I
Greg's contribution to the 1949 session of the English Institute, "The
Rationale of Copy-Text"—read for Greg by J. M. Osborn on 8
September 1949—was first published in the third (1950-51) volume of
Studies in Bibliography (pp. 19-36). (There is a certain
appropriateness, therefore, in re-examining the essay, on the twenty-fifth
anniversary of its original appearance, in the pages of the same journal.)
Since that time it has been republished in the posthumous volume of Greg's
Collected Papers (1966), edited by J. C. Maxwell, who
incorporated into its text a few minor revisions and a new footnote, as
indicated by Greg in his working papers.[4] The essay is not long or complicated and
is expressed with Greg's usual clarity. That such an essay should have
given rise to so much discussion, and even controversy, is not surprising,
however, for it has the kind of simplicity frequently characteristic of great
concepts—a sweeping simplicity
that results from having penetrated beyond peripheral complexities and
arrived at the heart of a problem. Just as it is not easy to achieve such
simplicity, neither is it always easy for others to follow or accept it.
Greg begins by referring to the first use of the term
"copy-text"—by R. B. McKerrow in 1904 in his edition of Nashe—and
sketches the history of the idea of "the most authoritative text"; it is
evident, from this kind of beginning and from later references to
McKerrow's and his own changes of position, that he is presenting his ideas
on copy-text as the outgrowth of an evolving train of thought extending
back over many years. Indeed, his opening paragraph says nothing about
putting forth a new theory but only that he wishes to consider the
"conception" and "implications" of a change in McKerrow's position.
Although he soon admits (p. 377) that he is drawing a distinction which
"has not been generally recognized," his emphasis is not on the
novelty of his contribution but rather on the way in which it seems but a
natural step in the line of thinking already pursued both by him and by
McKerrow. In effect he is saying that he has finally come to recognize
something which he had overlooked earlier and something toward which
McKerrow had gradually been moving.
It is important to notice the historical framework of Greg's essay: for
Greg, stepping into the discussion at a particular point in its development,
accepts without further analysis certain ideas about scholarly editing—two
in particular—which he feels have already been adequately established.
First, he makes clear that he rejects "purely eclectic methods," in which an
editor has no restraints placed on his freedom to choose among variant
readings on the basis of his subjective judgments of their aesthetic
appropriateness; the "genealogical method," developed by Lachmann and
his successors in the nineteenth century, was, he says, "the greatest advance
ever made in this field," because it provided a more objective basis for
preferring one text over another. McKerrow's concept of
"copy-text"—taking the term to mean, in Greg's words, "that early text
of a work which an editor selected as the basis of his own"—is clearly
placed in the context of the genealogical method, for it
implies that an editor has determined, through genealogical analysis, the
"most authoritative text" and therefore the one to which his own text should
adhere. By introducing Housman's criticism of the mechanical application
of this procedure (the fallacy of believing that the readings of the
"authoritative text" which are not manifestly impossible are in fact correct),
Greg suggests the direction in which his argument is to move. But he sees
no necessity to argue the general superiority of genealogical methods over
eclectic ones; at mid-twentieth century this superiority can simply be
asserted. A second assumption is that one can reject without discussion the
notion of choosing the last edition published during the author's lifetime as
the most authoritative. Placing his comment in a footnote—and in the past
tense—to suggest how little attention the idea deserves, Greg says, "I
have above ignored the practice of some eccentric editors who took as
copy-text for a work the latest
edition printed in the author's lifetime, on the assumption, presumably, that
he revised each edition as it appeared. The textual results were naturally
deplorable" (p. 378). Obviously Greg is not saying that one should ignore
late revisions which one has reason to think are authorial; but, he is
implying, it is no longer necessary to bother refuting the assumption that
the last edition in the author's lifetime is automatically the most
authoritative.
Without going over ground which he regards as already established,
then, Greg begins to reflect on current editorial practice and observes that
the situation facing editors of English texts is different from that facing
editors of classical texts, since the preference for "old-spelling" editions is
now "prevalent among English scholars," whereas editors of classical texts
normalize the spelling. Greg explicitly says that he does not wish to argue
the virtues of old-spelling editions but accepts this "prevalent" view—that
is to say, he accepts the view that editions of English works for scholars'
use should not involve normalized or modernized spelling and punctuation.
It should be clear, therefore, that his essay deals with one particular, if
basic, kind of edition and implies nothing about the relative merits of
modernized editions for other purposes—a point sometimes overlooked.
