II
In the years since Greg's "Rationale" appeared, the person who has
done most to make Greg's theory widely known and to demonstrate its
broad applicability is Fredson Bowers. His contributions have been of two
kinds: (1) general discussions of editing, which call attention to and
recapitulate Greg's ideas and which sometimes specifically take up the
question of applying his rationale to areas other than Renaissance drama;
(2) actual editions based on Greg's rationale, not only showing its
workability on a large scale but also developing an appropriate apparatus
to accompany texts edited in that way.
Bowers began his commentary on Greg's essay, even before it
appeared in print, in his 1950 article on "Current Theories of Copy-Text,
with an Illustration from Dryden."[15]
To use several examples from The Indian Emperour to
support the rightness of Greg's approach obviously suggests its usefulness
for Restoration, as well as Renaissance, drama; but, more important,
Bowers anticipates three objections which he thinks may be raised. One is
that editors, afraid of the greater role given to editorial judgment, will
complain that too much weight has been given to it; but the reply is that,
if an editor is preparing a critical text, "editorial
responsibility cannot be disengaged
from the duty to judge the validity of altered readings in a revised edition"
(p. 13). A second objection is that the result will be a conflated or eclectic
text; but, again, a
critical text, as opposed to a reprint, is by
definition eclectic, and there is no reason to fear eclecticism for its own
sake but only irresponsible eclecticism. It is in connection with the third
objection, however, that Bowers most usefully expands on Greg's
remarks—the objection that even an editor who accepts the responsibility
of judging between authorial and nonauthorial substantive readings may
hesitate to judge the authority of accidentals and may feel that the
accidentals of a revised edition at least possibly preserve some authorial
alterations. Bowers's reply calls attention to a point which Greg had not
perhaps sufficiently made clear: it is precisely because an editor has less
evidence for judging accidentals that he should normally fall back on the
first-edition copy-text for them,
since one of the few generalizations that can be made about accidentals is
their gradual corruption from edition to edition and the unlikelihood of
close authorial attention to accidentals in revised editions. If an editor
chooses a revised edition for copy-text, as Bowers succinctly puts the
matter, "in order to preserve a single accidentals variant which
may have been the author's, he is introducing a very
considerable number of other alterations which under no circumstances
could possibly have been authorial" (p. 16). Bowers preserves Greg's
emphasis on the expedient by repeatedly using an expression which
helpfully captures the spirit of the procedure: he speaks of the "odds"
favoring the readings of the first edition and of the editor "playing the
correct odds" in retaining those readings.
[16]
This first apologia for Greg's theory was promptly buttressed when,
only three years later, the first volume of Bowers's edition of Dekker
appeared, inaugurating the first full-scale edition to be produced according
to Greg's rationale. Besides making that rationale more widely known and
demonstrating its use in handling the problems of an actual edition (as
opposed to isolated examples of textual problems), the Dekker introduced
a form of apparatus which broke with tradition and which was particularly
appropriate for reflecting the central ideas of Greg's approach. The
traditional apparatus, which
McKerrow still supported in his 1939
Prolegomena, was to
have two sets of notes, one for recording variant readings and one for
making more discursive comment on any matter which the editor wished to
address; and the first of these kinds of notes, though not always the second,
was placed at the foot of each page of text. The departure of the Dekker
edition from this plan is two-fold: it divides the record of variants into
several categories (editorial alterations of substantives in the copy-text,
editorial alterations of accidentals in the copy-text, press-variants, and
substantive variants in pre-1700 editions) and it relegates part of that record
to an appendix (all but the first category). The result is to dramatize the
differing status of the copy-text from that of later texts by segregating the
record of its readings and by specifying every change—in accidentals as
well as in substantives—which the editor has made in it. Given Greg's
reasoning about the accidentals of
the copy-text, it is important for the reader to know where the editor has
altered them, so a full record is provided; but it is of no importance, in
most cases, for the reader to know the thousands of variants in accidentals
which entered the text in later editions, so only the substantive variants in
those editions are listed. There is a clear distinction between the record of
editorial decisions to emend the copy-text and the historical record of
substantive variants in later editions. This apparatus, while it does not
clutter the reading page with any but the most significant category of
editorial decisions.
