I
It should not be surprising that all textual scholarship is related, for
the same activities are involved, regardless of the diversity of the materials.
One must decide whether to produce a diplomatic—that is,
unaltered—text of a single document or a critical text, which is a
new
text that incorporates the results of editorial judgment regarding variant
readings and errors. One must assemble the relevant or potentially relevant
documents (handwritten, typed, or printed), then find out in what ways their
texts differ by collating them, then attempt to determine the relationships
among the texts, and finally, if the edition is to be critical, construct a new
text by choosing among variant readings and by making conjectures where
errors seem to be present in all texts. These stages are interrelated: the kind
of thinking one brings to the task of determining relationships among texts,
for example, will obviously have a bearing on the decisions made at the
next stage. Although
these two
stages are not entirely separable, textual discussions do, in practice, often
emphasize one or the other; and I think it is fair to say that perhaps the
principal distinction between the body of writing concerned with editing the
classics and that dealing with editing modern literature is their differing
emphases in this regard. Editors of the earlier material have access to no
authorial manuscripts and must contend with copies an unknown number of
steps removed (and often many centuries away) from those originals, and
such copies sometimes exist in the hundreds, or even—as with the
Greek
New Testament—the thousands. The task of working out the
relationships
among the texts of these documents is indeed formidable, and it is natural
that a great deal of the thought and writing about editing ancient texts
[5] has concentrated on this stage of
the
editorial process. What has traditionally been called "textual criticism"
—or, more recently, "textual
analysis"—is this attempt to fix the relationship of the surviving
documentary witnesses; and though many of the theories of textual criticism
have entailed certain assumptions about how the editor's critical text should
be constructed, the focus of attention has normally been not on the
"editorial" phase (the actual selection or emendation of readings) but on the
prior analysis of the texts that results in the assignment of relationships
among them.
[6]
Methodological writings about the editing of post-medieval literature,
on the other hand, have reversed this emphasis. Although relationships
among the texts from this period are by no means always clear-cut, the
dimensions of the problem are often significantly different: manuscripts in
the author's hand, copies made directly from them, printed editions set
from such documents (and perhaps proofread by the author), and later
editions during the author's lifetime (perhaps set from copies of the earlier
editions annotated by the author) are the characteristic materials. Editorial
theorists concerned with this period
have therefore not been required to give as much thought to the question of
establishing relationships among texts and instead have concentrated their
attention on the choice and treatment of a "copy-text." Choosing a copy-text
is of course dependent on knowing the relationships among the texts; the
central problem, however, is not the process of establishing those
relationships but of defining the authorial intention that is to be reflected in
the critical text, since often more than one document exists that is directly
associated with the author. The term "textual criticism" can be used broadly
to designate the evaluation of textual witnesses for writings of any period;
but its traditional, and more restricted, application to the study of ancient
manuscripts is appropriate, for it refers to the kind of analysis that has
bulked largest in textual work on those manuscripts.
In classical textual criticism, these basic operations have generally
been referred to as recensio and emendatio, and
the
distinction between the two points up another contrast with textual
scholarship of later literature. Recensio refers to the process
of
establishing the archetype, or the latest common ancestor of all surviving
manuscripts, insofar as it can be established from the evidence in those
manuscripts, which are the only witnesses to the tradition. The particular
decisions made about individual variant readings in the construction of this
archetype depend, at least in part, on the relationships that have been
postulated among the manuscripts; the practice of stemmatics—of
constructing genealogical trees to show manuscript relationships—is
therefore also sometimes called "recensionism." And whether or not one
aspires to a system that eliminates judgment in the construction and use of
the stemmata, the fact is that ultimately judgment will
have been involved in the attempt to choose the wording of the archetype
from among the variant readings. Swings in scholarly fashion toward, and
away from, the use of critical judgment—along with the associated
tendency to favor, or disapprove of, eclecticism—must be looked at
later;
but the point here is not whether a single text is principally adhered to in
producing the new recension but the fact that the recension is defined as
being limited to readings present in the witnesses (or obvious corrections
of them). It is the next stage, emendatio, in which the editor
can
engage in conjecture to rectify what appear to be errors in all preserved
texts.[7] Editorial discussion
dealing with post-medieval works, in contrast, generally takes the term
"emendation" to refer to any alterations introduced by the editor into a
particular documentary text (the one chosen as "copy-text"), whether the
source of those alterations are other texts or the editor's own ingenuity. It
is perhaps natural that this usage should have prevailed among editors of
modern works, since they often have an author's manuscript or a text only
one or two steps from it to use as a copy-text, and all their alterations may
then be seen as corrections to that single documentary text; editors in the
earlier manuscript tradition, on the other hand, normally have no such text
to choose, and the process of arriving at what might be regarded as the
counterpart is a major undertaking in itself, to be accomplished before one
can begin to think about how that text departs from what the author must
have intended to say. In any event, however the difference in usage came
about, it should be clear that
both groups of editors are talking about the same categories of editorial
intervention—alterations based on readings present in one or more
of the
documents and alterations emerging from the editor's own
conjecture.
It should further be evident that any approach or vocabulary
suggesting that the latter are more conjectural than the former is delusory.