If the editor of English texts properly follows the general tradition of the
genealogical method inaugurated by classical editors, and if he must be
concerned with the
spelling and punctuation of his text in a way different from classical editors,
it follows that his conception of copy-text must contain an additional
element. In fact, viewed in this way, as Greg says, "the classical theory of
the 'best' or 'most authoritative' manuscript . . . has really nothing to do
with the English theory of 'copy-text' at all" (p. 375)—because, under the
classical theory, the spelling and punctuation are not involved in selecting
the copy-text.
By the beginning of the fourth paragraph of his essay, Greg has led
the reader, with astonishing ease, to see the current situation in English
editing against the background of its development and to anticipate the
distinction he is about to set forth between, on the one hand, spelling and
punctuation, and, on the other, the words themselves. The rhetorical
strategy of the essay demands proceeding explicitly to make this distinction
before returning to an examination of McKerrow's changing position (which
thereby takes on a new dimension), and this remarkable fourth paragraph
(pp. 375-377) contains the essence of what is now referred to as "Greg's
theory of copy-text." First of all, it makes the point that an old-spelling
edition must rely on some contemporary document, for the "philological
difficulties" of attempting to recreate or establish spellings for a particular
author at a particular time and place are overwhelming. Second, in view of
this practical necessity, it says,
one must distinguish between the actual words of a text and their spelling
and punctuation:
. . . we need to draw a distinction between the significant, or as I
shall call them "substantive", readings of the text, those namely that affect
the author's meaning or the essence of his expression, and others, such in
general as spelling, punctuation, word-division, and the like, affecting
mainly its formal presentation, which may be regarded as the accidents, or
as I shall call them "accidentals", of the text. (p. 376)
The explicit separation of these classes for separate editorial treatment is
one of Greg's key contributions; the third major point of the paragraph is
what that separate treatment amounts to. Separate treatment is justified, the
argument goes, because copyists and compositors are known to treat the
two categories differently; since they generally attempt to reproduce
accurately the substantives of their copy but frequently are guided by their
own preferences in matters of accidentals, it follows that later transcripts
of a work may depart considerably from earlier ones in accidentals and at
the same time be very close to them in substantives. What an editor should
do, therefore, as a practical routine, is first to determine the early text
which is to be his copy-text; then, Greg says,
I suggest that it is only in the matter of accidentals that we are bound
(within reason) to follow it, and that in respect of substantive readings we
have exactly the same liberty (and obligation) of choice as has a classical
editor, or as we should have were it a modernized text that we were
preparing. (p. 377)
In other words, because a copyist or a compositor reproduces substantives
more faithfully than accidentals, substantive variants in later transcripts or
editions are more likely to be worth editorial consideration as possible
authorial revisions than are variants in accidentals.
Now a few observations are worth making in regard to what Greg
does and does not say in this statement of his "theory"—particularly as
an anticipation of some of the points which, as we shall see, have been
raised in recent years. To begin with, while the terms "substantive" and
"accidental" are not very happy choices,[5] what is crucial to
the theory is the distinction itself, and one should not be distracted from it
by other associations which these words have. The terms have by now
become so well established in editorial commentary that it would be foolish
to attempt to change them, even though their use tends unfortunately to give
the impression to the general reader that editing involves an arcane
vocabulary and mysterious concepts. The situation is ironic because Greg
did not pretend to be dealing with any abstruse concepts: he merely hoped
that these two words could serve as a shorthand means for making a
distinction between what are popularly regarded as content and form in
verbal expression, a distinction with which everyone, in one way or
another, has come in contact. Indeed, he goes out of his way to emphasize
the fact that he is not setting forth a philosophical theory about the nature
of language but is only drawing a practical distinction for use in the
business of editing.
