University of Virginia Library

III

Genuinely important discoveries of ways to evaluate physical evidence
systematically generate enthusiasms which can sometimes temporarily
obscure the abiding importance of judgment in editing. So it
was with the discoveries of the "New Bibliography," and so it was with
stemmatics. The discoveries of Lachmann and his predecessors certainly
put an end to some bad editorial practices, such as the one which favored
majority readings blindly, without considering whether the majority
was constituted of derivative repetitions of the same error. So
much basic confusion and so many worthless manuscripts did stemmatics
clear away that some less restrained practitioners applied it in pseudo-scientific
fashion, thus achieving insupportable results. On the one hand,
it was claimed that the method produced correct readings whenever it
did not produce impossible ones; on the other, eliminatio—that part of
recensio in which codices wholly derivative of others surviving are
eliminated from editorial consideration—was practiced falsely and with
a vengeance, so that all that remained afterwards was a sole source. By
these errors, described by E. J. Kenney as the "brutal simplification of
the textual evidence," errant Lachmannians came close to anticipating
by several decades that agnostic rejection of Lachmannism known as

the "best text" approach.[17] Housman, who ranked Lachmann as high
as Scaligero and Bentley in his editorial pantheon, did not think so
much of Lachmann's mistaken followers, whether they mindlessly believed
that stemmatics could extract correct readings from any number
of manuscripts automatically, or pretended that it was a just means of
eliminating troublesome evidence. Of the motives of those who labored
under either misconception, Housman reported, "They must have a
rule, a machine to do their thinking for them. If the rule is true, so
much the better; if false, that cannot be helped: but one thing is necessary,
a rule."[18]

The term "best text" is usually associated with the anti-Lachmannian
approach to medieval literature introduced by Joseph Bédier some
years after Housman made these remarks. It nonetheless accurately describes
a commonly recurring approach to editing literature of any
period. Housman was certainly familiar with earlier generations of it,
for in the same preface quoted above he criticized the "precious precept
of following one MS. wherever possible."[19] Housman's bold advocacy
of critical judgment would have an important if not immediate
effect on the editing of literature from the printed age. The founders of
the New Bibliography were at first not averse to the best-text approach.
Ronald B. McKerrow did not believe that the documentary evidence
could sufficiently support much critical emendation of sixteenth- and
seventeenth-century English literary texts. A response to the presence of
unreasoned eclecticism in the Shakespearean editorial heritage, as well
as to some contemporary scholarship which he regarded as overly speculative,
McKerrow's skepticism, while understandable, led him generally
to discount the role of judgment in editing. Hence, as Greg made known,
McKerrow, in his edition of Thomas Nashe (1567-1601), held that an
editor of a work existing in more than one edition, each deriving from
the one preceding, had no choice but to base himself on the latest edition
known to contain the author's modifications. This text McKerrow called
the "copy-text," and he recommended retaining it more or less whole,
even though he knew well that but for those late modifications, it was
probably less reliable than the earlier text.

McKerrow's edition of Nashe appeared in the first years of the 1900s.

In later years McKerrow reversed the direction of his practical recommendations,
though even then, when he seems to have turned his own
theory of copy-text upside-down, he persisted in an agnostic outlook:

McKerrow may have held agnostic views generally, but here and elsewhere
in his Prolegomena for the Oxford Shakespeare (1939) he seemed
illogically to suggest that knowledge of the literary past is especially
unobtainable. Paul Werstine lately argued that McKerrow's skepticism
was provoked by the high-flown conjectures of J. Dover Wilson, and by
Greg's (early and selective) endorsement of them.[21] Yet the Prolegomena
also expressed a more positive outlook, in its formulation of a new view
of copy-text:

By these remarks McKerrow seems to have opened the way to editorial
judgment that he had previously barred. His death in the year
following the appearance of the Prolegomena left his edition of Shakespeare
unrealized, but here he seemingly signaled an intention to edit
with an awareness of the problem Greg addressed more directly in "The
Rationale of Copy-Text." Greg defined the dimensions of the problem
with greater clarity and precision, especially by drawing the operative
distinction between accidentals and substantives. By identifying and
segregating these two categories of the problem of authority, Greg was
able decisively to release editorial judgment from the constraints of
McKerrow's early view. Among the examples Greg used to demonstrate
what he was getting at was McKerrow's critical text of Nashe's The Unfortunate
Traveller.[22] McKerrow based his text on the second edition,
since evidence indicated that it had been revised by the author. But the
editor also believed that Nashe was not responsible for all the changes,
and that the accidentals of the second edition were less reliable. Unable
to see his way clear to a rational eclecticism—which might have allowed
his text to reflect what he knew about the author—he surrendered the
better part of his judgment to the confines of what amounted to a
"best text."[23]

