University of Virginia Library

Greg's Theory of Copy-Text and the Editing of American Literature
by
G. Thomas Tanselle

Although the editing of literary texts has long been regarded as one of the basic tasks of literary scholars, I think it can be said that in the last fifteen years an unusual amount of scholarly attention has been directed toward editing and editorial theory. The situation is particularly striking in the field of American literature, for these years have witnessed the development of a coordinated effort—on a scale rare in scholarly endeavor generally and unparalleled in the editing of literature in English—to produce full-scale editions of most of the major (and several other important) nineteenth-century American writers. The need for reliable editions of the principal American figures had been given official recognition much earlier, when the American Literature Group of the Modern Language Association of America established—in 1947-48—a Committee on Definitive Editions, with Willard Thorp as chairman. Although that committee was unsuccessful in securing financial support for such editions, it laid the groundwork for continued discussion, which, after two conferences in 1962, resulted in the establishment in 1963 of the Center for Editions of American Authors. Since that time the Center has coordinated the work on fourteen editions[1] and since 1966 has allocated funds amounting to more than one and a half million dollars, provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities of the National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities. (In addition, many universities and university presses, as well as the Office of Education of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, have helped with individual editions.) As a result, more than one

hundred volumes have now been completed, and others are in various stages of preparation.[2]

The fact that an accomplishment of such magnitude, involving the cooperation of more than two hundred scholars, could be produced in little more than a decade of concentrated work—to say nothing of the existence of the Center as an official committee of the MLA or of its support by public funds—suggests a widespread recognition of the importance of the whole undertaking. This is not to say, however, that there is any unanimity of opinion as to the precise editorial principles which ought to be followed, and the CEAA editions have been the subject of a considerable number of critical attacks, directed both to particular editions and to general matters of policy. Now one of the unusual features of the CEAA as a scholarly coordinating committee is that it has insisted, from the beginning, that certain editorial principles be followed in any edition that is to be associated with it and receive its approval. To this end, it has established a seal to be printed in every volume which meets the requirements, certifying that the text is "An Approved Text" of the CEAA. The administration of this plan obviously involves the pre-publication inspection of each text by an examiner appointed by the Center, and the result is that any reader who sees the CEAA seal on a volume knows that its text has been prepared in conformity with a set of carefully defined guidelines, relating not only to editorial theory but to the practicalities of setting forth evidence and of proofreading as well. In essence, the editorial principles of the CEAA—set forth in its Statement of Editorial Principles and Procedures (originally published in 1967 and revised in 1972) —are those enunciated by W. W. Greg in his famous paper for the 1949 English Institute, "The Rationale of Copy-Text." Although he was talking specifically about English dramatic literature of the Renaissance, his discussion raised basic questions applicable to editorial theory in general, and his "rationale" has since been adopted by

various editors working in later periods of English literature as well as in American literature. But some scholars have questioned the applicability of Greg's principles to later literature and have thus questioned the wisdom of the CEAA requirements descended from Greg.

The time now seems appropriate—since both the CEAA and its critics have a substantial amount of material in print—to review the phenomenon of this debate.[3] Certainly the existence and the accomplishment of the CEAA as an institution constitute a phenomenon unique in the history of literary scholarship in English; but the response to the CEAA also is phenomenal in the amount of critical notice which it has bestowed on editorial and textual concerns. The controversy has doubtless caused people who normally pay little attention to editing to focus on some of the problems involved in editorial work, and as a result editing may have moved somewhat nearer to being a matter of vital concern to the scholarly literary world at large. Even if the tone of some of the discussion has served as a poor introduction to scholarly debate in this area, the fact remains that a number of respected figures have raised objections on matters of principle, and their criticisms deserve to be given serious attention. Sometimes, as it happens, their comments prove to be beside the point because of a misconception as to the nature of Greg's rationale or of its use by the CEAA; but some legitimate issues, worthy of continuing scrutiny, are raised in the process. An analysis of these discussions, it seems to me, must begin with a re-examination of Greg's seminal essay. By this time, that essay has reached the status of a classic; and, like any classic statement, it has so frequently been adduced to support or refute particular arguments that renewed exegesis of the document itself seems called for periodically. An understanding of exactly what Greg said is a prerequisite for examining, first, what application of his principles the CEAA stands for and, second, what criticisms of his and the CEAA's position have been put forth. In such an examination, it is important always to distinguish between theoretical and practical concerns. Criticisms on either level demand careful attention, but it is no aid to orderly thinking to treat purely practical questions as if they involved theoretical issues. I hope that these notes can begin to clarify the context within which each of the arguments must be judged and can thus help to provide a perspective from which the whole controversy can profitably be viewed.

I

Greg's contribution to the 1949 session of the English Institute, "The Rationale of Copy-Text"—read for Greg by J. M. Osborn on 8 September 1949—was first published in the third (1950-51) volume of Studies in Bibliography (pp. 19-36). (There is a certain appropriateness, therefore, in re-examining the essay, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of its original appearance, in the pages of the same journal.) Since that time it has been republished in the posthumous volume of Greg's Collected Papers (1966), edited by J. C. Maxwell, who incorporated into its text a few minor revisions and a new footnote, as indicated by Greg in his working papers.[4] The essay is not long or complicated and is expressed with Greg's usual clarity. That such an essay should have given rise to so much discussion, and even controversy, is not surprising, however, for it has the kind of simplicity frequently characteristic of great concepts—a sweeping simplicity that results from having penetrated beyond peripheral complexities and arrived at the heart of a problem. Just as it is not easy to achieve such simplicity, neither is it always easy for others to follow or accept it.

Greg begins by referring to the first use of the term "copy-text"—by R. B. McKerrow in 1904 in his edition of Nashe—and sketches the history of the idea of "the most authoritative text"; it is evident, from this kind of beginning and from later references to McKerrow's and his own changes of position, that he is presenting his ideas on copy-text as the outgrowth of an evolving train of thought extending back over many years. Indeed, his opening paragraph says nothing about putting forth a new theory but only that he wishes to consider the "conception" and "implications" of a change in McKerrow's position. Although he soon admits (p. 377) that he is drawing a distinction which "has not been generally recognized," his emphasis is not on the

novelty of his contribution but rather on the way in which it seems but a natural step in the line of thinking already pursued both by him and by McKerrow. In effect he is saying that he has finally come to recognize something which he had overlooked earlier and something toward which McKerrow had gradually been moving.

It is important to notice the historical framework of Greg's essay: for Greg, stepping into the discussion at a particular point in its development, accepts without further analysis certain ideas about scholarly editing—two in particular—which he feels have already been adequately established. First, he makes clear that he rejects "purely eclectic methods," in which an editor has no restraints placed on his freedom to choose among variant readings on the basis of his subjective judgments of their aesthetic appropriateness; the "genealogical method," developed by Lachmann and his successors in the nineteenth century, was, he says, "the greatest advance ever made in this field," because it provided a more objective basis for preferring one text over another. McKerrow's concept of "copy-text"—taking the term to mean, in Greg's words, "that early text of a work which an editor selected as the basis of his own"—is clearly placed in the context of the genealogical method, for it implies that an editor has determined, through genealogical analysis, the "most authoritative text" and therefore the one to which his own text should adhere. By introducing Housman's criticism of the mechanical application of this procedure (the fallacy of believing that the readings of the "authoritative text" which are not manifestly impossible are in fact correct), Greg suggests the direction in which his argument is to move. But he sees no necessity to argue the general superiority of genealogical methods over eclectic ones; at mid-twentieth century this superiority can simply be asserted. A second assumption is that one can reject without discussion the notion of choosing the last edition published during the author's lifetime as the most authoritative. Placing his comment in a footnote—and in the past tense—to suggest how little attention the idea deserves, Greg says, "I have above ignored the practice of some eccentric editors who took as copy-text for a work the latest edition printed in the author's lifetime, on the assumption, presumably, that he revised each edition as it appeared. The textual results were naturally deplorable" (p. 378). Obviously Greg is not saying that one should ignore late revisions which one has reason to think are authorial; but, he is implying, it is no longer necessary to bother refuting the assumption that the last edition in the author's lifetime is automatically the most authoritative.

Without going over ground which he regards as already established,

then, Greg begins to reflect on current editorial practice and observes that the situation facing editors of English texts is different from that facing editors of classical texts, since the preference for "old-spelling" editions is now "prevalent among English scholars," whereas editors of classical texts normalize the spelling. Greg explicitly says that he does not wish to argue the virtues of old-spelling editions but accepts this "prevalent" view—that is to say, he accepts the view that editions of English works for scholars' use should not involve normalized or modernized spelling and punctuation. It should be clear, therefore, that his essay deals with one particular, if basic, kind of edition and implies nothing about the relative merits of modernized editions for other purposes—a point sometimes overlooked. If the editor of English texts properly follows the general tradition of the genealogical method inaugurated by classical editors, and if he must be concerned with the spelling and punctuation of his text in a way different from classical editors, it follows that his conception of copy-text must contain an additional element. In fact, viewed in this way, as Greg says, "the classical theory of the 'best' or 'most authoritative' manuscript . . . has really nothing to do with the English theory of 'copy-text' at all" (p. 375)—because, under the classical theory, the spelling and punctuation are not involved in selecting the copy-text.