[6]
Naturally he is aware that content and form are never completely separable
and that the line separating meaning and formal presentation in written
language is not distinct (and philosophically raises complex issues); but for
his purposes it is enough to append a footnote (p. 376) acknowledging "an
intermediate class of word-forms about the assignment of which opinions
may differ and which may have to be treated differently in dealing with the
work of different scribes." Since the purpose of the substantive-accidental
division is to assist the editor in deciding what variants in a text can
reasonably be attributed to the copyist or compositor rather than the author,
the focus is pragmatic—on the habits of individuals—and Greg is
therefore more concerned with providing a suggestive approach, which can
be used with flexibility to meet various situations, than in defining as
philosophic concepts two mutually exclusive terms. The procedural
recommendation which concludes Greg's
paragraph is similarly couched in practical, and flexible, terms: the reason
for selecting a copy-text in the first place is the limited nature of historical
knowledge about accidentals (the copy-text is selected "on grounds of
expediency, and in consequence
either of philological ignorance or of linguistic circumstances"), and
therefore one should follow the copy-text in regard to accidentals—but
"within reason." This last phrase underscores Greg's approach: one follows
the "theory" when there is no persuasive reason for doing otherwise, but
when one has reason to depart from it, a rigid application of it would be
foolish. Because the editor generally has fewer means for rationally
determining authorial readings in accidentals than in substantives, he
generally follows the copy-text in accidentals; but Greg is not asking him
to fly in the face of reason by adhering to this procedure in situations which
are exceptions to the generalization. Nowhere does Greg claim that
following his rationale will invariably produce "correct" readings; what he
suggests is that it offers the safest approach when one has otherwise no
particular reason for choosing one reading over another as authorial. The
theory clearly is one of expediency.
The skillful organization of Greg's essay is nowhere better
exemplified than in his return to the subject of McKerrow in the pages
following this basic exposition of his theory. The rigidity of McKerrow's
approach is the more evident in contrast, and the reader is now in a position
to see its limitations; at the same time he recognizes how Greg's ideas
developed from McKerrow's and how McKerrow was on the verge of the
same insight as Greg. In the 1904 Nashe (which Greg quotes), McKerrow
had held firmly to the view that an editor should take as his copy-text the
latest edition which could convincingly be shown to contain authorial
revisions; so long as some of the variants in that edition were authorial, all
its readings should be accepted (since conceivably they could all be
authorial), except when they were obviously impossible. McKerrow allowed
for some editorial discretion in the determination of what was obviously
impossible, but in general he was determined to preserve the
"integrity" of individual texts. But by 1939, when he published his
Prolegomena for the Oxford Shakespeare, he had come to
believe that a later edition, even one with authorial revisions, should not
serve as copy-text, for—with the exception of those revisions—it would
be less likely to reflect the author's manuscript than an earlier edition,
which stood that much closer to the manuscript. He thus understood,
without explicitly stating, something very close to the distinction between
substantives and accidentals, since he now believed that the edition closest
to the manuscript preserved the general texture of the work better than later
editions and that authorial revisions should be incorporated into the text of
that edition. Although this position represented a considerable move away
from his earlier fear of eclecticism,
[7]
he was still not ready to allow an editor to combine readings from more
than two editions. When the editor believed a particular edition to contain
authorial revisions, he said, all the variants in that edition "which could not
reasonably be attributed to an ordinary press-corrector" (that is, in general,
all the substantive variants) must be accepted into the copy-text. By the time
of his death, therefore, McKerrow was well on his way to the position
finally advanced by Greg,
[8] the
essential difference between the two being in the amount of responsibility
given to editorial judgment. For McKerrow, the editor uses his judgment
in determining what edition should be copy-text, what edition, if any,
contains authorial revisions, and what readings are impossible, but he
cannot go further and reject some of the variants in that authorially revised
edition as not authorial.
[9] For Greg, the editor who has
already made certain basic decisions should be allowed to go on and choose
among the possibly authorial variants. The effort to eliminate as much
editorial decision as possible, he believes, is misguided:
Uniformity of result at the hands of different editors is worth little if
it means only uniformity in error; and it may not be too optimistic a belief
that the judgement of an editor, fallible as it must necessarily be, is likely
to bring us closer to what the author wrote than the enforcement of an
arbitrary rule. (p. 381)
Again Greg's emphasis is on the use of reason and discretion, as it is in the
brief summary which follows immediately: "the copy-text should govern
(generally) in the matter of accidentals, but . . . the choice between
substantive readings belongs to the general theory of textual criticism and
lies altogether beyond the narrow principle of the copy-text" (pp. 381-382).
Greg is careful here to insert a qualifying adverb even in the first part of
his statement, which deals with accidentals and thus the more mechanical
part of his theory; but in the second part he makes clear that the handling
of substantive variants is a matter of critical judgment and cannot be
regarded as mechanical in any sense. Not to recognize that substantives and
accidentals must be treated in different ways, he points out, has led in the
past to a "tyranny of the copy-text"—a tyranny because its readings were
thrust on the editor, without the benefit of his critical thinking about their
merits.
The remainder of Greg's essay, amounting to about half of it, consists
of illustrative examples and discussions of particular problems in the
application of the theory but does not add any essential point to the basic
idea set forth economically in the first half. After citing examples from F.
