University of Virginia Library

Tanselle's "Editing without a Copy-Text":
Genesis, Issues, Prospects

At the opening panel of the 2001 conference of the Society for
Textual Scholarship, some interesting remarks about copy-text
were delivered by John Unsworth, a member of the Modern
Language Association's Committee on Scholarly Editions
(CSE). Unsworth said that he had originally planned to tell his audience
that "the Greg-Bowers theory of editing" or "copy-text theory" had
once enjoyed "hegemony within the CSE," but no longer did, owing to
challenges from outside the Greg-Bowers school, where the focus was on
other "periods, languages, and editorial circumstances." Unsworth submitted
this thesis to Robert H. Hirst, the chair of the CSE at the time,
for his thoughts, and reported receiving the following reply:

Unsworth was kind to pass on this private communication, since it contains
many points worthy of deeper consideration. Hirst's phrase "hunkered

down group of copy-text editors" appropriately summons the
false image some critics have projected of adherents of the editorial
approach inspired by W. W. Greg's 1949 essay, "The Rationale of Copy-Text,"
and developed by Fredson Bowers—the better to dismiss them
as relics of a by-gone age. This criticism ignores the rich practical experience
of "copy-text editing" and the satisfying—one could even say
exciting—theoretical developments it has engendered over the years.
Hirst also names two outstanding moments in this experience when he
mentions Bowers's encounter with what he called "radiating texts," and,
most importantly, G. Thomas Tanselle's essay "Editing without a Copy-Text,"
which appeared in the pages of this journal in 1994.[2] This essay,
which is indeed one of the most important writings on editing to appear
in recent times, is concise and not intended to be exhaustive of its subject
in and of itself. It stands, however, upon a great body of knowledge,
having arrived on the morrow of a long period during which many
literary scholars were deeply engaged both practically and theoretically
with the Greg-Bowers-inspired idea of copy-text. Tanselle has been the
most insightful and far-seeing participant in this collective engagement,
and so his recommendation to "move beyond" Greg's "often useful but
nevertheless inherently restrictive concept" (p. 2), so that editorial
problems may be understood more immediately and with less technical
prejudice, should arouse intense interest.

I

Tanselle's essay focuses our attention on the point where Greg explicitly
limits the role of editorial judgment, and then demonstrates that this
seemingly modest restriction has had unexpected adverse consequences.
We are reminded that Greg's "strong endorsement of editorial freedom"
extends only to the text's substantives (Greg's term for the wording); the
copy-text "accidentals" (his term for the spelling, punctuation, word
division, and emphasis) are accepted almost automatically (p. 8). While
Greg also insisted that the editor be free to emend either the substantives
or the accidentals whenever there was cause to do so, his assumption
that a copy-text was needed at all was, in Tanselle's words, "founded on
a belief that there was usually insufficient evidence for reasoning about
accidentals" (p. 9). The copy-text, according to Greg, is to supply the

accidentals when variant accidentals from other authoritative texts are
not clearly superior—that is, obviously authorial or having more recent
authority. Tanselle argues that if the copy-text is used as the "fall-back"
text to decide among variant accidentals, and if copy-text accidentals and
substantives are to be altered by the editor whenever there is cause to do
so, then it stands to reason that the copy-text will tend to be treated as
the fall-back text for the substantives as well. This amounts to the "tyranny
of the copy-text" which Greg sought to avoid (p. 9)—that is, the
copy-text as monolith, unyielding of any word or mark of punctuation
that has not been decisively disestablished by the editor.

Greg's rationale presumes an ancestrally linear series of texts, from
author's manuscript to printed editions. Other kinds of textual traditions
exist, and in the late 1960s Fredson Bowers encountered the most
common of these in some of the stories of Stephen Crane. The stories were
printed more than once, but each time from different, now-lost documents
of equal authority. Some appeared in one American and one
British periodical, with one printing based on a ribbon and the other
on a carbon copy of a typescript made from Crane's manuscript. Other
stories were syndicated in American newspapers: the syndicate received
a manuscript or a typescript of the MS from Crane, made a proofsheet
of it, and sent copies to subscribing newspapers, which used them as
printer's copy. The prepublication documents are all lost, so the extant
tradition for each story consists of multiple newspaper or periodical
printings. Each printing was independently derived of the author's
manuscript and therefore all have equal authority. An interesting variation
occurred when, surmised Bowers, second typescripts (also now
lost) were made of the manuscripts of some of the stories that had appeared
in periodicals, in order to furnish printer's copy for book collections.
For these stories, all printings have equal authority, but the periodical
printings descend from one typescript, and the book versions
from the other.[3]

Bowers gave the term "radiating texts" to the tradition he encountered
because the multiple printings of each story "radiate" independently
from their lost manuscript. Though Bowers recognized that each
printing was therefore of equal authority, he still attempted, apparently,
to base each critical text on a copy-text as defined by Greg—"apparently,"
because, as Tanselle pointed out, he chose his copy-texts "not
for their authority but for the extent of their agreement with what he
had already decided the text should contain."[4] That is, after comparing
the texts of each printing, Bowers chose as copy-text the printing that
departed least from what he believed were the readings of the lost source.
He usually settled on the printing that was most often with the majority
wherever there was a variant. Bowers's apparatus reported all substantive
variants but only those accidental variants which had required him to
emend his "copy-text." Generally, according to Greg's rationale, accidental
variants in later editions in a linear series are assumed to be more
corrupt than those of an early copy-text, so excluding them from an
apparatus could possibly be justified. Radiating texts, however, are not
ancestrally linear, and the excluded accidental variants came from documents
of no less authority than those Bowers had chosen as copy-texts.

Bowers discussed radiating texts in a group of essays, the first of
which, called "Multiple Authority: New Problems and Concepts of
Copy-Text," was published in 1972. As the title indicates, Bowers maintained
that editing a group of radiating texts involves choosing a copy-text,
even if the choice is a "theoretically indifferent" one, made only
for the sake of "convenience," after the editor "has reconstructed the
lost, common printer's-copy. . . ."[5] Since Bowers chose his copy-text
after he had established his critical text, the copy-text was completely
outside his purposes, and imposed out of mere habit. His insights about
radiating texts recalled the way editors of ancient and medieval works
reconstruct a lost source when multiple manuscripts descending from it
survive—as Tanselle suggested in "Classical, Biblical, and Medieval
Textual Criticism and Modern Editing," an essay from 1983 containing
many forward-looking discussions on the relationship between judgment

and method in editing in all literary periods.[6] Bowers, it may be
added, even hit upon a simple guideline loosely applied in the editing of
ancient texts, known in that field by its Latin name, "difficilior lectio
potior" (the difficult reading is preferable). Bowers did not explicitly
cite this guideline, but he caught its gist when he observed that a less
common variant might be the authorial reading, since "a majority of
compositors faced with an unconventional accidental may sometimes
opt for normality, leaving the true authorial reading preserved only by
the dogged or indifferent few."[7]

Had Bowers pursued the relationship between modern radiating
texts and situations faced by editors of older texts, instead of attempting
to impose Greg's rationale on his problem, he might have felt comfortable
enough to allow his practical insights to shape his theoretical overview.
It was Tanselle who recognized the true implications of Bowers's
insights, which he revealed in his 1974 article, "Editorial Apparatus
for Radiating Texts." Here he recommended editing without a copy-text,
explaining that the critical text might be constructed of all the
independently derived printings, and supported by an apparatus recording
all variants, substantive and accidental.[8] In 1979, Robert H.
Hirst became the first editor to follow Tanselle's recommendations, in
his treatment of radiating texts in Early Tales & Sketches, an edition of
some of Mark Twain's early writings. Both volumes in this edition contain
critical texts reconstructed from contemporary, independently
derived reprints of passages that first appeared in letters in now-lost

issues of the Virginia City (Nevada) Territorial Enterprise. In his commentary
in the first volume, Hirst cited Tanselle's 1974 essay, and stressed
that for the radiating texts, "no copy-text is designated because none of
the authoritative texts is genetically closer to the original than the
other."[9] Following his own inclinations as much as Tanselle's recommendations,
Hirst also reported in the editorial apparatuses of the
radiating texts all substantive and accidental variants from all his sources.