By the beginning of the fourth paragraph of his essay, Greg has led the reader, with astonishing ease, to see the current situation in English editing against the background of its development and to anticipate the distinction he is about to set forth between, on the one hand, spelling and punctuation, and, on the other, the words themselves. The rhetorical strategy of the essay demands proceeding explicitly to make this distinction before returning to an examination of McKerrow's changing position (which thereby takes on a new dimension), and this remarkable fourth paragraph (pp. 375-377) contains the essence of what is now referred to as "Greg's theory of copy-text." First of all, it makes the point that an old-spelling edition must rely on some contemporary document, for the "philological difficulties" of attempting to recreate or establish spellings for a particular author at a particular time and place are overwhelming. Second, in view of this practical necessity, it says, one must distinguish between the actual words of a text and their spelling and punctuation:

The explicit separation of these classes for separate editorial treatment is one of Greg's key contributions; the third major point of the paragraph is what that separate treatment amounts to. Separate treatment is justified, the argument goes, because copyists and compositors are known to treat the two categories differently; since they generally attempt to reproduce accurately the substantives of their copy but frequently are guided by their own preferences in matters of accidentals, it follows that later transcripts of a work may depart considerably from earlier ones in accidentals and at the same time be very close to them in substantives. What an editor should do, therefore, as a practical routine, is first to determine the early text which is to be his copy-text; then, Greg says, In other words, because a copyist or a compositor reproduces substantives more faithfully than accidentals, substantive variants in later transcripts or editions are more likely to be worth editorial consideration as possible authorial revisions than are variants in accidentals.

Now a few observations are worth making in regard to what Greg does and does not say in this statement of his "theory"—particularly as an anticipation of some of the points which, as we shall see, have been raised in recent years. To begin with, while the terms "substantive" and "accidental" are not very happy choices,[5] what is crucial to

the theory is the distinction itself, and one should not be distracted from it by other associations which these words have. The terms have by now become so well established in editorial commentary that it would be foolish to attempt to change them, even though their use tends unfortunately to give the impression to the general reader that editing involves an arcane vocabulary and mysterious concepts. The situation is ironic because Greg did not pretend to be dealing with any abstruse concepts: he merely hoped that these two words could serve as a shorthand means for making a distinction between what are popularly regarded as content and form in verbal expression, a distinction with which everyone, in one way or another, has come in contact. Indeed, he goes out of his way to emphasize the fact that he is not setting forth a philosophical theory about the nature of language but is only drawing a practical distinction for use in the business of editing.[6] Naturally he is aware that content and form are never completely separable and that the line separating meaning and formal presentation in written language is not distinct (and philosophically raises complex issues); but for his purposes it is enough to append a footnote (p. 376) acknowledging "an intermediate class of word-forms about the assignment of which opinions may differ and which may have to be treated differently in dealing with the work of different scribes." Since the purpose of the substantive-accidental division is to assist the editor in deciding what variants in a text can reasonably be attributed to the copyist or compositor rather than the author, the focus is pragmatic—on the habits of individuals—and Greg is therefore more concerned with providing a suggestive approach, which can be used with flexibility to meet various situations, than in defining as philosophic concepts two mutually exclusive terms. The procedural recommendation which concludes Greg's paragraph is similarly couched in practical, and flexible, terms: the reason for selecting a copy-text in the first place is the limited nature of historical knowledge about accidentals (the copy-text is selected "on grounds of expediency, and in consequence either of philological ignorance or of linguistic circumstances"), and therefore one should follow the copy-text in regard to accidentals—but "within reason." This last phrase underscores Greg's approach: one follows the "theory" when there is no persuasive reason for doing otherwise, but when one has reason to depart from it, a rigid application of it would be foolish. Because the editor generally has fewer means for rationally determining authorial readings in accidentals than in substantives, he generally follows the copy-text in accidentals; but Greg is not asking him to fly in the face of reason by adhering to this procedure in situations which are exceptions to the generalization. Nowhere does Greg claim that following his rationale will invariably produce "correct" readings; what he suggests is that it offers the safest approach when one has otherwise no particular reason for choosing one reading over another as authorial. The theory clearly is one of expediency.

The skillful organization of Greg's essay is nowhere better exemplified than in his return to the subject of McKerrow in the pages following this basic exposition of his theory. The rigidity of McKerrow's approach is the more evident in contrast, and the reader is now in a position to see its limitations; at the same time he recognizes how Greg's ideas developed from McKerrow's and how McKerrow was on the verge of the same insight as Greg. In the 1904 Nashe (which Greg quotes), McKerrow had held firmly to the view that an editor should take as his copy-text the latest edition which could convincingly be shown to contain authorial revisions; so long as some of the variants in that edition were authorial, all its readings should be accepted (since conceivably they could all be authorial), except when they were obviously impossible. McKerrow allowed for some editorial discretion in the determination of what was obviously impossible, but in general he was determined to preserve the "integrity" of individual texts. But by 1939, when he published his Prolegomena for the Oxford Shakespeare, he had come to believe that a later edition, even one with authorial revisions, should not serve as copy-text, for—with the exception of those revisions—it would be less likely to reflect the author's manuscript than an earlier edition, which stood that much closer to the manuscript. He thus understood, without explicitly stating, something very close to the distinction between substantives and accidentals, since he now believed that the edition closest to the manuscript preserved the general texture of the work better than later editions and that authorial revisions should be incorporated into the text of that edition. Although this position represented a considerable move away

from his earlier fear of eclecticism,[7] he was still not ready to allow an editor to combine readings from more than two editions. When the editor believed a particular edition to contain authorial revisions, he said, all the variants in that edition "which could not reasonably be attributed to an ordinary press-corrector" (that is, in general, all the substantive variants) must be accepted into the copy-text. By the time of his death, therefore, McKerrow was well on his way to the position finally advanced by Greg,[8] the essential difference between the two being in the amount of responsibility given to editorial judgment. For McKerrow, the editor uses his judgment in determining what edition should be copy-text, what edition, if any, contains authorial revisions, and what readings are impossible, but he cannot go further and reject some of the variants in that authorially revised edition as not authorial.[9] For Greg, the editor who has already made certain basic decisions should be allowed to go on and choose among the possibly authorial variants. The effort to eliminate as much editorial decision as possible, he believes, is misguided: Again Greg's emphasis is on the use of reason and discretion, as it is in the brief summary which follows immediately: "the copy-text should govern (generally) in the matter of accidentals, but . . . the choice between substantive readings belongs to the general theory of textual criticism and lies altogether beyond the narrow principle of the copy-text" (pp. 381-382). Greg is careful here to insert a qualifying adverb even in the first part of his statement, which deals with accidentals and thus the more mechanical part of his theory; but in the second part he makes clear that the handling of substantive variants is a matter of critical judgment and cannot be regarded as mechanical in any sense. Not to recognize that substantives and accidentals must be treated in different ways, he points out, has led in the past to a "tyranny of the copy-text"—a tyranny because its readings were thrust on the editor, without the benefit of his critical thinking about their merits.

The remainder of Greg's essay, amounting to about half of it, consists of illustrative examples and discussions of particular problems in the application of the theory but does not add any essential point to the basic idea set forth economically in the first half. After citing examples from F. S. Boas's edition (1932) of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus and Percy Simpson's edition (1941) of Jonson's The Gipsies Metamorphosed to show the operation of the "tyranny of the copy-text,"[10] Greg provides a second brief recapitulation of his rationale (pp. 384-385), reiterating the limitations of mechanical rules and concentrating on the nature of the editorial judgment required for dealing with substantive variants. That judgment depends partly on an evaluation of the circumstances of the production of the editions in which those variants appear and partly on the relative reliability of those editions

as suggested by the number of "manifest errors" in them; but the heart of the matter is the editor's evaluation of particular variants in terms of "the likelihood of their being what the author wrote rather than their appeal to the individual taste of the editor" (p. 385). Then, to provide more practical help, Greg expands on three points already introduced. First, he suggests that an editor may legitimately decide to alter some of the accidentals of the copy-text and thus provides a gloss on the expressions "within reason" and "generally" which he had inserted parenthetically in his earlier statements about following the accidentals of the copy-text. Spelling or punctuation known to be at variance with the author's can be altered, for instance, and, when substantive emendations are made on the basis of later texts, the spelling of such words can be made to conform with the habitual spelling (if there is one) of the copy-text. Second, he restates in somewhat more detail his belief that an editor should not accept from an authorially revised edition any substantive variant that seems obviously incorrect, that seems not to be a reading which the author would have inserted, or that seems completely indifferent. The latter point illustrates once again the expedient nature of what Greg is proposing: if a variant appears so indifferent to the editor that he has no basis for arguing either for or against its adoption, then he simply follows the copy-text reading as a practical means for deciding what to do. "In such a case," Greg points out, "while there can be no logical reason for giving preference to the copy-text, in practice, if there is no reason for altering its reading, the obvious thing seems to be to let it stand" (p. 386). Third, he makes explicit (pp. 389-390) what was only implied before, that the choice of copy-text itself varies with circumstances and that situations arise in which one must choose a revised edition as copy-text, as when an author is thought to have overseen a revised edition so carefully that its accidentals as well as its substantives must be taken to carry his approval, or when revision is so complex or pervasive that it is not meaningful to think in terms of emending the unrevised text with later readings (Every Man in His Humour, Richard III, and King Lear are cited).

