II
Studies in bibliography | ||
II
Textual criticism, like all forms of scholarly investigation, is an activity
in which standing hypotheses are tested and revised or replaced, often by
the authors of the original hypotheses. Where the amount of evidence is
limited and fixed, difficult problems may over time be judged insoluble,
but
only after an extended period of examination. Greg's scholarship is
in a
sense a model of this process, as it is in part a record of corrective
second thoughts prompted by his own or others' further research. The
history
of The Editorial Problem in Shakespeare offers exemplary
testimony
to Greg's ever-growing views on the text of Shakespeare, most
obviously
in the preface to the second edition (written in 1950), in which
is of-
fered a catalogue of corrections of discussions appearing in the
first edi-
tion, along with references to further and better scholarship on
particular
points. The work had its origins in the series of Clark Lectures
he deliv-
R. B. McKerrow's Prolegomena for the Oxford Shakespeare appeared. This
important book obviously demanded Greg's attention, especially since
he found himself in some disagreement with McKerrow's conservative
editorial principles. In preparing the lectures for publication in 1942, he
expressed a "more elaborate and less rigid" approach in a preface, and
in his own "Prolegomena" ("Prolegomena.—On Editing Shakespeare")
gave a detailed introduction which contested some of McKerrow's recom-
mendations, but also clarified many of his own. An appended essay, "Note
on Accidental Characteristics of the Text," is a snapshot of Greg's think-
ing on this subject at a point a few years in advance of "The Rationale of
Copy-Text," and can deepen understanding of its better-known successor.
Both the "Prolegomena" and the "Note" are helpful in demonstrating
why the problem of "accidentals" became for Greg a key to unlocking
the theoretical doors behind which the progress of critical editing had
stalled. In his "Note" Greg confesses "strong 'conservative' instincts,"
and an editorial disinclination "to violate" the "integrity" of particular
editions or manuscripts, but explains that these attitudes are reflections of
the "bibliographer's outlook … only a stepping stone, though an essential
one, towards the truly critical position."[23]
Through the development and application of methods of the physi-
cal
analysis of documents, this "stepping stone"—which, of course, was
the New Bibliography—allowed for the possibility that judgment might
again play a serious role in the editing of English literature. Judgment
had
been robbed of its privileges by foregoing editorial abuses, in which
choices among variants were made haphazardly or according to the aes-
thetic
preferences of the editor. The conservatism of Greg and McKerrow
was a
natural enough reaction to the undisciplined editorial past, though
they
both strained under self-imposed restrictions. The strain was most
felt in
encounters with works surviving in multiple authorities, whose in-
terrelationships could sometimes be revealed through a combination of
bibliographical analysis and critical insight. On occasion the presence
of
authorial revision was suggested with more or less certainty, and so
emerged
the editorial problem of multiple recoverable moments in the
life of
literary works. The problem was new, for the most part. For most
surviving
ancient and medieval works the possibility of identifying more
cero's Academica, which survives in partial original (Priora) and revised
(Posteriora) versions, and the "Prologue" of the work by Chaucer tradi-
tionally known as "The Legend of Good Women," for which it is ac-
cepted that MS Gg contains the revised version of the earlier text (F)
preserved in several other manuscripts (see also note 33). When A. W.
Pollard and the others began developing methods to analyze printed
books, they could not help but draw lessons from the editorial experi-
ence of earlier literature, while taking note of differences. The differ-
ences seemed first of all to have to do with the amount and quality of the
textual evidence: while authors' manuscripts of works from the English
Renaissance are rare, the surviving early printed editions were, by and
large, made during or shortly after the authors' times. The apparently
better quality of the evidence suggested that methodical investigation of
mysteries of composition and tradition would be well rewarded; where
early expectations were not satisfied, it was not for want of trying.[24] Where
clarity was obtained, however, the nature of the new editorial problem
took shape. In this respect, historical importance attaches to McKerrow's
judgment that certain of Nashe's works survive in an earlier, uncorrected
edition, and a later edition which, while mainly derivative, also reflects
Nashe's corrections and, as with The Vnfortunate Traveller, revisions. This
may have been the first time that a scholarly editor, fully cognizant of the
survival of multiple moments in the history of the work he was editing,
was able to make a conscious choice to focus his critical text on one or
the other.