Of course, a reading adopted from one of the documents may be a striking
reading that the editor would not have thought of or dared introduce
independently, but the decision to consider it as worthy of acceptance into
the critical text is still an act of conjecture, always entailing the potential
danger that the reading is accorded too much credence by the mere fact of
its existence in one of the documents. To regard the choice among variants
as "recension," defined as establishing "what must or
may be regarded as transmitted" (Maas), and then to label
further editorial alteration as "emendation" or "conjectural emendation,"
would seem to overemphasize the objectivity of the first and to imply a
greater distance between the two than in fact exists. The recension, after
all, is a conclusion resulting from scholarly judgment or
conjecture—except, of course, when only one text survives or
(theoretically) when all surviving texts are identical. Even when the
archetype appears to be the text of one of the extant manuscripts, judgment
regarding individual variants is still involved in reaching that decision. To
think of
"what
must or
may be regarded as transmitted"
as
a single text, when variant texts survive, is to engage in conjecture; and
some of the "conjectural emendations" that an editor thinks of may attain
to a higher degree of certainty than some of the choices that are made
among variant readings in the documents. I do not believe that editors in
any field would disagree with this point, despite the implications of the
language sometimes used. The fact that the terminology employed by
editors of classical and of modern texts diverges somewhat is not important,
so long as both groups of editors recognize that they are dealing with the
same fundamental questions and so long as they are not misled by the
superficial suggestiveness of some of the terms.
As the division of the editorial process into recensio
and
emendatio makes clear, editors of ancient texts are normally
concerned with producing critical editions—editions, that is,
containing
texts that are different, as a result of the editors' intervention, from any of
the documentary texts now existing. Editors of printed texts from the last
five hundred years have also been engaged for the most part with this kind
of edition: the extensive discussion in the wake of Greg's "Rationale," for
instance, has concentrated on critical editions. Yet in the exchange of views
that has increasingly been taking place in recent years between editors of
modern literature and editors of statesmen's papers, some of the so-called
"historical" editors have questioned the value of critical texts, or at least of
texts that are "eclectic" in incorporating readings from two or more
documents. It is easy to see why a historian editing letters and journals in
the hand of a
particular statesman would think primarily of a diplomatic edition, and
similarly understandable that an editor of an ancient Greek text surviving
in much later manuscripts would probably wish to construct a new text
attempting to restore the author's words. But the difference between the two
situations does not really rest on the different nature of the materials: there
are different goals involved, the aim in the former instance being the
reproduction of the content of a given document and in the latter being the
reconstruction of what the author of a text intended to say. Both approaches
are applicable to any material: documents containing ancient Greek texts,
for instance, can obviously be treated as entities in their own right, with
texts to be exactly reproduced, as manifestations of particular moments in
the history of the pieces of writing involved; or they can be regarded as
evidence to be used in reconstructing a text nearer its author's intentions
than any of
the surviving texts manages to come. Historians may more often find
themselves producing diplomatic texts of particular documents
(the contents of which were often not intended for publication), and scholars
of literature (both ancient and modern)
may more often be engaged in constructing critical texts of
works (ordinarily finished pieces of writing—whether
"literary" or not—intended for public dissemination). But each group
should recognize the value of both approaches and understand how they are
related to one another.
This point would seem to be so elementary and obvious as not to need
stating; but unfortunately some textual controversies have arisen through a
failure to keep in mind the most basic distinctions and to appreciate the
place each editorial undertaking occupies in the large framework that
encompasses all textual work in all fields. One historical editor has gone so
far recently as to make this statement: "To what uses literary critics may
put bastard documents is for them to say, but the saying of the same will
not likely change the historical discipline's rules of evidence and
citation."[8] The narrowness and
closed-mindedness of this position is astounding. In a more sophisticated
form, however, this issue keeps turning up: the question of eclecticism has
perennially been a point of controversy among editors of the classics as well
as of modern works.[9] Some editors
of modern literary works, who well understand the
value of critical texts, have nevertheless argued against combining into a
single text readings that reflect different stages of authorial revision. There
is nothing wrong in principle, of course, with the position that authorially
revised texts may at times be best handled by preparing separate critical
editions of each version. But the mistake that sometimes follows is the
belief that no variant from one version can be incorporated into another.
That injunction would naturally be proper if one were producing a
diplomatic edition of each version; but if a critical text of each version is
the goal, then one must recognize that some of the variants among versions
do not represent a particular stage of revision or rethinking but are precisely
the kinds of corrections that the editor is already committed to
inserting—without documentary authority. I make this point (which
has
been discussed more fully else-where)[10] in order to suggest, once again,
that
the distinction between
adopted variant readings and conjectural emendations needs to be thought
about less mechanically than it often is and to show that editors would be
well advised to keep abreast of textual debate in fields other than their own.
Just as editors of statesmen's papers and of modern literature stand to
benefit from knowing more about the editorial thinking underlying critical
editions of ancient texts, so editors of the classics (and of statesmen's
papers) will find that the discussions of authorial revisions, engaged in fully
by editors of modern literature, raise questions relevant for them.
