend towards modernization of Elizabethan conventions with only doubtful benefit to modern clarity"); and Harold Jenkins's edition of Hamlet (fifteen pages in The Library [1983], examining in detail the bases for and the implications of Jenkins's elevation of the second quarto text).

If reviews, except in unusual instances, seemed to him a waste of energy, he did not feel the same way about lectures. Besides his major

essays that were delivered as addresses, he presented many other proficient pieces, always with flair, at a wide variety of locations, and most of them were later printed. His role as Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar in the 1962-63 academic year took him to Marietta College and Vanderbilt University, among other places, where one of his topics was Shakespeare; and he gave fourteen lectures during 1963-64 to commemorate the four-hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare's birth—participating in related events as well, such as a White House reception in June 1964 to honor the National Shakespeare Anniversary Committee. (The Vanderbilt lecture, "What Shakespeare Wrote"—published in the 1962 Shakespeare Jahrbuch—was praised by James G. McManaway in the 1965 Shakespeare Survey as "a fine introductory statement, one that will bear frequent reading.") The 1960s, indeed, were the period of his greatest activity as a lecturer, despite the heavy load of duties imposed by his departmental chairmanship. In early 1962, for example, he gave the Phi Beta Kappa Convocation address at Washington and Lee University (12 April, on Hamlet's fifth soliloquy); later that year, he spoke in the Sesquicentennial Series at Rice University (16 November, on point of view in Shakespeare), then at the South Atlantic Modern Language Association meeting (22 November, on editing American literature), and then at the MLA convention in Washington (28 December, on Hamlet). Among the places he lectured (with different lectures) in the years that followed were Wayne State University (10 March 1964 in the President's Lecture Series, on Shakespeare's texts), the University of South Carolina (on 2 April 1965 at the Southeastern Renaissance Conference, on Henry IV), the Clark Library (7 May 1966, sharing the platform with Lyle H. Wright at a Clark Library Seminar on "Bibliography and Restoration Drama," the papers from which were then published as a pamphlet), the University of Toronto (4 November 1966, in the second of its Conferences on Editorial Problems, on the textual implications of machine printing), and the University of Mississippi (27 November 1967, the Christopher Longest Lecture, on Paradise Lost). In the 1970s his lecturing tapered off, especially after his retirement from Virginia in 1975 (although two prominent 1971 occasions he participated in were the World Shakespeare Congress in Vancouver in August and the Colloquium on Nineteenth-Century Canadian Bibliography in Toronto in November); but he was still enthusiastic about lecturing in the last years of his life, as his performances at the biennial conferences of the Society for Textual Scholarship show (in 1981, 1985, 1987, and 1989).

Some of his lectures and publications dealt with professional matters

(a tradition with him going back at least to his Randolph-Macon address of 1954 on scholarship and undergraduate teaching). One of his Phi Beta Kappa talks was entitled "The Academic Jungle" and was full of frank and practical advice to undergraduates on the realities of the world of graduate study. In the course of it, he touched on a subject that was a favorite of his in the 1960s, the inappropriateness of the Ph.D. program for training teachers. Here he called the Ph.D. system "a singularly foolish one," and in other pieces on this topic he became a staunch and outspoken advocate of a Doctor of Arts degree for those who intended to be primarily teachers, not publishing scholars. He outlined the rationale for this degree in College English (November 1965), asserting that the concept of the Ph.D. as a "union card" had caused training in research to be "inflicted as a whole on the thousands for whom it was not designed." (He made clear in the process, however, that he did not lament the passing of "the old philological days" and welcomed the recent substitution of "critical learning for the older historical method.") Such further titles as "The Business of Teaching" (The Graduate Journal, 1961) and "On a Future for Graduate Studies" (American Association of University Professors Bulletin, 1970) showed his continuing concern for the training of teachers in graduate school. (The latter piece, delivered at the Brown University Graduate School Convocation on 1 June 1970, received further circulation when it was excerpted in PMLA in October under the title "The Dilemma of Graduate Education.")

His interest in the welfare of his profession was manifested in many other ways as well. For four years (1956-59) he was a Regional Chairman of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation; he served on the Executive Council of the MLA (1963-66), on the MLA's Committee on Research Activities (1955-60), New Variorum Shakespeare Committee (1955-82), Committee on Resolutions (1962), and English Program Advisory Committee (1966-68), and as the MLA delegate to the American Council of Learned Societies (1967-70); he was a member of the advisory boards of the Virginia Quarterly Review (1961-75)—the journal founded by his mentor James Southall Wilson—and the Shakespeare Quarterly (1954-72) and of the University Press of Virginia (1970-74); his term on the Executive Committee of the South Atlantic Modern Language Association (1967-71) included one year as vice president (1968) and one as president (1969); and he also held the presidencies of the Southeastern Renaissance Conference (1960) and the Society for Textual Scholarship (1985-87). The way such commitments made his schedule hectic is suggested by a letter he wrote to Gordon Ray on 30 November 1962:

These varied activities and writings, along with his brilliantly attentive chairmanship of his department at Virginia, were enough to demonstrate not simply his good citizenship in the academic world but his deep sense of professional responsibility.

By the time Bowers retired from his position at Virginia in the spring of 1975, having spent thirty-seven of his seventy years at the University, he had been—not surprisingly—the recipient of numerous honors and awards. His own university had recognized his achievements with two endowed chairs, first the Alumni Professorship of English (1957-68) and then the Linden Kent Memorial Professorship (1968-75), and with its highest honor, the Thomas Jefferson Award (1971). The citation for that award, calling him a "Jeffersonian gentleman," mentioned his knowledge of dogs, music, stamps, and wine as well as of literary scholarship, and it affirmed, "Mr. Jefferson, the extraordinarily versatile man in whose honor this award is made, would appreciate the versatility of Professor Bowers. Like Mr. Jefferson, Mr. Bowers masters thoroughly whatever interests him." Bowers's undergraduate university, Brown, had honored him with its Bicentennial Medal in 1964 and then with an honorary degree (Doctor of Letters) in 1970—the same year in which he also received a Doctor of Letters degree from Clark University. (He later —on 12 December 1983—wrote to his oldest son, "I have felt a peculiar obligation to Brown ever since I went there. . . . if Brown had not given me a scholarship . . . I'm not sure I could have gone to college.") His Gold Medal from the Bibliographical Society in London—the most important award in his field, which had been presented to only three Americans before—had come the previous spring (1969), and one more honorary degree, the Doctor of Humane Letters from the University of Chicago, was presented to him in 1973. Among his research fellowships had been three national ones, a Fulbright in 1952-53 and two Guggenheim Fellowships, in 1958-59 and in 1970 (postponed to 1972); he had also been made a Research Scholar at the Rockefeller Foundation's Villa Serbelloni Research Center (1970, 1972), a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford (1972, 1974), and a Fellow Commoner at Churchill College, Cambridge (1975). He had been elected to the American Antiquarian Society and the British Academy (as a Corresponding Fellow)

in 1968 and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1972. The bookish clubs he had been admitted to were the Grolier, the Codrington (All Souls), the Elizabethan (Yale), and the Tudor and Stuart (Johns Hopkins).

His many admirers naturally regarded his retirement as an appropriate occasion for another honor, in the form of a banquet or a conference. But he made clear that he wished no such thing, though he indicated that he would enjoy small dinners in friends' houses (and those friends responded, sometimes with formal dinners, remembering the many black-tie evenings at Woodburn). One of the most touching occasions for Bowers occurred early in his final year at the university. On 26 October 1974 his former Virginia and Chicago students who had written their dissertations under his direction (or co-direction) gave a dinner in his honor. The menu-keepsake, printed at the university library "by C.S. & K.S. for I.C." (Clinton Sisson and Kendon Stubbs for Irby Cauthen, on a Chandler & Price treadle press given to the library by the Bibliographical Society), listed all the names, twenty-eight from Virginia and two from Chicago. At the time of this dinner there was an exhibition of Bowers memorabilia in the Rare Book Department of Alderman Library (on display for the month of October), and A Keepsake to Honor Fredson Bowers was published to accompany the exhibition. George Walton Williams's elegant introduction to it spoke on behalf of all of Bowers's students:

The booklet contained ten photographs and two reproductions of title pages: the photographs were of Bowers in 1906, 1910, ca. 1924, ca. 1940, 1971, and 1973, along with one of him judging a dog show (correctly dated 1954 but labeled "Long Island Kennel Club" instead of Irish Wolfhound Club of America Specialty Show at Amory L. Haskell's Woodland Farm, Red Bank, N.J.), one of him and his wife at Bread Loaf in 1960, one reproducing a drawing of Nancy Hale (ca. 1940) by her mother, and one showing her mother's 1946 oil portrait of Bowers in his naval uniform (a portrait that hung for several years in the living room at Woodburn, before it was given to Bowers's oldest son); the title pages were of The Dog Owner's Handbook and Principles of Bibliographical Description (the latter most unfortunately reproduced from the Russell & Russell reprint of 1962).

At this dinner the official announcement was made that the Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia would be bringing out a collection of Bowers's essays. Late in 1975 a 550-page volume, containing twenty-six essays chosen by Bowers, was published, with an introduction by Irby B. Cauthen, Jr., expressing gratitude for Bowers's "service to the world of bibliography, a world that has felt—and will continue to feel—his creating and forming hand." Entitled Essays in Bibliography, Text, and Editing, the volume is one of the landmark books in the history of bibliography, bringing together many (but not all) of Bowers's most significant essays from 1941 through 1973, arranged in four sections, the first called "The Bibliographical Way" (six items) and the others dealing with descriptive bibliography (three items), analytical bibliography (six items), and textual criticism and editing (eleven items). Bowers did not revise the essays (a wise decision, since they were all historic documents that had been widely read and acted upon in their originally published form), but he did add a few comments in brackets and about two dozen new footnotes (some of considerable biographical interest). At the end of the volume were a check-list of Bowers's writings and a chronology of his career (based on his own records), which have been useful despite their occasional inconsistencies and inaccuracies. In reviewing this volume for Library Quarterly, G. Blakemore Evans stated, "No more fitting tribute than this volume could have been conceived for Bowers." Peter Davison, in Modern Language Review (1978), noted that Bowers's stature was such that reviewers took "glee" in pointing out errors in his work; but, Davison concluded, "picking holes in mountains does tend to leave them looking very much like mountains."

Bowers's life in retirement continued for a while to be much the same as it had been before, except that he had more time for his research and writing (and more time for long trips, such as the one he and his wife took to Egypt in the spring of 1978, when she was working on a book about her great-uncle, who had been a diplomat there). Shortly before his retirement, when he sent Gordon Ray a report (23 September 1972) on his remarkably active second Guggenheim Fellowship, he had said, "I feel I am entering a period of real productivity, now that the dam has broken, and I am grateful to the Foundation for the opportunity to let loose a great deal of activity that had been penned up for lack of time." Five years later—two years into retirement—he wrote Ray again:

His editions and essays kept appearing apace, and he attended conferences and gave lectures.

