University of Virginia Library

Scribal Errors and Textual Integrity: The Case of Innsbruck Universitätsbibliothek Cod. 960
by
Stephen K. Wright

Few manuscripts can claim to hold as much interest for students of early German religious drama as Innsbruck Universitätsbibliothek Cod. 960, the so-called "Innsbrucker Spielhandschrift."[1] The manuscript, which consists of sixty undecorated paper leaves filled with narrowly spaced verse, is essentially the work of a single scribe known to us only as "Johannes," who according to his own testimony copied out the entire book during a period of about two weeks late in the summer of 1391.[2] Despite its rather unprepossessing appearance, the Innsbruck codex is a rare treasure in that it preserves a complete fourteenth-century playbook containing three highly innovative vernacular dramas: a unique tripartite play depicting the preaching of the Apostles, the Assumption of the Virgin, and the conquest of the Jews (fols. 1r-34v); a justly famous Easter play (fols. 35v-50r); and a spectacular processional play designed for the feast of Corpus Christi (fols. 51r-59r).

The manuscript is all the more remarkable for two other reasons. In the first place, each of the plays in the book is the earliest extant complete work of its kind.[3] Secondly, each play manifests such theatrical, musical, and literary

sophistication as to deserve extensive critical attention in its own right. Indeed, a recent bibliography of studies devoted to the three plays in Innsbruck Cod. 960 runs to more than two hundred and thirty items.[4] Despite a healthy tradition of scholarly interest in its contents, however, Walter Neuhauser's introduction to the facsimile edition of the manuscript remains one of the very few paleographical or codicological analyses of the book itself. The purpose of the present study, then, is to enlarge upon Neuhauser's meticulous description of Innsbruck Universitätsbibliothek Cod. 960 by showing that the physical condition of the manuscript still has a great deal to tell us about the history of the three plays and their association with one another, about the way medieval readers responded to the allegedly disordered or fragmentary state of the plays, and about the process which may have brought the texts from their native Thuringia to their final home in the Tirol sometime between 1391 and 1445.

I

Since much of what is to follow concerns the nature of the lost source from which Johannes was working, it is necessary to begin this study with a brief review of what is already known about the composition and transmission of the plays in Innsbruck Cod. 960. To begin with, the confusion surrounding the provenance of the plays is reflected in the long-standing uncertainty as to what they should properly be called. In the past, the plays have commonly been referred to either as the Innsbrucker Spiele or the Neustifter Spiele. Both terms are misleading. The only connection that the plays have with Innsbruck is the fact that the manuscript in which they are preserved was transferred to the university library sometime between 1809, when the monastery which had once housed it was dissolved, and 1840, when Franz Joseph Mone discovered it as an uncatalogued item in the university collection.[5] The second designation has a somewhat better claim to accuracy. It is evident that by 1445 the manuscript had come into the possession of the Augustinians at

Neustift bei Brixen, since fol. 60v contains a note in the hand of "Scribe C" describing the burial of Oswald von Wolkenstein at the writer's own monastery.[6] Nevertheless, for reasons which will be explained below, it is highly unlikely that the plays were copied down in their present form at Neustift, although there is some evidence to indicate that they may well have been performed there at a later date. Therefore, in order to avoid unnecessary confusion in discussions of the plays' provenance and influence, it seems best simply to refer to them by the titles which Johannes himself used in 1391: Ludus de assumptione beatae Mariae virginis; Ludus de resurrectione domini; and Ludus de corpore Christi.[7]

Johannes' dated explicit establishes that the Innsbruck codex was completed on September 5, 1391, and the obituary added by Scribe C confirms that the book had come to Neustift by August, 1445. But where and when were the plays actually composed? Dialectical peculiarities shared by the Easter play and the Assumption play indicate that the original home of both works is to be sought in the Henneberg region of western Thuringia, probably in the prosperous mining town of Schmalkalden.[8] In this regard, it is worth noting that according to the Heiksche Chronik, Schmalkalden boasted a rich dramatic heritage which included not only plays on Biblical subjects, but also dramatizations of the destruction of Jerusalem, that is to say, plays similar to the final episode of the Ludus de assumptione.[9] One cannot pinpoint the provenance of the Corpus Christi play with the same degree of accuracy, but dialectical evidence demonstrates that it too was composed in Thuringia, probably somewhat to the east of Schmalkalden.[10] Although it is difficult to assign a precise date to the plays, it is generally agreed that all three predate the manuscript by at least fifty years. Topical allusions to papal and imperial politics place the date of the Easter play between 1323 and 1347.[11] The Assumption play, which may be slightly older than the Easter

play, also dates from the second quarter of the fourteenth century, while the Corpus Christi play may have been composed as early as 1314-1320.[12]