When in 1990 Tanselle reprinted "Editorial Apparatus for Radiating
Texts," he remarked provocatively that "the idea of editing without a
copy-text, set forth briefly here in relation to one particular kind of
situation, has further applications that ought to be explored."[10] That
Tanselle himself undertook the exploration was to be expected. In
"Editing without a Copy-Text" he reminds readers of Greg's warning
concerning the "tyranny of the copy-text," in which Greg maintained
that the failure to understand that accidentals are more often subject to
casual alteration, and substantives to purposeful—and therefore, more
potentially authorial—change

Tanselle points out in his essay that like Bowers in his encounter with
radiating texts, Greg too was "somewhat tyrannized by the idea of copy-text,"
since he also recommended choosing a copy-text in a situation
where two or more texts are of equal authority—that is, when there
would be no justification for presuming the accidentals in one document
to be more authoritative than those in the other (p. 10). What clearly
concerns Tanselle most, however, is that in situations where a copy-text
is warranted according to Greg's rationale, it tends to interfere with good
judgment, by extending its influence, despite Greg's wishes, over the
wording of a text as well as the accidentals. The "role of the copy-text,"

Tanselle remarked, "turns out to be that of supplying readings (of both
substantives and accidentals) whenever there seems no other basis for
deciding" (p. 9).

II

The history of editing has moved according to its own logic, marked,
on the positive side, both with methodological advances and with compelling
demonstrations of the importance of informed judgment. The
two elements, method and judgment, tend to appear on the intellectual
stage as opponents, and are sometimes identified, respectively, with the
ideas that the past is best recovered by either objective or subjective
means. The tension in this opposition has generated its share of pointless
negativity, but like all dynamic relationships the struggle has its
creative potential. In the cycle referred to by Tanselle on the first page
of "Editing without a Copy-Text," in which editorial discussions are
alternately dominated by objective or subjective orientations, come
points where deeper, synthetic breakthroughs seem possible. Not that
such breakthroughs necessarily emerge from the discussions to guide
editorial activity, but that the potential for holistic understanding exists
for editors to exploit, in the best work of those identified with both
sides. Ultimately, an editor can draw the two sides into a unitary approach,
as A. E. Housman did. Housman the scholar may be most widely
remembered for the sharp arguments he advanced in the prefaces to his
editions, and in his lectures, favoring informed judgment over the mechanical
application of methods. He is also recognized for his great talent
for conjectural emendation—the ability to detect and correct corrupt
passages without the direct support of documentary witnesses.[12] Less
known is that Housman did not edit by his emendatory power alone.
He recognized the importance of all pertinent knowledge and understood

the significance of Lachmann's method of the genealogical classification
of manuscripts better than those who believed in its oracular
powers. On his many-sided considerations, including his careful recensions
and careful handling of the recensions of others, did Housman's
insights flourish.

So dazzling were some of these insights that even canny admirers
failed to notice the full range of scholarship which supported them. In
La genesi del metodo del Lachmann (The Origin of the Lachmann
Method), Sebastiano Timpanaro cited the testimony of another that his
own teacher, Giorgio Pasquali, once declared excitedly, "C'è uno solo
che può far emendazioni, è il Housman" (There is only one who can
make emendations: he is Housman).[13] Timpanaro adds that in a lecture
he attended, Pasquali admired the genius of Housman's famous interpretation
of Catullus 64. For all his admiration of Housman, however,
Pasquali did not, Timpanaro notes, hold him in as high esteem as he
might have. Pasquali appreciated Housman's great gift for emendation,
his ear for language, and deep understanding of poetry, but believed
these were humanistic talents, which came at the expense of a more
developed scientific orientation to his subject matter. Pasquali's misconception
was partly due to Housman's reputation as a critic of the
routinized application of editorial methods, and to Pasquali's inability
to obtain Housman's edition of Manilius,[14] "where," said Timpanaro,
"the genealogy of the codices are delineated with a sure hand" (p. 103).
To his teacher's view that Housman's genius was "unmethodical," and

even "antimethodical," Timpanaro countered by referring to his "profound
`methodicity,' " according to which

What Timpanaro would have us understand is not so much that
Housman struck some adequate balance between method and judgment,
but more that Housman allowed his own intelligence to guide his approach
to textual problems, selecting and applying the relevant criteria
in accordance with the material and his purposes. The example of
Housman illustrates the fairness of the view that the opposition of
method against judgment is only apparent: method is rather a creation
of judgment, a development of it, a particular judgment, concentrated
and abstracted. A method, an analysis, or a rule is often independently
developed numerous times, and may therefore have more than one
author. La genesi del metodo del Lachmann contains the incontrovertible
demonstration that the method to which Lachmann gave his
name was not really his. Lachmann formally divided the process of
editing a text with multiple surviving sources into sequential halves. In
recensio (recension), the relationships between the sources are established
through collation and the analysis of errors held in common, to
determine, ultimately, whether one of the sources is the common ancestor
of the others, or whether the common ancestor is lost and must be reconstructed
of its independent surviving witnesses. In emendatio
(emendation) the common ancestor that has emerged from recensio—
whether a surviving exemplar or a conjecturally reconstructed one—is
corrected. Emendatio, Timpanaro pointed out, was an art as old as late
antiquity, revived by the humanists, and practiced with moments of
brilliancy in subsequent centuries by figures such as Giuseppe Giusto
Scaligero (1540-1609)[15] and Richard Bentley (1662-1742). Timpanaro
then demonstrated that recensio was the outcome of the collective work

of several nineteenth-century predecessors and contemporaries of Lachmann,
and its principles were already in place by the time Lachmann
summoned them into service for his Greek New Testament (first published
in 1831) and his famous edition of Lucretius (1850). Greg's rationale
is more rightly named, since it is mainly his alone—though, like
all good insights, it rests on the earlier, partial advances of others.
Whether a method or a type of analysis was created by a single individual
or was the outcome of an entire intellectual tradition, however,
it can never be anything more than the distilled thoughts of human
beings. Methodological and analytical approaches to editing emerge
from the thinking of their creators possessed of some objectivity, for
they likely were developed over time, as responses to a variety of experience.
Yet they are not natural laws; they can only suggest ways in
which judgment might be profitably focused in order to re-create the
past. They may be continually tested against new evidence, and adjusted
or abandoned, according to the limitations that are revealed by
this. They are, in other words, within our control. To regard them as
independent of human thought, as existing above and beyond judgment,
is a conceptual error that is bound to impede the understanding
and resolution of editorial problems.

