This article is concerned with elementary matters which may seem
beneath the consideration of readers of the journal in which it is appearing.
Nevertheless, my experience as an editor and a general editor suggests that
I
can save newly commissioned editors from a sense of frustration and an
expense of time if I talk about some guiding-lines that are in most instances
applicable to the editing of a play. The situation that I have in mind is that
where you (I shall employ this pronoun frequently, for what I am writing
is
in the nature of a personal, though generalized, communication) have
agreed
for the first time to edit a play in a series which has a general editor. Some
few of us are totally responsible for editing the plays of a major dramatist;
others are producing a facsimile or 'type-facsimile', probably with an
indication of variants in copies other than the one used as basis for the text.
For such scholars the substance of this article will be irrelevant. More
frequently,
however, in undertaking to edit a play, you are contributing it to a series
aimed at a fairly wide public and appearing under the auspices of a
publisher
who has initiated the project and has chosen a general editor who is
concerned with choosing the editors and with ensuring that proper standards
of scholarship are maintained. In most instances general procedures will
have
been agreed upon between the publisher and the general editor, but the
general editor will not have foreseen every contingency and will probably
in
any event allow the individual editor a considerable measure of freedom
within the total scheme.
It will be well to remember always that we are dealing with a
triangular
relationship, between the publisher and the general editor and the editor. I
shall not in what follows have much to say about the publisher,[1] but at this point I should salute the
enterprise
of a considerable
number of both commercial and university presses who in recent years have
undertaken the publication of a series of dramatic texts. The triangular
relationship, however, has its hazards: because it is triangular, there is often
an imperfect liaison, so that an editor may get instructions (about proofs
and
the like) from the publisher different from those he has received from the
general editor. My advice here is blunt: communicate with the publisher as
much as you wish, but let your general editor know what you have said;
when there is a conflict in instructions, at once get in touch with your
general editor about it.
[2] His
instructions
may, however, be buried in a cyclostyled memorandum he sent you some
time ago, when you agreed to edit your text: it is part of your responsibility
to know this document well.
Each of the three members of the triangular partnership has his
particular
responsibility. The publisher is responsible for seeing that the volume is
well
produced, is appropriate for the market he has in mind, and is a reputable
book on his list. The general editor must see that each volume in the series
maintains the scholarly standards he has set himself. The editor must do his
play justice, must remember that many thousands of people are going to
read
the play first in his edition, and that, in the case of lesser-known plays, his
may be the last edition in this century.
Some things you might remember are: in all probability, your general
editor is underpaid and tired; he believes in his job, and expects you to
believe in yours; there is no point in losing your temper with him (every
editor may feel so inclined on occasion); he may well have restrained
himself
rather hard before deciding that he must not lose his temper with you. The
remarkable thing is that, in the end, friendship between editor and general
editor tends to grow through the joint task; in few instances is there an
ultimate falling-out. But patience on both sides will at times be
needed.
It will be as well if I indicate the limits of my own experience in the
triangular situation. Many years ago, when I was far less equipped for the
task than any reader of this journal, I did a volume from manuscript for
Henry de Vocht's Materials for the Study of the Old English
Drama:
it was de Vocht who first showed me how much a general editor can do for
a volume in his series; more recently I have edited a New Arden
Shakespeare
and a Signet Shakespeare, and thus again
have had the advantage of working with excellent general editors; I have
been general editor of the Revels Plays since its beginning: in this series,
at
the moment of writing, fifteen volumes have been published, two more are
at
the press, and many more commissioned. So I have some grounds for
commenting on the relation between editor and general editor. It is the
editor's duty to conform with the established practices of the series he is
contributing to, but it must be remembered that in some details these
practices may change as time goes on. You, as editor, must not only know
your general editor's cyclostyled memorandum but must be aware of any
modifications that have appeared in the latest volumes of the series. A
general editor may revise his guidance-memorandum fairly often, but he
cannot do so every half-year. When you, the editor, decide there is a good
case in your particular play for departing from the general rules, you should
consult your general editor in advance: my
experience is that you will find him sympathetic if you have an arguable
case.
It is your book, not his. But you must be prepared to notice what the given
procedures are, including some he has not thought of mentioning (e.g.,
single or double quotation-marks as basic, the mode of indicating
scene-headings, British or American spelling). He will probably have told
you about the policy relating to elisions, including '-ed' endings in verbs
and
'-est' endings in superlatives and second person singular verbs. You should
remember, too, that you should not have taken the volume on if you were
not prepared, on this occasion, to accept the basic practices of the series.