There can be little doubt that the plays were intended for performance. The narrow half-folio format of the leaves, the rough manner in which the book has been handled, and the presence of red marginalia and underlining to indicate role assignments and stage directions all suggest that the manuscript may have been used as a director's script sometime after 1391.[13] But were the plays actually staged at Neustift? Until recently, it was simply taken for granted that the manuscript was the work of one of the brothers at Neustift and that the plays must have been performed within the walls of the monastery itself. However, the only tangible evidence connecting any of the three plays with the monastery is a late note in the hand of Scribe C (fol. 50v), which recommends the Corpus Christi play for performance and suggests when and by whom it should be staged: "Incipit ludus utilis pro devocione simplicium intimandus et peragendus die corporis Christi vel infra octavas de fide katholica. Sumentur persone litterate et apte et sic de aliis." A second argument for performance at Neustift can be made on the grounds of the commonsense supposition that the monks of that house would not have bothered to acquire and preserve such a copious playbook out of sheer antiquarian curiosity, but rather must have intended to use it at least as a model for theatrical productions of their own. Finally, the play with which the manuscript begins, the Ludus de assumptione beatae Mariae virginis, seems to be particularly appropriate for performance at Neustift. The central action of the play, the death and assumption of the Virgin, preserves much of the formality and musical complexity of the liturgical observances upon which it is based. What is more, the church at Neustift annually commemorated the dedication of its sanctuary on August 15, the feast of the Assumption.[14]

Nevertheless, recent studies have cautioned against the facile acceptance of the notion that all three plays were performed at Neustift around 1391, and that the monastery thus represents the source of the great flowering of Tirolian drama in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.[15] With the possible exception of a Latin Visitatio Sepulchri (Innsbruck Universitätsbibliothek MS. 610, fols. 182v-183r) which has tentatively been associated with the monastery,[16] an intensive search has failed to uncover any evidence proving that religious dramas were ever staged at Neustift, much less a vernacular play of the magnitude of the Ludus de assumptione beatae Mariae virginis, a 3200-line music drama which required a cast of nearly fifty well-schooled performers and took no less than two days to perform.[17]

Even if Innsbruck Cod. 960 were in Neustift in 1445, the further hypothesis that the scribe who copied the plays from a Thuringian source more than half a century earlier was also a brother of the same house is, as Barbara Thoran has emphasized, "kühn und gänzlich unbewiesen" (p. 361). Indeed, since the extant texts show no signs of Tirolian dialectical influence, one ought rather to assume that the manuscript did not arrive in Neustift until after 1391.[18] Hans Moser (pp. 183-184) argues that the finished playbook was probably obtained by the Augustinians at Neustift much closer to 1445 than to the actual date of its production in 1391, and that it therefore came to the region far too late to affect the local dramatic traditions which were already well established in Hall, Sterzing, and other neighboring towns. Likewise, neither Thoran (pp. 362-377) nor Moser (pp. 180-183) is able to detect any definite traces of the 1391 text of the Ludus de resurrectione domini in later versions of the Tiroler Passionsspiel, thus refuting the widely held notion that performances at Neustift profoundly influenced the development of the Tirolian dramatic tradition. If the plays were staged at Neustift at all, Moser (pp. 184-186) suggests that the extant manuscript would have been used only as a model from which revised acting scripts would have been rewritten in a more familiar dialectical form. For these reasons, it seems best to think about all three plays in terms of their original home in early fourteenth-century Thuringia, rather than as examples of fifteenth-century Tirolian

monastic drama. Accordingly, the task of the present study is to consider the technique and work habits of the scribe Johannes in order to learn as much as possible about the history of the plays before their inclusion in the extant Innsbruck codex.