[17] does enable the
reader easily to focus on all the editor's decisions—which is especially
important in view of the prominence given to editorial judgment in Greg's
rationale.
Bowers continued through the 1950s to keep Greg's theory before the
scholarly public, in the successive volumes of the Dekker and in various
theoretical discussions.[18] But as his
work on Dekker neared completion and he turned his attention to the editing
of Hawthorne, he produced the first detailed illustration of the application
of the theory to the period of machine printing and highly developed
publishing firms. His 1962 paper, "Some Principles for Scholarly Editions
of Nineteenth-Century American Authors,"[19] is the principal document
which stands between Greg's "Rationale" and the large series of CEAA
editions currently in progress. This paper begins by establishing two crucial
points which underlie all the others: that a scholarly text must be
unmodernized
[20] (recognizing this as
an issue even for nineteenth-century works)
[21] and that it must be critical
[22] (recognizing that probably "no
nineteenth-century text of any length exists that is not in need of some
correction").
[23] Bowers, like Greg,
and like the CEAA editors to follow, is concerned with
unmodernized critical texts, presenting "classic texts in as
close a form as possible to the authors' intentions"; the fact cannot be
overemphasized, in the light of later events, that these editors are not
attempting to lay down rules for all kinds of editions for all purposes but
are concerned with one particular kind of edition.
[24] After summarizing Greg's
rationale for an audience
which at that time was not likely to have been particularly familiar with it,
Bowers proceeds to show how Greg's approach accommodates the two
principal differences in the kinds of materials with which the editor of a
nineteenth-century work is likely to deal: (1) the fact that nineteenth-century
American books were normally plated does not mean that alterations do not
appear in later printings, and examples from Hawthorne illustrate the
necessity for making machine collations
[25] of copies of the first printing from a set
of plates against copies of the last printing; (2) the fact that authors'
fair-copy manuscripts frequently survive from this period means that in such
cases the editor will generally find himself employing a manuscript, rather
than a first printing, as copy-text, for what Greg said about the usual
degeneration of the accidentals from edition to edition applies also to the
initial step from manuscript to print. In making the latter
point, Bowers clearly restates the view of accidentals which is basic to
Greg's whole theory: "if an author's habits of expression go beyond words
and into the forms that these take, together with the punctuation that helps
to shape the relationships of these words, then one is foolish to prefer a
printing-house style to the author's style" (p. 226).
[26] The other concern of Bowers's paper is
an appropriate apparatus for the kind of edition he is describing, and he
lists five classes of material which scholars should expect to find recorded:
(1) variants among copies of a single edition, revealed by machine collation
of multiple copies; (2) emendations made by the editor in the copy-text
(along with discussions of any problematical readings); (3) substantive
differences in editions published during the author's lifetime
[27] and in
any posthumous editions that the editor judges to be of sufficient interest;
(4) "all the rejected readings and revisions during the process of
inscription" of the manuscript, when a manuscript exists—in other words,
the pre-copy-text variants; (5) compound words hyphenated at the ends of
lines in the copy-text (and thus requiring editorial judgment to determine
how they should be printed in the critical text),
[28] along with the copy-text forms of words
which are divided at line-end in the critical text. This list is obviously an
adaptation of the Dekker apparatus to a situation in which a manuscript may
be available, and it also recognizes for the first time the editorial problems
which line-end hyphens produce. Acknowledging the amount of effort
involved in preparing such an edition, Bowers ends with an explicit
reference to the continuity of editorial problems by calling on scholars of
American literature to "bring to their task the careful effort
that has been established as necessary for English Renaissance texts."
In the same year the first volume of the Ohio State ("Centenary")
edition of Hawthorne (The Scarlet Letter, 1962) was
illustrating in detail the points made in this paper and was exhibiting the
kind of apparatus advocated there. By providing a comprehensive essay
analyzing the textual history of the work and the editorial procedures
employed and by keeping the pages of the text entirely free of apparatus
(unlike the Dekker, all emendations were listed at the end), the Hawthorne
edition was to furnish a practical model for the later CEAA editions.