"Editing without a Copy-Text" shifts the editorial point of view
from Greg's methodological design to the immediate evaluation of the
work being edited. This is as it should be. As every experienced editor
knows, textual situations vary, so it may seem axiomatic to say that it is
best to approach each new project without the preconceived intent to
apply a particular method. Editorial history, however, mainly runs in
the other direction, and the shift that Tanselle makes in "Editing
without a Copy-Text" is also away from older and more restrictive (and
more enduring) points of view than Greg's. That Tanselle carefully
prepared the way for this shift is known to the readers of his many
essays, in which, over the years, he has investigated a great many of the
editorial and bibliographic questions that literary scholars face. The
essays are rich in interesting, relevant details, and the discussions are
clearly presented, if sometimes driven by an intense logic, which can
seem inescapable when a particular point is being made. After all,
however, most readers will agree that the true object of Tanselle's discussions
has never been to make points but to stimulate serious thinking
about texts, and countless passages are given over to fair assessments—
and sometimes optimally judicious restatements—of alternative viewpoints.

The idea that editors might pursue different goals has been understood
by Tanselle's readers as far back as 1976, when his essay "The

Editorial Problem of Final Authorial Intention" appeared in Studies
in Bibliography. [16] Here it was suggested that critical texts may be prepared
of earlier, unrevised versions of works, or of later, revised versions.
The recognition that literary works are defined by a series of historical
moments has emerged as an essential principle of critical editing,
as the texts of works from more recent periods have come in for scholarly
treatment. The chronology includes the moment of first publication, but
also earlier and possibly later moments, whether or not these are also
adequately represented in existing documents. The failure to grasp this
principle has led both to editorial blunders and to the mistaken charge
that critical editing is a platonic striving toward a single ideal text, by
means of unprincipled or aesthetics-based eclecticism. Over the years,
however, Tanselle has clarified and emphasized the centrally historical
nature of literary works to such an extent that by now this may be overlooked
only through prejudice.

Of course in 1976 it was assumed that readers of critical editions
were most interested in the text the author wanted, no matter what
point in the history of a work the editor was seeking to re-create. This
Tanselle noted in "Textual Criticism and Literary Sociology" (Studies
in Bibliography, 1991), at the beginning of a consideration of the ideas of
Donald F. McKenzie, Jerome McGann, and others, which move editorial
attention away from the author's text, toward the text as published and
received. "Editing without a Copy-Text" appeared at a time when the
ideas of McKenzie and McGann had already become popular, if not yet
with many practicing editors, then with many who write about editing. In
these writings, the emphasis on the social nature of texts is often accompanied
by a rejection of the author-centered editorial past and Tanselle's
role in shaping that past. The time at which "Editing without a
Copy-Text" appeared, then, was not the most opportune for a widespread
positive reception. Inevitable is the comparison with the essay
it is meant to replace, "The Rationale of Copy-Text," which Bowers
used to signal the dawn of a new age in American literary scholarship.
Every age has its moods, and presently most editors in this field have
the sense of a setting rather than a rising sun. But if an "age" of editions
of American authors has entered into a decline, valuable knowledge and
experience of the editorial problems of modern literature has accrued.
Greg's essay presented the wisdom of a half-century of thinking about
English Renaissance texts, which Bowers energetically applied to his
astonishing array of editions, including works from each of five centuries.
"Editing without a Copy-Text" comprehends both the wisdom

of Greg's considerations and another forty-five years of editorial practice
and thought. While Greg was tentative about the reach of his recommendations,
Tanselle—relying on further history and experience—
can confidently advance an "overarching framework" (p. 21) for approaching
all editorial goals, in all literary periods. He helpfully calls
what takes place within this framework "constructive critical editing,"
emphasizing that editing is a form of "historical reconstruction," wherein
each word, each mark of punctuation, is critically determined by the
editor, according to his or her knowledge of the author and the author's
associates, the physical evidence, and the purpose of the editorial project
(p. 22). Constructive critical editing is therefore not an editorial method,
but rather a highly informed state of mind, which, according to the
design of each project, draws to its attention all the relevant evidence
and applicable supporting methodologies. Greg's rationale, Tanselle
points out, may be one of those methodologies, but used to its original,
restricted purpose—as an aid, that is, to judge the authority of the accidentals,
and not as a base text for relieving the editor of the responsibility
for making editorial decisions.

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."

IV

An unintended consequence of the recent disputes over editorial
aims and methods has been the uncovering of a great deal of confusion
about the meaning of copy-text and what constitutes the "Greg-Bowers
approach." This development is potentially promising, since latent misunderstandings
are the more damaging. The shift in editorial focus,
from preconceived method to immediate thought, suggested by Tanselle
in "Editing without a Copy-Text," provides the logical grounds
for clearing the confusion away. Thoughtful Greg-Bowers practitioners,
social textual theorists, or adherents of any other editorial approach
ought to find in this essay the intellectual inspiration to achieve their
particular aims to a high standard of scholarship.

While "Editing without a Copy-Text" attempts to move editing
beyond the limits of the particular methodological preconception of
the Greg-Bowers approach, it also preserves and proceeds from the approach's
universal advantages. Among these are, first of all, a great body
of practical editorial experience, from which emerge the other advantages—the
intense focus on textual history, the high scholarly and technical
standards, and the tradition among its best practitioners of the free
exercise of informed judgment. Sustaining this common editorial heritage,
it may even be said, is the better part of Tanselle's aim. Today's editorial
climate, however, is clouded in places with barely qualified rejections
of the entire Greg-Bowers experience. While the critics have made many
valid points, they have also fallen too often into fundamental misunderstandings.
If these are allowed to stand, then little advantage will be
taken of Tanselle's essay, and so any assessment of the essay's prospects
must engage the criticisms. The most convenient way to do this involves
considering the social text as advanced in Jerome McGann's writings,
since here the criticisms are reasonably conceived.

Jerome McGann has been the most conscientious in attempting to
give the sociological approach to editing a theoretical foundation, and
in his writings one finds many fair assessments and criticisms of the
Greg-Bowers editorial approach. These are marred, however, by some
less informed remarks, indicating that McGann has absorbed a few tired
misconceptions about author-centered editing. Despite Tanselle's many
painstaking demonstrations of their illogic, these misconceptions have
appeared year after year as straw-men, set up and knocked down by the

opponents of author-centered editing, and sometimes mistakenly defended
by those in favor of it. From these misconceptions a reductive
shadow of the Greg-Bowers approach is cast, devoid of the approach's
defining nuances and flexibility of application. The emphasis on the
exercise of sound editorial judgment is especially absent, as is an awareness
of the theoretical and practical growth the approach has gone
through in recent decades. In place of variegated thought and rich
editorial experience come the impoverished notions of the copy-text as
a "best text," and of the critical text created according to the Greg-Bowers
approach as a timeless, ahistorical, and therefore ideal representation
of the author's intentions for his or her work—or, in McGann's
words, "a pure abstraction."[30] This second notion is openly proclaimed;
the first tends to steal into discussions or take hold of editions semi-surreptitiously.