After returning from the September 1978 conference at the University of Kansas that brought editors of literary and historical material together, he wrote me (on 31 October) as follows:

The following spring (1979) the Bowerses were in Venice and London in April, with a few days at Oxford in May before returning on the 7th. "Although I'm glad to get away," he wrote on 3 April, "I shall miss the Virginia spring, which is just beginning, with cherry trees out, our orchard full of daffodils, and, unfortunately, the grass beginning to grow." (He always mowed the five-acre clearing around the house himself, using a Gravely twelve-horsepower, fifty-inch rotary mower that he had to walk behind.) A letter from London on 25 April closed with a paragraph that started in a characteristically lively fashion and ended on a touching note: His description (after he was back home, on 27 May) of some of his doings in London and Oxford can stand as an indication of what his trips had always been like, with attention paid to friends, music, theater, and food: And a letter a few months later (27 September) suggested that the pace of his life had not slackened: he was "pushing ahead full steam" on the Nabokov, "since the publisher would like it six months ahead of the original schedule," and he was to lecture at Kent in October and at Yale in December.

The next spring (1980) everything changed, when his wife had a stroke. By late May she was thought to be recovering satisfactorily, but in early June she had a setback, followed by two operations to clear her carotid arteries. After more visits to the hospital, daily physical therapy, and constant attention from him, she regained considerable use of the left side of her body and was well enough by June 1982 for them to go to Folly Cove for the summer and to plan a trip abroad for the next spring. Bowers hoped to spend two months at Oxford, working through the Bodleian's newly acquired Harding Collection in order to amass further data for his Restoration drama bibliography—which, as he said in a letter of 16 March 1983, "has gathered dust for about twenty years but which I now want to revive and finish before I die." They did make the trip, living in Iffley Turn, Oxford, from 7 April to 7 June, during which time Bowers completed his work at the Bodleian and addressed both the Bibliographical Society (in London on 19 April) and the Oxford Bibliographical Society (in May). From then on, the Restoration bibliography was one of his primary concerns, vying with the Beaumont-Fletcher and James editions and with Studies for his time:

The process of looking at major collections that he had thus far not adequately examined meant that he needed to spend time at the Huntington Library. He was made a Research Fellow there for the month of May 1985, an arrangement that was repeated in the following two years. Thus the Bowerses added a new element to their annual routine, spending a month in California in May before going to Folly Cove.

Along with his devoted care of his wife, Bowers continued to have

an intense work schedule during these years, though he faithfully took a brief rest every afternoon (except at the Huntington, where—as he wrote on 14 May 1987—he worked "a seven-hour day without a mid-day nap"). Something of his old hectic pace is suggested by the events of late April 1985. On 20-23 April a conference was held in Charlottesville to celebrate Bowers's eightieth birthday; three days later (the day after his actual birthday) he flew to New York to deliver the Presidential Address ("Unfinished Business") at the conference of the Society for Textual Scholarship and to read another paper the next morning ("Mixed Texts and Multiple Authority"), returning home immediately after it in order not to be away from his wife longer than necessary; and on 1 May they flew together to Los Angeles for his work at the Huntington. The Charlottesville conference, which Bowers had agreed to only reluctantly, was organized by Hans Walter Gabler and David J. Nordloh and brought together twenty invited scholars for a series of discussions based on fifteen previously circulated papers. (At the opening session in the Rotunda, attended by both the Bowerses, I had the pleasure of conveying official greetings from the Bibliographical Society of America and of reading a paper attempting to characterize Bowers's achievement.) Bowers participated in all the discussions and was pleased, if exhausted, at the end. As he wrote me just afterward (24 April), "Usually I can snooze during meetings, but not those—too conspicuous, and in fact too interesting. . . . it was stimulating to me and being again in the midst of the clash of ideas which meant something was a very welcome change from the routine of my rather solitary existence." The appearance of some of the papers in SB reflects his continuing vigilance on behalf of the journal; but the papers most directly celebrating his accomplishments (David Vander Meulen's on the Principles and my opening statement) became the basis for a special commemorative number of the Bibliographical Society of America's Papers (Second Quarter 1985), published also as a separate pamphlet. (After this issue came out, Bowers wrote me —on 22 October 1985—that his "greatest pleasure" in it was "the vividness it has brought me of the positive need for me to put even greater effort into finishing the Restoration play bibliography while I am still able to poke a typewriter.")

Various references in his letters show that his "solitary" life had many interruptions—visits to the Houghton Library from Folly Cove, to the University of Maryland to deliver a lecture that resulted in what he believed was his first standing ovation (late spring 1984), to McMaster University to advise the Bertrand Russell editors (October 1984), and so on. Two more honors came to him at this time: on 24 January

1986 the Bibliographical Society of America made him an Honorary Member, and on 26 September of that year the Association for Documentary Editing (meeting in Charlottesville) held a session on his influence and awarded him its triennial Julian P. Boyd Award. The continuous appearance of his editions during these years (two or three volumes in a year not being uncommon) is of course the best testimony to the efficiency of his rigorous schedule at home. Hints of that schedule surfaced in his letters: on 24 July 1984, for example, he wrote, "So far this summer I've been working on Beaumont and Fletcher for the vol after next, but today a mess of proof for the next vol. arrived that must have priority. Poor Wm James is being left in the lurch"; and on 8 February 1986, "I am as eager as I can be to get cracking again on that bibliography, but there has been no chance all winter. Just now I have assembled what I need to write the intro to my text of Henry VIII for the next B & F vol., and then (except for some extra collation needed for Two Noble Kinsmen in the same vol.), I shall be free to try to tie up the next James volume on his mss." He was never without a heavy load; as he had written to his oldest son on 9 February 1982, "I have . . . taken on more than I should, but . . . I have a horror of not having enough to do." When Gordon Ray retired from the Guggenheim Foundation in 1985, Bowers said in a congratulatory note to him, "I'm sure you will stay as busy as I have. As W. W. Greg once remarked to me—'What else is there to do?'" Nothing better captures Bowers's energetic drive than this statement, especially since it implies his private measuring of himself against Greg.

Nancy Hale's health declined further in 1987, partly because her physical therapy was interrupted for a cataract operation. In April 1988 she had another small stroke, which prevented their going to California in May but not to Folly Cove in late June (when she flew with a friend and he drove as usual). About two weeks after their return to Charlottesville, on 24 September 1988, she died, at the age of eighty, and Bowers's life was never the same again. His depression over losing her after forty-six and a half years was scarcely to be relieved in work, which he had previously been able to immerse himself in, regardless of other problems that were on his mind. Besides, his own health was cause for further depression. He had felt ill during the winter of 1987-88, and in June 1988 he had a benign polyp removed from his colon and was diagnosed as having a duodenal ulcer. Although the treatment for it was successful at first, he developed a more serious problem, inflammation of the pancreas, that summer at Folly Cove. By 28 November, however, he could report that the doctors had given him "a clean bill of

health"; but ominously he added that he still felt "precarious and often somewhat ill." He was henceforth never to be without this feeling, in greater or lesser degree, and his last years can be summed up in his sentence, "I am partly ill, active, and unhappy" (16 January 1989).

He nevertheless delivered a paper ("Elizabethan Dramatic Texts: Problems in Semi-Substantives") at the April 1989 Society for Textual Scholarship conference in New York, went to the Huntington Library in May (this time on Mellon Foundation support), and spent the summer at Folly Cove. From the Huntington in early June he made a characteristic report: "I'm getting quantities of work done here, and helping a couple students in off hours when rare book room closed." And back in Charlottesville on 21 June, before leaving for Folly Cove: "I am busting the traditional gut to get my introduction off to England for the next Beaumont and Fletcher volume." What was uncharacteristic in these reports was his emphasis on his exhaustion. He did obtain satisfaction, however, from the work he was still able to do, and from his family and his friendships—he had himself always been the most loyal and considerate of friends. He continued to welcome family gatherings at Folly Cove; and on his last drives there, he was delighted to visit with his wife's granddaughter in Connecticut, having finally given in to the family's request that he make the trip in two days rather than one. (As late as 16 September 1987 he had referred to "a grueling 14-hour drive down from Folly Cove, two hours behind schedule with massive traffic jams.") In Charlottesville, he enjoyed seeing old English department friends, like Martin and Ruthe Battestin, Irby and Betty Cauthen, Don and Polly Hirsch, Robert and Francesca Langbaum, Barbara Nolan, and Tony and Viola Winner, as well as new friends like David and Doris Vander Meulen, who had moved there in the summer of 1984. David Vander Meulen's bibliographical work (stemming from a landmark Wisconsin dissertation of 1981, "A Descriptive Bibliography of Alexander Pope's Dunciad, 1728-1751") was beginning to be widely noticed; and, at Bowers's urging, he joined the Virginia English department that fall, with the understanding that he would assist Bowers in editing SB. Once they got to know each other, Bowers recognized that Vander Meulen was indeed the person he had hoped for as his successor to look after the future of SB and the Virginia bibliographical tradition.

Another satisfaction of his last years was the publication in late 1989 of Hamlet as Minister and Scourge and Other Studies in Shakespeare and Milton, a 239-page volume bringing together thirteen of his critical essays (one of which was also bibliographical, the one on "sullied"/"solid"), preceded by a biographically interesting preface. The dedication

to Nancy Hale repeated the dedication in his volume of Lyell Lectures twenty-five years earlier, but he could not conceive of dedicating it to anyone else. The essays were drawn from a period of almost three decades: the title essay, his most famous piece of critical writing, was the earliest one (1955), and the latest dated from 1982. After four essays on large themes (tragic reconciliation, dramatic structure, point of view, and "dramatic vagueness" in Shakespeare), the volume concentrated on Hamlet, with six pieces, followed by one on Lear and one on Henry IV; it closed with the only non-Shakespearean essay in the volume, his 1978 study of Samson Agonistes. David Bevington is quoted on the jacket as saying that the essays taken together "show the cohesion and growth of an impressive critical mind"; and the volume itself has more cohesion than one often finds in a collection of essays, because Bowers kept returning to certain subjects, notably structure and reconciliation—not unrelated in his mind, for he always dealt with the ethical implications of structure (as he had done from the time of his study of revenge tragedy half a century earlier). His critical essays gave permanent form to the kind of criticism that he engaged in so effectively in the classroom: explication thoroughly grounded in historical knowledge. Reviewers naturally compared and contrasted these essays with Bowers's bibliographical and textual work. Robert Y. Turner (in Shakespeare Quarterly, 1991), acknowledging the great influence of Bowers's approach to Hamlet, found the decisiveness and certainty of Bowers's "confident criticism," with its "tightly controlled postulates and definitions," to be related to the rigorous tone of his bibliographical writing. R. S. White (in Shakespeare Survey, 1991), on the other hand, said, "Fredson Bowers was known to my generation as the one who cast a long shadow on textual studies," but this volume "shows him in a more benign light as teacherly guide and critical inspiration."