Influential as Bowers's work on this edition was, his exposition of Greg
which was perhaps of the greatest potential influence came the next year.
In 1963 the MLA published a pamphlet, edited by James Thorpe, on
The Aims and Methods of Scholarship in Modern Languages and
Literatures;[29] consisting of
four essays, on linguistics, textual criticism, literary history, and literary
criticism, it was
intended, according to Thorpe's introduction, to offer a "review
of some current ideas" for "any members of the scholarly community,"
particularly those "into whose hands the future of American scholarship will
in due course fall." Such a pamphlet, circulated by the MLA—even
though it was not claimed to be "an official statement" of the
organization—was bound to be widely read and referred to, and Bowers's
essay on "Textual Criticism,"
[30] being
concise, up-to-date, and readily accessible, became the most convenient
source of information on editing literary texts. In his essay Bowers not only
suggests
[31] the wide applicability of
Greg's rationale, by citing illustrations from Shakespeare, Dekker, Dryden,
Fielding, Sheridan, Shelley, Hawthorne, Whitman, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and
Sinclair Lewis, among others, but also sets forth a practical routine to be
followed in the process of collating and emending and some considerations
to keep in mind in constructing an apparatus and a textual
introduction. Because the only editions at that time which illustrated the use
of Greg's rationale—and of apparatus which separates the listing of
emendations from the historical record of variants—were those with
which Bowers himself was associated, he cites the Dekker and the
Hawthorne (along with the forthcoming Beaumont-Fletcher and Fielding),
thus bringing to those editions the attention of a wider audience than might
otherwise have been expected to examine them.
When, that same year, the Center for Editions of American Authors
was established as an official committee of the MLA, it had available, in
Bowers's work, the reasoned and detailed application of Greg's theory to
nineteenth-century American literature. And when its Statement of
Editorial Principles emerged in 1967, several drafts having been
previously circulated for criticism among interested scholars, the principles
were those of Greg and the categories of apparatus were those of Bowers's
1962 paper and thus of the Hawthorne edition. It was necessary, of course,
for the CEAA to have a public statement outlining its standards, if it was
to award a seal (and dispense funds) to individual editions on the basis of
adherence to those standards. But the pamphlet has served a larger function,
for its practical recommendations of procedure are more detailed than any
available in the earlier discussions of editing in the light of Greg's
"Rationale." As
indicated by its subtitle, "A Working Manual for Editing Nineteenth
Century American Texts," the pamphlet concentrates on a step-by-step
explanation of the processes of bringing together the "authentic forms" of
a text, selecting the copy-text, performing collations (by machine and by
"sight"—that is, without a machine), presenting the evidence, writings
notes and introductions, and proofreading. It thus attempts to set forth the
principles behind this kind of editing as well as to offer practical advice on
how to proceed; while addressed specifically to editors who seek CEAA
support and approval, it functions also as a way of informing a larger
audience, wishing to keep abreast of developments in the scholarship of
American literature, of what is involved in these editions. Two features of
the
Statement deserve particular notice. One is its emphatic
recognition of the importance of proofreading in the production of a reliable
edition; it sets a minimum of five proofreadings
against copy as a requirement for any edition applying for the CEAA seal
(p. 11). Second is its provision for the dissemination of these editions by
attaching certain conditions to the seal: the editors of editions which
received public funds are to forgo royalties, and the publishers of those
editions are to make the texts (not necessarily the apparatuses) "available
to reprinting publishers no longer than two years after the date of original
publication for reasonable royalties or fees" (p. 14). These provisions
remain as important parts of the CEAA requirements in the revised edition
of the
Statement published in 1972,
[32] although the new edition makes clearer
the fact that the seal is available to any edition which meets the standards,
whether or not it has been funded through the Center, and that in such cases
no stipulations can be made about royalties or the availability of a text for
reprinting. The CEAA, as its
Statement indicates,
is concerned not only with the production of sound texts and informative
apparatuses but also with the practical problems of fostering a general
demand for reliable editions and of encouraging their widespread
distribution.
