III
I should now like to consider the larger matter of which McKenzie's
and Thorpe's arguments may be symptomatic: the possibility that the
current paradigm in bibliographic studies is no longer acceptable. They are
not alone in expressing dissatisfaction with conventional bibliographic and
editorial practices. The editors of The Complete Works of Robert
Browning
[19] reject the
conventional meanings of 'text' and 'author' and argue that punctuational
changes ought not to be differentiated from substantival variants, or, to put
it in their own language:
An accidental, we maintain, is a variant that cannot alter the semantic
function of the semiotic data. . . . . Punctuation, under which we include
paragraphing, does not merely affect the semantic continuum;
it is part of that continuum (p. ix).
I have always taught that substantive variations may
include punctuation. Thus, in The Dutch Courtesan, the 1605
corrected Quarto reads:
I must haue the Sammon to, worship: Cocledemoy,
now
. . . .
(The uncorrected quarto reads "to worship;") Martin Wine, in the Regents
edition, 1965, takes this to mean:
I must have the salmon to worship. Cocledemoy, now . . . .
The Fountainwell edition, 1968, which rather unsatisfactorily partially
modernizes (so 'to' means 'too') reads:
I must have the Sammon to. Worshipful Cocledemoy,
now . . . .
Whatever the correct reading (and as that is not my concern here, reference
should be made to the arguments in the respective editions), punctuation
certainly affects meaning and the effect is substantival. The reader of
Marlowe will not need reminding of the substantival effect on Edward II of
an unpointed line: there was nothing accidental about Young Mortimer's
omission.
But even if one accepts such punctuational variants as substantival,
this is not an open invitation to include all accidental variants as
substantives. Even if the argument of a continuum is acceptable (and the
word is overused by the Ohio editors, being applied to authorial, editorial,
and semantic functions), if given effect it means readers will be faced with
a welter of variants, from which, even when presented with the typographic
elegance of this edition, it is extremely difficult to distinguish the significant
from the insignificant. But, more seriously, are not the Ohio editors
abrogating their editorial duty even if these poems do not, like music or a
play, have to be performed? Can editorial responsibility be argued away by
a continuum of semantic niceties (or, perhaps, by an anxiety to avoid
assuming god-like pretentions)?
The Ohio editors are right, I think, to be uneasy about the
conventional meanings of 'text' and 'author', and they are very properly
much alive to the significance of the least comma in Browning's work.
Nevertheless, their analysis of the problem posed is confused and their
solution is unsatisfactory. One senses, perhaps unfairly, that, having
decided to abandon the variorum edition originally advertised, they settled
on a policy of reprinting the final edition published in Browning's lifetime,
supporting it with a register of all variants known to them, and that they
then looked round for a policy to justify this procedure. The choice of such
a text is unhappily reminiscent of a practice castigated by Housman in the
preface to his Juvenal, 1905:
A critic therefore, when he employs this method of trusting the best
MS., employs it in the same spirit of gloomy resignation with which a man
lies down on a stretcher when he has broken both his legs. But far other is
the spirit in which it is hailed by the reciter of formulas. He is not dejected
by its inadequacy, but captivated by its ease. 'Here', says he 'is a method,
sanctioned by critics, employed in scientific enquiry, and yet involving not
the slightest expenditure of intellectual effort: this is the method for me';
and he espouses it for ever.
[20]
We seem, indeed, to be back with the idea of a codex
optimus and one feels that in the Ohio Browning inadequate
attention
has been
paid to the readings of all the significant editions at the points at which they
diverge.
[21] On top of that there is a
failure to differentiate between the authorial and editorial functions. In:
there is no logical difference between an author's exercise of the
editorial function and an editor's, who is also an unstable and continuously
innovating continuum, but whose editorial function is precisely the same as
the author's (viii)
and:
other individuals also exercise the editorial function: the compositor,
the printer, and the copyreader (ix)
(to which one could add friends such as Joseph Milsand (xii)), there is
surely far more confusion than discrimination. What the logic of their
argument for a continuum demanded was a genetic text like that produced
by Harrison Hayford and Merton M. Sealts Jr. of
Billy Budd
in 1962. There is, of course, no reason why editors should have to produce
a variorum, a critical, or a genetic edition if none of these will serve their
purpose, but what the Ohio editors have produced is not, I think, the
happiest solution to their problem.
Nevertheless, criticism about the way the Ohio editors interpret 'text'
and 'editor' should not lead us to assume that the conventional meanings are
without problems. The Ohio editors have touched on a matter of some
concern.
E.A.J. Honigmann has recently argued against the idea that there is
but a single version of a Shakespearean text:
I envisage, in short, two copies of a play, each in the author's hand,
disagreeing in both substantive and indifferent readings: the play being
regarded as 'finished' by Shakespeare in each version though not therefore
beyond the reach of afterthoughts. Manuscript copies of their own works
by at least one contemporary of Shakespeare and by many later writers
reveal precisely the textual instability which I postulate, especially when
written out shortly after their original composition (as, one imagines,
Shakespeare's 'fair copies' would be too). In rejecting the notion of a
finalised text I picture, then, not so much a fastidious author's determined
attempts to improve passages that fail to satisfy as an author so unconceited
with himself and so fluent that little verbal changes, not necessarily always
for
the better, ran quite freely from his pen when the process of copying refired
his mind.
[22]
This is surely correct and not only for Shakespeare, as Honigmann shows.
The sort of problem this poses for an editor may be represented by extracts
from the 1869 and 1875 editions of
Culture and Anarchy and
J. Dover Wilson's treatment of one of these passages in his edition of 1932.
These changes were made by Arnold himself, in order, Dover Wilson
suggests, to suppress or tone down personal allusions or because the
allusions were no longer topical. Whilst the two readings are not the result
of the kind of instability Honigmann describes, the problem facing the
editor is similar. As Dover Wilson prints the text it appears at one point as:
we imagine we are delivering ourselves up captive to the ideas and
wishes of our fierce aristocratical baronet Sir Thomas Bateson; if with the
middle class in occupation of the executive government, to those of our
truculent middle-class Dissenting minister, the Rev. W. Cattle; if with the
working class, to those of its notorious tribune, Mr. Bradlaugh.
In the notes to this passage
[23] Dover
Wilson explains:
ed. 1 reads these names alone, ed. 2 suppresses the first two and
reads instead, "our fierce aristocratic baronet . . . our truculent middle-class
Dissenting minister . . . its notorious tribune, Mr. Bradlaugh." The names
"Elcho," "Bateson" and "Cattle" are similarly suppressed in later passages
of the book, and it is unnecessary to record instances.
Dover Wilson therefore gives us a version which Arnold never authorised
in this form. Whether it is acceptable is another matter; it is certainly
convenient but obviously it can only work if the words changed are
complementary — one cannot have the notes C and D simultaneously
in
the Bizet example, it will be recalled. Honigmann's solution, which is no
more in accord with the hypothetico-deductive approach than is Dover
Wilson's, is quite different:
the editor must screw his courage to the sticking place and choose
between each pair of variants. In short, he must discard the labour-saving
idea of 'indifferent' variants, recognising at the same time that to attempt
a feat left undone by Shakespeare, to finalise an unfinished text, will create
a version that never existed in the author's hand (p. 168).