S. Boas's edition (1932) of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus and
Percy Simpson's edition (1941) of Jonson's The Gipsies
Metamorphosed to show the operation of the "tyranny of the
copy-text,"[10] Greg provides a second
brief recapitulation of his rationale (pp. 384-385), reiterating the limitations
of mechanical rules and concentrating on the nature of the editorial
judgment required for dealing with substantive variants. That judgment
depends partly on an evaluation of the circumstances of the production of
the editions in which those variants appear and partly on the relative
reliability of those editions
as suggested by the number of "manifest errors" in them; but the heart of
the matter is the editor's evaluation of particular variants in terms of "the
likelihood of their being what the author wrote rather than their appeal to
the individual taste of the editor" (p. 385). Then, to provide more practical
help, Greg expands on three points already introduced. First, he suggests
that an editor may legitimately decide to alter some of the accidentals of the
copy-text and thus provides a gloss on the expressions "within reason" and
"generally" which he had inserted parenthetically in his earlier statements
about following the accidentals of the copy-text. Spelling or punctuation
known to be at variance with the author's can be altered, for instance, and,
when substantive emendations are made on the basis of later texts, the
spelling of such words can be made to conform with the habitual spelling
(if there is one) of the copy-text. Second, he restates in somewhat more
detail his belief
that an editor should not accept from an authorially revised edition any
substantive variant that seems obviously incorrect, that seems not to be a
reading which the author would have inserted, or that seems completely
indifferent. The latter point illustrates once again the expedient nature of
what Greg is proposing: if a variant appears so indifferent to the editor that
he has no basis for arguing either for or against its adoption, then he simply
follows the copy-text reading as a practical means for deciding what to do.
"In such a case," Greg points out, "while there can be no logical reason for
giving preference to the copy-text, in practice, if there is no reason for
altering its reading, the obvious thing seems to be to let it stand" (p. 386).
Third, he makes explicit (pp. 389-390) what was only implied before, that
the choice of copy-text itself varies with circumstances and that situations
arise in which one must choose a revised edition as copy-text, as when an
author is
thought to have overseen a revised edition so carefully that its accidentals
as well as its substantives must be taken to carry his approval, or when
revision is so complex or pervasive that it is not meaningful to think in
terms of emending the unrevised text with later readings (
Every Man
in His Humour,
Richard III, and
King
Lear are cited).
In connection with all three of these points Greg again defends the
use of editorial judgment. When discussing the first he says, "These
[decisions to alter accidentals], however, are all matters within the
discretion of an editor: I am only concerned to uphold his liberty of
judgement" (p. 386). In his discussion of substantives he repeats the view
emphatically:
I do not, of course, pretend that my procedure will lead to
consistently
correct results, but I think that the results, if less uniform, will be on the
whole preferable to those achieved through following any mechanical rule.
I am, no doubt, presupposing an editor of reasonable competence; but if an
editor is really incompetent, I doubt whether it much matters what
procedure he adopts: he may indeed do less harm with some than with
others, he will do little good with any. And in any case, I consider that it
would be disastrous to curb the liberty of competent editors in the hope of
preventing fools from behaving after their kind. (p. 388)
And in the third instance, dealing with the choice of copy-text, he states
that no "hard and fast rule" can be laid down but that, whatever text is
chosen, the editor "cannot escape the responsibility of distinguishing to the
best of his ability" between authorial revision and "unauthorized variation":
"No juggling with copy-text will relieve him of the duty and necessity of
exercising his own judgement" (p. 390). This sentiment is clearly the
dominant motif of the essay; if McKerrow had been reacting against
nineteenth-century eclecticism in restricting the role of editorial judgment,
Greg is here turning toward more reliance on judgment, but within a
framework that does not encourage undisciplined eclecticism. It is in
keeping with his approach throughout that Greg ends by saying, "My desire
is rather to provoke discussion than to lay down the law."
I hope that my account of Greg's essay, by its very repetitiousness,
has shown that the essay itself consists of repeated statements of a simple
idea. Three times he presents a concise summary of his theory followed by
a discussion of particular points implied by it, as if he were turning over an
object in his hand, focusing his attention alternately on the piece as a whole
and on certain of its details. The simplicity of his proposal is certainly one
of its most remarkable features and is a natural result of the emphasis on
individual judgment, for a methodology inevitably becomes more
complicated the more one tries to substitute rules for judgment in the
handling of the various situations that may arise. In somewhat blunt
language, Greg's theory amounts to this: it tells the editor what to do when
he otherwise does not know what to do. If he does know otherwise—that
is, if his analysis of all available external and internal evidence (including,
of course, his own intimate
knowledge of the author and the period) convinces him that a particular text
comes closest in all respects to the author's wishes or that a particular
variant is the author's revision—then he does not need further guidance.