McKerrow decided on the later versions, and his decision to use them
as his
copy-texts was most famously recalled and criticized by Greg forty-
in the third volume of Studies in Bibliography) opened a new vista in edi-
torial thought, one in which greater responsibility would be referred to
the judgment of the editor—the "truly critical position" of Greg's earlier
"Note on Accidental Characteristics of the Text." "The Rationale" was
one of the many important products of Greg's maturity, appearing in his
seventy-fifth year, more than fifty of which had been given over to the
study of Renaissance literature. In his youth he had been a pioneer of
bibliographical analysis, and in the extremity of age he tirelessly advo-
cated for an editorial approach fitted to its advantages and limitations.[25]
To the point when McKerrow and Greg began to consider the problem
typified by The Vnfortunate Traveller and present in certain other Renais-
sance works, the widely accepted goal of editing—the movement of the
received text closer to that which the author wrote—was of necessity
minimally defined. Though multiple levels of authorial intention are not
generally discernable in Renaissance works, Greg's recommendation in
"The Rationale of Copy-Text" for the construction of a critical text of
a revised work was ideally suited to the few, like The Vnfortunate Traveller,
which evidently survive in sequential series of documents. While many
Renaissance plays have two or more independent, often widely varying
witnesses, their relationships cannot often be established, with the result
that Greg's special copy-text recommendation can rarely be applied as
prescribed.[26] It was, however, in the editing of works of later periods,
the implications of Greg's discussion could unfold. The editorial experi-
ence of American literature proved that Greg was in the right frame of
mind, in emphasizing both textual genealogy and editorial judgment, in
the approach to works for which ample evidence had survived. As the
level of evidence rises, however, so does the complexity of the problem
of authorial intention; for much of the literature of the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, the boundaries of discussion established in "The Ra-
tionale of Copy-Text" are too narrow.
Without expecting to approach it too nearly, McKerrow and Greg
proposed as
their editorial goal a text reflecting the moment when the
author submitted
a finally revised and corrected manuscript for publi-
cation (or
performance)—the "finally intended" text.[27]
When editors of
American literature adopted Greg's recommendations
they also adopted
this goal, which for them was more nearly
realizable—the literature of
the last two or three centuries being
represented not only by published
forms, but often by prepublication
documents, from authors' drafts to
corrected proof sheets, and sometimes
illuminating collateral material
such as authors' notes and publishers'
correspondence. The history of
some works is therefore attested to well
enough for editors to recognize a
creative process and be able to
reconstruct several stages in its life. The
American editorial experience,
with Greg's essay providing the theoreti-
cal point of departure, was shaped
in many practical engagements with
the copious evidence, and accompanied by
many more discussions and
controversies. One of its great fortunes has been
to have as its chronicler
G. Thomas Tanselle, who was an important
participant in both the prac-
tical engagements (as an editor of the
Melville edition), and the discus-
sions and controversies, to which he made
many of the most learned and
(2005) is an indispensable guide to these discussions, which are carefully
recounted, dissected, and clarified in six thick survey-essays written at
intervals during thirty years.[28] The volume contains nearly six hundred
footnotes with references to perhaps two thousand editions of authors and
books and articles on editing. The titles of three successive essays are sug-
gestive of the problems that distinguish the editing of modern literature:
"Historicism and Critical Editing" (covering discussions from the period
1979–1985), "Textual Criticism and Literary Sociology" (1985–1990),
and "Textual Instability and Editorial Idealism" (1990–1995). The titles,
that is, call attention to the problems of authors' changing intentions and
the nonauthorial alteration of texts. Authors of earlier literature changed
their intentions too, of course, and their contemporaries and near-
contemporaries also influenced and altered their works, but this kind of
history only becomes generally visible—and therefore of central editorial