But it is his duty (i) to see that the general plan of the series has been kept
in
mind, (ii) to correct your manifest errors (and these may not be few,
however distinguished a scholar you are), (iii) to advise and warn when he
thinks you have left yourself vulnerable to attack from reviewers and to
incredulity from
non-reviewing readers, (iv) to bear in mind the general character of the
series
as already agreed on with the publisher, and (v) to recognize that it is
indeed
your book that is being published and, if you disregard his warnings and
advice (as distinct from direction within the scheme indicated), to let you
run
the risk.
Let us now assume that you have just agreed to edit a volume for the
New Arden, the Revels, the Regents, the New Mermaids, the Fountainwell,
the Signet, the New Penguin, the Pelican, or any other of the Shakespearian
or related series that are at present, or have been recently, in production.
You will have to produce an introduction (probably with a firm or
maximum
word-length indicated), a text with collation, a number of explanatory
annotations, and such appendices
as you want and the general editor (aware of the publisher's exigencies) will
allow. It must be assumed that you have familiarized yourself with (i) the
drama of the period (if it is Elizabethan-Stuart, you must have read the
whole of your playwright's work and a considerable proportion of
contemporary drama — the whole of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson,
the
best-known plays of Lyly, Greene, Kyd, Marston, Chapman, Beaumont and
Fletcher, Webster, Tourneur, Middleton, Ford, Massinger, Shirley)
[3], (ii) the major non-dramatic works
of the
period, (iii) the 'important' writings on the playwright of your choice, and
(iv) the main contributions to bibliographical and textual study of the last
thirty years. You can, if you like, make a 'start' (seeing the paper
accumulate)
before you have done all this, but you will have to do it sometime before
you
send in your typescript to the general editor.
But let us further assume you have completed this preliminary work,
or
are some way advanced with it. It might seem reasonable now to start
preparing your text. No great harm in beginning there. Yet I would urge
all
editors, before they know their play so well that its meanings lose much of
their difficulty, to go through a reasonably reliable modern reprint (if one
exists: if not, it must be done from photostats of the original edition) and
underline all words and phrases that appear to need annotation. The writing
of the actual annotations must be postponed until the text has been put into
shape for the general editor.
Now you must choose your 'copy text'. I have been rebuked by a
colleague and friend (quoting Greg[4])
for
using this term for an edition in modern spelling. What I mean here is
simply
the edition you are going to base the text on as your primary authority,
however much you may alter it to conform with modern usages in spelling
and punctuation. Incidentally, whether your text is to be in old or modern
spelling, whether you will change punctuation only when it is manifestly
wrong or will try to give in modern punctuation the sense that
Elizabethan-Stuart punctuation implied, the basic procedures will be the
same. The difference is simply this (though there are intermediate cases):
one
type of edition aims at presenting the text as the author would have liked
to
see it come from the original press; the other aims at translating into
modern
usage the accidentals of such an imagined text — at
giving, for example, a play by a contemporary of Shakespeare in a form
similar to that in which modern readers encounter Shakespeare himself
when
they are reading the best twentieth-century editions of his work. Of course,
your choice of 'basic copy' will depend on your decision that edition A
represents, as nearly as was then possible, what the author would have liked
to see. Perhaps he later revised, and you will have to decide whether you
want to base your text on edition B (representing his revision) or on edition
A (representing his first thoughts). Or edition B may make additions to the
text which you are convinced are the author's, while the rest of edition B
is a
mere reprint of A; or editions A and B may derive from independent, and
perhaps equally authoritative, manuscripts: in either of these cases your
edited text will doubtless be a composite one; in the latter case, indeed, this
composite text will be in some degree a thing of your imagining, based on
calculated
guesswork.
[5]
Having, for good bibliographical reasons, made your choice of basic
copy, you can now begin on your own text. You will need (i) a reliable
photostat of the 'basic copy', (ii) some typing-paper,[6] (iii) a set of cards. From the
photostat you will
type what you think will present, in accordance with the procedures of the
series you are contributing to, a provisionally acceptable text. You will
remember that this typescript is not going to the general
editor: it can
be as heavily ink-corrected as you like (and it will be), but you must space
it
generously, with wide margins. And do not use paste-ups from a previous
edition: if you do, you will either follow them too slavishly or quarrel with
them when they are as good as you could do; whichever your inclination,
you will ultimately leave some of their errors in. Every time you depart
from
your 'basic copy', use a card to indicate under act-, scene- and
line-reference
what the departure is. The
cards that result will not be your ultimate collation, because you will have
noted all sorts of things that no edition needs to record. But give yourself
a
free hand at first, including if you wish the insertion or omission of every
comma, every conceivably meaningful change of punctuation.