But when there remains a doubt in his mind, after thorough analysis, about
whether, for example, the author gave close attention to the punctuation of
a revised edition or
whether a particular altered wording, in a text which contains many clearly
authorial revisions, was the author's, the editor does need further help,
since he has gone as far as reasoning can take him and the results are
inconclusive. All that Greg suggests, in effect, is that the editor can most
sensibly extricate himself from this situation by keeping two points in mind:
(1) successive editions based on earlier editions become increasingly
divergent from the earliest edition in the sequence, particularly in such
matters as punctuation and spelling, not merely through carelessness but
through the natural tendency of compositors to utilize their own habitual
forms; (2) when an author makes revisions in a later edition, he may be
likely to give considerably less attention to spelling and punctuation than to
the words themselves, and even some of the differences in wording in a
revised edition may in fact result from the process of resetting rather than
from the author's revision. It
follows that the editor who chooses the edition closest to the author's
manuscript as his copy-text when he does not have strong reason for
choosing a later one, and who follows the readings of that copy-text when
he does not have strong reason to believe them erroneous or to believe that
a later variant in wording (or, more rarely, in punctuation or spelling) is the
author's—that such an editor is maximizing his chances of incorporating
the author's intended readings in his text. No one would claim—and Greg
specifically does not—that this procedure always results in the correct
choices, but it tells an editor how to proceed when he most needs such
advice (when he has exhausted the available evidence without reaching a
decision) and it is more satisfying than tossing a coin (since there is at least
a rationale involved, based on a generalization about the incidence of
human error and the behavior of human beings in dealing with written
language). The fundamental common sense of
this approach can be seen foreshadowed in Samuel Johnson's comments on
the editing of Shakespeare, when he says that "though much credit is not
due to the fidelity, nor any to the judgement of the first publishers, yet they
who had the copy before their eyes were more likely to read it right, than
we who read it only by imagination."
[11] The probabilities favor the correctness of
the first edition, and it makes sense to rely on that edition except when
there is compelling evidence for not doing so.
Expressed in this way—which emphasizes the flexibility and lack
of dogmatism basic to Greg's position—this "rationale of copy-text"
would seem to apply to all situations. But it is important to raise the
question of its universality, for Greg's primary interest, after all, was in the
printed drama of the English Renaissance, and all his illustrations are taken
from that literature. Did he believe that his rationale was more widely
applicable? He was dealing with a period from which relatively few
manuscripts have survived, but can the same procedure be applied to texts
for which manuscripts do survive? He was working with a period in which
greater variations in spelling were tolerable than in later times and in which
any editorial supervision of a printed text normally occurred in the printing
shop rather than, as later, in the publisher's office with its more highly
developed editorial routine; but can Greg's rationale be applied to the
products which emerged from the very different publishing circumstances
of later periods? Greg's own answer to these questions, I think it can be
plainly inferred from his essay, would be Yes. It is true that he limits
himself in his illustrations to
the field he knows best and limits his more abstract discussion for the most
part to printed books, but there are indications that he is thinking in broader
terms. For example, in that crucial fourth paragraph, distinguishing
substantives and accidentals, he twice refers to "scribes" and "compositors"
simultaneously, suggesting that the way human beings react to the two
categories is the same regardless of whether they are copying by hand or
setting type. He goes on, in the paragraph which follows, to restrict himself
to printed books for the historical reason that "the idea of copy-text
originated and has generally been applied in connexion with the editing of
printed books" (p. 378). The focus of the essay, it must be remembered,
is historical: a new approach to editing is set forth as a corrective to what
had been developing over the previous century. Since the principal
developments in editorial theory had taken place in connection with the
editing of Elizabethan and Jacobean
drama, it was natural that he should set forth his criticisms of current
procedure with reference to the same field—and convenient, also, since
that was his own area of competence. But he clearly implies that he is
dealing with a larger principle that could be illustrated in other ways than
the one he has chosen. Indeed, he suggests that the editors he is criticizing
might have taken a different approach if they had been more familiar with
the problems of variation in works transmitted in manuscript. And then he
adds:
For although the underlying principles of textual criticism are, of
course, the same in the case of works transmitted in manuscripts and in
print, particular circumstances differ, and certain aspects of the common
principles may emerge more clearly in the one case than in the other. (p.