When in early 1990 the next conference of the Society for Textual Scholarship was being planned (for the following year), Bowers agreed immediately to provide a paper, but in the autumn he began to wonder whether he would feel like attending and reading the paper himself. Both his perpetual stomach pains, still unsatisfactorily diagnosed, and his anti-depression medication robbed him of energy and concentration; "it is especially annoying," he said, "that I cannot forget my woes in work since my concentration is so bad that the tension rises if I put in much more than half an hour checking my play bibliography entries. And some days I can't quite manage that." By the time of this letter (15 March 1991), he had decided definitely that he could not attempt traveling to the conference (though he had not given up hope of going

to Folly Cove in the summer). It was agreed that I would read his paper for him; but the paper apparently went astray in the mail, and on 8 April, three days before the conference, I telephoned him to ask for another copy. He found one, which he thought was not identical to the one previously sent, and Vander Meulen faxed it to me. On the morning of Thursday, 11 April 1991, at the opening session of the conference, I read his paper "Why Apparatus?" as part of a program that also included a paper by his good friend Jo Ann Boydston. When I returned to my office that afternoon, there was a message to telephone Vander Meulen; he informed me that Bowers had died in his sleep early that morning and had been found by the housekeeper at about the time his paper was being read to the assembled textual scholars in New York. In two weeks he would have been eighty-six.

The news was learned by most of the conference participants during the course of the afternoon, and at the banquet the following evening David Greetham, founder and executive secretary of the Society for Textual Scholarship, read a memorial resolution, in which Bowers was described as "the most respected textual critic of this century." After the banquet Jo Ann Boydston and I, over drinks at the Algonquin, exchanged memories of Bowers—conscious of the fact that the three of us had regularly gathered there after these biennial occasions and had last dined together just before the 1989 conference. By having that conversation, we were acting in the spirit of Bowers's wishes for a memorial, because he had left these instructions, dated 25 June 1989:

On 21 April the Langbaums invited some forty-four of Bowers's friends "for drinks in Fredson's memory"; the only formal reminiscences on that occasion were moving statements by Fredson T. Bowers, Jr., Robert Langbaum, and David Levin (whose letter was read in his absence by J. C. Levenson). Two days later E. D. Hirsch delivered before the university faculty meeting a perceptive memorial resolution. By this time obituaries had appeared in newspapers in New York and London, as well as in papers closer to home; and the more extended process of reflection in scholarly journals was about to begin.

Two moments from Bowers's last months, representing breaks in his suffering, offer appropriate tableaux to remember him by. One shows him and the Vander Meulen daughters on a fine March morning, twelve days before his death, picking daffodils in the Woodburn orchard. The other was described by Bowers's oldest son at the Langbaums' gathering:

The body of Fredson Bowers was cremated, and the ashes were buried on 29 June 1991 in the Hale family plot at Forest Hills Cemetery, Jamaica Plain, Boston, next to the grave of Nancy Hale.

V

Fredson Bowers's life of scholarship was so productive and so controversial that his name, if not always his ideas, became known to nearly everyone in the field of English and American literary scholarship and to a great many in related fields. He was unquestionably one of the most famous scholars of the twentieth century. The sheer bulk of his publications was sufficient in itself to attract attention: a complete collection of his scholarly works would consist of 172 volumes (his eight books and six pamphlets, sixty-eight volumes of scholarly editions, forty-five volumes of SB, and thirty-three anthologies and twelve editions to which he contributed), plus two hundred issues of periodicals containing pieces by him. (These figures include the three volumes of Beaumont and Fletcher not published during his lifetime, but they exclude those volumes of editions for which he was a consultant and which contain no prose by him.) He published some seven thousand pages of scholarly expository prose, amounting to something like three million words (inclusive of the textual essays in his editions, but not counting the hundreds of pages of discursive notes and other apparatus in them). When one adds to this record the million and a quarter words he wrote on music and his writings

on dogs and stamps (along with the activities that lay behind them), his participation in other enjoyments, and his services to his profession, one tends to think of him in nineteenth-century terms, for many people today seem to believe that twentieth-century distractions have made such full lives scarcely possible.

A life so full of satisfactions is indeed an accomplishment. His life was significant, however, not merely for the quantity of his endeavors, or the wonder that he could engage so productively in so many of them (a wonder hardly lessened by the knowledge that he suffered from insomnia and never owned a television set); even more important was the nature of his productivity. His presence had a major impact on the history of bibliography—and on the perception of bibliography by those not directly engaged in it. Not only did he symbolize a whole field of scholarship; but people also thought of the field more often as a result of his presence, and saw more often the broad relevance of it. That the texts of verbal works are affected by the material means of their transmission —and therefore that the study of literature in the broadest sense entails the study of books and manuscripts as physical objects—are concepts not yet widely understood by readers in general, or even by all scholarly readers. But more people have probably been exposed to these ideas by Bowers than by any other person. He was a worldly scholar, not only in the sense that his scholarship was an element in a richly varied life but also because he cared nearly as much about promoting an understanding of his field as about contributing substantively to it. His influence was felt through his roles as publicist and catalyst in addition to his activities as research scholar.

An examination of that influence can usefully begin with a consideration of the style and tone of his writing, for his reputation—from the beginning—was linked to the personality conveyed by them. Although SB and the Principles were sufficient to earn him the respect of bibliographical scholars early in his career, they alone do not account for the special position he quickly came to occupy in the minds of many people, outside as well as inside the small circle of committed bibliographical scholars. The picture of him was more likely to be that of the advocate, the publicist, the polemicist, for it was he who often, and insistently, called their attention to the field and forced them to consider its indispensability for their own work. He tirelessly pressed the claims for "the bibliographical way" (to echo the title of his 1958 Kansas lecture); and he perennially made statements like this one from his earliest proselytizing talk (at the University of Pennsylvania in 1949): "No matter

what the field of study, the basis lies in the analysis of the records in printed or in manuscript form." The justice of his general position cannot be questioned; but the manner in which it was presented caused some people, if they were not already receptive, to resist what seemed to them a hard sell.

Advocates are often inclined, through temperament or the repeated necessity of being assertive, to overstate their cases, or to irritate some of their audience through too candid a depiction of the follies requiring correction. There is no doubt that Bowers was occasionally—or, as some thought, more often than that—guilty of these charges. Everyone who has read Bowers must have a collection of favorite examples of his scorn. "First let me," he once said (in the Pennsylvania talk), "utterly cast aside the kind of gossiping about books which is written by and published for amateur collectors and which reaches its nadir in some so-called bibliographies of modern authors or in book-collectors['] manuals." On the same occasion he asserted that library schools "do not know enough to teach analytical bibliography as I understand it, and this deficiency sometimes also means, unfortunately, that books cannot be recorded accurately in libraries." And we recall the curator who was an "outworn cataloguer" deposited in the rare-book room "as a reward for faithful service where the world will pass her peacefully by and no extraordinary demands will interfere with her equable latter years" (the University of California lecture in 1966). These snippets suggest why his talks (and the published papers they became) did not always win him new friends. But his blunt attacks did not arise from a love of controversy: as he said in a letter of 8 February 1986 (echoing similar statements in earlier letters), "I dislike controversy and the acrimony of the scholar." (Nicolas Barker, in his obituary of Bowers, put the matter well: "He was a powerful but never a joyful antagonist." Barker added, with reason, that Bowers's forcefulness "concealed a more tender regard for the sensibility and foibles of his adversaries than they appreciated.") The positions he took were not motivated by petty animosities or perceived slights but always by his deep commitment to the advancement of his field.

The movement of his prose was of a piece with his enthusiasm as an advocate. His sentences, often loosely constructed, seemed to rush along and, as they piled up, to envelop a subject. (He once described to his oldest son—in a letter of 27 February 1981—how, as he typed from a half-finished manuscript, "the thing sort of took over by itself and so without regard to my manuscript I went ahead composing on the typewriter until the end.") His was not a tight, elegant, balanced style but a flowing and encompassing one. John Carter, a highly conscious stylist, said in the

Times Literary Supplement early in Bowers's career (4 September 1948) that Bowers wrote "in a style sometimes lacking in limpidity." This comment, coming from a person sympathetic with Bowers's aims, was a relatively kind version of what many reviewers (largely British) spelled out in frank detail—noting examples of overly complex sentence structure, fuzzy syntax, and imprecise diction. But there was another point of view, which can be represented by Philip Young, though he was no admirer of Bowers's editorial practice. In an unfriendly examination of the Hawthorne edition (collected in Three Bags Full, 1973), he conceded that Bowers "writes rather well." Young did not elaborate, but one understands the virtues he must have had in mind. Bowers's prose had the strength that comes from immersion in a subject and from an analytical intelligence alert to the ramifications of every point. The density and complexity of his writing reflected both detailed learning and a delight in exploring exhaustively the implications of an observation.

This is not to say that such attributes cannot also underlie a spare, orderly prose; and in fact there were times when Bowers's sentences became uncomplicated in syntax and marched along in inexorable order, particularly in extemporaneous talks. (Those of us present at the small conference that brought together six Soviet editors and six American editors, held at Indiana University on 8-11 April 1976, will not forget an afternoon at the Howells edition headquarters when Bowers explained the rationale and procedures of critical editing; speaking without notes, he moved from one point to the next with a simplicity and clarity that not only reflected his familiarity with the subject but also revealed in action the workings of a keen intelligence.) Bowers's temperament was expansive, however, and in his case wide knowledge and acuteness of mind resulted normally in an exuberant prose that had the power of undisguised emotional involvement. Stylistic infelicities tended to be lost amid the onrush of ideas and examples, abetted by conversational clichés. This kind of prose is obviously not to everyone's taste, but it is by no means an ineffective way of using the language. (And it was certainly not unrevised: surviving drafts of his work show extensive rewriting, and in a 1982 interview for a student magazine Nancy Hale said that she had learned the importance of revision from— in the words of the interviewer's summary—"her husband's unceasing modification of his own work.") Bowers's ear, trained by wide reading in English literature and vast amounts of writing from the age of sixteen on, was thoroughly attuned to the nuances of English; and if some individual sentences suggested the reverse, his prose when taken in larger units was generally very effective indeed.