Indicative of the problem is a passage in McGann's 1991 collection
The Textual Condition in which two editorial outcomes are falsely set
in opposition to each other—"the production of an eclectic text" and
"the production of an edition which displays and analyzes the historical
descent of the work."[31] The former idea is identified with the Greg-Bowers
approach, and the latter is represented as being foreign to it.
Yet the two outcomes are not logically opposed, and a scholarly edition
of a work taking the Greg-Bowers approach should contain both an
eclectic critical text reflecting a particular moment in that work's history,
and a critical apparatus with the evidence necessary to reconstruct
other historical moments. Bowers has been much criticized by McGann
and other editors on subjects ranging from his overall interest in reconstructing
authorially intended texts, to the particular choices he
made in the works he edited. What is interesting about a great deal of
this criticism is that it is based, at least in good part, on the evidence
that Bowers published in his editions. One may go as far as to say that
the second of McGann's two editorial outcomes—"the production of
an edition which displays and analyzes the historical descent of the
work"—owes more to Bowers than to any other editor of anglophonic
literature. Early on in his project of transferring to the field of American
literature the more exacting standards of English Renaissance bibliography
and editing, Bowers declared it the duty of editors to place all
their "textual cards on the table—face up."[32] He demonstrated what he

meant in his series of editions, beginning with the Centenary Hawthorne,
which presented literary works as they had rarely been presented
before. A critical reconstruction of an author-focused text which aimed
at what Bowers called an "inferential authorial fair copy"[33] was accompanied—indeed,
inextricably linked with—an unusually full apparatus
criticus, containing not only editorial reasoning (textual notes), but the
history of the work in its variants from document to document. Bowers
even reported authorial alterations in the manuscripts he preferred as
his copy-texts. Along with these illuminating innovations, however,
Bowers's editions, as was subsequently shown, also contained not a few
errors (great and small), needless inconsistencies, and even some apparent
sloppiness of form. That Bowers did not always practically fulfill
the promise of his pioneering editorial outlook, however, should not be
allowed to obscure his achievements. His editions left a good deal of
room for improvement, but much of this could be (and was) made on
Bowers's own terms—with more careful historical collations, clearer
presentations of the relevant textual evidence, a better understanding
of the relationship between the critical text and the apparatus, and a
greater appreciation of pertinent biographical and historical evidence
relating to the author and the work being edited.

Since Bowers presented his critical text within the larger context of
a scholarly edition, his editorial choices were by and large open to general
scrutiny—that is, the alternatives which might be argued over were
published in the apparatus. The regular exception, of course, was the
accidental variants, which Bowers for the most part did not report. The
guidelines of the Center for Editions of American Authors (CEAA),
which attempted to codify Bowers's approach to editing, did not, as a
practical matter, require scholarly editions to report them. In his own
editions, Bowers cast this practical compromise in more theoretical
terms—citing in the Centenary Hawthorne, for example, not only the
"copiousness" of the accidental variants as cause for omitting them, but
"their basic lack of significance" as well.[34] The unfortunate appearance

of this claim—that accidentals are basically insignificant—in the edition
to which many apprentice editors looked for guidance had the predictable
effect of routinizing the omission from scholarly editions of a class
of evidence which at least sometimes was important. Bowers preferred
to take an author's manuscript as his copy-text when this was possible,
and so generally it was the accidental variants of the first edition that
went unreported. The many critics of Bowers's preference for manuscript
copy-texts—most prominently, James Thorpe, Donald Pizer,
Philip Gaskell, and Donald McKenzie—would not, however, have been
satisfied with mere lists of the missing variants. While they disagreed
among themselves on a variety of issues, they all believed strongly that
the critical text itself ought to reflect the process by which an author's
manuscript accidentals were subject to printing-house modifications.
Yet given that the alternative accidentals would not be reported in the
apparatus, Bowers's choice was, from a scholarly standpoint, the less
inconvenient one. First-edition accidentals are, after all, in first editions,
copies of which are usually easier to consult than authors' manuscripts.
Harder to investigate would be variant manuscript accidentals left unreported
in an edition using a first-edition copy-text. McGann endorsed
the argument in favor of first-edition copy-texts in A Critique of Modern
Textual Criticism, holding that it is "clearly more sound than Tanselle's
and Bowers's, for it takes better account of the social dimension
which surrounds the process of literary production."[35] McGann's statement
shifts the definition of copy-text, if Greg's rationale is at all being
taken into consideration, since that was designed not to emphasize the
social dimension of texts, but to keep as close as possible to the author's
manuscript accidentals. We hardly need wonder what Greg's recommendations
would have been if authors' manuscripts of the works that
he studied had survived.

Despite his overall emphasis on the socialized text, McGann does
favor fairly heavy editorial intervention in certain circumstances—
though his reasons for doing so are not obvious. He defends, for example,
a regularized and modernized "reading text" for early modern
works, "to preserve the continuity of a . . . cultural resource."[36] While
arguments for modernization have long been made, McGann's is peculiar
in its aggressively negative assertions against those who eschew
modernization. Tanselle, as McGann notes, has made the obvious point
that casting a work of literature in the wording and spelling of a different
time period is an "ahistorical" practice; for this McGann accuses him

of failing to "recognize the historical dimension of all literary productions,"
and failing to understand that "[e]very literary production is
`ahistorical.' " As if it were not hard enough to understand how the
same person could be guilty of both these transgressions at once, McGann
goes on to chastise scholarly editors who seek to conserve Shakespearean
spelling and vocabulary, for burying "the factor of the intended
audience" under their "social and institutional ideology."[37] Whatever
may be McGann's precise meaning here, what comes through generally
is, on the one hand, the belief that an editor's prejudice against the
competence of modern readers to understand old texts is a sufficient basis
for radically altering them, and, on the other, the denial of scholarly
legitimacy to attempts to move closer, by following the evidence, to
what might have been the text of the author's final manuscript. According
to McGann such efforts are deceptive and reveal a "hypnotic fascination
with the isolated author."[38]

Or so it would seem. In "Textual Criticism and Literary Sociology,"
Tanselle appraised McGann's initially keen appreciation of Hans Walter
Gabler's edition of Ulysses. [39] Tanselle pointed out that despite its use of
some counterproductive novelties—including a confused redefinition of
the term "copytext" (without the hyphen), to mean both the constructed
critical text and a stage in its construction—Gabler's method of editing
was essentially author-focused. Tanselle further showed that McGann's
endorsement of Gabler's edition as textually innovative was misplaced.
While the mode Gabler chose for presenting the textual history of
Joyce's work may have been unusual, the same kind of history is also
present in any good scholarly edition with a substantial apparatus. McGann
once believed that Gabler's arrangement of this history was a
fundamental improvement on Bowers's, while Tanselle explained that
such arrangements may reasonably differ as long as the history of the text
is expressed adequately. McGann eventually underscored Tanselle's
point, by backing away from his earlier appraisal. In his essay on Gabler's
Ulysses, McGann praised the editor's "synoptic continuous manuscript
text" as a "brilliant editorial reconstruction" that allowed "seriatim
reading" of Joyce's work as it had developed.[40] A few years later, however,
he questioned whether Gabler's edition could "illuminate" issues of

textual variation, and ironically asked, "Would anyone think that Hans
Gabler's edition of Ulysses is a work to be read?"[41]

Tanselle noted that Gabler's understanding of "copytext," the term
he attempted to redefine, was problematic to begin with, reporting
Gabler's belief that "By common consent, an editor chooses as the copy-text
for a critical edition a document text of highest overall authority."[42]
McGann expressed a similar understanding of the concept of
copy-text in his essay:

This definition of copy-text is not McGann's own, of course, but it illustrates
well enough the difficulty that even the most astute scholars have
had with Greg's conception of divided authority. McGann has also written
subsequently of "establishing" a copy-text, and of the copy-text becoming
"eclectic."[44] This difficulty caused mischief in the interesting
appendix of A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism. Here, under the
title "A Possible Objection" (pp. 125-128), McGann discusses exceptions
to his overall recommendation of an editorial focus on the socialized
text. He concludes that in situations of textual "expurgation,
suppression, and mutilation," editors had better focus on recovering
and presenting the text of the author. The inconsistency of this position
remains quite striking. One could expect an interest in texts as social
products to sharpen when dramatic differences separate authors' texts
from the versions permitted by publishers or governments or some other
controlling social factor. The examples McGann used to illustrate the
need for author-centered rather than social editing include the published
works of John Cowper Powys, which, according to McGann, were
ill-affected by the author's fear of lawsuits and a post-war paper shortage.
These are social factors, of course, as surely as others whose effects McGann
wants editors to respect, such as the imposition of printing-house
styles or publishers' wording changes on authors' texts. In his 1986 study
"Historicism and Critical Editing," Tanselle well expressed the dilemma

