University of Virginia Library

iii. Textual Notes

The section of discursive notes on textual matters is generally entitled "Textual Notes" but sometimes (as in the Irving and Melville editions) is called "Discussions of Adopted Readings." Both titles suggest an important point about the content of these notes: they are comments on individual problematical readings in the text which has been established, and any reading which appears there is the "adopted reading," whether it results from emendation or retention of the copy-text reading. The notes, in other words, discuss not simply emendations but also places where emendations might have been expected and yet, after careful consideration, have not been made. (The principal reason for putting the textual notes before the list of emendations, of course, is to emphasize the fact that they refer to the text itself and not to the emendations.) Since these notes deal with individual readings, it is important to keep general matters out of them and to limit them to cases which raise special problems. Any textual problem which recurs a number of times ought to be taken up in the textual essay, since it then constitutes a general textual problem and since a repetition of the same explanation several times in the notes or extensive cross-references between the notes would be more awkward and, indeed, less clear than one coherent discussion in which all the evidence is brought together.

The most convenient form which the textual notes can take is a citation of page and line number (or act, scene, and line),[31] then the reading under discussion (shortened by an indication of ellipsis if

necessary), followed in turn by the discussion itself. Generally a square bracket, the conventional sign to distinguish a lemma, separates the reading from the discussion but is of course not essential.[32] The note itself need not say what has been substituted or retained, because the reading of the edited text is the one fact which the reader inevitably knows at the time he consults the note, and if, in addition, it is cited at the head of the note, he has that reading before him on the same page. It is superfluous and uneconomical, therefore, to begin a note by saying, "We retain x at this point because . . ." or "This text adopts the reading y here owing to the fact that . . . ." Instead, all that is required is a direct statement, as simple as possible, of the facts which led to the decision which is already obvious. Thus a note might begin, "X, though unidiomatic, appears in a similar context at 384.27 . . ."; or, "No evidence has been discovered which would support z, the copy-text reading, as standard usage at the time, and the phraseology at 412.16 suggests that z is probably a compositorial error for y . . . ." The notes should be kept as few as possible: there is no point explaining matters easily checked in standard dictionaries or encyclopedias, nor is there any reason to refer to those general problems more cogently handled in the textual essay. Annotation which is unnecessary for either of these reasons only wastes the reader's time[33] and reveals the editor's failure to give sufficient thought to the rationale for textual discussions.