In connection with all three of these points Greg again defends the use of editorial judgment. When discussing the first he says, "These [decisions to alter accidentals], however, are all matters within the discretion of an editor: I am only concerned to uphold his liberty of judgement" (p. 386). In his discussion of substantives he repeats the view emphatically:

And in the third instance, dealing with the choice of copy-text, he states that no "hard and fast rule" can be laid down but that, whatever text is chosen, the editor "cannot escape the responsibility of distinguishing to the best of his ability" between authorial revision and "unauthorized variation": "No juggling with copy-text will relieve him of the duty and necessity of exercising his own judgement" (p. 390). This sentiment is clearly the dominant motif of the essay; if McKerrow had been reacting against nineteenth-century eclecticism in restricting the role of editorial judgment, Greg is here turning toward more reliance on judgment, but within a framework that does not encourage undisciplined eclecticism. It is in keeping with his approach throughout that Greg ends by saying, "My desire is rather to provoke discussion than to lay down the law."

I hope that my account of Greg's essay, by its very repetitiousness, has shown that the essay itself consists of repeated statements of a simple idea. Three times he presents a concise summary of his theory followed by a discussion of particular points implied by it, as if he were turning over an object in his hand, focusing his attention alternately on the piece as a whole and on certain of its details. The simplicity of his proposal is certainly one of its most remarkable features and is a natural result of the emphasis on individual judgment, for a methodology inevitably becomes more complicated the more one tries to substitute rules for judgment in the handling of the various situations that may arise. In somewhat blunt language, Greg's theory amounts to this: it tells the editor what to do when he otherwise does not know what to do. If he does know otherwise—that is, if his analysis of all available external and internal evidence (including, of course, his own intimate knowledge of the author and the period) convinces him that a particular text comes closest in all respects to the author's wishes or that a particular variant is the author's revision—then he does not need further guidance. But when there remains a doubt in his mind, after thorough analysis, about whether, for example, the author gave close attention to the punctuation of a revised edition or

whether a particular altered wording, in a text which contains many clearly authorial revisions, was the author's, the editor does need further help, since he has gone as far as reasoning can take him and the results are inconclusive. All that Greg suggests, in effect, is that the editor can most sensibly extricate himself from this situation by keeping two points in mind: (1) successive editions based on earlier editions become increasingly divergent from the earliest edition in the sequence, particularly in such matters as punctuation and spelling, not merely through carelessness but through the natural tendency of compositors to utilize their own habitual forms; (2) when an author makes revisions in a later edition, he may be likely to give considerably less attention to spelling and punctuation than to the words themselves, and even some of the differences in wording in a revised edition may in fact result from the process of resetting rather than from the author's revision. It follows that the editor who chooses the edition closest to the author's manuscript as his copy-text when he does not have strong reason for choosing a later one, and who follows the readings of that copy-text when he does not have strong reason to believe them erroneous or to believe that a later variant in wording (or, more rarely, in punctuation or spelling) is the author's—that such an editor is maximizing his chances of incorporating the author's intended readings in his text. No one would claim—and Greg specifically does not—that this procedure always results in the correct choices, but it tells an editor how to proceed when he most needs such advice (when he has exhausted the available evidence without reaching a decision) and it is more satisfying than tossing a coin (since there is at least a rationale involved, based on a generalization about the incidence of human error and the behavior of human beings in dealing with written language). The fundamental common sense of this approach can be seen foreshadowed in Samuel Johnson's comments on the editing of Shakespeare, when he says that "though much credit is not due to the fidelity, nor any to the judgement of the first publishers, yet they who had the copy before their eyes were more likely to read it right, than we who read it only by imagination."[11] The probabilities favor the correctness of the first edition, and it makes sense to rely on that edition except when there is compelling evidence for not doing so.

Expressed in this way—which emphasizes the flexibility and lack of dogmatism basic to Greg's position—this "rationale of copy-text" would seem to apply to all situations. But it is important to raise the

question of its universality, for Greg's primary interest, after all, was in the printed drama of the English Renaissance, and all his illustrations are taken from that literature. Did he believe that his rationale was more widely applicable? He was dealing with a period from which relatively few manuscripts have survived, but can the same procedure be applied to texts for which manuscripts do survive? He was working with a period in which greater variations in spelling were tolerable than in later times and in which any editorial supervision of a printed text normally occurred in the printing shop rather than, as later, in the publisher's office with its more highly developed editorial routine; but can Greg's rationale be applied to the products which emerged from the very different publishing circumstances of later periods? Greg's own answer to these questions, I think it can be plainly inferred from his essay, would be Yes. It is true that he limits himself in his illustrations to the field he knows best and limits his more abstract discussion for the most part to printed books, but there are indications that he is thinking in broader terms. For example, in that crucial fourth paragraph, distinguishing substantives and accidentals, he twice refers to "scribes" and "compositors" simultaneously, suggesting that the way human beings react to the two categories is the same regardless of whether they are copying by hand or setting type. He goes on, in the paragraph which follows, to restrict himself to printed books for the historical reason that "the idea of copy-text originated and has generally been applied in connexion with the editing of printed books" (p. 378). The focus of the essay, it must be remembered, is historical: a new approach to editing is set forth as a corrective to what had been developing over the previous century. Since the principal developments in editorial theory had taken place in connection with the editing of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, it was natural that he should set forth his criticisms of current procedure with reference to the same field—and convenient, also, since that was his own area of competence. But he clearly implies that he is dealing with a larger principle that could be illustrated in other ways than the one he has chosen. Indeed, he suggests that the editors he is criticizing might have taken a different approach if they had been more familiar with the problems of variation in works transmitted in manuscript. And then he adds: The implication certainly is that he is concerned with a basic concept[12] which might not be clear to one who has dealt only with a particular class of problems. And while his illustrations come from Renaissance drama, some of them do involve authorial proof-correction (Every Man in His Humour) and revised editions incorporating corrections derived from authorial manuscript (Richard III and King Lear). In any event, his whole approach, stressing expediency and judgment, suggests that he thinks of his procedure as one capable of fitting widely varied situations. When an editor judges that he has sufficient evidence for proceeding in a particular way, he has no need for a plan of expediency; but a lack of sufficient evidence is a common occurrence in dealing with works of every period, and Greg's rationale commands respect in such situations because it is based on what observation shows to be characteristic human behavior. If I have set forth accurately here what Greg says, then it would appear to be a self-evident proposition that his recommended procedure would serve in handling editorial problems involving manuscripts as well as printed books, arising in twentieth-century literature as well as sixteenth.

There is one kind of editorial problem, however, which clearly lies outside the scope of Greg's essay. To place presumptive authority for accidentals, as a general rule, in the edition closest to the author's manuscript presupposes an ancestral series, in which the line of editions—with each edition based (for the most part, at least) on preceding ones—leads back to the manuscript. Although some of Greg's examples involve complicated variations (such as the revisions incorporated in the folio text of Every Man in His Humour), in which a later edition is chosen as copy-text because of the extent and nature of fresh authority (authorial revision or recourse to authorial manuscripts), those examples do not include situations in which two or more texts stand in exactly the same genealogical relationship to a lost ancestor, with no earlier texts surviving. In such a case, Greg's approach offers no help in selecting a copy-text, for no one of these texts is nearer the manuscript (or the antecedent text) than any other. The inapplicability of Greg's rationale to this kind of situation is obvious,

once it is pointed out, but it has only recently been examined in detail. Fredson Bowers was confronted with the problem in editing Stephen Crane's syndicated newspaper pieces: the variant texts of a given piece, as they appeared in various newspapers, are all equidistant from the syndicate's proofs which had been sent to those newspapers; in the absence of the proofs, the editor is faced with several texts, any one of which could be chosen as copy-text under Greg's rationale. The solution, as Bowers sets it forth in "Multiple Authority: New Problems and Concepts of Copy-Text,"[13] is to combine the features of these "radiating texts," as he calls them, through a statistical and critical analysis of the variants. In effect, one has to construct a copy-text, and the more surviving texts there are the more accurately can the common ancestor (the lost syndicate proof) be reconstructed. From that point on, naturally, Greg's rationale takes over, and the text thus constructed may be emended with variants from later printings, as may happen with an ordinary copy-text. The essential difference is that, in the case of radiating texts, no one document can serve as copy-text, for no one of the radiating texts can be presumed to have reproduced the accidentals of the syndicate proof more accurately than another. Bowers's detailed exposition of his solution therefore becomes a major supplement to Greg; his essay—which incidentally offers an extremely useful statement of Greg's position—deserves to be taken as a companion piece to Greg's "Rationale," and the two essays together provide a comprehensive editorial theory.