The language of such discourse can give rise to serious problems, however, when an imprecise word, used for promotional effect, can be seen, upon reflection, to detract from the intellectual integrity of what is being said. A prime example is Bowers's use of the word "definitive" in connection with critical editions (a usage that fortunately declined in his later years). Those who already understood the nature of critical editing recognized that he was employing "definitive" in a special sense and that the word was rhetorically effective in helping him emphasize the rigor, discipline, and thoroughness of the bibliographical way. They knew, and realized he knew, that no product of critical judgment can ever be definitive. But not everyone knew: some people have been put off by what they regarded as an excessive claim, and others (less critical-minded) have come away believing bibliography and textual criticism to be more definite and factual than they are. In this way a tension sometimes developed, within a single piece, between the charged language of advocacy and the calmer and more precise discourse of the scholarship being advocated.

The dominant attitude that always came through, however, was one of uncompromising rigor, and that in itself has been enough to bring his work under attack from those who were made to feel defensive of their own less rigorous ways. Being an active advocate affords unlimited opportunities for giving offense in one way or another, both to the people one wishes to win over and to those who are already converted. If Bowers had written a quieter, less impassioned prose, he might have irritated fewer people, but his message would have received less attention—an outcome not in the long-term best interests of the field. In any case, Bowers's personality did not give him that option: he was not inclined to see any necessity for tempering his opinions in order to win support—and, indeed, no doubt felt that a forthright approach would ultimately command more respect. The persona that emerged from his writing is one that many people have taken pleasure in attacking; but the number who have thereby been blinded to the integrity and coherence of his position are relatively few (if sometimes vocal). The review of The Bibliographical Way in the Times Literary Supplement (19 February 1960) is paradigmatic: it took obvious enjoyment in declaring that Bowers's examples "are delivered like straight lefts to the jaw" and that readers might be "more amenable to conversion if the missionary acted less like Pizarro or Cortes"; but it nevertheless called the essay "required reading." Bowers's forceful lectures outlining the place of bibliographical and textual research in the world of scholarship form a major segment of his output and have been "required reading" for

a great many people. His advocacy of his field, which through the printed form of his lectures will continue to be influential, was one of his great accomplishments.

Bowers's role as a catalyst of bibliographical advances, closely related to his role as a publicist, benefited from the same qualities. The easy way in which prose flowed forth profusely from him, for example, enabled him to give copious advice, in the form of extremely long letters, to SB contributors, or potential contributors who had submitted articles for consideration. It was not uncommon for them to receive letters of six, eight, ten, or more single-spaced—and sometimes unparagraphed—pages (often with a postscript in his notoriously difficult handwriting). Frequently such letters were the by-products of the actual process of reading: he would go through articles at the typewriter (one of his trusted old machines, which he pecked at with two fingers of his left hand and one of his right and which produced pages that were recognizable at a glance to dozens of correspondents), and he would type out a running commentary as he read. This procedure sometimes resulted in his having to say, at some later place in a letter, that an earlier point he had made should now be disregarded; but even these adjustments of opinion were useful to the authors, who were thus alerted to spots in their articles that might at first be misleading or misunderstood. The authors always knew that their work was receiving Bowers's concentrated attention and that his suggestions grew out of an understanding of—and respect for—what they were trying to accomplish.

From the first volume of SB to the last one that he edited, his shaping hand was reflected throughout the published contents. When Curt F. Bühler reviewed the first one (in PBSA, 1949), he explained why it was not a "breach of good taste" for him to undertake a review when an article of his was included in the volume: "there may be advantages in these special conditions since I can testify, not only as a contributor but also as a very minor assistant in regard to another paper, to the great care exercised by the editorial board [essentially Bowers]. It is not too much to say that Professor Bowers virtually rewrote a whole section of my own contribution." Another such instance, the next year, has recently been described by George Walton Williams, who as a graduate student had been asked to give one of his papers to Studies:

This kind of care—if usually less dramatic—was lavished on contributors for the next four decades.

There was another, and even more significant, way in which he influenced the work that appeared in Studies: the solicitation and encouragement that brought the material to him in the first place. Solicitation of articles, which he engaged in continually, was of course a compliment and an incentive to the authors; but equally important was his recognition of bibliographical talent at an early stage and his supportive (if rigorous) criticisms that helped to give both reassurance and direction to those possessing it. He frequently invited his graduate students to contribute to Studies, when he saw that they had appropriate material, and thus helped to launch several of them on notable careers as publishing scholars. As for those who were not his students, Bowers's record of discovering talent extended from Allan Stevenson and William B. Todd, in the first volume, to Adrian Weiss, whose exciting and innovative investigations of Renaissance type fonts appeared in the final three volumes that Bowers oversaw. In the last of them, which was published nine months after Bowers's death, Weiss movingly recorded his indebtedness to Bowers:

It is a pleasing coincidence that Weiss's article dealt with A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres, the subject of Bowers's earliest substantial scholarly paper (and, further, that it concerned shared printing, the detection of which had caused Bowers a problem in his first contribution to The Library). But the significant point is that Weiss was giving voice to sentiments that had been felt by many earlier contributors as well. I can testify myself to the friendly support that underlay his letters to me, from the time of our first correspondence about SB in 1962; his encouraging inquiries (and, sometimes, tentative hints) regarding my work in progress were as important to me as his sensitive and shrewd comments on the work actually submitted. I cannot imagine being read by a more responsive and understanding reader, or receiving more constructive and meaningful encouragement. I know that my feelings are shared by many others; thus a considerable portion of the contents of SB might never have existed without his perceptively chosen words at the right moments.

Although SB was certainly Bowers's creature, it did not always speak for him. He conducted it with an open-mindedness that surprised some people, who thought that the assertiveness of his own writing indicated a lack of openness to other points of view. But just as the uncompromising quality of his public statements emerged from a principled and reasoned position, not from personal pique or stubbornness, so his standards for SB concerned cogency and scholarly responsibility, not a particular line of thinking. His position was revealingly illustrated by his response to a short piece I sent him in early 1969, criticizing one of the "notes" in that year's volume of SB: he said that he had planned to answer that note himself in the next volume but was pleased that the reply could now come from someone else. It is not common for an editor to print a contribution in one number and take exception to it in the next; but his willingness to do so was in line with his conception of SB as a place for the interplay of ideas, not the promulgation of a party line. On one occasion, nearly a decade earlier, he published a paper and a rejoinder to it in the same volume: John Russell Brown's defense of modernized editions and Arthur Brown's of old-spelling editions appeared side by side in the 1960 volume.

He made no secret about his disagreement with certain other articles he had accepted. In his 1975 volume of collected essays, one of his new footnotes commented on D. F. McKenzie's "brilliantly argumentative article," "Printers of the Mind," published in SB in 1969:

This was not the only occasion on which Bowers objected to McKenzie's distrust of analytical bibliography as reflected in this article; but he knew that the article deserved a hearing. Two other new footnotes in his 1975 volume referred critically to an article by Hans Zeller that had just been published in SB: in one he characterized its attitude as a "fetish" (p. 499), and in the other he questioned its use of the word "critical" to describe its approach (p. 527). The policy he always followed in SB was concisely stated in a letter to David J. Nordloh on 17 January 1970: "Studies in Bibliography is always prepared to consider articles about textual theory and practice whether or not they coincide with my own beliefs."

Bowers was obviously an active journal editor who influenced the production as well as the final form of the material that he published. The resulting publication has been at the heart of bibliographical developments since its founding. During the first half of the twentieth century, The Library was the journal that conveyed the excitement of being at the center of a growing field; and although its standard of excellence did not diminish in the second half of the century, SB nevertheless became the place after 1948 where one witnessed most dramatically the exploration of new techniques and new areas. One of the remarkable aspects of the impressive succession of SB volumes is that they were the product of a single sensibility. (Bowers's editorial longevity surpassed McKerrow's fifteen years as founding editor of the Review of English Studies and even Pollard's thirty-one-year editorship of The Library.) During this long period he proved himself to be a great editor, in an additional sense to the one usually thought of—for editing a journal is different from editing the text of a classic work of literature. Yet one of the distinguishing marks of his handling of SB is his understanding of the connections between the two. (His experience in thinking about textual matters surely lies behind his sensitive treatment of certain aspects of contributors' manuscripts—recognizing, for instance, that it is more sensible to let British scholars retain their British spellings than to enforce a formal consistency from article to article.) To create a journal that is indispensable to a field, and to maintain its vitality and stature over an extended period, are rare achievements. The role that SB has played in the history of twentieth-century bibliography can hardly be overestimated, and the influence that Bowers

exerted through SB is thus one of his enduring legacies. And when one thinks of the additional ways in which his influence operated through the writings and actions of others (his students and the many people who sought, and generously were given, his advice), one sees that his catalytic activities behind the scenes had effects as far-reaching as his promotional activities on the podium.

Of his own direct contributions to bibliographical and textual study, those concerned with descriptive bibliography may appropriately be considered first. It was the area in which he made his earliest extended contribution, the Principles, a book that remains his most widely known and influential piece of work; and he brought his focus back to descriptive bibliography at the end of his life, feeling that his Restoration bibliography in progress would be the essential capstone to his career. As he wrote me on 22 October 1985, "It is now . . . clear to me that this is a cap that must be put in place if I am to feel any real and lasting satisfaction." At that point the work had been a part of his life for forty years, a continuous thread in the fabric of his endeavor; but as an item on his agenda it frequently had to yield to other projects. It had been uppermost in his mind in the late 1940s, and again at the end of the 1950s, when it was his Guggenheim project (at that time, according to his Guggenheim application, he had completed his "basic examination" of copies and anticipated that a year "should largely finish the project"); and it surfaced intermittently after that whenever he was in a library and had time to examine some Restoration quartos. Reflecting on Greg's death during his Guggenheim year, he gave most attention to A Bibliography of the English Printed Drama to the Restoration and stated, "Among Greg's many achievements this seems to me to rank as perhaps the greatest"—an achievement that was "something of a miracle." Having written the Principles, Bowers was in a position to see "the originality of mind and the depth of comprehension that went into the detailed formulation" adopted by Greg in his Bibliography. (Eight years later, reviewing Greg's collected essays, he called Greg's collation formulary "an example of creative scholarship of near-perfect proportions.") But what particularly struck Bowers in 1959, given his impatience with abstractions divorced from concrete instances, was the way in which Greg's Bibliography put theory into practice: "in the Bibliography the concrete illustration of the adaptability and simplicity of his comprehensive system was so much more overwhelming than the previous bare statement of theory that common acceptance of his principles as the norm for modern bibliographical writing inevitably followed." Bowers

had produced his own statement of theory (by no means a "bare" one); but he would not be satisfied until he, like Greg, had completed a great bibliography to exemplify it.