Worth nothing is that The Unfortunate Traveller is a romance in
prose, and by using it as one of his central illustrations, Greg demonstrated
that he was not focusing his analysis on a particular literary
genre—that is, dramatic works—as is often assumed. Greg was also aware
that the "underlying principles of textual criticism" were held in common
across literary periods and languages.[24] He especially recognized
the relation of the problems he was facing in the literature of the English
Renaissance to those faced by editors of classical literature, and he introduced
his discussion with an illuminating sketch of editorial trends

in the classics, concentrating on the tension between method and judgment.
Of course Greg recognized the differences also, mainly nothing that
editors of early modern literature concerned themselves with their authors'
spelling, whereas editors of classical literature usually normalize
spelling, since their source texts were at too great a remove from the
original manuscripts to do anything else. But when Greg warned that
"the classical theory of the `best' or `most authoritative' manuscript . . .
has really nothing to do with the English theory of copy-text,"[25] he did
not mean to discourage readers from seeing connections between the
two editorial fields. Rather, this warning had the special purpose of preparing
scholars of early modern literature to accept what for some would
be difficult propositions: that textual authority relevant to the reconstruction
of a particular moment in the history of a literary work might
be preserved in more than one document; that for the reconstruction to
be credible, the editor must be free to draw upon all the authoritative
documents, as well as upon his or her own thinking; and that governing
power over the editorial process is the mind of the critic focused on this
historical problem. Greg's copy-text is not a "best text" or a base text,
since it is not meant to decide the wording.

It is fair also to say that Greg intended for his copy-text to decide
even less than the wording, since he expected an editor to think about
spelling and punctuation too, and alter copy-text forms whenever there
was reason to do so. While Greg's rationale has a methodological appearance,
it is reasonably conceived, since chances are that the earliest
surviving document in a series is the one which will preserve the most
authorial details. Greg did not believe, however, that the manuscript
details of the Renaissance works he was concerned with could be generally
restored by his rationale. Few manuscripts, of course, survive.
Collateral holographic evidence is usually scarce, and so an author's
customary spelling and punctuation patterns cannot often be identified.
Overall norms for such details, furthermore, had not yet emerged, and
one need not doubt the technical competence of Renaissance scribes,
compositors, and proofreaders, nor their disposition to follow copy
faithfully, to suspect that they would not hesitate to alter manuscript
spelling and punctuation which they believed were deficient or erratic.
In view of these factors Greg noted:

By his eloquent restatement in the Prolegomena of the idea of copy-text,
McKerrow revealed that he had been uncomfortable with his
earlier conception of it. The new conception that Greg took up, with its
reasonable eclecticism and emphasis on informed judgment, was bound
to make another kind of editor uncomfortable, one who, unlike McKerrow,
was at ease only when hunting in a single text for obvious
errors. Greg's rationale challenged editors to face the difficult editorial
choices. Aware of the extremes to which classical stemmatics had been
taken, the author hedged his recommendations against misuse, by emphasizing
that his intention was to clear the way for the intellectual
resolution of textual problems, and by his warning about the "tyranny
of the copy-text." When the subtlety of Greg's thinking is taken into
account, especially his pronounced distrust of even the copy-text accidentals,
then the warning seems to have more to do with the original
conception of copy-text than with his redefinition of it. The experience
of Lachmannism, however, showed that methodological approaches
can lose some of their theoretical subtleties in the course of a widely-based
practical application. The very presence of a method can entice
some editors to focus their energies on questions of its application (in
the case of Greg's theory, the choice of copy-text, whether to emend it,
etc.), rather than directly on the work being edited.

Owing to Fredson Bowers's strong personality and his unique interdisciplinary
expertise, Greg's rationale was widely applied, as everyone
knows, to the editing of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American
literature. In this field, published works had not received much critical
editorial attention, and so it was inevitable that the literary scholars who
assembled to prepare the texts of the many editions coordinated by the
CEAA beginning in the early 1960s would have had little or no experience
with textual problems. Some early efforts were not surprisingly
marked by a conservatism characteristic of inexperience, and provide
ample evidence of the tyrannizing influence of a designated copy-text.
Such a beginning could have been predicted, and over time—just as
predictably—better results were achieved more often, as editors gained
experience. It must be said, however, that the granting of undue influence