Bowers's discussion of radiating texts, in other words, does not invalidate Greg's theory in any sense, but it does show one respect in which that theory is not all-encompassing. No comparable supplement to Greg's theory has been made in the twenty-five years since its first

appearance, though many questions have been raised. But these questions (such as the extent to which the idiosyncrasies of nineteenth- or twentieth-century authors' manuscripts should be preserved in print), often interesting in themselves, involve matters of editorial judgment, not the basic theory. It is unfortunately true that such questions have frequently been posed as an attack on the theory; and the failure to distinguish between the theory itself and the individual decisions of editors who are following the theory has rendered much of the discussion less useful than it might have been, if not wholly beside the point. My own summary of Greg in these pages has tried to emphasize those elements of his essay which anticipate the later criticisms. Seemingly it takes many words to explain something which is simple and many assertions to proclaim lack of dogmatism; but the simplicity and lack of dogmatism of Greg's rationale have apparently not been perceived by a number of people, for many of their criticisms are undercut by a recognition of those qualities. A renewed close examination of Greg's essay does not suggest to me any reason to question Bowers's description of its thesis as "the great contribution of this century to textual criticism."[14]

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.

III

When one understands Greg's theory and the CEAA's implementation of it, one cannot help regarding many of the recent discussions (both favorable and unfavorable) of this joint subject as naïve and parochial, and frequently as uninformed or misinformed.[43] A few,

however, do raise important issues, and it is regrettable that a survey of these discussions must begin with one of so little substance as that of Edmund Wilson. In a two-part article entitled "The Fruits of the MLA," published in the New York Review of Books on 26 September and 10 October 1968, Wilson offered what can only be called an ill-tempered and incoherent attack on the CEAA editions, making references to six volumes ostensibly under review;[44] in December of that year the article, with a postscript commenting on some of the correspondence provoked by it,[45] was published in pamphlet form as "A New York Review Book," and in 1973 it was collected into the posthumous volume The Devils and Canon Barham (pp. 154-202), edited by Leon Edel.[46] Because of Wilson's stature, this article has received a considerable amount of attention and will continue to have an audience in the future as part of his collected essays; if it had been written by a lesser figure, however, its obvious motivation and manifest confusion would have prevented its being taken seriously. Wilson makes transparent his motive for discrediting the CEAA editions by quoting, at the start, a letter he had written to Jason Epstein in 1962 setting forth the idea of "bringing out in a complete and compact form the principal American classics," based on "the example of the Editions de la Pléiade" (pp. 155-156); this undertaking he had hoped would be supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, but the MLA, he says, "had a project of its own for reprinting the American classics and had apparently had ours suppressed" (p. 159).[47] Thus determined to find fault with the results of the MLA project, Wilson never addresses himself to the basic editorial rationale (that is, to Greg's theory) but instead is content to ridicule such matters as the laboriousness of the research involved, the extent of the apparatus, and the physical size of the volumes. The article is, uncharacteristically, full of confusions, if not inconsistencies,[48] the most egregious perhaps being his professed admiration for a "sound and full text" (p. 157) combined with his view that collation is unrewarding if it does not uncover "serious suppressions and distortions" (p. 161) or interesting variants ("the scrutinizing of variants may, in some cases, be of interest," p. 172). What Wilson is unwilling to acknowledge is that the CEAA's concern extends beyond a scholarly audience to the general public: the CEAA, he says, is "directing a republication of our classics which is not only, for the most part, ill-judged and quite sterile in itself but even obstructive to their republication in any other form" (p. 190). He fails to note that the pages of text, unencumbered in most cases by editorial intrusions, are suitable for photographic reproduction in volumes more convenient to hold and that the apparatus (which, admittedly, helps to make some of the volumes cumbersome), rather than being "sterile," may serve to generate other editions, based on differing evaluations of the evidence—or at least to encourage analysis of the editor's judgments. Wilson's piece scarcely demands any reply, but the celebrity it achieved caused the MLA to feel that some sort of official notice was appropriate, and in March of 1969 the MLA published a pamphlet entitled Professional Standards and American Editions: A Response to Edmund Wilson, containing two accounts of the history and aims of the CEAA, by William M. Gibson and John H. Fisher, along with letters from five scholars enumerating errors or confusions in Wilson's remarks.[49] Actually, all that was necessary, if a reply was to be made, was Gordon Ray's brief comment which stands as the epigraph to the pamphlet. Recognizing that "this attack derives in part from the alarm of amateurs at seeing rigorous professional standards applied to a subject in which they have a vested interest" (and thus recognizing the attraction which Wilson's position had for a number of people one might have expected to see through it),[50] Ray observes, "As the American learned world has come to full maturity since the second World War, a similar animus has shown itself and been discredited in field after field from botany to folklore. In the long run professional standards always prevail."

In contrast to Wilson's article, which makes no reference to Greg's theory, two brief essays which appeared soon after it—the work of Paul Baender and Donald Pizer—do raise questions directly about the applicability and usefulness of Greg's "Rationale." Although each of these essays is weakened by a partial misunderstanding of Greg, they at least raise issues the discussion of which may serve to clarify certain points in some people's minds. Baender, an editor associated with a CEAA edition, published in 1969 a note entitled "The Meaning of Copy-Text,"[51] which asserts that the term has become "ambiguous and misleading," principally for two reasons: first, that it is a "banner word" which "tends toward the superlative" and which thus implies "authority beyond its denotation, as though the term itself ratified an editor's choice of text"; second, that it is "not suited to the full range and complexity of editorial problems" (p. 312). The first point has nothing to do with the word "copy-text" or the concept but only with unscholarly reactions to it—unscholarly because they depend on the "prestige" (as Baender calls it) of the term rather than the arguments lying behind it. The second is of more consequence but is based on an oversimplification and distortion of Greg's position. If it were accurate to say flatly that Greg's theory is eclectic with respect to substantives but maintains "a single-text criterion" with respect to accidentals (p. 314), or if it were fair to suggest that its application to situations involving prepublication texts results in "another stage for a retrogressive pursuit of copy-text" (p. 316), then one would have grounds for claiming that it is "not suited to the full range and complexity of editorial problems." But nothing in Greg's theory, as we have seen, prohibits the emendation of accidentals in the copy-text when one has grounds for doing so; nor is it consistent with his theory to assume that a surviving manuscript must necessarily—regardless of its nature—become copy-text, since he allowed for the possibility that in some

cases a later, rather than an earlier, text is the appropriate choice. One of Baender's illustrations[52] rests on a basic confusion (of which Baender is not alone guilty) between "copy-text" and "printer's copy." Baender cites a situation in which the number of authorial alterations in a later printing makes it more convenient for the editor to use a reproduction of that later printing as the basis for his text, entering onto it the readings of the first printing wherever the later readings are not judged to be authorial. Such a procedure, of course, does not violate Greg's theory (however risky it may be in practical terms, since one is increasing the probability that nonauthorial readings may inadvertently be allowed to remain in the text); but Baender's feeling that one follows the procedure "despite this convention of copy-text" makes clear that he is not focusing on the distinction between "text," meaning a particular arrangement and formal presentation of a group of words, and "printer's copy," meaning a specific physical copy of a text furnished to the printer. Greg's "copy-text" is a "text"—which can exist in more than one physical embodiment (for example, the individual copies of an edition)—and Greg did not comment on the manner in which that text should be reproduced for the use of the compositor who is setting type for the editor's new edition. The CEAA Statement does go on to recommend, for obvious practical reasons, the use of a photographic reproduction of the copy-text as printer's copy; but not to follow this course, whether for convincing or questionable reasons, does not in itself contradict Greg's theory, since no theoretical matter is at issue.[53]

Two years later Donald Pizer raised again,[54] but in broader terms, the question of the applicability of Greg's theory to recent literature

by enumerating five ways "in which copy-text theory is unresponsive to the distinctive qualities of [that is, the historical circumstances lying behind] modern American texts" (p. 148).[55] Although Pizer calls attention to some issues that deserve careful consideration, his article is ineffective as an argument against the general usefulness of Greg's rationale because it fails to distinguish between theoretical and practical concerns and to recognize fully the lack of dogmatism in Greg's approach. The last three of his points are irrelevant to an analysis of Greg's theory—what they are relevant to is a consideration of the particular kind of edition (in the sense of text plus apparatus or other commentary) appropriate for modern (nineteenth- and twentieth-century) American literature. While this subject is of course a legitimate matter for debate, the issue is only confused by the implication that the adoption of Greg's theory determines the nature of the apparatus (or whatever accompanies the text) as well as of the text itself. Thus his third point—that the multiplicity of manuscripts, typescripts, and proofs which survive for some modern works makes the task of recording all variant readings excessively onerous[56] —presupposes that something in that theory of copy-text necessitates a complete record of variants, for he concludes: "the theory of copy-text either hinders the preparation of critical editions or encourages the production, at immense expense, of unusable editions" (p. 151). But whether or not one wishes to follow the practice of CEAA editions in recording variants (and the CEAA does not require as an absolute rule that all pre-copy-text variants be noted in print) has nothing to do with whether or not one edits a text in accordance with Greg's theory; and naturally the job of editing a reliable text is complicated by the survival of numerous documents, for the variants in them must be examined carefully regardless of whether a listing is to be published. Pizer's fifth point is a related one, dealing also with apparatus: he objects to clear text in a "critical edition" because turning to the back of a book to consult the apparatus is more difficult than looking at the foot of a page, and he disapproves specifically of the sections of apparatus which the reader of a CEAA edition must "juggle" (p. 152). The possibility that a more efficient apparatus can be devised is always open; but the plan of the apparatus does not alter the editorial procedure, and a dislike of "the tendency toward clear-text publication" cannot through any argument become an "objection to copy-text theory."[57] The fourth of Pizer's observations amounts to nothing more than the recognition that some editors may choose to edit works which some readers deem unworthy of the effort expended. He speaks of "the absolutism of copy-text procedures"—meaning the uniform treatment of major and minor works—without acknowledging that the decision to edit is a critical evaluation in itself. Not all the CEAA editions are "complete" editions, and those that are reflect—rather than any requirement of Greg's theory—the critical belief that the stature of the authors involved demands full-scale investigation of even their lesser pieces.[58] Very few people (and certainly not the CEAA) would dissent from the view that—since time and money are not unlimited—"practical editions" must suffice for many literary works; but there will never be complete agreement on exactly what works those are.