concern—for scholars of recent literature. Many of the most important
pages of Tanselle's surveys beginning with the "Historicism" essay are
therefore devoted to elaborating the conception of authorial intention to
address this history, and discussing the emerging editorial alternative of
social textual theory.[29] Together, the three essays constitute an extended,
many-sided exploration of what becomes visible to the editor of modern
literature: the complexities of the artistic process and the dynamic inter-
action of author and society. Tanselle's handling of several decades' worth
of often rancorous editorial disputes has been exceedingly judicious and
impartial, always seeking to clear away thoughtless or counterproductive
verbiage so that the most useful insights might be better appreciated. The
advantage to any discipline of having its scattered discussions brought
together in the careful analyses of an eminent scholar need hardly be em-
phasized; that much of the rancor which the author defused was directed
creases the overall achievement. Tanselle's many original essays on edito-
rial and bibliographical subjects had become essential reading for editors
of American literature, and so those who began to question the "Greg-
Bowers tradition" naturally saw the author as its inheritor and principal
exponent. This identification was not inappropriate in itself, though the
picture of the tradition painted by many of its critics might have been less
distorted had more practicing editors engaged themselves in the discus-
sions. The Greg-Bowers editorial model has been repeatedly criticized by
a few editorial polemicists for its supposed interest in establishing a single,
exclusively valid constructed text, reflecting only the author's last inten-
tions, while denying the social, collaborative dimension of the creative
process. To sustain this criticism, early, abstract, and simplified formula-
tions of editorial theory were used as points of departure, while practical
developments in the editions themselves were little accounted for.
The effect of these misconceptions was heightened by an initial lack
of
clarity on the part of some author-focused editors about the need to
deepen
the definition of their editorial goal; later on, as the best editions
began
to present critical texts reflecting complex histories of composition
and
tradition, much of the insight within their covers went unnoticed
and
unpublicized. Apart from those of Bowers and Tanselle, that is, few
contributions to the scholarly journals were made by practicing author-
focused editors, while the journals published little in the way of mean-
ingful assessments of the editions. These factors probably contributed to
the emergence of social textual theory, since it was conceived partly as
an
alternative to a perceived narrowness in the authorial focus. In fair-
ness
to those who were moved by the arguments of Jerome McGann,
social textual
theory's chief progenitor, it should be noted that author-
focused critical
texts were sometimes viewed as necessary outcomes of
an objective process, a
fallacy that has caused confusion in more than
one generation of scholarly
editors. Tanselle began the process of clear-
ing away some of the confusion
and rectifying the theoretical disjuncture
between the goal McKerrow and
Greg had conceptualized and the edi-
torial realities of more recent
literature in his 1976 essay, "The Editorial
Problem of Final Authorial
Intention."[30]
In characteristically systematic
fashion, the author drew upon
practical lessons, most obviously from his
own engagement with Melville's
works, as well as pertinent philosophical
and editorial discussions, to
sharpen the concept of artistic intention and
demonstrate its connection to
scholarly editing. From the practical side
it had already become apparent
that many modern works survived in a
sion, whether of a steady or irregular character, toward a single final state,
while others revealed complex forms of development, in which multiple
"final" states could be identified as possible objects for attempted critical
reconstructions. Not surprisingly, the evidence frequently revealed the
involvement, welcome and not, of persons other than the author in the
creative process. Tanselle discussed the expurgation of Melville's Typee
and Stephen Crane's Maggie, calling attention to a large class of modern
works whose themes and realistic language were more or less censored by
or at the behest of publishers or their agents. A whole range of uncoerced,
genuinely collaborative interactions between authors and others was also
being discovered at this time.