The fact that Bowers felt so strongly about descriptive bibliography and returned to it from textual criticism with an increased sense of its importance may surprise some people, who think of descriptive bibliography as less stimulating. But his final elevation of it was a striking reflection of the view of the field depicted in the Principles, which makes clear the intellectual excitement of its subject. The book shows that the practice of descriptive bibliography is a form of history, with all the same challenges and rewards. Although this point is not discussed explicitly at length, it in fact is the most fundamental and striking insight conveyed by the book—conveyed by its author's practice of treating bibliographies as pieces of writing (not as compilations), by his emphasis—in describing how bibliographers work—on the analysis and interpretation of physical evidence, and by the habit of mind he displays in working through particular examples. That descriptive bibliography is a demanding form of historical scholarship underlies every sentence of the book. Although there were a few earlier scholars who understood these points, none of them produced a detailed manual of practice.

The Principles moves well beyond what had previously been written, in two directions: it refines the formulary of collation by examining it in greater detail than had ever before been attempted, reinforcing the discussion with an extraordinary array of examples; and it places the collation in a larger context, offering a comprehensive plan for describing all features of books from all periods. The thoughtfulness of the exposition, which seems to cover nearly every contingency that might arise, remains impressive, even to readers who have gone over it many times. Those who have had occasion to work carefully through every statement of the book have emerged with some minor amendments but have also gained renewed respect for the quality of mind that produced such a structure of argument. The book's great achievement is to have made readily accessible, for the first time, a detailed and comprehensive practical guide to bibliographical procedure, building upon the best that had previously been written on the subject and reflecting a thoroughly considered rationale. It became standard upon publication, and it will remain so.

Such an accomplishment is not diminished by noting that it left some work undone and that some of its conceptual approaches may need adjustment. In treating the details of typography, paper, and binding, for example, the book was charting far less explored territory

than was the case with signature collation, and there is correspondingly more that one now might feel needs to be added to those discussions. On some larger theoretical issues, a few questions also must be raised: whether, for instance, the traditional approach to signature collation sufficiently distinguished an account of physical structure from a record of printed signatures; and whether the concept of issue could justifiably exclude binding if the binding was the publisher's. When the Principles was published, Bowers (like nearly everyone else) was less experienced in handling books after 1700 than earlier ones, and his account therefore needs more supplementing in its later parts. The failure to think through the implications of issue for volumes in publisher's bindings is an instance of the less perceptive coverage of modern books. Several scholars in recent decades have addressed some of these problems, and more will be said about them in the future, and about other trouble spots in the Principles. (Someone, for example, should publish an adequate index to it.) But such work is in the nature of the maintenance and alteration that a grand edifice inevitably requires, despite the soundness of its basic structure.

It is not surprising that when Bowers made remarks supplementary to the Principles, notably in his 1967 Bibliographical Society address, a dominant theme was "degressive bibliography," for any decision to abridge the quantity of detail in bibliographical entries reflects a sense of priorities regarding the purposes served by those entries. Thus whether the emphasis of a bibliography is on literary history and biography (in which case the description of impressions and editions after the author's death may be shortened) or on printing and publishing history (in which case such impressions and editions are no less interesting than those of greater textual significance) is a basic issue to be considered. However this matter is decided, Bowers left no doubt about another: the length of an entry cannot be allowed to determine the amount of investigation performed. The space one devotes to reporting the results of research, in other words, has no bearing on the effort required to determine what one is willing to assert are the facts. There can be no question that he was right on this score; but the propriety of the proportions embodied in published bibliographical accounts will always be a subject of debate, for it can no more be settled finally than the emphases in any other kind of historical account can be prescribed.

Whether descriptive bibliographers should be expected to collate texts and whether textual scholars have surpassed bibliographers in sophistication are perhaps finally rather unimportant jurisdictional disputes; what matters is that the work be done, by those who understand

how to do it, not how much of it is reported in bibliographies and how much in editions. Bowers's efforts to distinguish these scholarly genres may in the long run seem dated; but his cogent explanation of the relationships between the two provides a grounding of perennial value. His approach to descriptive bibliography, both in concept and in procedure, has been immensely influential—having been taught to thousands of graduate students in literature departments and library schools and having been followed by dozens of bibliographers in writing their bibliographies. (The basic form of entry used in the Pittsburgh Series in Bibliography was designed by him.) A great many people in the book world would join with B. J. McMullin in calling the Principles their "professional 'bible.'" Even though Bowers's Restoration bibliography remains to be completed by another hand, his contribution to descriptive bibliography stands as one of the great achievements in modern scholarship.

Bibliographical analysis is a tool of descriptive bibliography, but analysis can of course take place independently of an intention to write a full bibliographical description; and Bowers engaged in analysis in his earliest bibliographical articles, a decade before the Principles. By 1938 he had achieved some sophistication in the use of headlines for analysis; and when he and Charlton Hinman presented papers on headlines at the English Institute in 1941, they were—as matters turned out—offering a preview of how analytical bibliography would develop after they returned from war duty four years later. There is a historical neatness in the fact that the fiftieth anniversary of the Bibliographical Society occurred in 1942 and that for the occasion F. P. Wilson wrote his now-famous account of "Shakespeare and the 'New Bibliography,'" for these events proved to mark the close of one phase of the development of analytical bibliography. What was prophetic about the prewar Bowers and Hinman articles was not simply that they presaged the shift in major activity to America but that they emphasized new techniques for extracting, from physical evidence, details of the printing procedures underlying particular books. As Helen Gardner remarked in her revised edition of Wilson's essay, nearly three decades later, the greatest advances in the intervening years had been in the study of the printing of Shakespeare's plays, and she spoke of this work as the product of "what we must call the 'newer bibliography.'" The earlier development of the field, from Pollard (who was himself a link with the analytical study of incunabula) through McKerrow and E. E. Willoughby to Greg (whose writings were the climax of the prewar phase), resulted

of course from the continued exploration of physical evidence; and the "newer bibliography" represented no turning away from this trend. Its distinctiveness lay largely in its more intense focus on minute physical details, particularly on damaged types, and in its repertory of techniques (which expanded rapidly in the postwar years) for organizing those details into page-by-page case histories. Bowers played a critical role in this renewal of vitality in the field both through his early articles (several of which remain—despite later amendments—classic treatments of bibliographical detection) and through his encouragement of analytical work in SB, which resulted in an efflorescence of compositorial study, produced by an impressive assembly of able young scholars.

As the years passed, Bowers did not concentrate on this kind of work, as Hinman did, and his accomplishment in this area is not as great as Hinman's. In 1968, T. H. Howard-Hill asserted (in Shakespeare Studies), "Professor Bowers' own direct contributions to the advance of Shake-spearian bibliographical scholarship have been small, and rarely definitive." Few would contest the view that Bowers's essays in analytical bibliography have not been as important for understanding the printing of Shakespeare's—and other Renaissance dramatists'—plays as have the writings of a number of other scholars; and some of the conclusions he reached (as on Elizabethan proofreading) have since been challenged or overturned. Nevertheless, there remain a considerable number of accomplished and convincing analyses, particularly within the textual introductions to his various editions. As he well knew, inferences drawn from bibliographical evidence rarely reach the level of certainty, and new analyses may modify previous conclusions. But he also recognized that conclusions, however provisional, must be drawn in order to proceed; and the vast body of his editorial work demonstrates the essential role of bibliographical analysis in the textual criticism of authors from the Renaissance to the present. The exemplary role of his analyses, given his prominence and the visibility of his editions, is a major reason (along with his fostering role as editor of SB) for according him a significant place in the history of analytical bibliography; but one should not overlook the substantive contribution made within those editions, where order is brought (with more or less certainty) to the bibliography of several dozen important works.

There is yet another, and equally important, way in which Bowers was of service to analytical bibliography. Although one may regret that he never wrote an equivalent to the Principles for this aspect of bibliographical investigation, he did in effect write the prolegomena for such

a book in his 1959 Lyell Lectures, Bibliography and Textual Criticism. The book is subtle, rigorous, and absolutely fundamental, aiming at nothing less than a characterization of the habit of mind required for recognizing, and then responsibly employing, inductive bibliographical evidence. One might perhaps take from it (once again) the conclusion that bibliographers are historians, confronting the same problem that all historians face: how to weigh the preserved evidence in order to reconstruct past events. These points would seem to be unexceptionable and uncontroversial, and indeed the book has been generally neglected; yet it has a role to play in debates about the foundations of research in book history. A suspicion of analytical bibliography, publicized in McKenzie's "Printers of the Mind," exists in other quarters as well—such as among those historians of the book who work in the tradition of the French school of histoire du livre and stress the role of books in society. Recourse to archives, as these writers maintain, is certainly important; but they have difficulty in accepting the great store of existing books as an archive itself, containing primary evidence of printing processes. Anyone who understands that fact finds it a truism that the scrutiny of physical evidence in books cannot be abandoned; but the point is strangely difficult for some people to accept. Underlying this difficulty is a failure to perceive bibliography as historical research and interpretation; therefore Bowers's book ought to be assigned reading for those engaged in such discussion and ought to become increasingly prominent in future methodological controversy.

Bowers's impact in the field of textual criticism and scholarly editing is symbolized by the extent of his own published work in this area—three theoretical books, some two dozen major essays, and more than five dozen edited volumes (of works by thirteen authors from five centuries)—to say nothing of some forty-two additional volumes for which he was textual adviser (in the Dewey and Fielding editions), and a number of posthumous volumes in series for which he provided textual plans or procedures (the editions of F. Scott Fitzgerald and William James's correspondence). If, in descriptive bibliography, he did not live to produce a major demonstration of his principles in action, he provided ample testimony to the way his theories of editing could be applied in practice. He emerges from all this work as the preeminent authority of his time on the textual criticism of post-medieval writings; he was also—and this does not automatically follow—the most influential as well. His advice and his practice have not, it is true, been universally accepted;

but they have been so widely analyzed that even those who take a different line can scarcely be unaware of how their own views have been affected by the debate.

Many of the criticisms inevitably refer to specific textual decisions, or classes of decision, in particular editions. Since any critical edition rests on critical judgment, there will always be grounds for legitimate disagreement on individual cruxes or groups of related ones. Some critics, however, argue as if they believe that only one correct text, or responsible edition, of a work can exist; they do not seem to see that one can disagree with certain judgments in a critical edition and yet understand how those judgments can be defended, and thus still have respect for the edition as a whole. The same critics might well see this point in connection with a critical essay but have not learned that a critical edition is equally the product of judgment, which is necessarily subjective. Bowers embraced the opportunity for judgment in critical editions, regarding judgment not as a necessary evil but as a powerful tool for historical reconstruction. To Bowers's mind, textual criticism—as Ignas K. Skrupskelis (associate editor of the William James edition) has appropriately remarked—was "a means of controlling and stimulating the critical imagination," both for the editor and for the reader. (It is noteworthy that in a 1961 talk with the title "Future Needs for Editing" he emphasized the role of "practical criticism" in literary scholars' lives, stating that research should lead "to a better understanding of works and a greater capacity to teach their artistic values.") He was nevertheless fully aware of how tenuous some critical decisions are and was surprised when other people failed to understand that more than one outcome can be defended. On the controversy over his adoption of Crane's revised ending of Maggie, he wrote in a letter of 24 October 1981:

Bowers was more reasonable and open-minded than many of his critics. The magnitude of his achievement in elucidating the textual histories and providing critical texts of such a large number of important writings is not lessened by disagreements about some categories of emendations, or by the realization that no critical text can ever be the only defensible one.