Pizer's first two objections, in contrast, do raise questions about theory, but not, as he implies, solely about Greg's theory; they are serious questions which any editor must face, whether in the context of Greg's rationale or not. It is Pizer's contention that Greg's theory, by leading an editor normally to adopt the accidentals of a manuscript in preference to those of a first printing, ignores the fact that modern authors sometimes "rely on the taste" of particular publishing-house

editors, who thus "have increasingly participated in the creative process of their authors." He argues, in other words, that an author who expects or encourages certain kinds of alterations to be made in the publisher's offices must be said to prefer or "intend" the resulting text. "If an author," as Pizer concisely puts it, "within such a relationship and for whatever motives, accepts an editorial change or suggestion, his acceptance is the equivalent of a creative act, even though the act is the initial responsibility of an editor" (p. 148). The aim of Greg's theory, with which no scholarly editor would quarrel, is to establish the text which the author intended; and by concentrating on unmodernized texts it aims to establish the author's intended text in respect to accidentals as well as substantives. What constitutes the author's "intention" is of course the crucial question, and in answering it the editor must always depend, to a greater or lesser degree, on his critical insight. It is axiomatic that an author's own statements of his intention, when they exist, do not, for a variety of reasons, necessarily coincide with his actual intention—the only guide to which is the work itself. An author may acquiesce in his publisher's decisions and then rationalize his behavior; or he may genuinely be grateful for changes which make his work, in one way or another, more acceptable (and salable) to the public; or he may approve of alterations in many other kinds of situations—without truly believing that the result quite represents his own style or approach. What appears in a prepublication form of a text is normally a better representation of the author's habits than what appears in a first printing, and the text of a fair-copy manuscript or typescript reflects the author's intention, whether or not it turns out to be his final intention in every respect. It is true, as Pizer says, that choosing "an early copy-text encourages a frame of mind which requires later variants to 'prove themselves' as authorial rather than as editorial or printer's variants" (p. 149); but such would seem to be the safest course in most instances, since the author's responsibility for a later reading—especially in accidentals—is normally less certain than his responsibility for an early one.[59] Of course, such editorial caution may occasionally produce a text reflecting "an author's discarded rather than final intentions," but at least it reflects his, rather than someone else's, intentions. The editor's critical judgment—his literary taste exercised in the light of his intimate knowledge of the author and all known relevant external evidence—must finally determine the case; and there is nothing in Greg's theory to prevent him, on this basis, from deciding that the later variants have indeed "proved themselves." If, however, he starts from the assumption that the author and the publisher's editor are creative collaborators, he will, to be sure, produce an unmodernized text—in the sense that it reflects the author's period—but it may be far from the text which the author wished (finally, or at any other time).[60]

This question leads to a consideration of eclecticism, and Pizer's second point is that an eclectic text, incorporating later substantive readings into an earlier copy-text, violates the integrity (or "imaginative 'feel,'" as he calls it) of individual stages of an author's work. The result, which "may incorporate changes made by the author over many years," is, he says, "a text which never existed and which has little or no critical interest" (p. 150). Certainly it never existed, for a critical text by definition differs from any single extant documentary form of the text; but whether it is of critical interest depends on how well the editor has performed his task, for his aim is to produce a text which accords with the author's intention more fully than that of any given extant document or printing. The fact that an author may make alterations in a work over a long period of years does not necessarily mean that they reflect different conceptions of that work; when they do, then of course each version should be edited separately as a work in its own right (following the theory of copy-text with regard to each). But surely it blurs a critical distinction to insist that every revision "constitutes a distinctive work with its own aesthetic individuality and character" (p. 149).[61] What this argument leads toward, obviously, is the abandonment of the editor's critical function and the restriction of editing to the production of accurate facsimiles. It is somewhat puzzling that Pizer is reluctant to allow the scholarly editor to attempt

a historical reconstruction of the author's intended text, when he is quite ready to believe that contributions of the original publisher's editor were accepted by the author as furthering his intentions. And it is paradoxical that a person who objects to the uniform editing of major and minor works for its failure to make "critical distinctions" ("which is what the study of literature is all about for most scholars and students") should disapprove of texts that involve an editor's critical judgment and should hesitate to offer to the public clear-text editions without apparatus, since they constitute "only the editor's beliefs about the author's final intentions" (p. 152). If, as he recognizes, editing is "in varying degrees an aesthetic enterprise," the "editor's beliefs" command respect to the extent that the editor is at once a careful historian and a sensitive critic; and the existence of insensitive editors casts no more doubt on the undertaking as a whole than the existence of obtuse literary critics does on the activity of literary analysis. When Pizer calls Greg's theory of copy-text "'scientific' in its central impulse" because it "establishes a principle (albeit a flexible one) that is supposed to work in every instance" (p. 153), he disregards the fact that the principle is "flexible" for the very reason that it places no restriction on the operation of informed judgment.

In the months following the appearance of Pizer's article, several communications stimulated by it were published in the pages of the same journal. Norman Grabo, in April 1971, and Hershel Parker, at greater length in October, criticized Pizer's position.[62] Then in November John Freehafer, applauding Pizer, set forth what he considered to be three additional "major deficiencies of the CEAA editions."[63] It is significant that the deficiencies are said to be "of the CEAA editions" and not of Greg's theory, for what Freehafer objects to is not Greg's approach but the way it has been put into practice in CEAA editions, along with the decisions reflected in those editions about the kinds of material to be presented. His first two points are patently argumentative: the CEAA editions, he believes, exhibit "a failure to learn from the best editorial practice of the past," because the history of Shakespearean scholarship has shown that the "empty boasts" of an editor like Theobald prove in the long run to be of little substance

(whereas critical discussions, like Johnson's, are often of lasting value); and they demonstrate "a failure to present literary works as such" by not providing critical analyses[64] and explanatory notes, by being "almost totally concerned with bibliographical questions." The first point springs from the CEAA use of the word "definitive." As I have said before, this word was an ill-advised choice and has been too freely used; nevertheless, it should be clear to any reader of a CEAA apparatus, from its discussion of various problematical points, that CEAA editors are not claiming (nor did Greg expect editors following his rationale to be able to claim) that they have made all the right decisions and thus produced a "definitive" text; all they can aim for as a goal is to provide a definitive apparatus, recognizing that it is at least possible sometimes to establish facts. The decision to emphasize the history of the text (including the history of critical reaction to it) in CEAA introductions and afterwords is obviously related to this point, for those essays constitute another part of the apparatus, directed toward laying out what historical facts can be established.[65] That these editions are historically oriented, however, does not mean that they fail "to present literary works as such" but simply that they do not present literary works accompanied by any one critical interpretation.[66]