Further indication of these connections can be suggested by referring
to three of the more recent manuals on textual criticism, published
coincidentally at about the same time, James Willis's Latin Textual
Criticism (1972), Martin L. West's Textual Criticism and
Editorial Technique Applicable to Greek and Latin Texts (1973),
and
Vinton A. Dearing's Principles and Practice of Textual
Analysis
(1974).[11] These books offer several
contrasts. Willis and West, classicists and editors, address their work, as
the titles indicate, to other editors of classical texts; Dearing, a professor
of English who is establishing the text for the California edition of Dryden
and is also working on an edition of the Greek New Testament, intends for
his book to be applicable to all editorial scholarship, indeed "to the
transmission in any form of any idea or complex of ideas" (p. ix). Willis,
whose writing is marred by unsuccessful sarcasm, is
principally occupied with restating "the many ways in which scribes were
accustomed to make mistakes" (p. ix), though he prefaces that account with
a brief section on "Fundamentals"; West, who writes lucidly and concisely,
would claim originality largely (though not entirely) for his way of stating
certain complex questions and their conventional answers and for choosing
passages to illustrate his points; Dearing, who writes at greater length and
with some obscurity, covers what a manual must cover but uses the
occasion to set forth his own proposal for the analysis of relationships
among texts. Willis's book is the narrowest and least significant of the
three, focusing on scribal errors and devoting considerable space to "trial
passages," on which readers are invited to exercise their ingenuity by
proposing emendations
(answers are provided). Dearing's experience with both ancient and modern
texts (he is perhaps unique in working in both fields) and his view of
textual analysis as "a completely general discipline of very wide specific
applicability in the arts and social sciences" (p. 1) are encouraging signs,
and one has good reason to expect his book to have broader significance
than West's.
[12] In my view, however,
West's book is calmer, clearer, and more sensible and finally a better
introduction for students from any discipline. Whether or not I am right, I
hope that one point implicit in my opinion will be granted: that the interests
of all who deal with texts are closely related and therefore that the sources
of specific illustrations are of less moment than the basic statements and
discussions of principles. A book that draws its examples from many
periods and languages is not necessarily of more general applicability than
one that takes all its illustrations
from Greek and Latin texts; it may be, but the range of examples and even
the immediate aims of the author are not the decisive tests.
One vital matter commented on in all three books—and one
that
editors of modern literature have a particular interest in—is the role
of
the analysis of physical evidence in textual decisions. What has come to be
known as "analytical bibliography" is crucial to the editing of texts in
printed books: in order to be in a position to understand textual anomalies
in a printed text, one must first have extracted as much information as
possible about the printing of the work from the evidence preserved in the
printed sheets themselves. As a result of the efforts of McKerrow, Pollard,
Greg, Bowers, and Hinman,[13] and
of those that followed their lead, editors of printed texts must now deal with
such matters as the identification of compositors' habits and of the order of
formes through the press. Knowing as much as one can about what
happened to a particular text in the printing shop or the publisher's office
puts one in a better position to recognize
those features of the text that did not come from the author (or at least were
not present in the copy furnished to the printer); analytical bibliography has
shown time and
again that much can be learned from physical evidence about the
transmission of the text. The same principle obviously applies to
manuscripts as well: in the case of manuscript texts not in their authors'
hands, the scribe or copyist occupies the roles of publisher's editor,
compositor, and pressman combined. Introductory manuals for editors of
manuscripts have recognized this point to some extent in that they often
contain fairly detailed comments classifying the kinds of errors that scribes
were likely to make. Such "habits" are generalized ones, and less attention
has been paid to uncovering the habits of particular scribes through physical
evidence, including that which fixes the manuscript in time and
place.
This whole question enters Dearing's book in the first sentence,
where we are told that textual analysis "determines the genealogical
relationships between different forms of the same message" but not "the
relationships between the transmitters of the different forms"—or, as
he
puts it in the next paragraph, "the genealogy of the variant states of a text"
but not "the genealogy of their records."[14] The distinction, indeed, Dearing
regards
as one of his central achievements: he believes that his book "carries out to
the full" the differentiation set forth in the earlier version[15] between "the genealogy of
manuscript and
other books as physical objects and the genealogy of the ideas or complexes
of ideas that these physical objects transmit" (p. ix). It is of course quite
proper to begin with this basic point; editors of all materials from all
periods must recognize that the chronology of texts does not necessarily
match the chronology of their physical presentation. The point is perhaps
not quite such a revelation as Dearing thinks. Nevertheless, it is always
good to have fundamental distinctions set forth clearly at the outset of a
discussion, and one would have no cause for complaint if Dearing had not
carried the point to the opposite extreme, slighting the legitimate role of
physical evidence in textual study. Writers in the past, he says, have
"almost always" confused the physical document with the text it carries, and
he admits that "it is extremely difficult to free oneself from the
bibliographical spell"; but it is a "fundamental and important" matter, he
insists, "to exclude bibliographical thinking from textual analysis"
(p. 15). That the valid distinction he began with could have led to this
wrongheaded conclusion is unfortunate; but the problem might have been
predicted from some remarks made along the way to illustrate the basic
point that texts are different from their transmitters. To show that "the same
record" may preserve "two or more states of a text," he cites as one
illustration a poem appearing twice in an anthology (p. 14). But how is
"record" being defined here? What is the physical unit? One may ask the
same questions when he then says that different records may "transmit the
same state of a text when they are produced by a mechanically perfect
reproductive process, such as Xerox copying, and whenever it is deemed
vital to preserve the text without change, as in statute books, state
documents such as the Constitution of the United States, religious
documents such as the Book of Common Prayer, and careful scholarly
reprints of all sorts" (pp. 14-15). Xerox copying is not "mechanically
perfect," if only because the size of the image is not identical with the
original. Beyond that, it is no criticism of the Xerox process to say that it
is not "mechanically perfect," since no system can be, if what is meant is
that the reproduction is identical to the original. The reproduction is a
different physical object, and therefore it is not the same thing; and most,
if apparently not quite all, users of Xerox reproductions are aware of the
dangers of assuming that what they see in the reproduction is precisely what
they would see in the original. Furthermore, is Dearing suggesting that
whenever "it is deemed vital to preserve the text without change" such
preservation is achieved? Are there never errors in the reprintings of
statutes, or prayer books, or "careful scholarly reprints"? Does not the
acceptance of aim for fact question the need for textual scholarship at all (or
any other effort to establish truth)?