[33]
It should be clear that the CEAA's endorsement of Greg's theory and
its requirement of a particular kind of apparatus are separate matters. Greg
says nothing about apparatus in his "Rationale,"[34] and his approach entails no specific form
of apparatus; obviously one can edit a text according to Greg's principles
without supplying the reader any apparatus at all. The position of the
CEAA on the two must be examined separately. As to its choice of Greg's
theory, it could not responsibly have chosen any other. Greg was building
on the experience of McKerrow and thus represented the main line of
bibliographical development of this century; his theory not only emerged
from long experience but had a compelling internal logic of its own. Since,
by 1963, Bowers had amply demonstrated—what Greg himself had
implied—that this approach was not limited to Renaissance literature, the
CEAA was fortunate, at the time of its organization, in having readily
available a theoretical position that it could scarcely ignore if it was to
promote unmodernized critical texts. Clearly, one might wish to argue that
it ought to have decided to promote some other kind of text in the first
place; but, aside from the fact that the MLA, as a learned society, has a
responsibility to support scholarly work, any text which is modernized or
in some other way prepared for the "general reader" must, if it is to be
reliable, first entail the research involved in producing a scholarly (that is,
unmodernized and critical) text. The CEAA decision, therefore, makes
practical sense, particularly if the results of that research are made
available, so that editors who wish to produce different kinds of editions
can take the evidence already amassed and reinterpret it according to
different principles. Here is where the CEAA requirements for apparatus
come in. The Center was again fortunate, at its inception, in having
previous work to turn to, for the Hawthorne
edition provided the obvious example—the work of a nineteenth-century
American figure, edited according to
Greg, and supplied with an appendix containing a list of editorial decisions
as well as a historical record of substantive variants. Recognizing that the
precise form in which this material is to be laid out need not follow that of
the Hawthorne, the CEAA has never prescribed the physical arrangement
of the data; but it has always insisted on the presence of the same categories
of information as are found there, because those categories are essential for
any reader who wishes to reconstruct the copy-text with which the editor
worked and to examine the evidence on which the editor's decisions were
based.
[35] Inevitably the Hawthorne
has served as an influential model in formal matters,
[36] but there is no uniformity among CEAA
editions in the exact forms employed—only in the kinds of material
included.
[37] The practice of the
Hawthorne in presenting so-called "clear text"—pages of text entirely
free of editorial apparatus—has been of particular importance. While the
CEAA
Statement does not insist on clear text, it strongly
urges the use of clear text whenever feasible (there are some kinds of
material—especially those not intended for publication, such as letters or
journals—for which clear text may be impractical or even
misleading);
[38] and most of the CEAA
volumes have in fact presented clear text. The decisions of the CEAA, in
regard to editorial theory
and to apparatus, were prudent ones, both in the historical sense that they
took advantage of the most advanced current thinking and in the more
practical sense that they allowed for maximum future use of the
material—since they resulted in basic scholar's editions, which at the
same time contained easily readable texts that could be reproduced
photographically in paperback and other editions and which offered the
evidence that could be utilized by other editors in re-editing the text along
different lines.
What emerges from all this is the fact that the CEAA does not regard
the editions it approves as the only respectable or desirable editions of those
works that are possible. After all, its seal reads "An Approved Text," not
"The Approved Text"—which can be taken as implying two possibilities:
first, since emendations are based on the editor's judgment, another editor,
still aiming at an unmodernized critical text and following Greg's theory,
may arrive at different judgments and may therefore conceivably produce
another "approved text," even under the same general guidelines; second,
since a CEAA text is one particular kind of text, the existence of a CEAA
text of a work does not preclude the possibility that another kind of text
might be worthy of approval for other purposes.[39] What is now referred to as a "CEAA
edition," then, is the specific combination of two elements—a text edited
according to Greg's theory, combined with an apparatus
providing the essential evidence for examining the editor's decisions.[40] In a paper presented in 1968 on the
occasion of
the publication of
The Marble Faun in the Hawthorne edition,
Bowers undertook to define the relationship between a "CEAA edition" and
the kinds of editions commonly encountered in classroom use.
