The Old-Spelling Critical Edition
A far more complicated problem is the rationale of old-spelling
critical editions of Elizabethan and Jacobean plays. And here also it must
be expected that the advances in textual studies have modified both purposes
and achievements. At the beginning of this century it might have been
supposed that these editions were especially prepared for the textual student;
now, in the introductory remarks to his old-spelling edition of Dekker's
Dramatic Works, published in 1953, Professor Bowers has
stated clearly:
A critical edition is neither a diplomatic nor a facsimile reprint
addressed principally to those who need to make a close study of the most
minute formal characteristics of a text, and hence some degree of silent
alteration is advisable.
[19]
If a facsimile reprint is now of limited use to a textual student, an
old-spelling
critical edition will be even less able to satisfy him. In Professor Bowers'
admirable edition of Dekker, which may be taken as an up-to-date example
of such texts, the editor's silent alterations disregard the lining of prose,
destroy the evidence that any verse-line is a full line of type, expand
contractions, regularize the position and typography of stage-directions and
speech-headings, and emend 'faulty punctuation' at the end of complete
speeches. Moreover Professor Bowers has not indicated the relation his
printed text bears to the pages of the original editions. Such procedures
make it impossible for a textual student to use this kind of edition for a
close study of any Elizabethan or Jacobean play, for an attempt to decide
how its spelling, punctuation, lining and general arrangement were modified
in the printing-house; he would never know whether he was in possession
of all the relevant facts for debating the value of an emendation or
discovering the presence of
textual corruption. Such a text is not designed for him but for 'a modern
reader accustomed to [sixteenth- or] seventeenth-century usage'
[20] and who is willing to take the
editor's
work on trust.
The simplest example will help to show how some modern readers
are served. Let us neglect, for the time being, all occasions when there may
be some doubt about what old-spelling an editor should print or when there
is an ambiguity in the meaning of the text, and let us suppose that a
'modern reader familiar with seventeenth-century usage' is confronted with
an old-spelling, critical edition of a play of that period: what will it mean
to him? Let us take, for example, the word owl. When Mr.
F. L. Lucas, the learned editor of Webster, found 'Oowle' in the original
edition of The Duchess of Malfi, he wished to keep that
spelling in his edition of the play, commenting: "Oowle can only mean "Owl" and
is far too expressive to be given up."[21] Another reader, of a more precise
turn of mind, might seize on the same spelling as an example of ME 'Q'
becoming late ME 'ū', under the influence of the 'w',[22] and
might presume that Webster required such a pronunciation. But someone
familiar with both seventeenth-century usage and recent
textual studies will know that these readers are making unwarrantable assumptions;
at once several questions arise:
- 1). Was this spelling in the printer's manuscript copy, or did a
compositor introduce it? Or, to put this another way, is this a characteristic
spelling of Nicholas Okes' 'Compositor A' who set 'Oowle' on El (II.iii.9)
but 'Owle' on K4 (IV.ii.360),[23] and
was the position in which the word occurred on the printed page such that
his spelling might have been influenced by the need to justify the line of
type or a desire to emphasise the beginning of a line or speech?
- 2). If 'Oowle' was in the copy, did the scrivener, who prepared
this manuscript,[24] introduce this
spelling, or was it in the author's manuscript?
- 3). If 'Oowle' was in the author's original manuscript, was the
spelling just a flourish, or an accident, or the result of a significant, though
probably unconscious, act?
- 4). If 'Oowle' was a significant authorial spelling, how should it
be pronounced and how should this pronunciation contrast with the author's
pronunciation as a whole?
- 5). Is the capital 'O' authoritative and significant?
The fact is that only a specialist could attempt to interpret such a spelling
in terms of Webster's original intentions: the most that can readily be
proved from it is that 'Oowle' passed the proof-reader of the first edition
of
The Duchess of Malfi. To deduce anything further of the
author's intentions the reader must be a textual, literary and linguistic
student, well acquainted with other books from the same printing-house and
other works by the same author, and in possession of the original edition
in which it appeared, or a photographic reproduction of it. The same is true
of wider divergences from modern usages: anyone who has examined the
work of Elizabethan and Jacobean compositors in reprints, or has collated
scriveners' transcripts, will know that
lanthorn might be
substituted for
lantern, Bermoothes for
Bermoothas,
and so forth, in accordance with a workman's predilections or the
exigencies of justification or type-shortage; the presence of any
of these forms in a modern, old-spelling edition can tell the reader nothing
certain about the author's intentions.