Of the discussions Tanselle examined in this early article, perhaps
the most
provocative and helpful in its way was "A New Approach to
the Critical
Constitution of Literary Texts" by Hans Zeller.[31]
Zeller pro-
ceeded from an understanding that modern works present
editors with
rich and visible histories; he endorsed the concept of
authorial intention
as the proper focus for a critical edition, but rejected
what he under-
stood as the automatic preference of the Anglo-American
approach for
the author's last intentions. He furthermore disavowed
editorial eclec-
ticism, believing that each variant document, even if
distinguished by
but a single authoritative alteration, corresponded to a
particular set of
authorial intentions, and was therefore a discrete version
of the work in
question. In supplying a brief informative historical sketch
of German
editorial practices, especially in the determining field of Goethe
criticism,
Zeller found cause to examine the edition of Goethe's works
prepared by
the Deutsche Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin (DDR), from
1949.
The coincidence of this date with the appearance of "The Rationale of
Copy-Text" enhances Zeller's comparison of Greg's recommendations
with
the practices of the edition's first editor, the learned German Jewish
philologist Ernst Grumach (1902–67).[32]
Zeller found much in common
in the approaches of the two
contemporaries, though followers of Greg
might find more correspondence
between Grumach's views and those
Zeller's description, Grumach used revised editions as copy-texts for the
two works he edited (the epics Reinecke Fuchs and Hermann und Dorothea).
Zeller's main reason for pairing Greg and Grumach, however, seems to
have arisen from the willingness of both editors to draw readings from
different authoritative documents to serve their goal of an authorially in-
tended critical text. Zeller's theory of insular documentary-based versions
prevented him from endorsing their approaches, which he equated with
"contamination"—the term used in the editing of ancient texts to indicate
the classic problem of a single document carrying variants from alternate
traditions and so resistant to stemmatic classification.
Despite his rejection of the logic of Greg's rationale, Zeller did state
the
editorial problems of modern literature with admirable clarity, and
was
especially helpful in stressing that modern works could survive in
multiple
versions. A weakness for exaggeration sometimes misdirected
attention when
an issue of importance was being discussed: it is unhelp-
ful, for example,
to consider the "editorial principle of final authorial
intention" in light
of Zeller's suggestion that its "logical conclusion" would
be the
"annihilation" of works such as The Aeneid, whose authors
willed
that they be destroyed.[33]
The belief that "final intention" must mean the
author's last
expressed wishes for his or her work has proved to be a
persistent one.
Certainly when J. P. Postgate spoke in 1911 of the "ul-
timate intention" of
Marlowe with respect to the variants of the widely
divergent 1604 and 1616
versions of Doctor Faustus, something like last
(known) wishes was meant (see note 27); instructions to destroy works,
however, are rarely of use to the editor of a critical text. Zeller's view
that each variant document (and even each layer of alteration on each
document), constitutes a discrete version, was in part a reaction to his
mistaken belief that the Greg-Bowers approach held either a "morpho-
logical" or "teleological" view of literary works.[34]
These notions—which
seem suggestive of a work of art
perfecting itself (or maturing), in a ba-
sically involuntary natural or
philosophical movement—are of course
foreign to modern scholarly
editing. Yet few would deny, as Zeller seems
develop works, with one or another degree of deliberation, toward points
of completion. It is a process that most would agree can be revived, in
pursuit of a revised end. Whether all the development within this process
is constructive, or should be described as progress, are not strictly edito-
rial questions, though they will likely demand the attention of the editor
of a modern work, at least when it comes to deciding which point of the
process should be the object of the attempted reconstruction. For Zeller,
however, authors' interest in perfecting their works, or their response to
others' suggestions or demands, are, in the distinction he draws, matters
for literary rather than textual analysis. The editor's job as he sees it is
limited to recounting the history of the work in its versions and selecting
the version to be presented as the critical text, which is defined as the
text of a particular document, cleared by the editor of simple errors. He
criticizes attempted reconstructions that purport to go beyond particular
documents, to reflect the author's uncompromised intentions. His reasons
are clearly stated: referring to Fredson Bowers's relatively straightforward
restorations in The Blithedale Romance of manuscript deletions of a few ref-
erences to liquor and sex, Zeller writes, "I find the idea perplexing, that
the editor should feel obliged not only to make inferences about the final
intentions of an author, but also about the causes behind these intentions.
