University of Virginia Library

Read before the English Institute on September 7, 1949.

John Burnet, Essays and Addresses, p. 36.

R. W. Chapman, Three Centuries of Johnsonian Scholarship, pp. 28-29.

TLS, May 20, 1949, p. 329.

G. B. Harrison, Shakespeare, Twenty-Three Plays and Sonnets; O. J. Campbell, The Living Shakespeare.

M. J. Quinlan, Victorian Prelude, p. 246.

W. Hale White, A Description of the Wordsworth and Coleridge Manuscripts in the Possession of Mr. T. Norton Longman, plates i and iii.

The term "diplomatic edition" is so loosely employed that, pending more precise definition and agreement on its meaning, its use is better avoided. It has been employed to cover anything from an edition which consistently adopts the readings of a single text or manuscript to one which reproduces a particular text with extreme scrupulosity, down to every contraction and error, even, in the case of printed texts, to turned letters and irregular spacing. In the discussion following the reading of this paper it was suggested that whereas a facsimile reprint was a page-for-page and line-for-line reprint, a diplomatic edition was not, but I cannot feel certain that this distinction can be made to hold.

J. Dover Wilson, Preface to Life in Shakespeare's England.

R. B. McKerrow, Prolegomena for the Oxford Shakespeare and W. W. Greg, The Editorial Problem in Shakespeare. See also Greg's "Rationale of Copy-Text" in the present volume.

With the possible exception of Messrs. Wellek and Warren, who state that "if we examine drafts, rejections, exclusions, and cuts, we conclude them not, finally, necessary to an understanding of the finished work or to a judgment upon it. Their interest is that of any alternative, i.e., they may set into relief the qualities of the final text. But the same end may very well be achieved by devising for ourselves alternatives, whether or not they have actually passed through the author's mind." (Theory of Literature, p. 86).

Sculley Bradley, "The Problem of a Variorum Edition of Whitman's Leaves of Grass," English Institute Annual, 1941, pp. 129-57.

H. J. C. Grierson, Sir Walter Scott, Bart., p. 164, n. I am indebted for this example to my colleague, Professor David Daiches.

I. A. Shapiro, "The Text of Donne's Letters to Several Persons of Honour," Review of English Studies, VII (1931), 291-301.

R. E. Bennett, "Walton's Use of Donne's Letters," Philological Quarterly, XVI (1937), 30-34.

Evelyn M. Simpson, A Study of the Prose Works of John Donne, chapter 12, letters 23 and 25.

Letter of January 2, 1810.

For the argument against normalization, see W. W. Greg, The Editorial Problem in Shakespeare, p. 11.

Burnet, p. 34.