Those scholars who have prepared a modern edition reproducing the
spelling of a first edition would claim that its spelling is
nearer
to the author's original spelling than that of a modernized text.[25] This, of course, is true, for some
of the
author's spellings will survive the modifications of scribes, compositors and
proof-correctors, and the number of survivals may be high, especially in
books printed before
1600.
[26] But, nevertheless, as soon as
a reader of a modern old-spelling edition puts his faith in any single
spelling as due to his author, he is making assumptions which cannot be
warranted without recourse to further evidence than that provided by the
text before him. Now that this is fully realised, is it not preferable to leave
old-spelling to those who can begin to appreciate it (and prepare
photographic reproductions for their convenience), and not give other
readers a mass of in-formation which they must—if they know their
limitations—ignore?
If a 'modern reader familiar with sixteenth- and seventeenth-century
usage' cannot (or, rather, should not) take the spelling of an old-spelling
critical edition seriously with respect to the author's intentions, there must
be some other reasons for presenting him with such a text. One reason that
has been advanced is that it is appropriate to read an author in the spelling
of his first edition, even if that was not the author's spelling—an old
play
in an old spelling. Sir Walter Greg has said:
To print
banquet for
banket, fathom for
faddom, lantern for
lanthorn, murder for
murther, mushroom for
mushrump, orphan for
orphant, perfect for
parfit, portcullis for
perculace, tattered for
tottered, vile for
vild,
wreck for
wrack, and so on, and so on, is sheer
perversion.
[27]
—a perversion that is of Elizabethan English, not necessarily of the
English of the particular author. But it is also a perversion to recognise
these particular forms as antique or special:
lanthorn, murther, parfit,
vild, and so forth were every-day spellings in the sixteenth- and
seventeenth-centuries and presumably represented every-day pronunciations;
often they had no associations differentiating them from the alternative, now
standard, forms.
[28] There were some
authors, as Jonson and Spenser, who took special care to ensure an
individual form of spelling in their printed works; but these were
exceptional in Elizabethan and Jacobean times and most authors and readers
(each of whom always spelt to please himself) must have accepted the
irregular spelling of their printed books with something close to the
unthinking ease with which we accept modern, regular spelling.
'Old-Spelling' was
neither old nor odd nor distinctive to them, and it is impossible for us to
read a play as they did. The 'Elizabethan flavour' of an old-spelling text is
a modern phenomenon (as the term 'old spelling' is itself), and its
dissemination can do no service to the original authors or their works. Of
course if it could be shown that for a particular author
parfit
or
vild had particular connotations compared with
perfect or
vile, and that the occurrences of that
word
in particular contexts were not due to scribal or compositorial interference,
then a reader would wish to have the old form in the edition he was
using—it would take its place with those old words which have no
satisfactory modern equivalent in sense or metrical value and must be
retained on that account. But such occasions are likely to be infrequent. A
perversion of Elizabethan English is inevitable in both old-spelling and
modern-spelling texts, and so it may seem advisable to choose that kind
of edition which dispenses with the risky impression of the 'real' thing, to
avoid a text which is anachronistically unusual and full of minute
distinctions which the inexperienced reader might easily observe too
curiously and the experienced one must ignore or else seek more
information to interpret.
It is hardly relevant to bring up the question of pronunciation in this
connection, for if it would be hard to make a consistent attempt to speak the
speeches from an autograph manuscript as the author would have
pronounced them, it would be impossible to pronounce them in any
meaningful fashion from the doubly or trebly confused orthography of a
printed book. And failing a consistent Elizabethan pronunciation, there
seems little point in restoring a partial 'Elizabethan' pronunciation to those
few words whose old spellings more clearly suggest a sound different from
the customary modern ones.
Perhaps one of the chief reasons why scholars prepare modern,
old-spelling editions is the difficulty of preparing modern-spelling ones. The
ambiguity of the original spelling presents the most intractable problems.