[41] The first he called a "definitive edition,"
which "establishes with absolute accuracy the exact documentary forms of
all authoritative early texts of the work being edited" (p. 52), presents in
lists "the concrete evidence on which the establishment of the text has
rested" (p. 54), and offers a text reflecting "the author's final intentions
insofar as these can be recovered by systematic, principled selection from
among the variants of different authoritative forms of the text, supplemented
by editorial emendation" (p. 54). The research required for this kind of
edition is time-consuming and is carried through without regard for
financial return, whereas the editions usually circulated among students and
the general public are commercial products, in
the preparation of which the factor of expense has to be taken into account.
The latter are "practical editions," which "present to a broad audience as
sound a text (usually modernized and at a minimum price) as is consistent
with information that may be procurable through normal scholarly channels
and thus without more special
research than is economically feasible" (p. 26). Practical editions, while
useful in the absence of more scholarly editions, clearly represent a
compromise, and better practical editions can come only as more "definitive
editions" are produced to serve as the source of information for them. The
CEAA, it is true, is supporting work principally on only one carefully
defined kind of edition—but one that provides the materials basic to other
kinds of editions, if they are to be reliable. By focusing on these basic
editions and at the same time encouraging the use of clear text and the
photographic reproduction of these texts by other publishers, the CEAA is
accommodating both the needs of scholars and the long-range interests of
the general reading public.
Of course, some people may feel that it is proper for the CEAA to
support basic scholarly editions without believing that Greg's theory (or,
perhaps, any other single theory) ought to be the required approach, and
they may be inclined to think that such a requirement contradicts the
freedom from dogmatism which Greg himself emphasized. This position,
however, involves several confusions. To begin with, any standard against
which performance is measured must inevitably be dogmatic to the extent
that it asserts a particular position, and the CEAA cannot avoid taking a
position if it is to attempt to control the quality of work performed under
its auspices or published with its endorsement. But that kind of dogmatism,
if it can be called such, is an entirely different matter from the dogmatism,
or lack of dogmatism, of the position actually taken. Since Greg's approach
allows for the operation of individual judgment (providing a dogmatic, or
arbitrary, rule only when there is no
basis for rational judgment) and since the CEAA has adopted Greg's
approach, it follows that the CEAA's dogmatism amounts only to insisting
on an approach which in itself minimizes the role of mechanical rules and
maximizes that of critical judgment.
Furthermore, whatever rigidity there is in the adoption of a single
approach is reduced by the inclusion, in CEAA editions, of the materials
out of which texts based on other approaches can be prepared. To call these
editions "definitive" may sound dogmatic, but Bowers's definition makes
clear that "definitive edition" has come to be a technical term, referring to
an edition which includes a text prepared in a particular way along with an
apparatus containing certain information. The word "definitive" has
undoubtedly been used too freely and unthinkingly and may even at times
have been applied loosely, though still incorrectly, to a critical
text rather than an edition. If a critical text depends
on editorial judgment and critical perception, it cannot
be definitive in itself, for judgments and perceptions are always, at least to
some extent, arguable. But such a text can be based on a definitive
assemblage of relevant material, on painstaking research which, if done
properly, does not have to be repeated.
[42] No serious student of literature would
wish to put a stop to the endless process of rethinking the nuances of a text;
but none would desire to repeat the process of accumulating the factual
evidence necessary as background for informed judgment if that process had
already been satisfactorily completed. A so-called "definitive edition" thus
achieves its status through the inclusion of a definitive apparatus; the text
presented in such an edition commands respect, because of the thoroughness
of the research involved, but it cannot be regarded as the element of the
edition which justifies the appellation "definitive." Confusion has arisen
because the word "edition" sometimes is used to mean simply "a
text" and sometimes refers to a text and its appurtenances. The CEAA, with
its dual focus on a rationale for editing and a rationale for presenting
evidence, has clearly been aware of these problems and has obviously
recognized in its requirements the desirability of encouraging critical
thinking about a text by providing the reader with the basic factual
information necessary for such thinking. The CEAA's use of Greg's theory,
therefore, has perpetuated Greg's recognition of editing as an activity of
informed criticism.