Speech-headings will perhaps give some difficulty, however fully
your
general editor has gone into the matter in the guiding-lines he has
offered. Remember you want the play to be read with as little difficulty as
possible, and you may (I hope you will) want actors to use your text in the
theatre. So, whatever you do with scene-headings (where I hope you will
be
austere) and stage-directions (where I hope you will be generous in the
number you provide but always economical in wording), see that the
speech-headings are clear and uncluttered by brackets. Do not use different
headings for the same characters, whatever your 'basic copy' does (you
may
collate if you will). Use collation, annotation, or comment in the
introduction
to provide any necessary observation on a changed form of heading, but do
not hold up either reader's time or rehearsal time by slavish adherence to
what Q1, or whatever it is, has put in front of you. Q1 is not sacred, except
in a facsimile edition.
You will have your own views on the lineation of your text, and your
general editor is likely to respect them, but in turn you must listen to him
when he says that two or more consecutive part-line speeches by different
characters must be counted either as one numbered line (i.e.,
a blank
verse line or approximately so) or as more than one such line
(i.e., as
two or more separate fragmentary lines). It will be for you to decide which
decision is to be reached in every instance. Remember, too, that
either your series counts every line of print as a numbered
line
or it counts a total verse-line as a numbered line (indenting
appropriately). When you change the lineation of the 'basic copy', you must
of course make an entry on a card.[7]
Do not do what some editors have done: have all available editions
around you simultaneously, and then try to make a finally acceptable text
by
comparing them all at once. That is the way to induce weariness and
neurosis. Weariness is the worse of the two. You would not have started on
the job at all if you had not already some degree of neurosis. If you have
made a provisional text from your 'basic copy' as seen in the light of your
own common sense and your knowledge of the idiom of the playwright and
his time, it will not take you very long to go through subsequent editions
one
by one, noting each reading which differs from the one that is, so far,
yours.
For, when the pages and the cards have mounted and you have come
to
the end of your text, you have to consider every detail in other editions.
And
you must not trust any previous edition (however distinguished) to have
done your collation for you: no edition is free
from error. It is true that some previous editions will turn out to be hardly
worth examining in detail, and in some instances you will know them in
advance. But certainly, from the first reprinting to the last scholarly edition,
you must compare your rough text with what previous editors have done:
where they have differed either from the 'basic copy' or from your present
rough text, you must make an entry on the appropriate card. Some of the
cards will be fairly full by now.
Next you must consider the variants in the extant copies of your
'basic
copy'. How much of this you will do will depend on the series you are
working for. For the Arden and the Revels, an editor is expected to
establish
to his own satisfaction the 'corrected' and 'uncorrected' states of each
forme,
if both states exist (and it will be remembered that instances of double
correction occur); for a series that comes nearer to the 'textbook' class, the
duty may be, reluctantly, excused. Any variants discovered will be entered
on the cards.
You are now in a position to revise your rough draft, and you may
make
substantial changes in the light of your acquired knowledge of previous
editors' handling of the text. When I was editing The Two Noble
Kinsmen for the Signet, I changed my mind between prose and
verse
after I had seen what other editors (from the eighteenth century onwards)
had done. On the other hand, you may feel (as I did on that occasion) that
an
emendation is justified despite the other editors' obliviousness of it. And
you
will prune your collation, deciding what is and what is not worth presenting
to a twentieth-century reader. No one cares, really, whether at some time
'Ile' was expanded to 'I will', unless the metre is substantially helped by
it.
Remember that not even a Ph.D. examiner wants every spelling- or
punctuation-variant over three centuries presented to him. You will scale
down your card-collation to the point where you may be prepared to shed
tears over labour lost. But it is not
lost labour: if the collation on your cards were not over-long, you could not
be sure that you had done the job fully enough. It is a still more demanding
task to decide what you should offer to the reader. And you must
remember,
too, that if you give him too much to read in your collations he will not
read
any of them: do not bury the important things under a monument of trifles.
This is one reason why collation should be kept strictly apart from
explanatory annotation (as did not happen with John Munro's London
Shakespeare). What you must do is to indicate where you have felt
you
have had an editorial choice to make, whether or not you are convinced you
have made the right choice.
Now you have text and collation more or less done. The next task
should be annotation, and you are in a position to go back to that copy you
underlined. You may think that many things you marked on it are not worth
annotating, so clear has the text become to you. But you have to bear in
mind that you are one of the first, perhaps the first, to edit this play in the
twentieth century, and, as a scholar, you know far more about the language
of the play than most people are likely to do. At this stage, moreover, you
may notice some words and phrases giving you difficulty which you had
previously passed over as needing no comment: some difficulties are more
obvious at a first glance, others become obvious only as one gets to know
the text more fully. So you will probably have additions to make to your
rough list of points to annotate. In any event, it is useful to annotate as
freely
as your series allows you (and of course in this there is a great deal of
variation). When you are baffled, indicate the fact: otherwise a reader will
be
frustrated
by his own sense of ignorance. When
O.E.D. gives the
answer, refer
to it. When you find, independently of
O.E.D., an
illuminating
parallel in the literature of the time, give it. When a simple gloss will do
(i.e.,
when the scholar knows, but an undergraduate may not), give that: no one
is
going to feel insulted if you gloss more than he needs. If you annotate
unnecessarily, it is your general editor's task to tell you so: he has already
seen many other volumes in the series through the press. He should be
aware, too, that to-day we can assume a much more limited acquaintance
with classical mythology and the Bible than was the case fifty years ago,
when the reading public for old plays was much smaller.