Not that a reader familiar with seventeenth-century literature will be
perplexed by 'lose' for 'loose' and 'lose' in modern- or in
old-spelling texts; nor 'curtsy' for 'curtsy' and 'courtesy'; he
needs to be watchful for such ambiguities in both kinds of texts. But
sometimes the ambiguity of an original edition embraces two modern words
which are not clearly related in form or sense: so in 'How now brother
what trauailing to bed to your kind wife'[29], 'trauailing' is an old spelling for
both the
modern 'travelling' and the modern 'travailing'; or 'Machiuillian',[30] besides being the equivalent of the
modern
'Machiavellian',
may also allude to the word 'villain'. For such words a modernizing editor
would either have to make an exception and keep these few, old forms
unchanged in his text (thus giving them false prominence, along with words
retained because there is no acceptable
[31] modern equivalent), or, with
greater
consistency, he would have to content himself with printing the
primary modern spelling in his text and noting the ambiguity
of
the original spelling in a footnote. The old-spelling method of reproducing
the spelling of the copy-text seems easier here, but the advantage is not all
on that side. If the compositor of the first example had set 'trauail' on all
other occasions in the text where modern 'travel' was required and modern
'travail' could not possibly be implied, or if, in reprints, he was known to
have changed 'trauel' to 'trauail' with no cause to do so, then the chance
that the author wrote 'trauail' is considerably diminished; then 'travel' in
the text and a footnote suggesting the slight possibility of a quibble would
seem to be all that was required in order to present the author's intentions
for a modern reader. The chief difficulty with an old-spelling text, in this
respect, is that, while it keeps all the allusive ambiguities of the original,
it gives
equal importance to those which, on further study,
are
almost certainly authorial and those which are almost certainly accidental
and impertinent—unless, of course, the old-spelling editor resorts to
explanatory footnotes like a modernizing one.
So far only ambiguous spellings actually found in first editions have
been considered, but the argument must be taken further. Several facts need
to be remembered: firstly, that a compositor could remove ambiguous
spellings as well as introduce them; secondly, that some spellings were
ambiguous to Elizabethans which are now understood in one sense only;
thirdly, that ambiguity of spelling does not necessarily imply ambiguity of
meaning, even if it could be proved that the author himself was responsible
for it—he could have used the ambiguous form unintentionally. It
follows
that an experienced reader of an old-spelling text knows that many of the
author's ambiguous spellings may have been lost and that any ambiguous
spelling in the text may be fortuitous; he would in fact be on the look-out
for double meanings at all points, regardless of the spelling
of
any particular word. Old spelling is therefore no guarantee that a reader
will appreciate all the author's meanings:
its ambiguities will often mislead the inexperienced reader and must always
be questioned by the experienced in the light
of his own ever-watchful literary awareness. In view of this, some editors
may wish to accept the situation frankly and present a fully modernized
text, placing the burden unequivocally on the reader and aiding him by such
textual and interpretative notes as an editor can add from his detailed study
of the original printed text and of the author's complete works.
Early dramatic texts have some ambiguous spellings which could not
possibly imply ambiguity of meaning, but rather two mutually exclusive
meanings. Such are
Old Spelling
|
Modern Counterparts
|
heare, etc. |
hear, here |
I |
I, Ay |
of |
of, off |
the |
the, thee |
then |
then, than |
to |
to, too |
whose |
whose, who's |
The use of an apostrophe before or after final
s raises similar
problems:
cats in an Elizabethan text may stand for modern
cats, cat's cats', or, with elision,
cat is, and
occasionally the sense of a passage can bear two or three of these exclusive
meanings. The old-spelling editor is here at a disadvantage, for, keeping the
ambiguous spelling, he must make its meaning plain, or draw attention to
its ambiguity, in a footnote. The modernizing editor judges each case on its
own merits and prints the preferred modern spelling, adding a footnote to
explain his decision; the meaning of the text itself will not be dependant on
a footnote unless the editor can find no clear preference between the
alternative meanings of the original text.
It has been said that an old-spelling, critical editor 'could console
himself' in difficulties such as these 'with the knowledge that his scholarly
readers were in possession of sufficient evidence to make up their own
minds'.[32] But this is no longer true:
a choice between two exclusive meanings, as between modern
to and too, may often depend on a knowledge
of a
compositor's predilections, of text-space and type-shortage, and so to
attempt a decision in any particular instance, a 'scholarly
reader' must be furnished with a copy of the original edition or a
photographic reproduction of it. Without provision for all this, no reader
should dare to make up his mind. Clearly this is an editor's responsibility,
and the most convenient way of assuming it is to give
the modern, unequivocal form in the printed text wherever possible; it is
only the fully equipped textual student who can travail on these strange seas
alone.
The time has come for editors to consider whether they should not
adopt the policy of 'all and nothing' with regard to the
spelling
of Elizabethan and Jacobean plays: for those who can attempt to interpret
the old-spelling, there can nowadays be the photographic reproduction of
a first edition; for those who cannot (or in the time at their disposal do not
wish to exert themselves to that extent), there should be a critical edition,
as fully modernized as possible—one that can be relied on not to give
meaningless or erroneous detail, and one that interprets the ambiguities of
the original text in the light of the fullest possible knowledge. Anything
between these two extremes would be incomplete for the specialist, and
misleading for other readers.