Textual Criticism
An editor preparing a critical old-spelling edition of an Elizabethan
poet or dramatist must process an enormous amount of literary data.
Collation of early printed editions can be facilitated by machines, as
Professor Charlton J. K. Hinman has demonstrated in his collation of
dozens of copies of the First Folio. Future editors will also wish to explore
the possibilities of computer collation. The more complicated the textual
tradition, the more the scholar will appreciate electronic aid in
reconstructing a stemma.[12] Again,
every editor has to analyze such matters as characteristic locutions and
linguistic preferences through all of his author's extant writings, as well as
the spelling of any surviving holographs, so that he can decide to what
extent a base-text which is not a holograph, and perhaps was not transcribed
or printed from a holograph, represents his author's idioms and
orthography. In the past, an editor has had to depend upon his
memory, at best an incomplete and unreliable guide, or to compile by hand
a private concordance, as it were, an index of his author's graphic-semantic
patterns. Computers can relieve him of this labor, which adds far too much
to his already heavy burdens. Accurate and complete counts of an author's
particular word-sequences can also help to detect contaminations. On the
basis of such analyses, computers can automatically fill in lacunae or offer
conjectural
emendations of corrupt or suspect passages;
[13] these reconstructions may then
serve as
a check on the editor's conjectures, or they may stimulate further insights.
It is not, of course, a question of a machine's replacing the judgments of
a Greg or a Grierson, but of freeing future Gregs and Griersons from the
mechanical drudgery that must precede final editorial judgment.
Since a concordance is valuable for textual criticism, we may expect
that editors of Elizabethan dramatists and poets will also edit concordances
to their authors. A preliminary tape that will help the editor to establish his
text can be corrected to embody final editorial decisions and a concordance
can then be published by offset from machine-prints.