There are, however, appropriate grounds for dissatisfaction with certain aspects of Bowers's editorial performance. For example, he had a tendency to engage in the partial regularization of punctuation and spelling. A given author's practice in these matters may of course be a matter of judgment; but, despite his usual statement that authorial preferences were honored, he often seemed to begin with the assumption that an author was consistent in pointing and spelling, or intended to be (an assumption that results in an unwarranted contraction of the area in which critical judgment can operate). And to regularize or normalize on the grounds that an author expected such alteration (a standard occasionally appealed to) seems at odds with his regular rejection of other instances of possibly tacit approval by the author. Another lapse is his attempt to justify omitting punctuation and spelling variants from the historical collation on grounds of principle rather than simply of expense. In the textual essay in the Dewey edition, for example, he said, "since the editors will have adopted as emendations of the copytext all such accidentals variants that seem to be either authoritative or advisable changes, no useful purpose would be served by listing the hundreds and hundreds of publishers' or printers' unauthoritative normalizings of the text on which they worked." In fact, several purposes would be served—the most obvious being that readers would have the opportunity of judging for themselves whether all those variants are "unauthoritative." In the Crane edition, Bowers dismissed the idea of collating multiple copies of magazines containing contributions by Crane: "no useful purpose would be served by multiple machine collation of magazine copies in search of textual variation." Yet magazines are printed objects, just as books are, and they are subject to the same possibilities for variation among supposedly identical copies. Also in the Crane edition, the apparatus for Crane's syndicated newspaper pieces is illogical, reflecting a failure to think through the implications of radiating texts for apparatus: after recognizing that no one of the radiating texts can be a copy-text in Greg's sense, Bowers still chooses one of them (for economy, the one closest to his reconstructed text) as a "copy-text" for purposes of the apparatus and does not report variant accidentals in the other equally authoritative texts.

Furthermore, an alarming number of inaccuracies exist in the apparatuses to Bowers's editions; some of the errors have been put on record in the editions themselves (in the last volume of the Crane edition,

for example, is a section of nine pages listing errata in the previous nine volumes), and others no doubt remain to be detected. Perhaps there would have been fewer errors if Bowers had not undertaken so many editions and felt obliged to work so fast. An additional problem related to his prolific production of editions, with contents covering such a broad span of time, is that it has unfortunately fueled the already prevalent misconception of editing as a mechanical or technical skill, which—once learned—can readily be applied to any writing. Bowers certainly knew that the critical judgments required by critical editing must grow out of a thorough knowledge of the writers being edited and their times: in Textual and Literary Criticism, for instance, he spoke of the necessity of having a "feeling for its [the past's] idiom, and above all the knowledge of its language for which no amount of enthusiastic dilettante sensibility can adequately compensate" (p. 10). But many people concerned with literature (even among the scholarly public) do not understand the point. No one would wish that Bowers had edited fewer authors simply to avoid this situation; but it is a regrettable fact that his actions sometimes exacerbated it. That he sometimes failed to follow through the implications of his arguments has led Paul Eggert to assert, "Bowers's concentration on questions of editorial methods and standards was not accompanied by an equivalent, philosophic interest in their underlying assumptions." Although this statement is perhaps too harsh, there is no doubt that Bowers was temperamentally less interested in concepts than in procedures. One of the consequences—one that Eggert discusses in some detail—is that he did not clearly work out the relation of authorial expectation to his concept of authorial intention.

These various concerns about Bowers's editing do not raise the question of his editorial goal—the construction of texts representing their authors' final artistic intentions. His preference for texts that were as unaffected as possible by the processes of publication (or dramatic production) was a source of some criticism nearly from the beginning; and in his later years those who conceived intention to include expectation, or viewed authorship as social and collaborative, became more vocal. To them, Bowers's concentration on writers as individual creators, rather than writing as the product of a social milieu, seemed unrealistic and old-fashioned. Others believed that his emphasis on "final" intention minimized the importance of textual evolution and instability. These views all reflect valid approaches to textual study that have been neglected and deserve to be pursued; but they do not discredit an interest in final authorial intention, which must remain one of the few available paths to an understanding of writings from the past. When Bowers's

editorial career began, it would have been hard to conceive that by the end of his life editions focusing on final authorial intention would be received grudgingly by a number of critics, who found the basic aim misguided. His unswerving devotion to it was quite proper, however; changing fashions in literary scholarship do not alter the basic value of a "Bowers edition," and the majority of readers are still interested in works from the past as the products of individual minds. In his immense series of volumes he set a style for scholarly editions—both in concept and in form—that was widely imitated. Other styles will follow, and other critical editions of the same works will inevitably appear. But his masterly charting of textual histories and his judgments as to the intended wording of numerous texts will continue, into the indefinite future, to affect the way readers approach the authors he dealt with.

His influence on scholarly editing was of course also felt through lectures and other writings; and his introductions to the rationale of critical editing—like On Editing Shakespeare (1955), Textual and Literary Criticism (1959), "Textual Criticism" (in the 1963 MLA pamphlet), and "Scholarship and Editing" (PBSA, 1976)—are still, and seem likely to remain, among the best examples of their genre. In all his editorial writing there is an unflagging insistence on the importance of critical editing to reconstruct authorially intended texts; although he recognized the value of facsimile editions, he felt passionately that documentary texts cannot bring one as close to past intentions as can texts that are the joint product of documentary evidence and informed judgment. His resistance, in some of his late lectures, to the "social" approach to textual criticism came not from closed-mindedness but rather from the belief that a socialized concept of literary production did not lead to textual criticism at all, for an emphasis on texts as they emerged from the process of publication seemed to require the diplomatic or facsimile reproduction of texts. A late lecture like "Greg's 'Rationale of Copy-Text' Revisited" showed the supreme importance to him of the exercise of critical judgment, which he felt should not be hampered by any set of guidelines, even Greg's "Rationale." (Critics who have accused Bowers of dogmatism in pushing the claims of Greg have not taken this important paper to heart.) Those late lectures were the last in his long series of writings on the eclecticism of critical editing, which have set a standard of argument and eloquence that those taking other positions must attempt to equal. He has thus been a powerful force for raising the level on which editorial discussion must be conducted. At the beginning of his Rosenbach Lectures in 1955 he had remarked on the "comparatively little discussion" of the principles for editing printed,

rather than manuscript, texts; they have now of course been very much discussed, and the sophistication of his essay revisiting Greg, emerging as it did from a long line of his own essays and responses to them by others, is a measure of the extent to which he is responsible for the profoundly changed environment in which editors of modern writings work.

This view of Bowers's achievement makes clear why any serious discussion on a bibliographical theme is bound to involve issues on which he took an illuminating and provocative stand, and why anyone with the slightest exposure to descriptive bibliography, analytical bibliography, or textual criticism has come across his name. The extent of his influence is suggested by the frequency with which one encounters references to him—references sometimes trivial in themselves, yet revealing, like Roy Stokes's allusion to the "grey eminence in Charlottesville" (Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada, 1979). The graduate students of 1963 who read Frederick C. Crews's The Pooh Perplex no doubt saw something of Bowers in the supposed contribution of "Smedley Force"; at any rate one can maintain that without his presence it is not likely that there would have been a chapter of that book asking "why are there no watermarks in Winnie-the Pooh? Why are there no chain lines? Why no colophon? Why no catchwords? No signature? No cancelland or cancellans?"

If one turns to the Oxford English Dictionary to learn what cancelland and cancellans mean, one finds that quotations from Bowers's Bibliography and Textual Criticism are among the citations offered. Quotations from him appropriately appear in the entries for other bibliographical terms as well, such as collational, copy (as in "copy-text"), ideal (as in "ideal copy"), impression, inner (as in "inner forme"), Q (standing for "quarto"), recto, and skeleton (as in "skeleton forme"), among others. While they were at it, readers for the OED used his writings to illustrate some nonbibliographical words, which indicate how colorful his prose could be: blue-nosed, furor poeticus, heurige (page 3 of Bibliography and Textual Criticism yields, "a headache can be especially acute the morning after tasting Heurige, the new wine"), and stand-off, among others. All told, the second edition of the OED contains fifty-nine quotations from Bowers (forty-four from Bibliography and Textual Criticism, ten from the Principles, four from Textual and Literary Criticism, and one from his 1952 PBSA article, "Bibliography, Pure Bibliography, and Literary Studies"). Bowers also wrote the articles on "Textual Criticism" (1959) and "Bibliography" (1960) for the Encyclopaedia

Britannica and thus was a prominent representative of his field in two of the most widely used reference works in the English-speaking world.

His fame by now extends beyond that world, as one can see from the work of Roger Laufer and Wallace Kirsop (e.g., Australian Journal of French Studies, 1966); or from Katia Lysy's translation of "Multiple Authority" into Italian (in Pasquale Stopelli's 1987 anthology, Filologia dei testi a stampa), Conor Fahy's eleven-page Bibliofilia obituary of Bowers in Italian (1991), and his Italian translation of "A Digest of the Formulary" (from the Principles) in Bibliofilia (1992); or from Sachiho Tanaka's translation of Textual and Literary Criticism into Japanese (1983), Akira Takano's exposition of the Principles in Yōsho no hanashi (1991), and Hiroshi Yamashita's teaching of Bowersian bibliography and textual criticism at Tsukuba. As Yamashita wrote David Vander Meulen on 22 July 1991, "Mr. Bowers's influence in Japan has been quite great not only on English literature but also on Japanese literature"—an influence that owes much to Yamashita's own compositor studies of Spenser and his textual work on Rashomon and Natsume Soseki. The depth of Yamashita's feeling for Bowers—both as individual and as spokesman for an approach—is suggested in a letter he wrote me on 1 June 1992:

Peter Davison's obituary of Bowers in The Library (1991) mentions the same occasion in Birmingham: Bowers's work is naturally still best known in the English-speaking world, which produced a wide array of admiring and affectionate obituary tributes like Davison's—among them Nicolas Barker's in the London Independent (15 April 1991) and David Vander Meulen's in the Johnsonian News Letter (1992), along with a substantial gathering of recollections in the Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook 1991 (1992) and a "Fredson Bowers Commemorative Issue" (Second Quarter 1991) of the Bulletin of the Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand. The awe with which Bowers's attainments were viewed in all of them was conveyed by the opening of Barker's piece: "To revolutionise any branch of human study is an achievement: to do it twice is a triumph. Fredson Bowers brought this off." (The two fields are of course bibliography and textual criticism.)