Freehafer's third point, however, raises an issue which deserves to be commented upon, even though what must be said is implicit in Greg's theory and will therefore seem redundant to some readers. He

complains that the CEAA editions have failed "to use Greg's theory of copy-text with sufficient boldness and imagination to reconstruct ideal authorial texts of many of the works being edited" (p. 419). In support of this proposition he cites the differences in the texture of accidentals between The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables in the Ohio State edition, resulting from the fact that copy-text for the former is a first printing (the manuscript not having survived) and for the latter is a manuscript; these differences, he says, can be regarded as "valid reconstructions of the author's intentions . . . only on the incredible supposition that within a year Hawthorne turned from a passionate devotion to house-styling to a passionate rejection of it" (p. 422). What this argument fails to notice is that Greg's theory, as a scholarly procedure, must operate on the basis of the available materials for a given text and aims at reconstructing the author's intention insofar as surviving evidence permits. One can well believe, with Freehafer, that Hawthorne's preferences did not shift so drastically within a year. But can one therefore say that the features of one known manuscript would also have been those of another, now missing, manuscript from approximately the same time, and that an editor would on that basis know how to set about inserting those features into the text for which no manuscript survives? Answering No could perhaps be called unimaginative, but one should then add that to be more "imaginative" would be inconsistent with the scholarly goal of exercising critical judgment within the bounds set by ascertainable fact and documentary evidence. The belief that the accidentals in one CEAA text should be identical to those in another contemporary text by the same author stems from an assumption that the CEAA goal is to reconstruct the author's "intention" in an absolute sense, rather than in the more realistic sense of that intention for which there is documentary evidence for a particular work. Naturally the editor's knowledge of the author's practice in other works, for which a different range of documents exists, ought to play a role in any decision he makes; but it would be a rare instance indeed in which such knowledge was so certain and comprehensive that the editor could feel confident in his ability to repunctuate or respell for the author without introducing far more readings that never existed than those that did. Anyone who wishes to take a more "imaginative" approach and to interpolate the habits of one manuscript or a group of manuscripts into the texts of other works would of course be able to examine and utilize the evidence present in the texts and apparatuses of the relevant CEAA volumes. A second illustration of Freehafer's is again indicative of a fundamental misunderstanding of what kind of text the CEAA is attempting to provide. Turning to a different period, he cites two recent editions of Dryden's The Indian Emperour (one in the University of California Press Works, 1966, and the other in the University of Chicago Four Tragedies, 1967) and observes that, by selecting two different copy-texts, these editions present, even after editing, two very different texts. Since both attempt to reconstruct the author's intention, both should theoretically, he says, "have arrived at identical texts" which "agree word for word, letter for letter, comma for comma" (p. 422); that they do not so agree he attributes to an unimaginative use of Greg's theory, to "tyranny of the copy-text." But Greg, precisely because he recognized the role of imagination and judgment, would never have expected two editors to make all the same choices and emerge with identical texts. What the scholarly editor is striving to do is to put his critical judgment at the service of recognizing what the author intended, and no one, including the CEAA editors, would claim that any one attempt at this is the final or "definitive" one. Freehafer's urging of a more imaginative use of Greg's rationale to produce an "author's ideal text" seems rather at odds with his criticism of the Ohio State Hawthorne, both here and in an earlier detailed discussion of The Marble Faun,[67] for making too many emendations; the existence of arguable emendations and variants suggests the impossibility of universal agreement on critical issues, and a more imaginative approach would not be likely to lessen the range of disagreement. Several times Freehafer speaks of "definitive texts"—not "definitive editions"—and in that earlier essay says that how definitive the Hawthorne edition is "largely depends upon how the editors have used their collations, concordances, and other data in establishing Hawthorne's texts" (p. 487); however, the distinction between a "critical" text and a "definitive" edition (which embodies such a text along with other information) cannot be overlooked if debates about these matters are to get anywhere. Pizer, too, in his response in December 1971 to Grabo and Parker,[68] reiterated the need for "flexibility" and for resistance to "the tidy and neat," apparently without recognizing that CEAA critical texts and their apparatuses reflect those qualities.

The same month saw the appearance of the first volume of Proof, which contained a long essay by Morse Peckham, "Reflections on the Foundations of Modern Textual Editing."[69] Peckham is the only critic of Greg's theory thus far to explain his criticisms in the context of a thoughtfully developed analysis of the nature of human communication. Most of the previous comments, as we have noticed, either arose from a misunderstanding of Greg or dealt with largely superficial matters; Peckham, on the other hand, attacks Greg's central assumptions by setting forth a view of human behavior incompatible with them. Although I shall try to show why his argument does not seem

to me to invalidate Greg's rationale, I hope it will be clear, at the same time, that Peckham is raising the kind of fundamental questions that have been too little discussed. His essay—aside from its examination of whether analytical bibliography can be regarded as "scientific"[70] —attacks Greg's theory in two respects: (1) it denies that substantives and accidentals can be meaningfully segregated; (2) it denies that the reconstruction of a text representing the author's intention is a meaningful (or attainable) goal. Although the argument supporting the first can be seen as consistent with and deriving from the larger propositions underlying the second, the first point can be taken up separately and is discussed first by Peckham.

The distinction between substantives and accidentals, Peckham says, was necessary to Greg because of the nature of the material he was dealing with: "the sparse and inconsistent punctuation in [Renaissance] dramatic manuscripts that have survived" (p. 124).[71] But, he adds, the distinction "is useless outside of his very special class of texts" (p. 125), because most later authors (and some Elizabethans as well) were aware that punctuation affects meaning and were not helpless victims of a house-style imposed by their publishers. Punctuation, he argues, does more than affect meaning, for, without punctuation, "it is frequently impossible to decide on that meaning":

Thus "an educated author produces his punctuation as he produces his words; together they make up an unbroken semantic continuum." Clearly Peckham is correct in believing that no fixed line separates punctuation (or other "accidentals") from wording in the expression of meaning; and I am not aware of any editor who accepts Greg that would take issue with this point. But it does not therefore follow that no practical distinction can be made between them. Greg, of course, insisted that he was concerned with a "practical," not a "philosophic," distinction; but Peckham finds illogical (because it does seem to claim a "philosophic" basis for the distinction) Greg's footnote in the "Rationale" which asserts that punctuation "remains properly a matter of presentation," despite the fact that it can affect meaning. Now that footnote, it must be admitted, is not written with Greg's characteristic clarity, but the point he was getting at (as the drift of his whole essay suggests) is not, in my opinion, illogical. A paraphrase might go something like this: "Although punctuation and spelling are, from a theoretical (or 'philosophic') point of view, inseparable from words in the written expression of meaning, in practice people (i.e., scribes, compositors, and even authors at times) do react to them as if they were somehow less significant." What Greg meant by a "practical" distinction is one which, however mistaken it may be, has in fact operated to govern human behavior; and, since the editor is concerned with analyzing the behavior of certain individuals, such a distinction may be useful to him. It is certainly true, as Peckham later points out (p. 145), that Elizabethan compositors felt freer to depart from the punctuation and spelling of their copy than later compositors. But does not a modern publisher's editor generally feel less compunction about inserting a comma than altering a word? Does not the author who acquiesces to a suggested change of punctuation more readily than to one of wording, or who believes that his punctuation but not his diction actually demands revision, feel that there is some sort of distinction? So long as one can say, "I think my quotation is accurate, though it may differ in a mark of punctuation here and there," and not be regarded by most people as uttering nonsense, one can believe that a "practical" distinction between the two does widely exist in people's minds. To the extent that punctuation and spelling are popularly regarded as distinct from what is being said—and it scarcely requires demonstration that they are, and have been, so regarded—the transmission of texts is correspondingly affected. However much an editor may deplore the confusion behind this attitude (analogous to the popular oversimplification of the relation between form and content), it is his business to take into account, as realistically as he can, the factors that influence textual transmission. (Of course, some accidentals do have less effect upon meaning than others: a comma marking a phrase-ending that would be recognized even without the comma serves less purpose than one which marks the beginning of a nonrestrictive clause. But no definite line separates this second type of accidental, sometimes called "semi-substantives," from the first, which also, though more subtly, may affect the sense.) What I take Greg to be saying, then, is that the editor distinguishes substantives and accidentals not because he believes that he is making a valid conceptual distinction between two elements in written language but because the distinction is one which is likely to have been made by the persons who have been involved in the transmission of any given text (and which therefore may be useful in segregating different features of that text which may have been accorded different treatment).

Obviously Greg does not expect an editor to be bound by this distinction in his own thinking, for he makes no requirement that the editor always accept the accidentals of a first edition or that he always accept all the accidentals of whatever text he selects as copy-text. He merely observes that, given the popular tendency to be less careful with accidentals than with substantives, more of the author's accidentals are likely to be present in a first edition than in later editions. And, of course, the whole point of attempting to recover the author's accidentals is that they do indeed constitute an important part of his expression. The distinction between substantives and accidentals has no influence on what an editor decides to do when he believes that he has convincing reasons for doing a particular thing,[72] but when he does not have such reasons, the distinction enables him to make a decision in accord with what common experience shows to be a widespread attitude (one which is thus likely to have been operative in any given instance).[73] Although English spelling has become more fixed over the centuries and styles of punctuation have altered, I see no evidence that the popular conception of spelling and punctuation as the accouterments of words has shifted[74] —or any reason, therefore, not to find

Greg's approach applicable to later writings. Greg's choice of the terms "substantive" and "accidental" was, as I have said before, unfortunate, and the fun which Peckham has with them, calling them "strangely medieval," is deserved; there would have been fewer misunderstandings (and certainly fewer complaints about unnecessary jargon) if, as Peckham suggests, plain terms like "words," "punctuation," and "spelling" had been employed. But surely the point Greg was getting at is not completely hidden behind the terms he chose.[75]

Peckham's principal argument, however, deals not with accidentals but with the concepts of "text" and "author." He believes that many literary scholars—including Greg and his followers, who attempt to establish the author's intended text—are guilty of literary hagiolatry, exalting the ideas of "author" and "work of art" in ways not consistent with the nature of human communication. An author, he says, is simply an organism which produces utterances, not as a result of any special inspiration but as a result of being human:

But the author is different from other utterers in that he assembles a series of utterances into what "he judges to be a discourse" and makes this series available to others, proposing "that they too judge it to be a discourse" (p. 138). The development of the discourse up to that point has involved a combination of producing utterances and changing (or revising) them;[76] thus the author, even before his work becomes public, has already been in the position of looking back over something previously written, reacting to it as a reader, since he is not at that moment the producer. This process, Peckham argues, continues indefinitely: sometimes other human beings (such as publishers' editors) react to and change the discourse, and sometimes the author continues to change it. Each is responding to a particular version, and each "can make a change acceptable to the author or to anyone else involved" (p. 141). The "textual editor" is but one more human organism in this sequence, producing one more version of "a postulated work, that is, of a construct" (p. 128). Whether a valid distinction can be made between changes by the author and by others, therefore, turns on As a result, one cannot speak meaningfully of a single ideal "text" of a work; if the development of the concept of individuality ("self-mediated divergence from a cultural norm") had not caused the editor to confer "sainthood" on the supposed "author" and exalt certain works as canonical (p. 149), he would realize that he is "simply continuing an activity initiated by the author" (p. 144).