378)
The implication certainly is that he is concerned with a basic concept
[12] which might not be clear to one who has
dealt only with a particular class of problems. And while his illustrations
come from Renaissance drama, some of them do involve authorial
proof-correction (
Every Man in His Humour) and revised
editions incorporating corrections derived from authorial manuscript
(
Richard III and
King Lear). In any event, his
whole approach, stressing expediency and judgment, suggests that he thinks
of his procedure as one capable of fitting widely varied situations. When an
editor judges that he has sufficient evidence for proceeding in a particular
way, he has no need for a plan of expediency; but a lack of sufficient
evidence is a common occurrence in dealing with works of every period,
and Greg's rationale commands respect in such situations because it is based
on what observation shows to be characteristic human behavior. If I have
set forth accurately here what Greg says, then it would appear to be a
self-evident proposition that his recommended procedure would serve in
handling editorial problems involving manuscripts as well as printed books,
arising in twentieth-century literature as well as sixteenth.
There is one kind of editorial problem, however, which clearly lies
outside the scope of Greg's essay. To place presumptive authority for
accidentals, as a general rule, in the edition closest to the author's
manuscript presupposes an ancestral series, in which the line of
editions—with each edition based (for the most part, at least) on
preceding ones—leads back to the manuscript. Although some of Greg's
examples involve complicated variations (such as the revisions incorporated
in the folio text of Every Man in His Humour), in which a
later edition is chosen as copy-text because of the extent and nature of fresh
authority (authorial revision or recourse to authorial manuscripts), those
examples do not include situations in which two or more texts stand in
exactly the same genealogical relationship to a lost ancestor, with no earlier
texts surviving. In such a case, Greg's approach offers no help in selecting
a copy-text, for no one of these texts is nearer the
manuscript (or the antecedent text) than any other. The inapplicability of
Greg's rationale to this kind of situation is obvious,
once it is pointed out, but it has only recently been examined in detail.
Fredson Bowers was confronted with the problem in editing Stephen
Crane's syndicated newspaper pieces: the variant texts of a given piece, as
they appeared in various newspapers, are all equidistant from the
syndicate's proofs which had been sent to those newspapers; in the absence
of the proofs, the editor is faced with several texts, any one of which could
be chosen as copy-text under Greg's rationale. The solution, as Bowers sets
it forth in "Multiple Authority: New Problems and Concepts of
Copy-Text,"
[13] is to combine the
features of these "radiating texts," as he calls them, through a statistical and
critical analysis of the variants. In effect, one has to construct a copy-text,
and the more surviving texts there are the more accurately can the common
ancestor (the lost syndicate proof) be reconstructed. From that point on,
naturally, Greg's rationale takes over, and the text
thus constructed may be emended with variants from later printings, as may
happen with an ordinary copy-text. The essential difference is that, in the
case of radiating texts, no one document can serve as copy-text, for no one
of the radiating texts can be presumed to have reproduced the accidentals
of the syndicate proof more accurately than another. Bowers's detailed
exposition of his solution therefore becomes a major supplement to Greg;
his essay—which incidentally offers an extremely useful statement of
Greg's position—deserves to be taken as a companion piece to Greg's
"Rationale," and the two essays together provide a comprehensive editorial
theory.
Bowers's discussion of radiating texts, in other words, does not
invalidate Greg's theory in any sense, but it does show one respect in which
that theory is not all-encompassing. No comparable supplement to Greg's
theory has been made in the twenty-five years since its first
appearance, though many questions have been raised. But these questions
(such as the extent to which the idiosyncrasies of nineteenth- or
twentieth-century authors' manuscripts should be preserved in print), often
interesting in themselves, involve matters of editorial judgment, not the
basic theory. It is unfortunately true that such questions have frequently
been posed as an attack on the theory; and the failure to distinguish between
the theory itself and the individual decisions of editors who are following
the theory has rendered much of the discussion less useful than it might
have been, if not wholly beside the point. My own summary of Greg in
these pages has tried to emphasize those elements of his essay which
anticipate the later criticisms. Seemingly it takes many words to explain
something which is simple and many assertions to proclaim lack of
dogmatism; but the simplicity and lack of dogmatism of Greg's rationale
have apparently not been perceived by a number of people,
for many of their criticisms are undercut by a recognition of those qualities.
A renewed close examination of Greg's essay does not suggest to me any
reason to question Bowers's description of its thesis as "the great
contribution of this century to textual criticism."
[14]