If the so-called "new bibliography," emphasizing the place of physical evidence in literary study, can be designated—as it often is—an Anglo-American approach, we must recognize that Bowers played the pivotal role in causing "American" to be a part of this epithet. What had been essentially a British movement became an active field in American scholarship through the force and breadth of his published writings and through his personal influence. The central position of his work across the whole spectrum of bibliographical-textual studies is what places him in direct succession to the great triumvirate of Pollard, McKerrow, and Greg. One can name other first-rate bibliographical scholars between Bradshaw and Bowers, but none of them matches those three for the size and quality of a body of work that encompasses bibliographical description and analysis and critical editing. And Bowers outdistanced his great predecessors in the range of detail at his command—without recourse to the discoveries of others—to support general observations. Bowers is their rightful heir in the double sense that he built on their achievement and that what he built ranks with their achievement in range and distinction.

Comparisons of Bowers with Greg have often been made. F. C. Francis, for instance, in his Feldman Lecture (A Bibliographical Ghost Revisits His Old Haunts, 1972), said that Bowers "wears the mantle of Sir Walter Greg with such conspicuous success," and he elaborated on the parallel between the two. G. Blakemore Evans, in his review of Bowers's collected essays (Library Quarterly, 1977), stated that Bowers, "both by precept and example, has done more for those first cousins, bibliography . . . and textual criticism, than any other man in this century except W. W. Greg—a single exception Bowers would himself be the first generously to admit." Not everyone would admit it, but the ranking is not

important. Joost Daalder, in a somewhat different comparative evaluation, believed that Bowers "was probably not quite as extraordinary a scholar as Greg" but was "a better literary mind." There is much to be said for this view; but both men were so extraordinary that the only point in making such judgments is the possibility of arriving at a more precise sense of their achievements.

Bowers himself had some doubts about Greg's critical abilities, for in his review of Greg's collected essays (Times Literary Supplement, 28 September 1967) he described Greg's "blind side" as those instances "when the daring of a logically pursued but highly speculative critical argument obscured his usual fine discrimination between fact and fantasy." Regarding a nonbibliographical essay of Greg's on King Lear, Bowers believed that "the end result may be more valuable for the exposure of the simple facts about the dislocations of time than for the critical conclusions drawn from the evidence, which are in part strained." But Bowers firmly believed in the necessity of linking bibliographical and literary considerations; and—whatever he thought of the outcome of Greg's critical thinking—he could still say, "One of Greg's most striking characteristics as a scholar was that in the end his technical skill, as for example in palaeography, was always placed at the service of textual and other forms of criticism." From the beginning Bowers's emphasis was on literary values, and he would not have disagreed with F. W. Bateson's point (in The Scholar-Critic, 1972) that the function of bibliography in textual criticism is "negative—to exclude the irrelevant or to correct what is historically impossible." It is therefore ironic that Bateson, who felt that Greg "was not a literary critic" and who called Bowers "Greg's most enthusiastic American disciple," thought that some of Bowers's arguments illustrated the "dead-end into which textual criticism is driven if it ignores aesthetic considerations." Bateson was not the only person, however, to misunderstand the role of judgment in bibliography and to be misled by Bowers's emphasis on bibliography into thinking that he was more interested in mechanical routines than in literary considerations.

The ultimate reputation of Bowers's literary criticism depends on the readers of his editions, where thousands of his literary judgments are embedded. When all these judgments, and the notes discussing some of them, are counted in his literary criticism, as they should be, his position as a critic is seen to be of enormous proportions. Even if one focuses on the more limited body of his critical essays, he remains a prominent critic through his influence on the study of Hamlet and revenge tragedy generally. In 1991 Robert Y. Turner said (in Shakespeare

Quarterly), "Fredson Bowers was one of three or four scholars who set the pace and direction for literary studies of the English Renaissance during his generation. The names of Alfred Harbage and Madeleine Doran come to mind as his peers, but not many others." Whatever group of names one finally fixes on, the fact is that Bowers belongs there, judged not as a "textual" or a "bibliographical" scholar but simply as a literary scholar. A love of literature, as deep as the love of music so movingly depicted in his 1961 Richmond lecture, underlay his literary judgments and his willingness to spend endless hours investigating textual evidence. I believe that Ignas K. Skrupskelis was correct when he said (in Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook 1991) that Bowers "did what he did not because he thought it was useful but because it was part of his enjoyment of literature." Skrupskelis then significantly enlarged the point: Bowers's enjoyment of literature and his enjoyment of editing were a part of his enjoyment of a life filled with enthusiasms—for dogs, music, stamps, cars, contract bridge, food, wine, single-malt Scotch, the stock market.

The sense of his life as one activity followed by another, punctuated by satisfactions, is conveyed by a passage in his uncharacteristically self-reflective letter of 22 October 1985 (from which I have quoted several times):

Whatever he thought of his mental abilities, nearly everyone else saw in him an extraordinary intelligence. But the mood of the passage in other regards—the brisk and unsentimental attitude, the delight in intellectual puzzles and "analytical thinking," the eagerness for the next challenge—does seem accurate. He once described the rewards of bibliographical work, which overshadow the drudgery, as "a generative excitement of exploring the unknown" and of "drawing some maps of terra incognita" (Clark Library lecture, 1966). The terra incognita of the past yields some of its secrets to bibliography, which he described near the beginning of Textual and Literary Criticism as "the only sure foundation on which to rear the necessary wide acquaintance with the whole complex of the past" (p. 10). He pursued the work with joy and vigor, as he pursued all his interests, and the maps that resulted will serve as guides for an increasing number of fields.

In thinking about the place of Fredson Bowers in the history of scholarship, we must remember how intertwined in him were the publicist and the scholar, and how interrelated were the responses each aroused. The value of securing for the field a larger place in the scholarly public's consciousness is undeniable, and Bowers's success in this regard was directly related to his stature as a productive scholar: we listen more attentively, if not always with agreement, to the publicist who is not a popularizer but who has actually produced some of the work that makes the field important. If Bowers had not chosen to play this larger role, the state of bibliography today would be less vital and populous, even though he had made his scholarly contributions. It must be admitted that there is a less fortunate side to these connections: temperament and feelings influence scholarly judgment, and some scholars who—for whatever reason—have been offended by, or who disapprove of, the stance of the polemicist may criticize the scholarship without having been open-minded to what it had to say and without fully understanding it. This personal element has entered into commentary on Bowers's scholarship; it is one of the side-effects of his unique position.

What we should concentrate on in the future is a productive criticism

of his work. I think it can be said that in descriptive bibliography, in analytical bibliography, and in textual criticism an understanding of his treatment of the basic issues is an essential ingredient of future progress: his work may need, here and there, some revising and extending, but to proceed without recourse to it would be folly. In matters of consequence, the last word can never be said; the highest praise is not that one's work has ended debate but that it is indispensable for further discussion. Reciting Bowers's accomplishments is therefore only the beginning of a proper assessment; our debt to him is adequately acknowledged only when we understand that our discussions, now and in the future, must build on his. To find that some of his practices or conclusions require rethinking or amplification is not to diminish his achievement; indeed, it is the best way to underscore his accomplishment, because it reveals that whatever we say takes its bearings from what he has already said.

In Nancy Hale's The Life in the Studio, we read, "With their instinct for making something, artists tend to respect the past as something also made." The bibliographical way, like all other paths to the past, requires the shaping vision of the scholar-artist. Bibliographical clues, like the objects she found in the studio, serve as "keys to release the life that trembles behind them in the void," a life that one "otherwise would never have suspected was there." She might have been describing her husband's writing. And he understood the ways in which his work was similar to hers: in 1982 he told an interviewer, "I think some of my wife's intuitiveness has rubbed off on me." The effort to establish what a printer did, or what an author thought, at a particular moment in the past is not essentially different from any other exercise of the historical imagination. There are responsible ways, and irresponsible ways, of marshaling the preserved evidence to create a picture of the past. What we have cause to admire in Fredson Bowers's work, whether or not we agree with every detail of it, is his responsible and imaginative fashioning of bibliographical evidence into a coherent view of certain kinds of past events. His writings have made, and will continue to make, the bibliographical way of thinking a presence in many people's lives, through the artistry of his creative scholarship.

Note on Sources

Fredson Bowers put himself on record voluminously, and his own writings, which are naturally the primary source for his intellectual biography, also contain a surprising amount of personal information. (They are recorded in the accompanying checklist, which is followed by a chronology.) Among other printed sources, there are several pamphlets of biographical interest that appeared in connection with significant moments in his life: at the time of his Gold Medal from the Bibliographical Society, John Carter's elegant assessment was printed in The Gold Medal of the Bibliographical Society: Graham Pollard, Fredson Bowers, 1969 (1969); at the time his last year of teaching began, a chronology of his life and a selection of photographs (described in the text above) appeared in A Keepsake to Honor Fredson Bowers (1974), and a list of the students who wrote dissertations with him was included in a menu-keepsake entitled Honoring Fredson Bowers: A Dinner with His Doctoral Students (26 October 1974); and at the time of his eightieth birthday, Fredson Bowers at Eighty (1985; reprinted from Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America [PBSA]) contained my address "The Achievement of Fredson Bowers" (many passages from which are incorporated into the last section of the present essay), David L. Vander Meulen's "The History and Future of Bowers's Principles," David J. Nordloh's brief account of "The Bowers Eightieth-Birthday Conference," a resolution from the Bibliographical Society of America, and a checklist supplementing Bowers's own checklist of his writings in his 1975 Essays (which also included a chronology).

Bowers's death of course produced a large outpouring of biographical accounts and memoirs. Two substantial gatherings have appeared: a "Fredson Bowers Commemorative Issue" (ed. Ross Harvey) of the Bulletin of the Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand (15.2 [Second Quarter 1991], 45-102), which contains reminiscences by Hans Walter Gabler, Clive Probyn, and David L. Vander Meulen, along with articles by Joost Daalder (on Marlowe's Doctor Faustus), Paul Eggert (on Bowers's textual practice), B. J. McMullin (on the Principles), and Peter L. Shillingsburg (on the concept of work); and "Fredson Thayer Bowers" in the Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook 1991, ed. James W. Hipp (1992), pp. 224-253, which contains articles by Matthew J. Bruccoli (on working with Bowers), Irby B. Cauthen, Jr. (on Bowers as teacher), George L. Geckle (on Bowers as literary critic), Ignas K. Skrupskelis (on Bowers as editor of William James), Robert Kean Turner (on Bowers as editor of Beaumont and Fletcher), David L. Vander Meulen (on Bowers as music critic), and George Walton Williams (on Studies). Among the other notable obituary tributes are Nicolas Barker, "Professor Fredson Bowers," The Independent (London), 15 April 1991 (reprinted in Book Collector, 40 [1991], 257-259); Jo Ann Boydston, "In Memoriam: Fredson Thayer Bowers," Documentary Editing, 13 (1991), 68; Peter Davison, "Fredson Thayer Bowers," The Library, 6th ser., 13 (1991), 356-358; Conor Fahy, "In Memoriam Fredson Bowers (1905-1991)," Bibliofilia, 93 (1991), 311-321; Roy Flannagan, "The Death of Fredson Bowers," Shakespeare Electronic Conference, 2.126 (5 May 1991); G. Thomas Tanselle, "In Memoriam: Fredson Bowers, 1905-1991," PBSA, 85 (1991), 183-187, and "Fredson Thayer Bowers," Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, 101 (1991), 235-240; David L. Vander Meulen, "In Memoriam: Fredson Thayer Bowers (1905-91)," South Atlantic Review, 56.3 (September 1991), 165-167, and "Fredson Bowers and the Eighteenth Century," Johnsonian News Letter, 52.2-3 (June-September 1992).