Although this is a greatly simplified summary of Peckham's analysis, I think that it does not distort the main outlines of his position. But one does not have to disagree with this general position in order to

believe that such editors as those of the CEAA volumes are pursuing a sensible, meaningful, and useful goal. The "textual editor" whom Peckham describes—he defines the term as subsuming "both analytical bibliographer and textual critic" (p. 141) —is naturally, in Peckham's general terms, just another person making changes in a text; but it would seem to be more illuminating to go on and note how he is to be distinguished from others who do that. For persons who make changes in pieces of writing—and are admittedly engaging in basically similar actions—fall into two groups, those performing scholarly editing and those performing what may be called "creative editing."[77] There is no reason why one cannot regard a piece of writing as the common product of all beings who have come in contact with it and reacted to it; when it is viewed in this way, any change, made at any time, whether by the original publisher's editor, by the author, or by a later "editor," has the same status and may be judged to have improved the work, harmed it, or left it the same. From this point of view a critic is not performing his function conscientiously if he does not alter the work to make it, according to his standards, more satisfying than it has ever been before. There is, as I say, no objection to this procedure—so long as one's goal is critically rather than historically oriented. But the scholar sets a goal of historical reconstruction.[78] That the "author" has some individuality is suggested, even in Peckham's approach, by the recognition that he initiated the discourse, which is then operated upon by himself and others. If that discourse is of sufficient interest, a historical interest may also attach to the initiator; and if the same being initiates a number of such discourses, the interest may be correspondingly greater. What the scholarly editor attempts—recognizing the difficulty of the task and even the impossibility of its absolute achievement—is to remove from the discourse those features for which the initiator was not responsible.[79] The result is not necessarily what the editor himself prefers but what he believes to be the author's contribution to a given discourse. The scholarly editor is thus a different kind of responder from the others in the chain Peckham is talking about; it may be that the editor, if he lives in the mid-twentieth century, cannot avoid reacting in part in mid-twentieth-century terms, but his aim is to use his critical faculties[80] to place himself in the frame of reference of the author and the author's environment. That such an aim is impossible of full attainment does not invalidate it as a guideline for a direction in which to move, despite Peckham's labeling of this attitude as "pure hagiolatry" (p. 138).[81]

The difficulty with accepting Peckham's statement of the case is evident when he remarks that the concepts of "text" and "author" require the "textual editor" to "produce a definitive edition, which he cannot do, instead of producing a new version more satisfactory for some specific purpose than any existing version, which he can do" (p. 151). What Peckham says the editor can do is in fact what CEAA editors do (and realize they are doing): they produce a critical (not definitive) text which they believe to be more satisfactory for the purpose of the historical study of literature than any previous text,

and they regard the edition embodying that text as "definitive" only in its recording of certain classes of data. Part of the problem, throughout the essay, is Peckham's interchangeable use of "text" and "edition" and his belief that CEAA editors really think they are producing definitive texts.[82] Perhaps, indeed, this is the fundamental problem, for his concluding section (pp. 153-155), recognizing that the "textual editor" may decide to produce a text representing any given stage in the history of a work, goes on to assert, "No misplaced confidence in inadequately based theory can justify his evasion of the problems of an empirical situation." But when one observes that Greg's approach is an attempt to confront the empirical realities involved in the reconstruction of a particular stage in the history of a work and that it does not proclaim the result to be the only useful text of the work (even for historical study), the issue Peckham raises is no longer an issue. It seems to me that Peckham's final description of "the task of the textual editor" is—after one has penetrated the vocabulary—accurate: But when he proceeds to say that there is no definitive version to be arrived at and "no one set of instructions" to follow, he is responding to a nonexistent argument. Much of Peckham's essay helpfully focuses on the nature of written language, and his suggestion that editors ought to be aware of the nonliterary uses to which their apparatuses can be put (as in a study of human behavior) is worth serious consideration; but as a critique of Greg's "Rationale" and the CEAA editions, it misses the mark.

During the following year (1972) there appeared two books with general-sounding, but somewhat misleading, titles, James Thorpe's Principles of Textual Criticism and Philip Gaskell's A New Introduction to Bibliography. Each raises some questions, either explicitly or implicitly, about the validity of CEAA procedures—questions which, by this time, seem very familar. Thorpe's most direct comment on the CEAA—a brief discussion of its Statement—is related to his underlying belief that textual criticism has become too bibliographical in approach and that bibliographers are trying to make textual criticism

a "science." Despite his assemblage of quotations intended to serve as background, these issues are in fact illusory: for the leading bibliographers over the years have recognized that textual criticism can never be mechanical and that bibliography is simply one tool among several useful in dealing with textual problems.[83] Thorpe paints a picture of bibliographers greedy to annex the whole "province of textual criticism," as he calls it; but whether the present emphasis of textual criticism is excessively bibliographical is a question that cannot be approached in general or theoretical terms but only in relation to the details of specific situations. After all, if bibliography offers one kind of evidence to the textual critic, he cannot sensibly say that he desires only so much, and no more, of that kind of evidence; but if his attention to those details causes him in a particular case to neglect his search for letters or documents or other kinds of external evidence, then obviously he can be criticized in that instance for undue concentration on one type of evidence. What Thorpe tries to argue, however, is that the CEAA Statement, by requiring attention to bibliographical details, implies such attention to be "the efficient cause of an ideal edition" (p. 72).[84] The Statement, he believes, reflects "the view of a text as a system of infinitely perfectible details, by which scrupulous attention to all details will ultimately yield ideal results" (p. 57). Although he does not wish "to suggest that meticulous care is pedantry" (p. 76), he does suggest that close analysis of what seem to be unimportant variants is a waste of time (e.g., p. 74). He does not acknowledge the fact that laborious collation of texts[85] and analysis of variants accomplish just as much when they demonstrate the absence of significant variants—or the presence of variants only in "the relatively trivial matters of spelling, punctuation, and capitalization" (p. 51)[86] —as when they show the existence of dramatically different readings. And no editor that I have heard of ever claimed that "scrupulous attention" to details and "meticulous care" are "a complete substitute for intelligence and common sense" (p. 78).[87] One must agree with Thorpe's later insistence (pp. 179-183) on the importance of a thorough knowledge of the author's works and period and of a diligent search for external evidence. But there is nothing inherent in the attention to bibliographical detail which prevents an editor from giving attention to other essential matters. The CEAA Statement does set forth the importance of accuracy in collating and proofreading, but it also points out the necessity for knowing the author's works and for searching out all relevant documents bearing on the history of a text[88] —and the CEAA editions have repeatedly been responsible for the uncovering of new documents and the assembling of comprehensive collections of reference material. An editor who neglects any part of his duty is open to criticism, and Thorpe's conclusion that editors should exploit "every kind of relevant evidence" (p. 79) is unexceptionable; but his belief that the "strongly bibliographical cast" (p. 103) of the CEAA Statement leads to a "glorification of method" (p. 79) rests on the fallacious assumption that attention to one kind of detail necessarily involves the neglect of other kinds. Some editors may of course be guilty of neglecting evidence, but it seems perverse to search for the cause of their incompetence in their careful attention to one kind of relevant detail.