The serious bibliographical problem raised by these statements
becomes even more evident with Dearing's next sentence: "The many
identical copies produced by printing from the same setting of type,
however, provided they are uniformly bound and readied for sale as a
single lot, are usually counted as one record." Analytical bibliographers
have been demonstrating for three-quarters of a century that surviving
copies from the same setting of type (i.e., from the same edition) are not
necessarily "identical" in their text—indeed, that they are frequently
(or,
in some periods, usually) not identical. (Whether or not they are "uniformly
bound" or "readied for sale as a single lot" has nothing to do with their
text.) Differences can come about either intentionally or inadvertently,
through stop-press corrections and alterations between printings or through
accidents that damage the type (perhaps necessitating some resetting) and
deterioration of type or plates through wear. The
essential point is that different copies of an edition are different physical
objects and are therefore separate pieces of evidence; it is unscholarly to
assume, without investigation, that they are identical, and in fact such an
assumption would very often be wrong, for books of any period, even the
twentieth century. If one were to regard all copies of an edition as a single
"record," one would have to define "record" in a special way, for there
would frequently be textual variants among particular copies of the
"record." It is difficult, for example, to say what "the" text of the
Shakespeare First Folio is; one might say that it is the text in Charlton
Hinman's
Norton Facsimile (1968)—but that work
assembles
from various copies of the Folio the pages representing corrected formes.
No one surviving copy contains all the corrected pages, and constructing
such a copy in facsimile is a task requiring scholarly judgment. Some
people who work only with manuscripts (and some who work with printed
books as well) think of copies of printed editions as
identical, in contrast to manuscripts, each of which is expected to be
different. Undeniably manuscripts and printed books are produced in
fundamentally different ways; but the fact that copies of an edition are
mass-produced and intended to be identical does not mean that they are
actually identical. Indeed, they cannot be identical, since no two physical
objects are identical in every respect; and textual differences are among the
kinds of variations that occur. Printed books resemble manuscripts more
than many people seem to think. These are elementary points, and Dearing
(who has done a great deal of work with seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century English books) certainly understands them; why he fails
to take them into account here is inexplicable.
[16] The fact that their absence is more
likely
to be noticed by students of printed books than by students of the
manuscript tradition is an indication of the distance that exists between the
two
groups—an unfortunate distance, since these points clearly have their
implications for manuscript study as well and form one more illustration of
the common issues facing all textual scholars.
We thus come back to Dearing's assertion that "bibliographical
thinking" should be excluded from "textual analysis." It is no doubt true
that some textual critics have been confused in their thinking and have not
differentiated between a document and the text it contains; but it is an
overstatement to say that "textual critics in the past almost always confused
the two genealogies when they did not devote their attention exclusively to
the genealogy of records" (p. 15). In any case,
the solution to the problem is not to banish the allegedly overemphasized
bibliographical approach, since it unquestionably plays a crucial role in the
whole process. To be fair to Dearing's argument, one must remember that
he distinguishes "textual analysis" from "textual criticism": the latter is the
larger term, covering all the stages of textual work, whereas the former is
one particular operation, concerned with working out the "genealogy of the
states of a text" (p. 2) and reconstructing their latest common ancestor. It
is from "textual analysis" that bibliographical thinking is to be excluded.
Nevertheless, one can insist that even here bibliographical analysis is
important without being guilty of equating texts with records, for the texts
are tied to the records, and an understanding of the physical evidence is
necessary for an informed interpretation of the textual evidence. Dating a
document (manuscript or printed book), for example, is significant even if
one recognizes
that the state of the text is not necessarily of the same date. Dearing makes
much of what he sees as different uses of manuscript dates for textual
analysts and for bibliographers: he neatly pairs the successful copyist, who
"produces a record that postdates the state of the text it records," with the
successful editor, who "produces a state of the text which anedates his
exemplar" (p. 39). But to contrast "successful" copyists and editors is to
place the emphasis on what they intended to do. In actuality copyists do not
always reproduce with fidelity the texts in front of them, and though the
records they create certainly postdate the records they use, their texts may
also postdate those of the earlier records. Similarly, editors do not always
succeed (it must be assumed but cannot be proved) in reconstructing earlier
forms of the texts, and the texts they do produce may be said to postdate
the other extant states.