II

In the explicit to the Ludus de resurrectione domini (fol. 50r), Johannes tells us that he finished copying that particular play on "sexta feria in die Egidij" (Friday, September 1) in the year 1391, only five working days after he had completed the Assumption play on the Saturday after St. Bartholomew's day, that is to say on August 26. Since he was apparently working at a steady pace of about five to six pages a day, it is tempting to guess that Johannes was just beginning his second day's work on the Easter play when, at the top of a fresh page (fol. 38r), he made the only serious blunders in an otherwise carefully executed piece.[19] After having lost his place in his source, Johannes twice began to insert speeches from the preceding Assumption play into the Ludus de resurrectione domini. He quickly caught each mistake in turn, deleted the offending passages, and continued on with the appropriate lines from the Easter play. Apart from being mere paleographical curiosities, these scribal errors are worthy of our attention because of what they have to tell us about the lives of both of the plays in question prior to their inclusion in Innsbruck Universitätsbibliothek Cod. 960. Even more importantly, the botched work on fol. 38r can shed some light on the vexed question of the completeness and performability of the Ludus de assumptione beatae Mariae virginis, and can also help establish the correct sequence of several crucial episodes in the Ludus de resurrectione domini.

It is necessary to begin by describing the errors themselves in some detail. After having transcribed the first 194 lines of the Easter play without mishap during what was probably a single session, Johannes left off work at the bottom of fol. 37v. As is often the case, the end of the page did not exactly correspond with the completion of the speech in question. Consequently, fol. 37v breaks off abruptly in the middle of an apology by "Quartus Miles," one of Pilate's hapless guards who has just been awakened beside the empty tomb by the fulminations of the Roman procurator himself:

At the top of the facing page, however, Johannes began not with the continuation of the same speech, but with lines 2864-72 of the Assumption play which he had finished copying only a few days before. As soon as he recognized his mistake, Johannes underlined the erroneous insertion as a conventional sign of deletion and promptly returned to his task. Unfortunately, he again failed to find the correct place in the speech of the fourth knight, but copied instead lines 2906-25 from the same Assumption play. Perhaps more out of sheer frustration than out of any attempt to re-establish clarity for his readers, Johannes crossed out all twenty-seven lines with hasty diagonal slash marks, scribbled the warning "non pertinet" in the upper margin, left the bottom third of the ruined page blank, and began anew with the correct speech from the Easter play at the top of fol. 38v.

The reasons for these unusual errata are not difficult to explain. As has already been noted, the three dated explicits in Innsbruck Cod. 960 confirm that the scribe was copying difficult and perhaps unfamiliar material at a rather rapid pace. In his haste, it appears that Johannes was misled by a number of superficial similarities between the interrupted speech of Quartus Miles in the Easter play and the two passages which he inadvertently cited from the Ludus de assumptione. Both passages are taken from an elaborate initiation ceremony during which a recently converted king institutes a new order of Christian chivalry. Specifically, lines 2864-72 of the Assumption play are part of the obedient reply of a certain "Tertius Miles" to his sovereign, while lines 2906-25 come from a dialogue between the king and "Secundus Miles." The close resemblance of the speakers' names ("Quartus Miles" in the Easter play, "Tertius Miles" and "Secundus Miles" in the Assumption play) and the similar dramatic contexts of all three of the speeches in question (a dialogue between a ruler and his knights) temporarily blinded Johannes to the fact that he had begun copying at the wrong place. His confusion was perhaps compounded by the close proximity of the two speeches from the Assumption play and by the possibility that both speeches stood at the top of their respective pages. It cannot be known, of course, how closely Johannes was following the original line divisions of his source, but in their existing form lines 2864-72 are found at the very top of fol. 31v, while lines 2906-25 are the first lines on the facing page, fol. 32r.

Beyond giving us a vivid momentary glimpse into the scriptorium of a conscientious but apparently overtaxed medieval copyist, the errors on fol. 38r are important because of what they can tell us about the lost source from which Johannes was working. Clearly, Johannes could not have made mistakes of this nature if he had been copying the text from a manuscript which contained only the famous Easter play. Nor could he have copied the two incorrect speeches from his own transcription of the first play in Innsbruck Cod. 960, since this would require us to imagine the absurd scene of a scribe so befuddled as to miscopy a text by repeatedly paging back and forth between fols. 31v and 32r of his recently completed Assumption play and fol. 38r of the still unfinished Easter play in the same manuscript. It is, of course, barely possible that Johannes copied the speeches from the wrong playbook altogether, if one assumes that he was so negligent as to go back to the book

containing the Assumption play, which he had already finished and laid aside on August 26, rather than resume copying from the manuscript of the Easter play which he had handled only the day before. It is far more reasonable, however, to suppose that Johannes began his day's work by mistakenly turning to the wrong page of the same book which he had been using for more than a week. By the process of elimination, then, we are left with what is by far the simplest and most plausible explanation, namely, that Johannes was not working from a set of separate codices containing a single play each, but from a small collection of plays, a lost fourteenth-century Thuringian anthology which must have included at least the first two works in the Innsbruck manuscript and probably the Ludus de corpore Christi as well.