I cannot regard the psyche of an author and its analysis as a substantial
foundation for editing."[35] This remark is more consistent with Zeller's
practical recommendations than is his earlier avowal of the goal of an
authorially intended text. The creative human mind does not always re-
spect documentary boundaries. The original documentary record, never
having been complete, is liable to have eroded by the time a work comes
in for scholarly attention. Editors of modern works commonly seek to
reconstruct texts of lost documents—fair-copy manuscripts, typescripts,
proof sheets—from descendents and ancestors. Only by drawing readings
from both an early printed edition and a draft manuscript, for example,
can an editor reconstruct the text of the intervening lost authoritative
document. In other words, for some historical purposes, only an eclectic
text will answer. There are limits of course.
Given his view of literary history as cut-and-dried matter, Zeller un-
surprisingly found Bowers's treatment of Stephen Crane's Maggie espe-
cially untenable. Maggie is
uncharacteristic of Bowers's work in that it
cal editing its essential meaning. From a single round of revisions Crane
made in the text of the privately printed 1893 version of his story for
publication by D. Appleton in 1896, Bowers sought to preserve only what
he regarded as "stylistic changes as well as literary improvements," while
rejecting bowdlerizing changes the publisher had demanded.[36] For his
critical reconstruction of The Blithedale Romance, Bowers believed he could
reasonably restore three references to liquor and sex that were deleted
in manuscript, on the grounds that, unlike the bulk of the alterations,
these three did not reflect Hawthorne's own inclinations. They seem to
have been made out of deference to polite taste (possibly as represented
in the person of Sophia Peabody, Hawthorne's wife). A simple case like
The Blithedale Romance, in which a few revisions seem clearly out of step
with the rest, allow us to conceive of an author separately serving his or
her own intentions and someone else's while engaged in a single round of
revisions of a work. Bowers argued that two sets of intentions were also
served in Crane's revision of Maggie, but the editor was unable to identify
the two types of changes convincingly, as he had done for the Hawthorne
work. The basis of his critical reconstruction was questioned, politely by
Tanselle in "The Editorial Problem of Final Authorial Intention," and
more forcefully elsewhere.[37] His acceptance of the bowdlerized version
of the ending of chapter 17 attracted particular unfavorable notice. One
would have to assume that the evidence for alterations serving the pub-
lisher's rather than Crane's intentions was in the toning down or removal
of highly realistic language or subject matter—curse words, primarily,
and, in chapter 17, Maggie's encounters with prospective customers. By
restoring only some of these deletions in the critical text, Bowers seemed
to negate the controls he had established for his reconstruction.
