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Textual Criticism
An editor preparing a critical old-spelling edition of an Elizabethan poet or dramatist must process an enormous amount of literary data. Collation of early printed editions can be facilitated by machines, as Professor Charlton J. K. Hinman has demonstrated in his collation of dozens of copies of the First Folio. Future editors will also wish to explore the possibilities of computer collation. The more complicated the textual tradition, the more the scholar will appreciate electronic aid in reconstructing a stemma.[12] Again, every editor has to analyze such matters as characteristic locutions and linguistic preferences through all of his author's extant writings, as well as the spelling of any surviving holographs, so that he can decide to what extent a base-text which is not a holograph, and perhaps was not transcribed or printed from a holograph, represents his author's idioms and orthography. In the past, an editor has had to depend upon his memory, at best an incomplete and unreliable guide, or to compile by hand a private concordance, as it were, an index of his author's graphic-semantic patterns. Computers can relieve him of this labor, which adds far too much to his already heavy burdens. Accurate and complete counts of an author's particular word-sequences can also help to detect contaminations. On the basis of such analyses, computers can automatically fill in lacunae or offer conjectural
Since a concordance is valuable for textual criticism, we may expect that editors of Elizabethan dramatists and poets will also edit concordances to their authors. A preliminary tape that will help the editor to establish his text can be corrected to embody final editorial decisions and a concordance can then be published by offset from machine-prints.
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