The argument that Innsbruck Universitätsbibliothek Cod. 960 represents a copy of an earlier, non-extant collection of Thuringian dramas has several important corollaries for the textual history of the three plays. In the first place, the nature of the errors described above rules out the possibility that Johannes himself may have been the author, redactor, or even the first anthologizer of the plays. Only a copyist working quickly, mechanically, and somewhat too inattentively could have transposed two fragmentary speeches from one play to another with so little regard for the grammatical correctness or logical continuity of what he was writing. Furthermore, the mistakes on fol. 38r demonstrate that whether or not Johannes was ever a brother at Neustift bei Brixen, the lost anthology which served as his source certainly could not have been either a product or a permanent possession of that house. It is difficult to imagine a set of circumstances which would cause the small group of Augustinians at Neustift to make an identical copy of a lengthy collection of plays already in their own library without first bothering to alter at least some of the unfamiliar Thuringian dialectical forms into the more readily comprehensible speech of their own region. One can only conclude that like its lost precursor, the anthology preserved in Innsbruck Cod. 960 was copied in or around Schmalkalden before making its way to its final home in the Tirol.

Given that the extant Innsbruck codex is based on a lost anthology, one can also safely infer at least one other prior stage in the textual history of the three works when archetypal versions of each play existed as independent documents. As has already been mentioned above, the home of both the Ludus de assumptione beatae Mariae virginis and the Ludus de resurrectione domini is to be sought in the Henneberg region of western Thuringia, whereas the Ludus de corpore Christi must have been composed in eastern Thuringia in the first half of the fourteenth century. The provenance and transmission history of the three texts can thus be described by a simple stemma. In the following diagram, α, β, and γ represent the archetypes of the Assumption play, the Easter play, and the Corpus Christi play, δ is a hypothetical intermediary collection consisting only of the two western Thuringian plays, and ε is the lost three-play anthology used by Johannes as the source for the Innsbruck manuscript:

What we know about Johannes' lost source has important implications for readers of the Ludus de assumptione beatae Mariae virginis, a complex and fascinating music drama in its own right. As was noted above, the play concludes with the representation of a pitched battle between armies of Christians and Jews, an episode based loosely on the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus and Vespasian in 70 A.D.[20] The Christian warriors are initially driven back by the defenders of the castrum Judaeorum, but their king rallies them to a counterattack with a rousing battle cry:

At this point the play suddenly ends. The conclusion of the battle scene seems so abrupt that some readers have argued that the text preserved in Innsbruck Cod. 960 is in fact a fragment which lacks the anticipated ultimate Christian victory over the Jews. David Brett-Evans, a surprisingly unsympathetic student of the play, has gone so far as to suggest that Johannes omitted the closing lines of the work out of sheer boredom: "Damit läβt der Verfasser die Belagerung von Jerusalem beginnen, aber gerade an dieser Stelle bricht der Text mit einem lakonischen et cetera, explicit ludus de assumptione ab. Man kann sich freilich des Eindrucks nicht ganz erwehren, daβ der Kopist eher das Interesse an seiner Aufgabe verloren hatte, als daβ ihm die fehlenden Verse nicht vorlagen" (II, 25-26). Needless to say, there is absolutely no evidence to warrant such a disparaging pronouncement. On the contrary, Johannes assures us in the explicit that the Ludus de assumptione "est completum." His use of the phrase "et cetera" after the king's last speech merely implies that the final assault upon the Jews is meant to be portrayed by means of mimed stage business, with the specific manner of the performance being left to the discretion of each subsequent producer of the play. Brett-Evans neglects to mention that the playwright (or his copyist) uses the phrase in exactly the same manner at the end of the Ludus de resurrectione as well (fol. 50r), a play whose completeness and performability have never been called into question.

In the context of the present study, it is worth emphasizing that what we know about the relationship between Innsbruck Universitätsbibliothek Cod. 960 and its lost source also suggests that the Assumption play should be read as a complete work as it now stands. The errors on fol. 38r demonstrate that Johannes did not copy the play from a defective manuscript which lacked the final pages of the text, but rather from an anthology nearly identical in appearance to the surviving Innsbruck playbook. This means that the version of the Ludus de assumptione in the lost ε-manuscript must have contained the same abrupt conclusion ridiculed by Brett-Evans, namely, the spectacular battle scene outside the walls of Jerusalem. It follows, then, that at least two dependable fourteenth-century readers—the scribe Johannes and the unknown redactor of the lost Thuringian anthology—both perceived the extant version of the play to be a coherent, finished text, comprehensible and playable exactly as it has come down to us. Since neither Johannes, nor his precursor, nor any of the later users of the manuscript seem to have doubted the structural or thematic integrity of the work, modern readers might be well advised to consider the Assumption play in terms of its own carefully plotted musical and dramatic symmetries before dismissing it out of hand as a tedious and hopelessly truncated fragment.