Without losing sight of the idea that the genealogy of texts is a
different concept from the genealogy of documents, there is a real sense in
which one may still claim that a text does date from the time it is inscribed
or set in type. The changes introduced by a scribe or compositor, whether
out of habitual practice or out of inadvertence, produce a new text;[17] and understanding as much as
possible
about the production of that text—the habits of the individual scribe,
the
characteristics of the period, and so on—helps one to know how
certain
readings occurred. If one rules out this knowledge, one makes textual
analysis a rather fruitless exercise, for one may postulate relationships that
are shown by
physical evidence to be incorrect. Purely as abstract statements about
agreements and divergences among certain messages, they are not incorrect,
and this is Dearing's point; but so long as textual analysts are
concerned—as they ultimately must be—with direction of
descent, with
genealogical relationships, they cannot ignore any physical evidence that
eliminates certain relationships from further consideration as factual
possibilities. Dearing himself does discuss general categories of scribal
error (pp. 44-54) in his treatment of directional variation. Recognizing the
influence of the physical process of transmission on what the text says (that
is, "bibliographical thinking") cannot therefore be divorced from the
analysis of the relationships among texts and need not involve a confusion
of texts and records. Dearing asserts that textual analysts describe "not what
was but what is and therefore what all can agree upon" (p. 19). They
describe "what is," however, only if their
aim is to record variant readings, and even then it is by no means certain
that all would agree on what the reading of each text is at every point. But
if the textual analyst's work includes reconstructing "the latest state from
which all the extant states have descended," a state that is "in most respects
the closest we can approach to the author's original intention" (p. 2), the
textual analyst does deal with "what was," just as the bibliographer does.
Both are engaged in historical reconstruction, and their tasks are intimately
linked. When Dearing speaks of "bibliographical thinking" he may be
referring more to descriptive bibliography (the history of the physical forms
in which a work has appeared) than to analytical bibliography (the analysis
of the physical evidence present in those physical forms), but the latter is
of course a tool used in the former; in any case Dearing's approach, in the
course of emphasizing texts as "messages," neglects the inextricability of
the
"transmitter" and the "message" and therefore the role of physical evidence
in the interpretation of textual evidence that the textual analyst must
perform.
[18]
In contrast, West's manual sets forth emphatically, if briefly, the role
that the analysis of "external" evidence must play. He points out that the
process of examining texts has refined "our understanding of the languages,
metres, and styles of the Greeks and Romans," which in turn provides a
background for examining further texts; we learn about "such matters as the
proclivities of scribes" and "the processes governing the spread of texts at
different periods" (p. 8) and need that knowledge (which, as he correctly
says, is of interest in its own right) in evaluating particular texts. At other
points he refers to the use of paleographical
evidence and watermarks in dating manuscripts (p. 30), along with
information about "what is known of the general historical conditions that
governed the transmission of classical texts at different times" and "more
particular facts such as the movements of individual known scribes" (p. 31);
and he speaks of eliminating from the text "those features which we know,
from our general knowledge of the history of books and writing, to have
been introduced since the time of the author" (p. 54). He recognizes, in
other words, the relation of physical evidence to textual study, even if he
does not go beyond the traditional statements of its role. Like most writers
of textual manuals, he explains the categories of alteration that scribes are
likely to be responsible for (pp. 18-29);
[19] as usual, these characteristics are
discussed as generalized possibilities, and little attention is given to
procedures for establishing the habits of individual scribes or
assessing the textual implications of physical features that may reveal
information about the method of production of individual manuscripts. One
misses the kind of detail now standard in the compositorial and physical
analysis of printed books; more work is needed for manuscript studies along
the lines of Farquhar's and Van Sickle's investigations of the physical
characteristics of codices and book rolls and Colwell's focus on the
characteristics of particular scribes.
[20]
But even if, to students of printed books, West's manual seems to slight the
explicit treatment of techniques for analyzing physical evidence, they would
nevertheless find his essential position congenial. His repeated, if general,
comments on the necessity for investigating the processes of the production
of manuscripts form a sounder basis on
which to proceed than Dearing's well-grounded but inappropriately applied
segregation of bibliographical and textual concerns.
West's inclusion of the results of paleographical analysis and
watermark study among the types of "external" evidence points to the way
in which terminology reflects point of view. To the analytical bibliographer
such evidence would be thought of as internal, because it is part of the
physical evidence of the document, as opposed to relevant information that
comes from outside the document, such as that from publishers' archives
or from one's knowledge of the book-making practices of the period (itself
built up from internal evidence from other documents). West can place both
watermark evidence and one's general knowledge of the period together as
external evidence because they are both external to the text, even though
one is not external to the document transmitting the text. Both
usages—that of the analytical bibliographer and that of the textual
critic—are proper: they simply result from different approaches to
the
material. Such differences in terminology should prove
no obstacle to mutual comprehension so long as the operations being
referred to are thoroughly understood and so long as the line between the
approaches is not imagined to be firmer than it actually is. Some techniques
of analytical bibliography—compositorial analysis, for
instance—involve evidence drawn from the text itself; determining
the
habits of a compositor, or a scribe, depends on a close examination of
practices within the text. One can say, and some have said, that this kind
of examination takes the text only as additional physical evidence, regarding
it simply as ink on paper. It is true that those inked shapes constituting the
text are physical evidence; it is also true, however, that the analytical
bibliographer must understand what the text says, in order to know which
characteristics are worth studying as possibly attributable to compositorial
or scribal practice. Determining whether this evidence is internal or external
is not a very productive problem; what is
important is to guard against equating "external" with "objective" and
"internal" with "subjective." The terms unfortunately come to have these
connotations in many discussions of the textual criticism of manuscripts.