Bowers called his critical text the "'ideal' text of Maggie
as a literary
fact, not a limited 'ideal' text either of the 1893 or of the
1896 edition."[38]
This statement is not worded very clearly, nor was its meaning clarified
elsewhere in Bowery Tales, the volume containing the
story, but it seems
to indicate a belief that the critical text was an ideal
reconstruction of
the work as a whole, as opposed to a rendering of one or
the other ver-
sion. If this surmise about Bowers's meaning is accurate,
then he was
the general direction of the editorial tradition he was otherwise involved
in upholding. Within the author-focused model, a critical text can be
said to represent the work as a whole only when the evidence indicates a
creative process defined by a single culminating point or when there is not
enough evidence to do anything else. Otherwise, a critical text can only
represent a particular moment in the history of the work. Bowers's Maggie
was more truly an attempted reconstruction of a presumed, intermediary
third version of the story, which, in the editor's view, existed once in the
author's mind, but only there. It might, however, be recovered in the
comparison of the text of the first edition with that of the revised one. The
authorially intended text is often partly defined by the rejection of altera-
tions made by or at the behest of publishers or their agents—especially
those with the suspected purpose of censoring coarse language or sensitive
subjects. Yet a scholarly editor must construct a critical text according to a
viable historical hypothesis, whereby it is argued that the author intended
for the work to take the chosen form at one time or another—though the
factor of time cannot be defined too narrowly, since a particular version
may have taken shape over an extended period. Bowers's claim for the
critical text of Maggie indicates that he came to believe that Crane had
corrected and improved the text according to his own tastes, quite apart
from simultaneously fulfilling the bowdlerizing demands of his publisher
(possibly with the assistance of Ripley Hitchcock, Appleton's editor). Had
he neatly separated the bowdlerizations and the improvements, and ad-
opted only the latter, his text might have attracted less criticism. Even
better would have been a clear, convincing demonstration, if such were
possible, that Crane had conceived of such a text. As it was, the edition
of Maggie must be counted among those few early occasions when Bowers
did seem to misrepresent the critically reconstructed text in metaphysical
terms, as the definitive synthesis of a literary work's constituent histori-
cal moments. Opponents of the "Greg-Bowers" editorial approach have
tended to fix their arguments to these early missteps, allowing themselves
thereby to miss a world of subsequent experience, in which editorial un-
derstanding developed and matured.
Ibid., pp. [a–i], iv, liv n. 2. A third edition of Greg's book was
brought out in 1954, for
which he made further corrections and took
welcome note of the appearance of Alice Walker's
Textual Problems of the First Folio (Cambridge: Univ.
Press, 1953). Though he believed the "im-
plications" of Walker's work
were "far reaching," he did not otherwise discuss it, nor did he
make
any significant revisions for the third edition, largely because his latest
thoughts would
soon be available in a new book, The
Shakespeare First Folio: Its Bibliographical and Textual History
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955).
Greg was aware that satisfactory explanations of textual variation can be
frustratingly
slow in coming, and sometimes never arrive. In
attempting to show that Greg contrived an
abstract and rationalized
"grand narrative" to explain the origin of Shakespeare's plays, Paul
Werstine better reveals that for the most part each of Greg's hypotheses of
tradition derived
from and bore upon the details of a particular play,
and that he readily abandoned hypotheses
when logic and better
research demanded it. Much of Werstine's case against Greg in "Nar-
ratives About Printed Shakespeare Texts," for example, turns on a theory of
the reportorial
origins of the "bad" Quarto of The
Merry Wives of Windsor, first published in 1910; as Werstine
acknowledges, however, Greg altered his theory as early as 1928, and
modified it further in The
Editorial Problem in
Shakespeare. Neither does Werstine fail to recognize that Greg's
final view that
the relationship of the Quarto and Folio King Lear—a problem to which Greg devoted many
years of thought—was still an open question (see pp.
77–79 in Werstine's "Narratives," cited
in note 7). Greg
concluded one of his last writings (published posthumously) with a
character-
istically open-minded criticism of the New Bibliography,
which by then was no longer new. In
noticing Fredson Bowers's
uncertainty of the tradition of Thomas Dekker's works, he remarked,
"Is it that our hopes of being able to infer from the features of a printed
text the nature of the
manuscript that served as copy are fated to
vanish like a dream?" ("The Dramatic Works of
Thomas Dekker. Edited by
Fredson Bowers. Vol. III," Review of English Studies
n.s. 10 [Nov.
1959]: 413–415, quotation from p. 415).