Evidence from fol. 38r of the Innsbruck playbook can also help us ascertain the proper sequence of several episodes in the Ludus de resurrectione. In the manuscript itself, the dramatization of the Harrowing of Hell culminates with a typical piece of social satire in which the demons repopulate their recently invaded domain with the souls of recognizable scoundrels from all walks of medieval urban life. This satirical interlude concludes with a long lament by Lucifer, who adopts the unlikely role of a preacher in order to warn the audience against the dangers of the sin of pride (ll. 406-21; fol. 41r). In his 1937 edition of the Easter play, Eduard Hartl transferred Lucifer's poignant monologue from the end of the satire to its beginning, immediately after the procession of the redeemed souls into paradise, on the grounds that "nur an dieser Stelle findet die Klage ihre innere Berechtigung: Lucifer, der seit seinem Sturz nur das Böse sah und das Böse übte, sieht jetzt auf einmal wieder die ganze Reinheit und Herrlichkeit des Himmels vor sich, es überkommt ihn wehmütige Erinnerung an sein einstiges Leben, in dem auch er ein strahlender Engel war, und nun befällt ihn tiefe Reue" (p. 124). Hartl justifies his radical departure from the testimony of the manuscript on the grounds of supposed theatrical effectiveness, claiming that his reconstruction would generate a more highly charged emotional response in medieval and modern audiences alike.[21] Unfortunately, this subjective and

wholly arbitrary approach to the text is uncritically adopted by Rudolf Meier, who reprints Hartl's drastic rearrangement without comment in what is now the most widely available edition of the play.[22]

The only manuscript evidence Hartl can present in support of his revision is his interpretation of a phrase found among the otherwise indecipherable pen strokes and random scribblings which fill the lower third of fol. 38r, the portion of the page left blank by Johannes after he crossed out his two erroneous insertions. Hartl (p. 125) notes that the following lines appear near the bottom of the page: "Awe awe hoffart daz din ie erdacht wart / Dar umb wart ich vorstosen."[23] Hartl identifies these lines as the opening verses of Lucifer's monologue, and then contends that their inclusion at this point in the manuscript proves that Lucifer's entire speech on fol. 41r requires editorial repositioning:

As we have already seen, however, the reasons for the presence of the two speeches from the Assumption play have nothing whatsoever to do with misordered sequences of scenes in the plays themselves, much less with what Hartl imagines to have been the haphazard looseleaf state of Johannes' source manuscript. The errors on fol. 38r testify to the fact that a confused scribe twice turned to the wrong page in his source; they do not indicate that the pages in that source were themselves in a state of confusion.

What is more, Hartl seriously misconstrues the significance of the verses which he cites. Although the lines clearly echo Lucifer's autobiographical monologue, there are glaring discrepancies between the two passages in terms of orthography, morphology, syntax, and sheer content. One need only compare the italicized lines in Lucifer's actual speech in the Easter play with

the lines from fol. 38r cited above in order to appreciate the striking differences which Hartl completely disregards: Clearly, the lines on fol. 38r are not an exact transcription from a misordered page in the source manuscript as Hartl contends, but rather an extremely loose paraphrase of Lucifer's lament which has been jotted down in an empty space on a ruined page already half-filled with meaningless penstrokes, a page so disfigured and irrelevant to the text of the play itself as to be an open invitation to the casual graffitist.

Indeed, the fragmentary verses on fol. 38r are almost certainly the addition of a later user of the manuscript rather than the work of Johannes himself. The lines are spaced more than twice as far apart as the width uniformly maintained by the scribe throughout the rest of his work, and the first two lines of the inscription are run together without being separated by the clear vertical stroke which Johannes customarily employs to indicate line divisions in the verse. The ink is of a different quality from that used by Johannes and has thus faded noticeably more than the rest of the writing on the page. Finally, the handwriting itself, while closely resembling the cursiva textualis of Johannes, shows features absent from his work, including an idiosyncratic loop above the A, a larger, less sloping, and more fully rounded loop above the b, d, and h, the lack of exaggerated ornamental descenders on the f, h, s, and z, and the use of a final b and an unusual ligature over the word umb. Perhaps the most plausible way to account for the addition of these lines by a later hand is to read them as a humorous commentary on the unsightly appearance of the page itself, an oblique joke at the expense of the unfortunate Johannes. By means of this tongue-in-cheek allusion to Lucifer's lament, the unknown graffitist playfully equates the proud angel's calamitous lapse from grace with the lapsus calami of the inattentive scribe, suggesting that in both cases the parties in question were guilty of spoiling an otherwise perfect creation.