McGann faced by selectively advocating a socialized text: either, he
argued, McGann is recommending a socialized text only when the editor
finds it preferable—which amounts to a call for aesthetics-based editing—
or he is recommending it only when the author preferred it—which
shifts the overall editorial focus back to the author, where McGann supposedly
does not want it.[45]

The dilemma is complicated by a tangled discussion involving copy-text,
which turns on the apparently needless question of whether the
expurgated, published version of Powys's novel Porius—the version that,
we are told, was "drastically cut back" because of the paper shortage—or
the unpublished, unexpurgated typescript text, should be used as the
copy-text of a critical edition of the unpublished text. In 1983, when
McGann's discussion appeared and most scholarly editors were concerned
with representing an author's final intentions, it was generally
thought that some works exist in versions too different to be adequately
presented in an edition containing a critical text of but one of the versions.[46]
Editions had already appeared, however, that ran counter to this
supposition, or at least demonstrated that scholarly editions could present
a great deal of textual history, including the details necessary to
reconstruct more than one version of a work. One of these editions,
Early Tales & Sketches, the previously mentioned collection of some of
Mark Twain's early writings edited by Robert Hirst, presented critical
texts of the early versions of magazine and newspaper stories that Mark
Twain later revised—sometimes extensively and sometimes more than
once—for a series of book collections. The variants from the later versions
were recorded in the apparatus. An editorial precedent for treating
a situation even more closely related to the one McGann describes, in
which an author's work was grossly altered for clearly practical reasons,
had also been set by that time. The Northwestern-Newberry Typee,
edited by Tanselle, Harrison Hayford, and Hershel Parker, appeared in
1968, and presented a critical text reflecting Melville's original intentions
for his work, as expressed in the first British edition, before he
acceded to the demands of his American publisher to soften his criticisms
of missionaries. In line with these examples of author-centered
editing (though without reference to them), McGann favors presenting
readers with an unexpurgated Porius; once this view is taken, it would

seem no choice remains concerning a copy-text, since we have been told
that there are but two significant documents—the author's original typescript
and the expurgated book version. By "copy-text," however, McGann
has McKerrow's meaning in mind, since Greg's rationale is only
a tool for preserving in a later, revised text, an earlier and presumably
less corrupt level of accidentals. McGann does mention accidentals, but
the meaning of his discussion about copy-text obviously turns on the
widely differing wording of the two versions of the novel.

Mix-ups like these have plagued Greg's conception of copy-text for
most of its history, partly because its adherents have employed the term
as loosely as its critics. Greg recognized two meanings for the term, corresponding
respectively to textual situations defined by a single authoritative
document, and those involving multiple authorities whose texts
relate to each other in linear fashion. His unique contribution—his
"rationale"—addressed only the second type of situation. Bowers, with
Tanselle's help, came to understand that it could not address situations
defined by multiple authorities which descend independently from a
common ancestor—that is, a nonlinear tradition. For clarity, he might
have added that neither can Greg's rationale be applied to works surviving
in a single authoritative source—a situation which, logically
speaking, is also nonlinear. Yet when creating critical texts of such works
(as Hawthorne's Fanshawe, for instance), Bowers and most CEAA-CSE
editors have called the single authorities their copy-texts. Greg also endorsed
this wholly different use of the term copy-text, meaning the document
whose text the editor "copies" out and then corrects:

Here the "copy-text" is the only "substantive" text. Greg then reemphasized
his special rationale for situations defined by "more than one substantive
text"—where the copy-text is followed "in accidentals," but
"allowed no over-riding or even preponderant authority so far as substantive
readings are concerned."[47]

Terminology is sometimes regarded as a secondary question by innovative
thinkers such as Greg, but one need not subscribe to the views
of Derrida to see that the labels by which ideas are known can sometimes
decide whether they are understood rightly or not. As Greg noted, McKerrow

"invented the term `copy-text' " in his edition of Nashe, "giving
a name to a conception already familiar," being "that early text of a
work which an editor selected as the basis of his own" (p. 19). The precedence
of this definition of copy-text, its simplicity, and its compatibility
with the sound of the term itself probably explains why it continues to
be used in the way McKerrow defined it. Had Greg labeled his innovation
"the rationale of multiple authority editing" or even "the rationale
for an accidentals text," some confusion might have been avoided. As it
was, Greg's modified definition of copy-text never took full hold in the
minds of many professed adherents, and so it is not really surprising
that its critics also should have found the concept difficult to grasp. McGann,
for example, cites "An Introductory Statement," issued in 1977
by the CSE (the successor of the CEAA), in which it is asserted that a
"primary requirement for any responsible edition is that it include a
statement identifying the document which supplies the copy-text—that
is, the text which the editor is following as the basic text."[48] The ancestor
of this document, the CEAA's 1972 "Statement of Editorial Principles
and Procedures," similarly defined copy-text as "that individual manuscript
or proof or state of an impression which forms the basis for the
edited text; in other words, it is the text which the editor follows at all
points except those where he believes emendation to be justified."[49] Both
definitions were augmented with extended discussions of how the copy-text
should be chosen and treated, especially in the 1977 document, and
generally presented thoughtful and clear guidelines for constructing accurate,
informative editions.

As official statements, both documents were aimed at imparting vital
bibliographic and editorial wisdom to scholars engaged in editorial
projects who may not have had much experience in scholarly editing.
In line with their educative purposes, the statements may also have deliberately
emphasized that aspect of "The Rationale of Copy-Text" in
which Greg seems to reduce the importance of the distinction he himself
drew between accidentals and substantives, in order to encourage
editors to alter either whenever there was reason to do so. Tanselle, a
creator of the CEAA and CSE statements, would likely have been responsible