Sometimes "internal evidence" is used to refer to the kind of evidence
adduced by an editor to support a conjectural emendation (largely evidence
from context, which, in varying degrees, involves interpretation and is
therefore subjective), and "external evidence" is taken to mean the
relationship among manuscripts, which in turn leads (without the necessity
of literary judgment) to the adoption of certain readings rather than others.
West is too sensible to make this mistake: he describes "the more exact
information derived from internal evidence" as "the interrelationships of the
copies as inferred from comparison of their readings"
(p. 31), recognizing that the establishment of a genealogy involves
inferences and that the result is normally conjecture rather than established
fact.
Nevertheless, his statement is not as clear as it might be. One
assumes that "copies" refers to texts, for if it referred to the manuscripts
themselves the statement would be guilty of the confusion, about which
Dearing warns, between records and texts. Even so, there is a problem, for
the sentence seems to make "the interrelationships of the copies" wholly
dependent on a "comparison of their readings" and leaves one wondering
how the "external" evidence previously described fits in. "The inquiry,"
West says, "proceeds on two fronts, from external and from internal
evidence" (p. 30). The external evidence of provenance, paleography,
"general historical conditions," and the like then becomes the "historical
backcloth" (p. 31) against which to "project the more exact information
derived from internal evidence." Stated in this way, it is hard to
comprehend precisely what the function of the "backcloth" is in the whole
process. West does understand that physical evidence plays a
role in interpreting the readings present in a text, but his category of
"external evidence" is here presented largely as having to do with the
relationships of documents rather than of texts. What is lacking is explicit
recognition that the comparison of readings, leading to inferences about the
relationships of the texts, must involve analysis of physical evidence as well
as literary analysis: examination of the physical features of a document is
relevant not only to dating the document but also to evaluating the readings
in the text contained in that document. Whether one is dealing with printed
books or with manuscripts, understanding the physical evidence may set
limits on the literary speculation that can be engaged in. I do not wish to
dwell on what is only an infelicity in West's exposition, but it provides an
occasion for underscoring a significant point. Distinguishing "external" and
"internal" as they refer to evidence is finally not so important as
recognizing the
interrelatedness of all evidence. Neither kind of evidence has a monopoly
on demonstrable conclusions; because generalizations based on inductive
evidence are inevitably provisional, some historical "facts" may be more
conjectural than emendations based on an editor's judgment. And if one
wishes to think of the physical evidence of a document as external to the
text, then one must think of degrees of externality, for such evidence is not
in the same realm as the larger historical framework into which one hopes
to place both the document and the text. If West, instead of asserting that
"the interrelationships of the copies as inferred from comparison of their
readings" should be projected onto a "historical backcloth," had
said—turning his statement around—that the comparison
of readings, taken together with physical evidence and the historical
background, results in the tentative establishment of the relationships among
the texts, his comment would not have required discussion. That he could
state the matter as loosely—in effect, carelessly—as he did
must
reflect, at least to some extent, a general lack of awareness, among textual
critics of manuscript material, of the contribution analytical bibliography
has made to the editing of printed texts.
Some of the techniques of bibliographical analysis, such as some of
those used to distinguish compositors, rely on characteristics of spelling and
punctuation; and data about compositors' habits in these respects are
important to the editor whose aim is to restore the author's spelling and
punctuation as well as wording.[21]
Most scholarly editors of postmedieval writing have such an aim: since
spelling, punctuation, capitalization, and so on must be considered an
integral part of texts, affecting their meaning, and since most of the extant
documents containing these writings are relatively near to the authors'
manuscripts (or include those manuscripts), editors dealing with these
centuries have given a great deal of thought to the problem of authoritative
spelling, punctuation, and capitalization (or "accidentals," as these features
are sometimes called, in distinction to "substantives," or the words
themselves). It is a common notion that the
treatment of accidentals is one of the major respects in which the editing of
ancient writing differs from the textual work on more recent material;
because the spelling, punctuation, and system of abbreviations in the
surviving texts of ancient works generally reflect the customs of scribes
who lived long after the authors of the works, many people assume that
even if these matters are of bibliographical significance they are not of
textual importance and that editors of such texts would therefore find
nothing relevant in the extensive discussion of recent decades concerning
the accidentals in literature of the last five hundred years. At first glance
there would seem to be good reason for this position, when one considers,
among other points, that, although punctuation was in use from at least the
fourth century B.C., the extent of its use is a matter of considerable debate;
that in ancient times texts were normally written as a continuous series of
letters, without spaces to
separate words; and that in both Greek and Latin there was flexibility in
spelling in certain periods.[22] Thus
both the possibility of restoring to a classical text the spelling and
punctuation of its author
and the desirability of restoring certain features in use in the author's time
(such as the lack of word-division) are seriously to be questioned. This
conventional position is expressed by West in his manual when he says,
"The critic is at liberty . . . to repunctuate, even if he has taken a vow
never to depart from the paradosis" (p. 55).