III

By way of conclusion, it is worth pausing to consider the question of how Johannes' anthology migrated from Thuringia to the Tirol. Walter Senn

adopts the romantic but wholly unsubstantiated view that the book was acquired by Oswald von Wolkenstein during his travels, and that the minnesinger bequeathed it to the monks at Neustift when he died in August, 1445.[24] Similarly, Wolfgang Michael, who has long been intrigued by the possible influence of Goliardic verse on the development of German religious drama, speculates that the playbook may have been carried south by wandering scholars.[25] Although it is true that the Ludus de resurrectione concludes with St. John's plea to the audience to donate "braten / schuldern und ouch vladen" to the hungry students in their midst (ll. 1176-77), the three plays are all conceived on such a vast and elaborate scale as to make them totally unsuitable for performance by a small troupe of vagantes. Indeed, Hartl (pp. 130-131) and Neuhauser (p. 5) are correct to point out that a reference to the prayers of "dy pristere und dy schulere alle" in the exhortation by St. John cited above (l. 1183) suggests that the play was staged by a monastic schola cantorum.

There is no need to invent such colorful intermediaries as minstrels or vagantes, however, if one accepts the more mundane premise that the Augustinians at Neustift simply acquired the plays from brothers of their own order in Thuringia. During the fourteenth century, the Augustinians enjoyed a period of great expansion throughout central Europe. Even as early as 1300 the order had over forty houses in Germany. It is surely not without significance that two of the oldest and most prominent Augustinian houses were those at Gotha and Schmalkalden, in the very heart of the region which produced not only the three plays in Innsbruck Universitätsbibliothek Cod. 960, but also a number of similar plays now preserved elsewhere.[26] What is more, there is considerable evidence of direct contact between Thuringia and various Tirolian monasteries throughout the period in question. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, for example, numerous clerics from central Germany served as bishops, abbots, and provosts in the Tirol, including such a distinguished figure as Nicholas of Cusa, who was bishop of Brixen from 1450 to 1458.[27] Walter Neuhauser (pp. 13, 18, n. 29 and 30) records the names of several scribes who found their way from central Germany to Tirolian monastic scriptoria, and notes that a certain "Georg, genannt der Heuss" (the Hessian) resided at Neustift in 1384. Taken together, this evidence suggests that although the plays in the Innsbruck codex may not have been originally

composed by or for monks,[28] it is quite likely that they were collected in the vicinity of Schmalkalden by Augustinians who eventually carried their small anthology south to their sister house at Neustift bei Brixen.

It has recently been argued that because every new performance of a play is tantamount to the creation of a new textual variant, it is unreasonable to criticize editors who propose fanciful, if dramatically effective, emendations of the manuscripts which we have inherited. According to this line of reasoning, it is not the individual extant text, but rather the dramatic tradition itself—a process predicated on constant variation from performance to performance—which is the legitimate object of critical attention:

Few would argue that later adaptations and performances are unworthy of study in their own right. Nor can it be claimed that codicological evidence alone enables one to make definitive pronouncements about a playwright's intentions or about how a play may have been staged at any given performance. Nevertheless, it remains true that manuscript studies can teach us a great deal about the origin and transmission of medieval plays.[30] Moreover, as this study has attempted to demonstrate, the analysis of scribal errors can be an especially useful test to help us decide whether a copyist was acting as an independent redactor or as a scrupulous transcriber of texts which, to him at least, seemed authoritative, complete, and performable exactly as they had come to his hand. In the present case, the palpable embarrassment of the scribe who crossed out his own errors on fol. 38r, only to be mocked for his carelessness by a later reader, testifies to the fact that the maker of the Innsbruck playbook understood that his task was not to alter or improve his source, but to preserve it. While directors and actors must indeed be free to manipulate texts in order to serve their own theatrical purposes, historians and editors can surely do no less than adhere to the same strict standards of textual fidelity which Johannes and his peers adopted for themselves.

Notes