for this emphasis. In his influential essay of 1975, "Greg's
Theory of Copy-Text and the Editing of American Literature," he
stressed the "pragmatic"—and therefore provisional—nature of Greg's
distinction, reminding editors to follow the accidentals of the copy-text
only when they had no reason to do otherwise. He noted that resorting
to the procedural part of Greg's rationale in such circumstances "is
more satisfying than tossing a coin"—an endorsement whose obvious
meagerness was meant to illustrate the relative positions of procedure
and judgment in Greg's essay. Later in the 1975 essay, Tanselle reasserted
that "nothing in Greg's theory . . . prohibits the emendation of
accidentals in the copy-text when one has grounds for doing so."[50] This
remark was part of a brief response to Paul Baender, who, in his article
"The Meaning of Copy-Text," had suggested that the retention of the
concept of a copy-text was out of keeping with Greg's main observation,
that textual authority might reside in more than one document. Baender
was a CEAA editor and inspector, and in this published form of a paper
he first read in 1967, he endorsed the use of Greg's rationale for certain
situations, while describing other situations for which he believed it
was not suited. One of these involved the presence of multiple independently
descended witnesses of a lost original—exactly the problem
that Bowers would encounter a few years later and acknowledge as insusceptible
to Greg's rationale. In hindsight, Baender's early identification
of what Bowers later called "radiating texts" is eye-catching, as is
his further questioning of whether the concept of a copy-text was ever
appropriate, now that editorial "principles have become eclectic." Baender
suggested, for example, that McKerrow in his Prolegomena, Greg,
and Bowers "may not have realized the full implication of their eclecticism,
which in the long run rules out the designation of a single text,
basic text, or copy-text when there is more than one text of substantive
authority." In an attempt to understand why the concept was retained
even though McKerrow's early single-text rationale for which the term
was invented had been discarded, Baender guessed that perhaps it was
because "with respect to accidentals there still remained a single-text
criterion."[51] This was the remark that elicited Tanselle's objection,
quoted above; in saying this, however, Baender was not quite expressing
his own belief, but rather giving his estimate of the belief of others, and
the remark by itself does not indicate an aversion to the reasonable alteration
of copy-text accidentals. In "The Meaning of Copy-Text: A
Further Note," an earlier and more expansive answer to Baender, Tanselle
upheld "Greg's theory of copy-text" as applicable "to all situations,"
while attempting to dispossess Baender of his eccentric insistence on the
interchangeability of the terms "copy-text" and "printer's copy."[52] This
obvious misconception certainly harmed the reception of Baender's
other observations, which were also expressed too briefly, perhaps, to
encourage exploration of their potential implications. Baender, furthermore,
seems never to have pursued these matters, even in his own
editorial practices. Instead, in those early days before much editorial
experience had accrued in the field of American literature, Bowers and
Tanselle sought to foster a position according to which the copy-text of
Greg supplied "fall-back" authority for substantives as well as accidentals,
while stressing the importance of subjecting the whole copy-text to
a thorough critical examination. The plain intention of taking this
approach was to maximize editorial judgment, but the approach also
risked obscuring Greg's special contribution to copy-text theory; potentially
elusive, in other words, especially for newer editors, was Greg's
notion that for certain situations, the copy-text is only and at most an
accidentals text: "The true theory is, I contend, that the copy-text
should govern (generally) in the matter of accidentals, but that the
choice between substantive readings belongs to the general theory of
textual criticism and lies altogether beyond the narrow principle of the
copy-text."[53]

In the CEAA and CSE statements quoted earlier, the copy-text is
represented first as the overall authority for the substantives and accidentals
(unless emendation is warranted), whereas in the situations Greg
wanted to emphasize, the copy-text would be at most ("generally") the
authority for the accidentals. Logically, according to Greg's rationale,
no direct causal relationship should exist between the wording of the
copy-text and the wording of the critical text. If the two texts agree, it
should not be because the wording of the copy-text has simply been
followed in the critical edition; rather, the wording of all "substantive"
(authoritative) texts in a series collectively establish the wording of the
critical edition—where they agree and there is no other contradictory
authoritative evidence. Assuming, for example, the goal of a critical
text reflecting an author's later final intentions, it might even be said
that the wording of the later, revised text is more relevant, even in those
places where it agrees with the earlier copy-text, since a revising author
who allows some wording to stand might be conferring upon the unchanged
passages the fresh authority of his or her new intentions. Where
the earlier and later authoritative texts do not agree, the editor chooses

from among the variants, according to the chronologically limited set
of authorial purposes from which the critical text is being derived. In
this example, an editor would favor the later variants (minus errors and
changes not ascribed to the author) for the critical text, and report the
earlier ones in the apparatus.

Those editors of American literature who have understood the meaning
of Greg's rationale may not realize that the term "copy-text," in its
wider contemporary use—in fields such as Chaucer and Shakespeare criticism,
for example—usually carries its original meaning. Editing with a
copy-text, furthermore, ordinarily means following the text of a particular
document wherever possible, as this typical editorial statement,
taken from a (modernized) edition of Shakespeare intended for the
college classroom, indicates:

The copy-text is followed conservatively in all matters, that is, for each
and every play, whether it survives in a single substantive text or several.
The explanation of the use of the brackets invites readers to trust only
copy-text readings, and regard what has not come from there with suspicion.
Similar statements can be found in other editions of Shakespeare,
and also in modern editions of Chaucer's works, where the existence of
multiple independently descended manuscript witnesses of all the tales
would seem to discourage the assigning of preponderant authority to
any one.

In "Editing without a Copy-Text" Tanselle acknowledges that the
"basic meaning of the term `copy-text' has remained stable from McKerrow's
time onward—that is, the documentary text used as the basis for
a scholarly edition" (p. 11). On the other hand, he also notes that the
term "copy-text editing" is often used by Greg's critics to refer to the
editorial practices of his adherents—to the use, in other words, of Greg's
rationale. The term therefore signals, after all these years, either of an
old pair of opposites—a best-text approach, or an eclectic one based on
historical textual analysis. Greg was originator of this duality, and was
comfortable using the same term to describe the counterposed approaches,

since he felt each had its place. Many of those who took notice
of Greg's altered meaning of copy-text, however—whether to adopt it or
criticize it—had trouble keeping it apart from the earlier meaning, while
editors who were unaware of Greg's considerations (or McKerrow's
second thoughts) gave the term in its original sense a wide currency.
Whether because the term was too well suited to the meaning McKerrow
first gave it, or because the CEAA/CSE upheld an interpretation
of Greg's rationale that allowed the copy-text to be used as the fall-back
authority for the substantives as well as the accidentals, or simply because
easy-to-use "best-text" approaches will tend to drive out more
nuanced eclectic ones—whatever the cause or causes, that is—the further
existence of Greg's special sense of the term copy-text, as an accidentals
text, is in question. In "Editing without a Copy-Text" Tanselle recommends
that in constructing critical texts scholarly editors abandon Greg's
copy-text (while, of course, preserving his rationale concerning accidentals),
so that it will not be held up falsely, as a truth-giving mechanism,
nor used to disguise virtually noncritical reprints of previously
published texts as eclectic, critical texts. Should Tanselle's recommendation
gain wide acceptance, especially among Greg's followers, the
meaning of the term copy-text would, paradoxically, cease its sixty- or
fifty-year internal struggle, and resume its original and untroubled one-dimensional
appearance.

V

If misconceptions about copy-text and Greg's rationale have "mesmerized"
(to borrow a term of Greg's) author-focused and society-focused
editors alike, it is the latter group alone that has, mistakenly, criticized
the authorially intended text as ideal in the philosophical or aesthetic
sense. Accordingly, eclectic texts are seen as manifestations of the idealistic
philosophical views of those taking the Greg-Bowers approach,
views which cause them to pursue a phantom, perfect form of the works
they edit. Tanselle has shown that this criticism is not really new: in his
entertaining biography of Fredson Bowers, he recorded what must be
its earliest appearance, in remarks made by Leo Kirschbaum at an MLA
conference in 1959. Kirschbaum believed that an editorial focus on the
author's text was out of place in works designed for theatrical performance,
and he saw a "Platonic bias" in Bowers's application of Greg-based
eclecticism.[55] Kirschbaum was reacting to the very first practical demonstration

of Greg's copy-text recommendations, made by Bowers in the first
volumes (1953, 1955, 1958) of his four-volume edition, The Dramatic
Works of Thomas Dekker. A quarter-century later, McGann expressed
concerns similar to Kirschbaum's:

Critical texts of course do exist. By saying that "they do not exist in
fact," McGann presumably meant that they do not exist until scholars
perform the necessary historical research and create them. In other
words, critical texts do not present the text of any single preexisting
document. When speaking of older works, however, it must be recognized
that for the most part, the preexisting documents may themselves
be described as critical editions. That is, the scribes who made them
ordinarily attempted to correct errors that they perceived in their
sources, and not infrequently ventured ambitious emendations, whether
by conjecture or by consulting manuscripts other than the one they were
immediately copying. Many manuscripts are, furthermore, the products
of a more thoroughgoing conflation of multiple sources. Most editors,
whether they are editing older or more recent works, rather than working
"toward their ideal text," seek to reconstruct, according to the limits
of the evidence, texts that can be said to have existed "in fact," as long
as factual existence is granted to the intentions of the author, whether
or not these were ever accurately recorded. In the course of reconstructing
the last surviving common ancestor of the extant witnesses, for example,
the editor of a classical work may discover that this text—the
"archetype"—contained errors. If the editor corrects them, then he or

she is departing from the archetype, and moving toward what the author
wanted—whether or not he or she ever got it. The same holds true for
the editor of a modern work who finds that the author's wishes were
contravened by the publisher, typesetter, or even his or her own hand, in
the process of writing down the words formed in the mind. Factual existence,
that is, can also be assumed of Mark Twain's intentions to write
"Becky" and "Rebecca" where he referred, mistakenly and in different
books, to Judge Thatcher's daughter as "Bessie" and to the heroine of
Scott's Ivanhoe as "Rachel."