to the copy-text continued and continues, in editorial endeavors
that stick to copy-text readings rigidly, or select a copy-text with the
disguised or half-disguised purpose of excluding other evidence from
editorial consideration altogether. Of the two transgressions, the former
is the less troubling, provided that the rejected variants are recorded in
the apparatus; the second is the more harmful, since the copy-text is
chosen in order to withhold evidence from the reader. Either way, however,
adherence to Greg's rationale is often proclaimed in the textual
essay, while the ostensibly critical text more truly reflects a best-text
approach. The failure to recognize radiating multiple authority remains
a persistent problem. More than once in the field of American literature,
for example, critical editions have adopted as copy-text a first book
edition of a work that was also printed serially in a magazine, with
both printings deriving from the same typescript copy of the author's
manuscript. While the first book edition's accidentals may be followed
carefully, with as small a detail as a broken comma reported in the
apparatus, the accidentals of the magazine printing are simply ignored,
owing to the mistaken notion that scholarly editing means never having
to report accidental variants. Bowers, as we have seen, was partly responsible
for fostering this notion, which, like the kind of copy-text
choice described above, compounds the ill effects of misconceived editorial
choices with a deceptively spare apparatus. The main thrust of
Bowers's recommendations on apparatus, however, went in the other
direction. Here he followed McKerrow's good example, laid out in the
Prolegomena, and improved upon it over the years. In 1962 he revealed
his plan for the informative apparatus criticus now familiar to scholars
of American literature. The plan advised editors to report many textual
details, including what came to be called "pre-copy-text variants"—varior
evidence of revision found in documents preceding the selected
copy-text.[27] It should further be remembered that Bowers was also responsible
for those deeply penetrating writings on radiating multiple
authority, which should convince modern editors of what is more commonly
understood by editors of earlier texts—that the existence of multiple
independent witnesses of a lost original is an editorial blessing and
not a curse. From multiple independent authorities the substantives
may be established more securely than from a single line of descent,
while at the same time informed choice about the accidentals becomes
possible.

With his bibliographical experience and familiarity with English

Renaissance studies, Bowers was well prepared to direct the attentions
of American literary scholars to textual matters, and introduce critical
editing into their field. Taking stock of the better preserved historical
record of modern literature, Bowers did not simply transfer the lessons
of editing English Renaissance texts to the new period. He rather extended
the logic of Greg's and McKerrow's recommendations, guided
quite naturally by the same overriding interest in what the author wrote.
This interest, Bowers understood, could be pursued further in modern
works than in works from more remote periods. He also developed the
concept of the "author's final intentions," first named by McKerrow,[28]
in recognition of the ample documentary record of many modern works,
which often preserves more than one moment in the development of
an author's intentions. The "ancestral series" on which Greg based his
rationale was a series of printed texts containing at least two "substantive"
texts—that is, texts carrying authority, such as the earliest, or a
later one bearing an author's revisions.[29] For editors of modern literature,
the series may include early draft manuscripts, a fair copy
manuscript, typed or handwritten amanuensis copies, galley and page
proof-sheets, prospectuses, periodical printings, and first and subsequent
book editions (and possibly separate series of these in different countries).
Any of these documents might contain the handwritten revisions
of the author or an assoociate; its genetic development may be linear to
a point and then radiate from there. Several extant "substantive" texts
may predate the first book edition of the work. Bowers created a scholarly
edition that made use of this evidence, in a critical text ordinarily
(not always) reflecting the author's final intentions for the work at the
time of his or her last revision of it, and an apparatus recording much
of the history of the text to that point. The author's earlier intentions—
whether expressed in a draft manuscript, or a first edition (when there
was a later revised edition also)—would therefore be recoverable in the
apparatus.

Like any good historian—for scholarly editors are historians of the
written word—Bowers suited his approach to the evidence. The history
of editing is defined not only by advances made within a particular subject

period, but also by the belated movement of scholarship through
literary time. With each succeeding chronological period coming in for
editorial attention, the level of documentary evidence rises, improving
in both quantity and quality. Speaking very generally, the evidence
available to editors of ancient texts is the most compromised; the situation
improves, slowly at first, and then more dramatically, for editors
of Medieval, Renaissance and early modern, and modern texts. As Greg
noted, editors of ancient texts tend to normalize spelling and punctuation,
since the evidence rarely permits them to know anything at all
about their authors' preferences. Some authorial details may survive in
Renaissance books, and preserving these in a critical text is the purpose
of Greg's rationale. Obviously editors of modern literature can recover
much more textual history, since they may be able to call upon multiple
surviving "substantive" documents, including authors' manuscripts, and
possibly external evidence as well (such as letters and other collateral
documentation). The intentions of the author might now be understood
in their development—how they changed over time, on the author's own
initiative, or through a collaborative interaction, with a reader whose
opinion the author valued, for example. The degree to which these intentions
were respected in the publication process might also be discoverable,
and where they were not respected, a cause might be revealed, such
as careless typesetting, the application of a publishing-house style, or
factors more deeply related to the substance of the work in question.
The author's text, for example, might have displeased the publisher, an
agent, or even a government censor, for reasons ranging from the commercial
to the political. Many editors who have focused on authorial
intention are familiar with these relationships and factors, having recorded
the evidence of them in their editions and analyzed their significance.
Their interest in the author helps them understand that in
such situations, authors have sometimes had no recourse but to alter
their works, or allow them to be altered by others, according to the demands
of those with the power.

The essence of editing is in the treatment of the historical evidence.
Unfortunately, the vitally important historical aspect of author-centered
editing has not always been recognized by its contemporary critics.
Those lately emphasizing the social nature of texts have thus negatively
evaluated eclectic texts as things unto themselves, without referring to
the scholarship—which ought to be published in the apparatus—on
which they depend. Of course some editions are more competently edited
and therefore more informative than others, but the uneveness in
quality has not been an essential target of these criticisms. A well-edited

work, however, should contain the evidence of how the author's text was
"socialized."