A more consequential matter which Thorpe takes up is the treatment of accidentals (pp. 131-170).[89] After providing a sampling of statements from authors of various periods, stressing their indifference to accidentals, and a historical survey of printers' manuals, suggesting that printers over the years have felt an obligation to "correct" accidentals, Thorpe concludes that "probably in most cases" the author "expected the printer to perfect his accidentals" and that therefore "the changes introduced by the printer can be properly thought of as fulfilling the writer's intentions" (p. 165). It seems to me that there are two basic difficulties with Thorpe's position. The first is that quotations from authors and from printers' manuals are not comparable, because the former are statements of personal opinion (often prompted by specific situations), while the latter are public announcements of recommended general practice. Thus Thorpe's evidence from the printers' manuals[90] is sufficient to show that printers have widely regarded the alteration of accidentals in copy as part of their function; but his evidence from individual writers by no means can be generalized upon to suggest that in any given instance the chances favor an author's having been indifferent to the handling of accidentals. The conclusion would seem to follow—contrary to Thorpe—that, without convincing evidence on the other side, an author's manuscript stands a better chance of reflecting his wishes in accidentals than does a printed text. Here the second difficulty arises—in Thorpe's conception of an author's "intention." In his opening chapter—his well-known essay on "The Aesthetics of Textual Criticism"[91] —he asserts, "While the author cannot dictate the meaning of the text, he certainly has final authority over which words constitute the text of his literary work" (p. 10). As a result of this distinction between "meaning" and "words," Thorpe tends to accept at face value an author's statement about wording, without focusing on the fact that the motivations influencing such a statement may be just as complex as those lying behind a statement of intended "meaning." Although he recognizes that, in the absence of an authorial statement, the intended wording must be arrived at through a critical analysis of all available evidence (p. 193),

at various points he implies that the existence of a statement settles the matter—as when he says that "the personal testimony by the author as to his intentions is plainly the most primary textual evidence that there can be" (p. 109).[92] This point of view leads to an uncritical acceptance of an author's remarks about his indifference to accidentals (or his preference for those in the printed text). The upshot of Thorpe's discussion is his astonishing recommendation that "the editor will do best to spend only a modest amount of his time on accidentals—mainly a losing cause—and devote himself to matters of substance" (p. 168). It is difficult to reconcile Thorpe's readiness to believe that an author preferred the printer's accidentals with his strict view of "the integrity of the work of art" (pp. 14-32); and it is hard to see how an editor whose aim is to establish the author's intended text, in accidentals as well as in substantives,[93] can justify the decision in advance to spend a "modest" amount of time on the accidentals. Like the earlier discussion of bibliographical detail, this chapter on accidentals reflects a peculiar view of scholarly endeavor: it suggests, in effect, that a scholar's sense of perspective is shown less by his ability to evaluate and integrate data than by his prior decision to limit his consideration of certain clearly relevant areas.[94]

If Thorpe's book, weakened by such contradictions, does not manage to serve the useful function of fairly surveying "the basic principles which underlie the practice of textual criticism" (p. vii), neither does Philip Gaskell's chapter on "Textual Bibliography" (pp. 336-360) in A New Introduction to Bibliography provide the kind of basic summary of current thinking which one might expect of an "introduction." Although his exposition of "Copy-Text" (pp. 338-343) does not specifically mention Greg's rationale, he does provide an accurate statement of its general application, with one important exception.[95] He is unwilling to push that rationale to its logical conclusion and recognize that a fair-copy manuscript, when it survives, becomes the copy-text, except when there is convincing evidence pointing toward the first (or some later) edition as the proper choice.[96] His argument rests on the same assumption as Thorpe's:

He concludes that it "would normally be wrong, therefore, rigidly[97] to follow the accidentals of the manuscript, which the author would himself have been prepared—or might have preferred—to discard" and asserts that "in most cases the editor will choose as copy-text an early printed edition, not the manuscript" (p. 340). Later, he reiterates that "the manuscript if it survives, will be consulted but will not be followed in accidentals unless the compositor appears to have misrepresented the author's intentions" (p. 358). Although he allows for situations in which the manuscript is the proper choice, he places the presumption of authority with the first printed text. I have already commented on the difficulties of maintaining such a position, but I should perhaps call attention to the way in which Gaskell's wording itself reveals some of them. To say that an author is "implicitly endorsing" the accidentals of the proofs when he lets them stand is not at all the same as to say that he prefers them, and it ignores the economic (and other) factors which may have influenced his decision; similarly, to believe that an author "would himself have been prepared . . . to discard" the accidentals of his manuscript is not the same as to believe that he wished to discard them, and it surely does not give an editor license to carry out that discarding. Gaskell asserts that the accidentals of a first edition, despite "the process of normalization carried out in the printing house," will "still be closer both to the text that the author wanted, and to the reading of his manuscript, than the altered accidentals of the second and third editions" (p. 340). This statement is true, but the reference to manuscript readings undermines the general argument: if there is any desirability in having the accidentals resemble those of the manuscript, then the manuscript ought to be chosen for copy-text in the first place; on the other hand, if the author's preference is for the first-edition readings, then the manuscript is irrelevant in this context. Gaskell raises further doubts in the reader's mind by citing the example of Thomas Hardy, who, "in revising his printed texts for new editions, appears to have changed the normalized accidentals back to the forms of the original manuscript" (p. 342). Even though Hardy may not be a typical case, his revision illustrates the point that a writer may acquiesce in printing- or publishing-house styling without preferring it. Is not the more reasonable approach, then, to presume, until contrary evidence is adduced, that a manuscript reflects the author's intentions in accidentals, rather than to begin with the presumption that it does not?

A further confusion is introduced by the argument that an author's accidentals may stand in need of correction. Gaskell doubts "whether it is worth preserving thoroughly bad punctuation just because it is the author's" (p. 358) and later advises, "Let us carry out the author's intentions wherever we can, but not to the extent of taking pride in reproducing the manifest inadequacies of his accidentals" (p. 359). But punctuation which seems "bad" to the editor may have seemed appropriate to the author; and if the editor's aim is to preserve what the author wrote, rather than his own "improvements" upon it, he cannot very well say that he will pursue the author's intention only up to a point, and no farther. Gaskell's belief that "an editor may reasonably aim at consistency in his final version" (p. 358) suggests that he is thinking of a modernized text,[98] although most of his comments seem to be concerned with editions that aim to recover the author's intentions. At any rate, it is true that his discussion never focuses on the differences in purpose between modernized and unmodernized texts:

The illogic of this passage results from the fact that two kinds of editions are being talked about simultaneously. Since "unsatisfactory" accidentals may not be "in contravention of the author's usual practice," the editor is being instructed here to emend only those "unsatisfactory" accidentals which are not characteristic of the author, thus producing a partially regularized, but not modernized, text. But when he has done that, he does not still have open to him the option of emending "according to the conventions . . . of his own" period—that is, of modernizing. After all, there would be no point in selecting the readings in need of emendation on the basis of whether they are uncharacteristic of the author and then to emend them on the basis of present-day practice. Either the editor decides to establish, as accurately as he can, the author's own accidentals; or he decides to make all the accidentals conform to the practice of his own time. The fact that the former approach is necessary for scholarly (that is, historical) study does not, of course, mean that there may not be occasions on which the latter is more appropriate. But the failure to distinguish carefully between the two cannot lead to clear thinking about editorial problems. It is unfortunate that Gaskell's discussion gives the impression of describing (as one would expect an "introduction" to describe) current generally accepted practice; beginners who turn to it for guidance will be puzzled and misled.[99]

This account of the CEAA's application of Greg's rationale to American literature and of the critical reaction to it suggests several observations. To begin with, one must recognize that, when Wilson expressed surprise at the "violence and venom" of the correspondence

aroused by his article, he was calling attention to characteristics which have unfortunately been manifested by a number of persons in this debate, on both sides. It may be gratifying to some editors to find that people care enough about editing to become emotionally involved in theoretical discussions, but scholarship is not advanced by arguments which rest on preconceptions or vested interests or clashes of personality. There can be no doubt that some of this debate has sunk to that level, and the opponents of CEAA policy are not the only ones at fault. What is particularly unfortunate is that so much time and energy has been poured into arguments about superficial or nonexistent issues, when there are so many issues of importance that remain to be considered. The belief that bibliographical and textual work is not humanistic simply because it tries to establish facts or utilizes mechanical aids—and that those engaged in it therefore do not really care about literature—is obviously an emotional rallying cry, not a proposition to be seriously entertained. Similarly, the view that editors who follow Greg are engaged in a mysterious, complex procedure with an elaborate, arcane terminology can only be regarded as an invention of those who are temperamentally disinclined to perform editorial work, for it would be uncharitable to believe that they actually find these concepts and terms a strain on the intelligence. As emotional reactions, these attitudes are understandable, and proponents of Greg's theory have sometimes done their part to provoke them; but as intellectual arguments, there is simply nothing to them.

I am not suggesting that the entire controversy has been frivolous; but even the more serious arguments have so often resulted from a misunderstanding of what is really an uncomplicated approach that one is puzzled to account for them in any but emotional terms. Neither am I saying that Greg's theory and the CEAA application of it ought not to be criticized and analyzed, for any serious intellectual position can only benefit from thoughtful constructive criticism. The point, indeed, is that there has been too little—scarcely any—of this kind of criticism. Yet much of fundamental importance remains to be thought about. The question of what is meant by authorial intention, of how that intention affects the treatment of punctuation, of what differences may be required in working with a typescript rather than a holograph manuscript—such matters as these, when disentangled from self-serving attacks on or defenses of particular editions, need more discussion. Now that a considerable interest in editorial matters has been aroused, a great deal can be accomplished if the collective effort of those interested is expended constructively. No one pretends to have solved all

the problems, but solutions can best be approached by a positive effort to understand what accomplishments have so far been achieved and to build on them. Presumably all readers are interested in seeing reliable texts of American literary works made widely available; it would be unfortunate if those who share a common goal allowed themselves to be diverted by controversy from keeping that goal at the center of their attention and working together to attain it.[100]

Notes