[23] Later he repeats, "Careful thought
should
be given to punctuation, which can be a great help or hindrance to
following the author's train of ideas, and which is of course entirely a
matter for the editor's discretion" (p. 69).
The issue is not as simple, however, as these statements, taken out
of context, would suggest, and West's own discussion raises some of the
considerations that link so-called accidentals with meaning and with the
author. West recognizes that "in theory an accent or a breathing in a
medieval copy of a post-Hellenistic writer might go back to the author's
autograph"; but he goes on to say that in most cases "all such features of
the tradition will represent some later person's interpretation of a text
consisting of virtually nothing but a continuous sequence of letters" (pp.
54-55) and that the textual critic is also "at liberty" to "reinterpret" the text
in this respect. The question of how, or whether, to divide a continuous text
into separated words is one that editors of modern works do not have to
face, and it has therefore not been included in those editors' discussions of
accidentals. In one sense word-division does fall into the group of features
sometimes classed as
"accidentals," for it is a matter of spacing and not of what letters are
present. But obviously there may be ambiguous spots in an undivided text,
where the letters can be formed into more than one set of words that make
sense in the context, and matters of wording are usually called
"substantive." The point is not what label ought to be used but the fact that
the distinction between substantives and accidentals involves form, not
meaning.[24] West further underlines
the connection between marks and meaning when he says that, in the case
of a nonsense word, "accents etc. may be valuable clues to what lies behind
it, since they must have been supplied when the text was in a more
intelligible state" (p. 55). Words that are not nonsense, however, may still
be wrong (as West recognizes elsewhere), and accents or punctuation may
provide clues anywhere in the text, not just where the text fails to make
sense. Similarly, scribal
abbreviations in manuscripts are not always unambiguous; and though West
is right to caution that "abbreviations are not actually misread as often as
some ingenious emenders think" (p. 28), editors should remember that
abbreviations do sometimes affect substance as well as form. The same
points are also applicable to spelling. As West realizes, spelling variants
"can be of use (though not by themselves) in working out the details of a
stemma, and they are not uninstructive in themselves" (p. 66). This view
is not always accepted, even by persons who emphasize the breadth of
significant evidence; thus Willis claims that "any variant other than the
purely orthographical
may be significant, however trivial it
may
appear" (p. 36). For Dearing spellings, and the other accidentals as well,
enter into bibliographical, but not textual, analysis: "the textual analyst,"
he says, classifies variations as "
substantive,
quasi-substantive,
and
accidental and ignores the
latter class" (p. 34); later he says that an editor who concludes that scribes
or compositors were following copy "even in accidentals" can "make a
bibliographical analysis in which he includes accidental variations with the
rest of his evidence" (p. 154). The idea that accidentals partake more of the
nature of physical than of textual evidence fails to give them their due as
elements of meaning in a text; indeed, the interpolation of a class of
"quasi-substantives" between substantives and accidentals shows that
accidentals are being thought of here as not involving meaning. However,
they are indisputably part of the text and may affect the meaning of the text
at any time; whether or not they do in a given instance
[25] has no bearing on their
classification as
accidentals. I am not suggesting that scribal punctuation, abbreviations, and
spelling necessarily ought to be preserved in a critical text, but they should
certainly be taken seriously as
part of the textual evidence present in manuscripts; they may point to how
the text was understood at a particular time and may therefore—like
the
words themselves—be a link to a tradition and help to establish the
author's meaning.
The attention one pays to accidentals, in other words, goes beyond
the question of whether they reflect authorial or scribal practice. It is no
doubt true that the accidentals in surviving manuscripts of classical texts
exhibit more alterations by scribes than do the words, and equally true that
editors have more basis for attempting to establish authors' wording than
punctuation and spelling. Nevertheless, scribes do alter words as well as
accidentals; the distinction is one of degree, and the texts one has to deal
with contain both words and accidentals. If one decides in a given case that
the accidentals of the manuscript tradition have no authority,
the decision results not from theory but from the circumstances of the
individual situation. To agree with Greg that people involved in the
transmission of a text have generally felt freer to alter accidentals than to
alter substantives is not to say that accidentals in scribal copies are
necessarily unauthoritative, though it does provide a basis, when the
evidence warrants, for treating accidentals differently from substantives.
The editor is finally responsible for establishing both substantives and
accidentals, and to assume that scribal accidentals are too far removed from
the author's practice to be worth preserving is to ignore the connections
between accidentals and meaning. One may not in the end accept those
accidentals, but the question of what accidentals to include in a critical text
must be faced. Authorial accidentals in ancient texts may be more
conjectural than in modern texts, but the attempt to approximate them is not
necessarily to be rejected in favor of
standardized spelling and modernized punctuation. West's discussion takes
this point into account:
As a general rule it would seem most rational to impose consistently
the spelling that the original author is most likely to have used (for which
the manuscript tradition may not be the best evidence). It is true that he
himself may have been inconsistent, and it may be argued that the best
manuscript authority should be followed on each occasion. But this will be
no reliable guide to his practice; we shall surely come nearer the truth by
regularizing the spelling than by committing ourselves to the vagaries of the
tradition. (p. 69)
Presumably this "regularizing" would be to the practice contemporary with
the author, insofar as it is known. West also takes up briefly the question
of variations in spelling in Greek and Latin: in contrast to early Greek, he
says, "In Latin there is not the problem of different alphabetic systems, but
notions of the correct way to spell things were more fluid until the first
century of the Empire, and here again (though with less justification) the
convention has been established of presenting authors at least of the late
Republic in the orthography of a somewhat later period" (pp. 69-70). This
matter is not pursued, but a doubt about the convention has been registered.