Greg supplied a note on the text of The Vnfortvnate
Traveller for F. P. Wilson's cor-
rected and augmented reprint
of McKerrow's The Works of Thomas Nashe (5 vols.,
Oxford: Basil
Blackwell, 1958): see vol. 5, notes p. 33. As Wilson,
who had solicited the essay, noticed in a
posthumous tribute, Greg
there made his final case for judgment-based editing, at the age of
eighty-two (F. P. Wilson, "Sir Walter Wilson Greg, 1875–1959," Proceedings of the British Acad-
emy 45 [1959]:
307–334; repr. in Sir Walter Wilson Greg: A
Collection of His Writings, ed. Joseph
Rosenblum, Great
Bibliographers Series, No. 11 [Lanham, Md., and London: Scarecrow Press,
1998], pp. 1–28; see p. 19 of the reprint). The argument was
forcefully stated, going so far as to
describe as "perverse"
McKerrow's policy of accepting whole an early printed text (after cor-
recting it of obvious errors) in which he had detected both authorial
revision and non-authorial
alterations. Greg's reasoning was
nonetheless as sound as ever: "Judgement must inevitably be
exercised
alike to detect the presence of authorial alterations and to eliminate
'obvious blun-
ders and misprints', and there can be no logical reason
for refusing to exercise it likewise to
discriminate between
alterations for which the author must be considered responsible and those
due to some other agency…. The truth is that no critical
principle can be devised that will
relieve an editor of ultimate
responsibility, and the risk of over-looking some authorial correc-
tions is no excuse for an editor's including in his text readings that he
himself believes to be of
no authority at all. Essential as it is to
eschew the excesses of eclecticism, any attempt to evade
the
responsibility of individual judgement is an abdication of the editorial
function."
The Complete Oxford Shakespeare (ed. Stanley Wells, Gary Taylor, et al.,
1986–
1987, see note 53), accepted much of Greg's work on the
tradition of individual plays, including
the substance of his views
with respect to the use of foul papers and memorial reconstruction.
The Oxford critical texts, furthermore, relate to the model proposed in "The
Rationale of
Copy-Text" wherever some advantage might accrue in
respecting the accidentals (called "inci-
dentals" by the Oxford
editors) of a particular early print (cf. discussions of the plays surviving
in multiple substantive authorities in Greg's Editorial Problem [see note 22] and Taylor's William
Shakespeare: A Textual Companion [New York: W. W.
Norton, 1997]). The Oxford editors may be
best known for accepting a
theory which Greg explicitly rejected: viz., that King
Lear Q and F
reflect, respectively, Shakespeare's original and
revised versions. Yet while the Oxford edition
presents separate
critical texts for each version of Lear, both draw
heavily on Greg's extensive
research and discussions of this play.
Greg adorned his critical edition of Marlowe's Doctor
Faustus, based on the so-called
B-text (1616) but relying also
the A-text (1604), with a quotation from J. P. Postgate's entry
for
textual criticism in the Encyclopædia
Britannica of 1911: "Where there is great or compli-
cated
divergence between the editions, as in the case of Marlowe's Faustus, the production of
a resultant text
which may be relied upon to represent the ultimate intention of the author
is well-nigh impossible." From his prefatory remarks, Greg can be
taken to have endorsed
Postgate's judgment, which is interesting for
its early expression of the editorial conception of
final authorial
intention (The Tragical History of the Life and Death of
Doctor Faustus, A Conjectural
Reconstruction by W. W. Greg
[Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1950], quotation taken from p. iv
of the
1961 repr.).
G. Thomas Tanselle, Textual Criticism since Greg: A
Chronicle, 1950–2000 (Charlottes-
ville:
Bibliographical Society of the Univ. of Virginia, 2005). This new edition of
six essays
supersedes an earlier edition containing only the first
three; all the essays appeared originally
in Studies
in Bibliography. The initial essay, "Greg's Theory of Copy-Text and
the Editing of
American Literature," which covers an unusually long
period (twenty-five years) of scholarly
discussion, guided the work of
many editors from its appearance in 1975 (SB 28); the
remaining
five essays cover discussions and disputes at intervals of
roughly five years each.