Tanselle raised the important conceptual points relevant to this
issue in "Textual Instability and Editorial Idealism," the 1996 essay
(see note 55) that ought permanently to have dispelled the mistaken
notion that editors, acting as editors in exercising their judgment, are
idealists. He noted that the preoccupation of editors concerned with
authorial intention is hardly as McGann has it—with a "pure" artistic
form, poorly reflected in the material world—but rather with the more
pedestrian problem of "the difficulty of getting words transferred accurately
to a physical surface" (p. 12). McGann's misreading partly stems
from "his failure to consider intentions as historical events" (p. 13).
Furthermore, Tanselle points out, editors create critical texts reflecting
authors' intentions not to serve as perfect, stable, or definitive versions
of their works, but more basically "because intended texts are not available
in documents and therefore cannot be studied without the exercise
of critical judgment, leading to attempted reconstructions" (p. 13).

For McGann, the idealism manifest in the eclecticism of the author-centered
editor goes hand-in-hand with a quixotic desire to fix a "single
`text' of a particular work . . . as the `correct' one." If this were true, then
his purported counter-emphasis on the "indeterminacy of the textual situation"
would be justified.[57] In his 1994 essay "The Rationale of Hyper-Text,"
in the context of an argument against printed forms of scholarship
and in favor of electronic forms, McGann expressed his distaste for scholarly
editions of the Bowers type as "infamously difficult to read and use."[58]

This remark may explain his willingness to believe that author-centered
editors present the critical text as the only "correct" text. Yet what is "difficult"
to understand is not the scholarly edition (assuming it is competently
constructed), but the "indeterminacy of the textual situation" itself,
at least for some works. A scholarly edition allows readers to view a work
in its development, by presenting the essentials of its history in the apparatus.
The presentation is made mainly by recording the variants,
rather than printing multiple versions of the work, but this form is convenient
for study, since it focuses attention efficiently, on the changes. If
the edition is well-organized, the difficulties inherent in grasping a remote
and complex history are minimized with no oversimplification of
the evidence.[59]

The introduction of philosophical language into any discussion ought
to signal the deepening of understanding, but the casual laying on of the
term "idealist" to author-centered texts and editing has not been helpful.
Those who have used it have, most basically, failed to recognize that all
scholarly editions present "ideal," or hypothetical, re-creations of past
moments in the life of literary works. This is true whether the main
purpose of the edition is to present the unaltered text of a document, or
an authorially intended critical text.[60] Either way, a moment from the
past is resurrected by a scholar or group of scholars, who collect and
evaluate the surviving materials and decide how best to present them, in
a process involving human judgment from beginning to end (even when
the choices are not explicitly acknowledged as choices).

Editors preparing an edition of a work of modern literature must
often first decide which moment or moments in the life of that work to
present—since sufficient documentary evidence for re-creating several
may have survived. As has been discussed, a Greg-Bowers-style scholarly
edition usually offers a critical text reflecting one more or less discrete
level of an author's intentions for his or her work, while supplying in

the apparatus what evidence exists of other levels, as well as a record of
errors, and of alterations made by persons other than the author, such as
those that yielded the first published text.

A social textual editor constructing a scholarly edition around a
socialized text must also make a series of decisions. The first and most
important of these involves choosing the fundamental conception of
socialization that shall govern the text. Two distinct conceptions seem
possible: the social text can be viewed either as the outcome of the collaborative
intentions of all who took part in the process of publishing a
work, or simply as the published text received by its first readers. These
two different forms of socialization correspond to different moments in
the history of a work, and though these moments may have followed
closely on each other, it is unlikely that the same text, nor even the same
kind of text, could accurately represent both moments. The earlier
moment, the "collaborative" social text, probably cannot be adequately
represented by reproducing the text of any one preexisting document,
and so an eclectic critical text is here indicated. The later moment, the
"received" social text, is by definition the text of a particular document,
and to represent it, an essentially noncritical presentation is called for.[61]
To re-create the collaborative social text, the editor must deal with the
problem of errors, since, presumably, all involved in the publication
process intended for the text to be without errors. Of course once social
textual editors admit that human intentions are historical facts, then
they are, despite their different goal, operating within the same concept
of history as author-focused editors. The decision to correct errors, furthermore,
means that social textual editors are sharing a concern with
their author-centered counterparts. Here they must resist the temptation,
apparently felt by some with social textual interests, to limit their
corrections to obvious errors. The reader does not really need a scholarly
editor to find obvious errors; however, obviousness is not an essential
characteristic of errors. There are also errors that are not obvious,
and to correct these, access to original documents and specialized knowledge
is needed. For scholars to restrict their own editorial judgment
artificially just at this point, where it might be of help to readers, is, it
must be said, intellectually irresponsible. On the other hand, an editor
presenting a "received" social text would not correct original errors,

since here the object would be to reproduce the text experienced by its
early readers, and the errors were, of course, part of that experience.

A further issue concerning the nature of texts is worth remarking
upon at this point, as it helps further reveal the inadequacy of the idea
that author-centered critical texts are idealistic abstractions, while preexisting
texts are faithful expressions of material reality. It is the observation,
made briefly by Tanselle in "Editing without a Copy-Text"
and discussed more expansively by him elsewhere, that the texts of documents
are not literary works in themselves, but rather sets of instructions
for the re-creation of these works.[62] Readers of A Rationale of Textual
Criticism, the slightly revised published version of Tanselle's 1987 series
of Rosenbach lectures, will be especially familiar with this insight,
which memorably relates literary works to works of music or dance,
while distinguishing them from works of painting or sculpture. In the
former grouping are works conveyed in "intangible" media—language,
sound, movement. Their "tangible" artistic compositions—documentary
linguistic texts, musical scores, dance notations—are unlike the tangible
creations of painters or sculptors in that they are not the works themselves,
but rather the forms into which intangible works must be converted
so that they may be reconstituted and experienced. These forms
consist of complex series of marks—as many (for a novel, for example)
as a million or more letterforms, symbols, and spaces. Being highly complex,
texts of documents are therefore also potentially highly unstable,
prone to heavy levels of accidental alteration every time they are copied.
While scholars might agree on what constitutes the text of a particular
document, they will likely come up with different answers to the question
of how accurately it records the instructions of the author. By
embracing the roles of those who worked with the author, social textual
editors might expect the problem of the textual fidelity of documents to
diminish. Where, for example, the author-centered editor would find
infidelity, the social textual editor would presumably endorse a text in
which a publisher's copy-editor has regularized an author's punctuation
or toned down his or her colorful language. Yet for an editor interested
in the collaborative social text, there remain the questions of how accurately
the text as first published reflects the intentions of the copy-editor,
where alterations were desired, and also of the author, where his or her
text was allowed to stand. As for the editor desiring to present a received
text to modern readers, he or she faces a number of questions about how

best to re-create that early reading experience. The editor may have to
decide which of several early published forms of the work to re-create,
and whether the chosen text—say it is the first book edition of a novel—
should be reproduced in an exact transcription or in photographic facsimile.
The text of the chosen edition will have to be investigated by
comparing numerous copies. If press variants are discovered, these
should, of course, be recorded in the scholarly edition, but their presence
would require a basic textual decision, about whether the scholarly
text should reflect a particular variant state or the edition as a whole.[63]
Answering the questions inherent in a social textual undertaking might
easily demand as much critical thinking as is expended in author-centered
editing, and whether social textual editors seek to present
critical or essentially noncritical texts, they should find the author-centered
editorial past full of useful lessons (both positive and negative)
on the construction of scholarly editions—especially in the matter of
scholarly apparatus.