For the general context of bibliographical history into which Bowers's work fits, one might turn to my "Issues in Bibliographical Studies since 1942," in The Book Encompassed, ed. Peter Davison (1992), pp. 24-36. The influence of Bowers in the fields of descriptive bibliography and textual criticism is so pervasive that almost everything about them since mid-century discusses him in one way or another. For descriptive bibliography, the places to start are Vander Meulen's PBSA article cited above; two Engelhard Lectures, his Where Angels Fear to Tread (1988) and my A Description of Descriptive Bibliography (1992; also printed in Studies in Bibliography [SB], 45 [1992], 1-30); and my "A Sample Bibliographical

Description with Commentary," SB, 40 (1987), 1-30, which records the major articles that supplement the Principles. For textual criticism, I will mention two titles of mine, only because they attempt to provide comprehensive surveys of the textual debates of this period and therefore can serve as a guide to an extensive literature dealing with Bowers's ideas: Textual Criticism since Greg (1987), supplemented by "Textual Criticism and Literary Sociology," SB, 44 (1991), 83-143.

Reviews of Bowers's monographs and editions of course form another extensive body of commentary. In the present essay I have mentioned the reviews that seem to me the most significant or useful, and I shall not repeat those references here. For additional reviews of the Principles, one should consult Vander Meulen's 1985 article (cited above). For some of the other books and editions, I list here a few more worthwhile reviews: on Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy—Frederick S. Boas in Year's Work in English Studies (1940), Edgar C. Knowlton in South Atlantic Quarterly (1941), and Leland Schubert in Quarterly Journal of Speech (1940); on On Editing Shakespeare—James G. McManaway in Shakespeare Survey (1956); on Textual and Literary Criticism—Johan Gerritsen in English Studies (1967), Donald J. Greene in Studies in English Literature (1961), Victor M. Hamm in Thought (1960), John Edward Hardy in Yale Review (1959-60), F. D. Hoeniger in Queen's Quarterly (1960), James G. McManaway in Shakespeare Survey (1961), and Times Literary Supplement (17 April 1959); on Bibliography and Textual Criticism—Robert Donaldson in The Library (1965), Paul S. Dunkin in American Notes & Queries (1965), and Johan Gerritsen in English Studies (1967); on Beaumont and Fletcher edition—G. I. Duthie in English Language Notes (1966-67), Philip Edwards in The Library (1968), and Johan Gerritsen in Review of English Studies (1969, 1972, 1979); on Crane edition—Peter Davison in The Library (1972) and G. Thomas Tanselle in Book Collector (1974); on Dekker edition—J. R. Brown and W. W. Greg in Review of English Studies (1956, 1963) and Karl J. Holzknecht and Thomas B. Stroup in PBSA (1955, 1959); on Fielding edition—Frederick W. Hilles in Yale Review (1975; replied to by Martin C. Battestin, 1976) and Michael Irwin in Review of English Studies (1976); on Hawthorne edition—John Freehafer in Jahrbuch für Amerikastudien (1970), Leon Howard in Nineteenth-Century Fiction (1967-68), Buford Jones in Studies in the Novel (1970), G. Thomas Tanselle in Book Collector (1974), and Dennis Welland in The Library (1964); on Marlowe edition—Times Literary Supplement (8 February 1974); on Whitman edition—I. R. Willison in The Library (1956). In addition, the annual commentaries in Year's Work in English Studies and Shakespeare Survey should be examined: Bowers's name appears in the indexes nearly every year during his most active period.

A number of sources provide background for specific aspects of Bowers's life. For information on the family Bowers thought himself to be descended from, see Charles Candee Baldwin, Rev. John Bower, First Minister at Derby, Conn., and His Descendants (1879); for a picture of Brown University in Bowers's time, see By Quentin Reynolds (1963), in addition to the biographies of S. J. Perelman and Nathanael West cited in the essay; for an understanding of Bowers's place in the world of dogs, see the fiftieth-anniversary number of Harp & Hound, 27.1 (1976), esp. 19, 36-41 (and the earlier and briefer account in 5.2 [Spring 1954], 37); for a thorough listing of Bowers's music reviews (with the main subject of each column indicated), see John Denniston, "Fredson Bowers and 'Music Off Records': An Index of Newspaper Columns, 1939-1967" (April 1990 typescript, available in the Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library); for Bowers's place in the local stamp scene, see Bernard P. Chamberlain, "History of Charlottesville Stamp Club, 1936-1961" (1 September 1961 typescript, available in the Albemarle County Historical Society).

Nancy Hale's autobiographical and critical writings—especially A New England Girlhood (1958), The Realities of Fiction (1962), and The Life in the Studio (1969)—contain many passages relevant to the study of Bowers's life. Biographical accounts of Nancy Hale also inevitably contain relevant information; see the articles by Anne Hobson Freeman in the Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook 1980, ed. Karen L. Rood, Jean W. Ross, and Richard Ziegfeld (1981), pp. 212-219, and 1988, ed. J. M. Brook (1989), pp. 218-228 (the latter

also containing tributes by John C. Coleman, Philip Hamburger, Mary Gray Hughes, William Maxwell, and John Frederick Nims), and the article by Laurie Buchanan in Dictionary of Literary Biography, 86 (American Short-Story Writers, 1910-1945, First Series, ed. Bobby Ellen Kimbel, 1989), 124-129. The Bowerses were interviewed many times by local reporters; three particularly useful news stories about them are Anne Simmonds, "A Profile of a Lioness of Letters," Charlottesville Daily Progress, 9 June 1966; Doug Kamholz, "Writing Careers for Charlottesville Couple Are a Natural," ibid., 18 November 1979; and Paige Tucker, "A Tale of Two Authors," Creator [sponsored by the Cavalier Daily], March-April 1982, pp. 20-22. (These and other news stories are available in a clipping file at the Albemarle County Historical Society.)

Many of the details in the present essay come from manuscript sources or from conversations and correspondence I have had with persons who knew Bowers. The principal collection of his papers is in the Special Collections Department of the University of Virginia Library (much of it housed under the classification numbers 5691 and RG-21/30.801, .811, .872, .881-.884, .901, .911). His work on the Crane and Nabokov editions is particularly well represented, but there are papers relating to other editions, as well as typescripts and proofs of a number of his articles, and some correspondence. Bowers's extraordinary term paper for Hyder Rollins at Harvard is a part of this collection (RG-21/30.882), as are the manuscript and typescript of his Richmond lecture on music (5691-f). Letters from this collection mentioned in the essay are Bowers's to Mrs. James Southall Wilson, 28 June 1963 (6453-f); Bowers's to David J. Nordloh, 17 January 1970, and to Matthew J. Bruccoli, 7 February 1970 (both RG-21/30.883); and A. L. Rowse's to Bowers, August 1982 (5691-ag). I am grateful for permission from the Library to quote from these documents.

Some important letters to Henry Allen Moe and Gordon N. Ray are in the files of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, along with Bowers's statements of plans for, and reports on, his Guggenheim Fellowships. All other quoted letters of Bowers—to Fredson T. Bowers, Jr., Jo Ann Boydston, David L. Vander Meulen, and me—are still in the hands of the recipients. (I am to be understood as the recipient whenever no other person is stated.) I have also drawn on several other unpublished documents: letters in the files of the University of Virginia English department (including V. A. Kolve's letter to Bowers, 28 May 1980); the typewritten citation for Bowers's Thomas Jefferson Award, 13 April 1971; typewritten reminiscences by Fredson T. Bowers, Jr., along with his compilation of excerpts from his father's letters and from other letters and tributes; memorial statements by Robert Langbaum and David Levin (21 April 1991); E. D. Hirsch's memorial resolution for the University of Virginia faculty meeting on 23 April 1991; and Hiroshi Yamashita's letter to David L. Vander Meulen, 22 July 1991.

I wish to express my gratitude to the following archivists, librarians, and representatives of organizations for their gracious assistance, in correspondence and in person: Ann Sergi, American Kennel Club Library; Susan Dixon, American Philatelic Research Library; Martha L. Mitchell and Gayle Lynch, Brown University Archives; Maxine Sullivan, University of Chicago Registrar's Office; Bruce Rutherford, Collectors Club Library; Martin Antonetti and Kimball Higgs, Grolier Club Library; Nancy Boyden, Harvard University Student Affairs Office; Alfred de Quoy and Mrs. Charles F. Schreiner, Irish Wolfhound Club of America; Warren F. Kimball, Jr., Mobile Post Office Society; James W. Campbell, New Haven Colony Historical Society; Carl Esche, Princeton University Archives; Maida Goodwin, Smith College Archives; and Kathryn N. Morgan and Michael F. Plunkett, University of Virginia Library Special Collections Department.

I am also greatly indebted to the following individuals (some of whom are quoted in the text) for their friendly cooperation and invaluable help: Martin C. and Ruthe Battestin, David M. Bevington, William H. Bond, Fredson T. Bowers, Jr., Jo Ann Boydston, Mark Eccles, Richard Colles Johnson, Gwin Kolb, Vera Brodsky Lawrence, Robert V. Lindsay, Nina W. Matheson, David Rubin, Samuel Schoenbaum, Sue Schwager, William B. Todd, Michael L. Turner, Robert Kean Turner, Jr., David L. and Doris Vander Meulen, James M. Wells, Anthony Winner, and Hiroshi Yamashita. Three of these people must be singled

out for their special contributions: Martin Battestin, Bowers's literary executor, for his permission to quote from Bowers's letters and other unpublished writing; Fred Bowers, Jr., for his readiness to locate family details and share them with me; and Dave Vander Meulen, for his indefatigable researches, which went far beyond the call of duty, even for an editor of SB. The generosity of their assistance is a reflection of the depth of their feeling for the subject of this essay.