Conclusion
McGann's definition of copy-text seems to be a reasonable extension
of Greg's notion, and certainly is useful in practice:
In the post-Greg context, the term signifies what an editor chooses to
take as the text of highest presumptive authority in the preparation of an
eclectic, or critical, edition. That is to say, after examining the surviving
documents in which the text is transmitted forward, the editor chooses one
of these—or sometimes a combination— as his copytext. The
copytext
serves as the basis of the critical edition that is to be produced.
(Social
Values, p. 177)
The rejoinder to this argument is that it provides an excellent definition of
a "base text" (implying an eclectic edition), not a "copy-text" (implying a
recension edition or what was once meant by the phrase "critical edition").
Furthermore, the argument assumes that editors must choose a text as their
highest authority. Yet recension editions still exist, and Kane has proved
that even a base-text edition can exist without attributing undue authority to
the basic text itself.
Chaucerians, however, seem to be moving toward single-text editions,
and Greg's inadvertent defense of such editions can certainly be taken at
face value: "what many editors have done is to produce, not editions of
their authors' works at all, but only editions of particular authorities for
those works, a course that may be perfectly legitimate in itself, but was not
the one they were professedly pursuing" (p. 384). Editions of Hg and
editions of Chaucer are two different things, and there are certainly reasons
to prefer the former (economics, editorial consistency in a project involving
many editors, etc.). And editors might do well to portray legitimate,
economically based decisions for what they are, rather than to obscure them
with textual-critical jargon. This is the approach successfully taken by the
Toronto Medieval Latin Texts series. Furthermore, editorial projects are not
necessarily doomed because they have multiple (and possibly conflicting)
purposes. Poiron's cheap
student edition of the Roman de la Rose follows a single
manuscript (allowing the reader to reconstruct it) while adding in brackets
the lines of the textus receptus not included in it. In so doing,
Poiron can incorporate earlier editions rather than condemn them.[40]
An obvious conclusion here would be for Middle English editors to
drop the notion of copy-text altogether unless they are willing to define it
precisely (as, say, Greetham, "Normalisation") and to speak directly to the
problem of what the accidentals provided by such a text are supposed to
represent
or suggest: those of the author? or simply those of one of the author's
near-contemporaries? Unless an editor is interested in grappling with such
questions, I see little reason to invoke Greg's term. A statement such as
"the base text for the edition is X (corrected), with forms normalized
according to the edition of Robinson" makes perfect sense and can be easily
justified. An edition will not (or should not) be condemned simply because
it is selective in the issues it deals with. The use of the term "copy-text" for
Middle English editions that are completely different from the type of
edition on which Greg based his theory leads generally to confusion and to
an obscuring of the often legitimate editorial procedures employed.