One of my editors told me that he got most of his editorial pleasure
out
of annotations; one of my general editors told me that he 'liked reading
notes'. You may not feel the same way, but there is in annotation a sense
of
grappling with every detail of the play's meaning that has its special
rewards.
Your edition may have appendices, at the discretion of the general
editor, who will be in some degree controlled by the publisher. These may
be
'sources', which are important but do not need to be 'edited' as your text
has
been edited. It is usually best to give them in the original spelling from the
edition of your choice, with such alterations as to make them generally
intelligible — indicating, in a head-note or footnotes, what liberties
you
have taken.
And then there is the introduction, on which you will have been given
a
directive as to content and word-length. This may be the editor's most
rewarding task and is certainly his most arduous. He will feel particularly
on
his mettle here, but will have to listen to his general
editor when his argument has been obscure or he has been insufficiently
heedful of his play's character. As we all are. The play that is being edited
is
one that has, in many instances, given rise to more than one interpretation.
If
it is by a major dramatist, the differences may be considerable. Part of the
task is to give the reader an idea of previous views, to indicate the
consensus
if there is one; at the same time the general editor must be prepared to let
the
editor say what he himself thinks: that is one of the inalienable rights when
one is editing a play in the kind of series we are here concerned with. No
general editor, if he is any good at his job, will agree with everything said
in
the introductions in his series. If he did, he would either have chosen his
editors badly or have imposed his views too forcibly on them. There is
nothing, there can be nothing, definitive in our interpretation of a major,
or
even a specially interesting, dramatic text. We have indeed the
right to announce our own views; we have no right in our introduction to
indicate only our own views.
[8]
The general editor should check all the editor has quoted from his
own
text in his introduction and annotations. He may also check Shakespeare
quotations too (and why does any editor give line-numbers from Alexander,
who, in other ways so admirable, says he is following Old Cambridge
numbering and is therefore impossible to refer to for prose?), but he cannot
be expected to check other references. There is a limit to what you can
demand of him. Even so, most editors experience a shock when they
discover what a second pair of eyes has found to be imperfect in their text,
collations and references. No one of us — well, almost no one
— should
be allowed to edit a text entirely on his own. A general editor must
scrutinize
the typescript as fully as a man can, and must be more than an averagely
good proofreader, on whom, none the less, the editor must not rely.
So (i) the text and collation, (ii) annotations, (iii) appendices, (iv)
introduction. It is amazing how many good editions we have recently had;
but how much work has been put into them by, for example, the Arden and
Revels editors is by no means yet — or perhaps ever will be
— generally
realized.
Yet, when you have sent off the typescript to the general editor, you
are
probably under the impression that the work (proofs apart) has been done.
It
may be well to issue a warning: in any of the more ambitious series, you
may
regard it as highly probable that the typescript will come back. This will be
no damning reflection on the quality of your work, but (i) the general editor
is likely to have simple
errors to point out, (ii) he may suggest more, or less, annotation, (iii) he
may
ask how you defend such-an-such an approach, may warn you of views you
have not taken into account, may suggest that some aspects of the play have
been neglected in the introduction. Where opinion (not fact, or an accepted
practice of the series) is involved, he will leave the ultimate decision to
you,
but he has to indicate a dubiety that he thinks your readers may share with
him. He may also have to say, with reluctance, that your introduction is
longer than he can ask the publisher (with whom, as indeed you will have
been told, he has made a previous agreement on this matter) to print. He
may tell you that your appendices are too numerous or too long for the
series.
So you then, digesting his doubtless many-paged letter, will have to
check, to revise, to add, to scrap this or that part of your edition. Here
indeed you have to try to be patient with your general editor —
partly
because he asks for revision, partly because he has probably delayed a long
time before replying to you. Remember you are not his only editor;
remember too that he is other things as well as a general editor, and
doubtless had many things awaiting his attention (apart from things he is
himself writing) when your typescript arrived.
You may put the whole matter aside for a time. But if you are aware
that
what has been just outlined is the normal sequence of events, you will not
be
unduly discouraged: you will get back to the job as soon as you can. The
end-result may be an edition of outstanding quality. It will be your book,
produced after listening to — sometimes following, sometimes
rejecting
— another man's advice. At least on occasion he is likely to have
saved
you from manifest error. You would save him, too, if the rôles were
reversed.