Opposition to the concept of authorial intention and the belief that
the eclectic text is an ahistorical, idealistic abstraction turn out to be
counterproductive of thoughtful editing, no matter what editorial goal
is being pursued. By accepting instead of rejecting historically determined
eclecticism, social textual editors not only would avoid falling
into logical contradictions, they would find themselves able to correct
unintended errors more efficiently, by making optimum use not only of
their own powers of observation but also of the ascertainable knowledge
of the habits and activities of those originally engaged in the publication
process. In discarding logically untenable objections to the Greg-Bowers
tradition, furthermore, social textual editors might better appreciate the
revealing textual histories available in editions whose critical texts reflect

an authorial focus. They might discover that the word "final" in
"final intention" has sometimes meant that the contributions of an
author's welcome collaborators have been admitted to the critical text,
since its aim may be to reflect the text the author wanted, whether or
not these wants were influenced by others. Author-centered editing is,
of course, also sensitive to what authors did not want. From this sensitivity
too comes much that should be of absorbing interest to the social
textual editor. Scholars interested in the social text would hardly want
to limit their understanding of printing-house styles, for example, by
remaining in the dark about the author's competing preferences, if
those can be known; nor, when faced with expurgated texts, would they
want to investigate the differences between authors' and publishers'
texts (as well as the causes of the differences) any less thoroughly than do
author-focused editors. The pressures brought by others upon the author
to alter his or her text are evaluated with care by the author-centered
editor, to determine whether the resulting changes were accepted in the
spirit of willing collaboration, or were forced upon an author who had
little choice in the matter. While social textual editors may not be interested
in a critical text that remakes this result in the author's favor, they
should nonetheless welcome the presentation in the apparatus of the
evidence of how the author's text was forcibly socialized (if this was the
case), and find ways to match or improve on such presentations in their
own editions.

Such typical editorial problems help reveal that the social and authorial
focuses in editing have many concerns in common. What they
do not have in common, however, is a history. All of that—the experience,
the insight, the technical skill—has been gained in pursuit of the author's
text, which is why it is imprudent, to say the least, for those interested in
the social text to continue denying the validity of the Greg-Bowers approach.
Many benefits would consist in accepting its validity and absorbing
the lessons of its historical experience, including, most obviously for
the social textual editor, how best to identify and account for non-authorial
contributions to the development and production of texts.

In the compelling final pages of "Editing without a Copy-Text," the
author conveys the essence of his recommendations by calling the reader's
attention to the proven editorial conception of radiating texts. The
advantages to reading and scholarship of having more than one independent
documentary witness of the same lost text are self-evident. That
a critical reconstruction of the lost common ancestor, and its accompanying
apparatus of rejected variants, do not practically require a base- or
copy-text has been proven. The designation of a copy-text in such situations,

furthermore, needlessly obscures the textual genealogy, and potentially
clouds the editor's judgment. Once it is established that a group
of sources descend independently from the lost ancestor, then any text
in the group may be right against the others at any point of variance.
All editorial choices must therefore be active choices; none can be made
by default, by resorting, thoughtlessly, to a copy-text. At points where
variants "seem `indifferent,' " Tanselle writes,

This is the approach that Tanselle proposes be taken to all textual situations,
not only those involving radiating multiple authorities.[64] If critical
editing has permanent scholarly value—and the foregoing discussions
have attempted to show that it has, no matter what editorial goal is being
pursued—then editorial judgment must not be unreasonably restricted.
As we have seen, even the most thoughtful editors have fallen victim to
the "tyranny of the copy-text"—despite Greg's warning about it. Accordingly,
Tanselle, rather than issuing a stronger warning, has proposed
that the truest way to stay clear of unreasoned results is to remove the
copy-text from the editing process, since it has proven after all to impede
serious thinking about the wording of critical texts.

Tanselle's recommendation may be said to consist of two parts: 1) as
explained in his essay, the concept of editing without a copy-text, and
its practice, modeled on the experience with radiating texts; and 2) the
many lessons of a long editorial past, on which his concept depends and
which he assumes will have been understood by its practitioners. These
lessons contain both negative messages (such as warnings about the potential
deceptiveness of facsimiles, the tyranny of the copy-text, or the
limitations of mathematical schemes for evaluating variants), as well as
many positive ones. The lessons of the New Bibliography, the observations
of Greg and others about textual genealogy, the insight about the
potential superiority of difficult or unusual variants, paleographic analysis—all
editorial and wider historical knowledge, that is—retain their
value within Tanselle's framework. To edit without a copy-text, editors

focus on the editorial problem with the maximum amount of relevant
knowledge obtainable. This knowledge aids, rather than substitutes for,
editorial judgment. Judgment is "clearly in the dominant position" (p.
20). The distinctiveness of Tanselle's approach is emphasized in his assessment
of the likelihood that an editor employing Greg's rationale but
without recourse to a copy-text might "select" some of the same readings
that would have been "retained" had a copy-text been designated. Here
Tanselle rightly insists that the distinction between the two approaches
is nonetheless essential:

Tanselle has taken care that his recommendation embraces all critical-historical
editorial goals, including the author's "finally intended" text,
earlier or later authorially intended texts, and socialized texts emphasizing
the contributions of the publisher's staff. His plan for "constructive
critical editing" (p. 22) is therefore "a framework that liberates
editorial judgment from the concept of copy-text while being neutral in
itself as to the goal toward which that judgment should be directed"
(p. 21).

Perhaps, as it becomes widely adopted, every truly important editorial
insight, such as Lachmann's or Greg's, is fated to go through a
period of overwork. Stemmatics was worked very hard for about fifty
years, before Housman and others pointed out the uselessness of much
of its product and reminded those who were listening that no mechanism
can rightly substitute for an editor's good judgment and expert knowledge
of his or her subject. As the writings of Giorgio Pasquali, Sebastiano
Timpanaro, L. D. Reynolds and N. G. Wilson, E. J. Kenney, Bruce M.
Metzger, and many others reveal, the best scholars of literature from
the remote past have long since recommended a thoughtful approach to
editing, appreciating the limitations as well as the benefits of methodologies
and formulaic analyses, drawing upon them as needed, to aid,
rather than override, thought. Fraught as the editorial outlook for more
recent literature now appears, here too it seems inevitable that the most
thoughtful scholars will move in a similar direction, if they haven't already

begun the process. The shift in editorial orientation may take
a while longer, since divisive, extraneous prejudices against author-centered
editing, which have needlessly accompanied the appearance of
social textual concerns, have yet to fade from the scene. But sooner or
later, the characteristically generous and inviting spirit of G. Thomas
Tanselle's profound essay will attract to it the best editorial minds of
all orientations.