Editors of post-mediaeval English literature are not very often
required, in the absence of an authorial holograph or authoritative edition,
to reconstruct texts from a profusion of non-authorial copyings. When they
do, as in the instances of Donne, Rochester and the authors of late
seventeenth-century libertine verse and "state poems," they will naturally
try to adapt the methods developed by classical and biblical scholars to deal
with the problems that arise, but will not always find them as clarified or
thought-through as would be desirable.[1] One reason for this may well be
that
editors of classical texts, dealing as a rule with thoroughly contaminated
textual traditions which may, in any case, lead only to the conjectures of
some Byzantine or Hellenistic editor or to an archetype that was already
seriously deficient, have rightly placed their main emphasis on the
reconstruction of the author's text through philological and historical
means —reserving the genealogical method for situations where its
conclusions would be more or less open and shut.[2] Biblical scholarship faces much
the same problem multiplied several hundredfold due to the enormous
number of surviving sources and the complexity of their interrelationships,
and, as a result, is reduced to dealing with broad groups or families of
manuscripts without much fine tracing of individual lines of descent. In
dealing with traditions such as that of Rochester, however, the editors have
every right to feel that they
should be able to make sense of
the
genealogical relationships—even when faced with groups of twenty
or
more manuscripts. Far from extending over centuries or millennia, the
copying of the sources was probably concentrated within a decade or two.
It was performed by scribes and compositors who spoke a common dialect
of the English tongue, into which the editor can acquire more insight than
would be the case with texts in a dead language.
[3] There is a good deal of incidental
information surviving about the circumstances of
copying.
[4] Finally, these were not
sacred texts or high literature but topical poems written out
currente
calamo for immediate consumption, with the consequences that
variation abounds and that the tradition is less likely to have been corrupted
by the drawing of readings from more than one exemplar, though there may
have been a fairly high incidence of memorial contamination.
Yet the problems clearly remain considerable. David Vieth, the first
scholar to attempt to create a text of Rochester from the full range of the
surviving sources (which he himself had been responsible for
charting)[5], was, according to his
own account, able to make only limited use of the genealogical method and
relied in the establishment of his text on an adaptation of the "best
manuscript" theory.[6] The present
article
grew from a wish to discover whether, despite Vieth's scepticism, it might
be possible to present plausible stemmata for Rochester's longer
poems.
[7] The innovations in method
proposed have been developed solely with that end in view and will not
necessarily apply in other areas of textual scholarship, though it is hoped
they will be found to have some wider applicability.
The approach in general involves an insistence on the historicity of
the act of transmission which has been unfashionable in recent years, and
which departs, perhaps unwisely, from the principle argued for by Vinton
Dearing that the concern of the editor should be with the text considered as
a logical construct rather than with the manuscript as carrier of the
readings.[8] The distinction in itself
is an important one which may be grasped most easily if we consider a
manuscript which is a copy of a source, A, being corrected from a
manuscript descended from a source, B, belonging to a different branch of
the textual tradition, so as to remove all the substantive readings which
were characteristic of A. If we assume that the deleted readings are
rendered illegible, it is fair to say that the text of that
manuscript, in so far as this is defined by substantives alone,[9] now belongs to the branch of the
tradition
represented by B, although it remains a historical fact that the majority of
the words inscribed on its pages—those in which it did not vary from
either A or B—had descended by a physical act of copying from A.
When editors construct a stemma, they will normally see their aim as that
of producing a diagrammatic representation of the logical relationships of
the groupings of variant readings that characterise the sources, not a family
tree of copyings which would show the paths by which the majority of
readings in each instance, whether variant or invariant, were actually
transmitted from page to page. So, to return to the earlier
example, our manuscript would have to be included in a
logical
stemma as a descendant of B, even if the editor had firm external or
non-substantive evidence for its having been initially copied from A.
There is, of course, no objection to this procedure as long as there is
no confusion in the minds of editors or their readers over what is taking
place. Indeed, it is often much more serviceable to the inquiry in hand than
a strict family tree of sources would be. But dangers can nonetheless arise
if editors allow themselves to lose sight completely of the nexus between
the text and its carrier.[10] If the study
of variation is, from one point of view, an exercise in the manipulation of
symbols according to the principles of mathematical logic, it is equally the
study of a certain kind of human behaviour—that of the scribe,
professional or amateur, in the act of copying. The importance of
habituating oneself to think in terms of the genealogies of manuscripts as
well as of the class-relationships of texts is simply that the significance as
evidence of a variant in any kind of textual inquiry must lie ultimately in
the processes of thought (or
non-thought) which have led to its coming into existence, its further
transmission and possibly its disappearance. Modern English-language
editorial practice admits the validity of such criteria, but insists that they
should be reserved until the stage when the editor has established the
primary pattern of relationships between his texts and begins the search for
evidence of the direction of variation in order to locate the position of the
ancestor.[11] My own contention is that
the consideration of scribal motivation is relevant to every stage of textual
reasoning and that to ignore it is to assent to the proposition that all cases
of variation are of equal value as evidence for the relationship of
texts—a
proposition which may, indeed, be an unavoidable rule of
procedure in certain specialised studies of textual data, but which is in itself
an absurdity.