The point he proceeds to make about still later texts in which "it is often
impossible to distinguish between the barbarisms of copyists and those of
the original" is illogical but instructive: "In this situation, rather than
impose a consistent system which can only be chosen rather arbitrarily, it
is better to
follow the paradosis, not under the delusion that it is at all reliable, but as
the most convenient way of exhibiting it" (p. 70). Of course, in a critical,
as opposed to a diplomatic, text, exhibiting the paradosis within the text is
not in itself a virtue, and the accidentals of the paradosis would
properly be retained only if there is a chance of their reflecting authorial
practice more accurately than another system. But West's concern for
establishing accidentals contemporary with the author and possibly retaining
the accidentals of the manuscript tradition is uncommon in this field; though
his discussion is undeveloped, it implies a greater link than some have
imagined with the approach to accidentals followed by many editors of
post-medieval work. Indeed, one must ask whether for a work of any period
there is ever a justification, from a scholarly point of view, of any aim
regarding accidentals other than the reconstruction of the author's own
practice; however imperfectly that aim may be realized in many instances,
it is the only aim consistent with the view that accidentals are integral to a
text and that modernization therefore has no place in scholarly editing.
Without underestimating the differences between ancient and modern texts,
one can see a common issue
here; West's brief remarks would strike an editor of modern literature as
bordering on familiar territory.
[26]
These considerations have direct implications for the apparatus. Since
accidentals can affect meaning and scribal practices in accidentals can
constitute important textual evidence, a complete recording of such details,
as well as of substantive variants, would seem to be desirable. Selectivity,
of one kind or another, has been the rule, however, in apparatuses for early
texts, though disagreement has existed about the principles of selection.
Willis approvingly claims that it is "a matter of common consent that purely
orthographical variants should be excluded" (p. 35). His statement is
disproved by West, who finds it "advisable to record orthographical
variants fairly systematically, at least for portions of the text," and who
further implies their significance by holding that, if one decides not to
record "certain orthographical trivialities," "the fact should be stated" (p.
66).[27] Of course, printing costs
sometimes dictate selectivity. Even some of the CEAA/CSE editions of
nineteenth-century authors, which always contain complete lists of editorial
alterations in the copy-texts, exclude accidentals from the lists of variants
among other collated texts. But it is one thing to be selective as a result of
believing that completeness is unimportant or even undesirable and quite
another to recognize selectivity as a matter of expediency only—for
in the
former case one is likely to think that subjective notions of significance are
sufficient for determining what to include, whereas in the latter one will
wish to define the categories included or excluded as objectively as
possible. Willis advocates (in addition to the elimination of spelling
variants) the exclusion of certain manuscripts, but on grounds that grossly
misunderstand the purposes of an apparatus: "An apparatus criticus," he
maintains, "which tries to use too many manuscripts is liable not only to be
obscure and hard to use
(the problem of finding enough sigla is not the least), but to be inaccurate,
since the task of collating accurately some thirty or forty manuscripts is
enormous for one man, and to find and organize reliable helpers is scarcely
less difficult than doing it all oneself" (p. 43). It seems hardly necessary to
reply to these objections, for the difficulty of using a complex apparatus is
of no importance to a person who values having the evidence recorded (the
designation of sigla is surely a trivial matter), and the attainment of
accuracy is always a challenge, regardless of the scope of the coverage (one
wonders how scholarship would ever progress if this challenge were
allowed to inhibit activity). Willis's statement that "About ten manuscripts
should be enough to set up the text of a Latin author" (p. 42) may be
accurate on the average (I am not questioning Willis's knowledge of his
field), but it seems unwise to prescribe how much evidence will be
significant. In justifying a
selective approach, Willis enunciates the principle that it is preferable "to
give all the readings of some than some of the readings of all" (p. 44). This
particular point can be (and has been)
[28] legitimately objected to, but the
motivation behind it—to find an objective basis for
selectivity—is one
to be taken seriously. Dearing, thinking along the same lines, says, "The
critic should define the interesting variations as precisely as possible so as
to be consistent and accurate himself and to facilitate consistency and
accuracy in the work of his staff or associates" (p. 147). There is no doubt
that the number of
manuscripts available in some cases, especially in biblical studies, is so
large as to make impractical the goal of recording everything in all of them
(or even the examination of all of them). But whenever one finds it
necessary to be selective—either in the texts to be covered or in the
details from those texts to be recorded—one should remember that
no
amount of rationalization will conceal the fact that the resulting apparatus
is a compromise and is less satisfactory than a complete record. In such
cases one owes the reader the courtesy of an unambiguous definition of
what is included (not just some such statement as "the most significant
readings"), so that the reader will be in the position of knowing precisely
what kinds of evidence must be looked for elsewhere.
[29] These questions concerning the
construction of an apparatus thus raise issues relevant to all textual
scholarship, regardless of the period involved or the nature of the surviving
textual witnesses—as indeed, I have tried to suggest, do many other
questions relating to other aspects of the editorial process.