The "Historicism" essay is also known for its continuation of the author's
fruitful
examination, begun in an earlier essay, of the false
dichotomy of "literary" and "historical"
approaches to scholarly
editing—perpetuated mainly by scholars identifying themselves as
historians as opposed to literary or textual critics. The earlier
essay, "The Editing of Historical
Documents," was one of Tanselle's
most influential writings, as it offered helpful criticism of
some
relaxed editorial practices used in editions of the papers of American
politicians; the es-
say first appeared in Studies
in Bibliography 31 (1978): 1–56, was distributed as a
pamphlet at the
interdisciplinary editorial conference mentioned in
note 46, and was reprinted in G. Thomas
Tanselle, Textual Criticism and Scholarly Editing (Charlottesville: Univ.
Press of Virginia for the
Bibliographical Society of the Univ. of
Virginia, 1990), pp. 218–273.
Studies in Bibliography 29 (1976): 167–211,
reprinted in Textual Criticism and Scholarly
Editing (see previous note), pp. 27–71.
Hans Zeller, "A New Approach to the Critical Constitution of Literary
Texts," Studies
in Bibliography 28 (1975):
231–264; Zeller (b. 1926), is professor emeritus of the Faculty of
Letters
of the University of Fribourg (Switzerland).
Grumach's many scholarly accomplishments include a bibliography of
Cretan-Minoan
epigraphy and an edition of Aristotle in German; he
managed to survive slave labor under the
Nazi regime, forced to make
records of looted Jewish Books at the Reich Security Main Of-
fice
(RSHA) in Berlin. Two documents bearing witness to this experience, one
authored by
Grumach and the other co-authored by him with other
survivors, were recently published
in English: see Dov Schidorsky,
"Confiscation of Libraries and Assignments to Forced Labor: Two
Documents of the Holocaust,"
Libraries & Culture 33 (Fall 1998):
347–388, for Grumach, see
pp. 351, 384 n. 11 (this issue is
available on-line at <http://sentra.ischool.utexas.edu/~lcr/
archive/landc-toc-v33-no4.php>, visited April 2008).
Zeller, op. cit., p. 243; the source Zeller cites, the Vita Vergilii of Aelius Donatus
(c. 350, which is thought to
have been derived from a lost life by Suetonius), relates details of
the 11-year (B.C.E. 30–19) composition history of The Aeneid, including Vergil's plans to revise
and complete
the work, and his sudden illness which thwarted them. As he was dying he is
supposed to have asked his friends to burn the scrolls, but they
refused; after he died friends
Varius and Tucca, encouraged by
Augustus, published the unfinished work against the author's
wishes.
Some of these details are supported by near-contemporary sources. Zeller
further men-
tions Max Brod's denial of Kafka's wishes that Der Prozess be destroyed (ibid., p. 243 n. 19).
Interesting as it is to read about the last wishes of some authors to have
their papers destroyed,
such stories turn on a different meaning of
the word "intentions" than the one that is relevant to
critical
editing; obviously, an editor is concerned with author's creative intentions
for a work.
Zeller, op. cit., p. 246; Bowers reasonably believed that Hawthorne made
these dele-
tions at the behest of his wife (The
Blithedale Romance and Fanshawe, The Centenary Edition
of the
Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Volume 3, ed. William Charvat, Roy Harvey
Pearce,
Claude M. Simpson, Fredson Bowers, Matthew J. Bruccoli, and L.
Neal Smith [Ohio State
Univ. Press, 1964], pp. 1,
lii–liii).
Bowery Tales: Maggie and George's Mother, University
of Virginia Edition of the Works
of Stephen Crane, Volume 1, ed.
Fredson Bowers, with an introduction by James B. Colvert
(Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1969), p. lxviii.
See Hershel Parker, Flawed Texts & Verbal Icons:
Literary Authority in American Fiction
(Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1984), pp. 11–13,
39–40, and David J. Nordloh, "On
Crane Now Edited: The
University of Virginia Edition of The Works of Stephen
Crane," Studies in
the Novel 10 (Spring 1978):
103–119.
II
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