University of Virginia Library

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:

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)

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  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:

—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.