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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
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
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
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,
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:
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 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
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
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:
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
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
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,
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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,
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
Two years later Donald Pizer raised again,[54] but in broader terms, the question of the applicability of Greg's theory to recent literature
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
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
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
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
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
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":
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
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:
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
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,
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 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),
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:
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:
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
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
Notes
Presenting the work of twelve authors: Cooper, Stephen Crane, John Dewey, Emerson, Hawthorne, Howells, Irving, Melville, Simms, Thoreau, Mark Twain, and Whitman.
A more detailed account of the history of the CEAA can be found in William M. Gibson's "The Center for Editions of American Authors" and in John H. Fisher's "The MLA Editions of Major American Authors" (and the chronology which follows it) in Professional Standards and American Editions: A Response to Edmund Wilson (Modern Language Association, 1969), pp. 1-6, 20-28. A survey of editions in progress and proposed editions at the time of the inception of the CEAA (and based on the 1962 discussions) is provided by William M. Gibson and Edwin H. Cady in "Editions of American Writers, 1963: A Preliminary Survey," PMLA, 78 (September 1963, part 2), 1-8 (reprinted in an MLA pamphlet, The Situation of English, 1963); another essay useful for background relating to the inception of the CEAA is Willard Thorp's "Exodus: Four Decades of American Literary Scholarship," MLQ, 26 (1965), 40-61.
A convenient record of the books and articles related to CEAA editorial theory and practice is provided as an appendix (entitled "Relevant Textual Scholarship") to the CEAA Statement (2nd ed., 1972), pp. 17-25.
The added footnote, enclosed in brackets on p. 382 of The Collected Papers, is the one which attributes the phrase "the tyranny of the copy-text" to Paul Maas. (He used it in his review of Greg's The Editorial Problem in Shakespeare, RES, 20 [1944], 76; Greg's reaction appears on pp. 159-160 of the same volume.) The 1966 text also adds the second "are" to "what readings are possible and what are not" at 381.31; it inserts the comma in "In the folio, revision and reproduction are so blended" at 390.32; and it adds the clause set off by commas in the statement that "the quartos contain, it is generally assumed, only reported texts" at 391.19. Another difference in the 1966 text is an error: in the quotation from McKerrow's Prolegomena at 380.32, "what we call inner harmony" ought to read "what we may call inner harmony," as it did in the original SB printing. As one would expect, the essay has been included in anthologies: Bibliography and Textual Criticism, ed. O M Brack, Jr., and Warner Barnes (1969), pp. 41-58; Art and Error, ed. Ronald Gottesman and Scott Bennett (1970), pp. 17-36. Both of these anthologies reprint the SB text rather than the text from The Collected Papers.
Greg himself calls attention in a footnote (p. 378) to the fact that McKerrow used the word "substantive" to refer to "an edition that is not a reprint of any other," and he adds, "I do not think that there should be any danger of confusion between 'substantive editions' and 'substantive readings.'" Nevertheless, it is unfortunate that the word should be given two special meanings in editorial discourse. The awkwardness of "accidental" (when it is not used as a plural noun, "accidentals") is obvious and is in fact demonstrated by Greg's own prose a few lines after his introduction of the term: "As regards substantive readings . . . they will doubtless sometimes depart from them accidentally and may even . . . do so intentionally: as regards accidentals, they will normally follow their own habits . . ." (pp. 376-377). Furthermore, since both terms are used by grammarians, one might at first suppose that editors, also concerned with language, might use them in the same way; but "substantive" in grammar means "noun" (which is a less inclusive concept than Greg's "substantive"), while "accident" (or "accidence") refers to inflection for case, number, tense, and so on (which is not "accidental" alteration in Greg's sense but rather falls within the scope of "substantive" changes). Perhaps the closest parallel is the use of "substance" and "accident" in philosophy to signify the essential and the nonessential; yet Greg insists, rightly, that his concern is not with a philosophical distinction. (Greg had used the word "accidents" in 1942 in The Editorial Problem in Shakespeare, where one section is entitled, "Note on Accidental Characteristics of the Text," pp. l-lv; but instead of "substantives" the term "essentials of reading" is employed.)
After defining the two terms (p. 376), he says in the body of his text, "The distinction is not arbitrary or theoretical, but has an immediate bearing on textual criticism"; and in a footnote to the definitions he emphasizes, "The distinction I am trying to draw is practical, not philosophic." See also footnote 12 below.
Although Greg does not say so here, McKerrow's attitude doubtless sprang from his overreacting against the abuses of some nineteenth-century editors, who felt free to choose among variant readings without adequate study of the nature and origin of the editions in which those variants appeared. Later Greg does make a similar point in general terms: "The attitude may be explained historically as a natural and largely salutary reaction against the methods of earlier editors. Dissatisfied with the results of eclectic freedom and reliance on personal taste, critics sought to establish some sort of mechanical apparatus for dealing with textual problems . . ." (p. 383). For a development of this point, see Fredson Bowers, "McKerrow's Editorial Principles for Shakespeare Reconsidered," SQ, 6 (1955), 309-324; and "Multiple Authority: New Problems and Concepts of Copy-Text," Library, 5th ser., 27 (1972), esp. 90-91.
Greg did not move all at once to his final position. In "McKerrow's Prolegomena Reconsidered," RES, 17 (1941), 139-149, and, more fully, in the Prolegomena to The Editorial Problem in Shakespeare (1942), he recognized the unnecessary rigidity of McKerrow's insistence on adopting all the substantive variants from an edition which contains some authorial revisions, but he followed McKerrow's inclusion of "wording" as one of the criteria for choosing a copy-text. By the end of the decade, however, in this "Rationale," he had developed his distinction between substantives and accidentals and therefore admitted in a footnote, "There is a good deal in my Prolegomena that I should now express differently, and on this particular point I have definitely changed my opinion. I should now say that the choice of the copy-text depends solely on its formal features (accidentals)" (p. 386). In making revisions in 1950 of The Editorial Problem, he added a new preface repeating this point and referring to the "Rationale" essay.
More than once Greg calls attention to McKerrow's use of the word "reprint" for "critical edition" (e.g., pp. 379, 380). "Reprint," of course, implies complete absence of editorial interference; but while McKerrow expects an editor to use critical judgment in correcting obviously impossible readings he does not conceive of the result as a "critical edition." Greg calls this confusion "symptomatic"—that is, of McKerrow's pervasive reluctance to give rein to individual judgment.
The examples are effective in demonstrating not only undue reliance on the copy-text but also the self-confidence required to alter the copy-text, and in both instances Greg perhaps overstates the obviousness of the emendations he proposes. His arguments for emending the copy-text in each case are persuasive; but the larger argument of his essay does not require him to assert that these emendations are in fact correct but only to show that an editor ought not to be prevented from seriously considering them by too rigid an adherence to the copy-text. It is one thing to say that Boas and Simpson might have adopted his emendations if they had not been under the tyranny of the copy-text, but quite another to imply that they certainly would have done so.
It should be clear that there is no contradiction involved between the assertion that Greg is dealing with a concept and his own repeated emphasis on the practical rather than the theoretical. Obviously, as the word "rationale" in his title suggests, his argument is conceptual and theoretical, since it attempts to formulate a general statement which can be illustrated by reference to specific situations. But the theory itself is proposed as a matter of expediency, as a workable practical solution to a problem, rather than as a philosophic truth. One can say that it is a theory suggesting how best to accommodate one's ignorance but not that it is a theory leading to a reduction of that ignorance.
Library, 5th ser., 27 (1972), 81-115. His later article, "Remarks on Eclectic Texts," in Proof, 4 (1974), furthers the discussion by elaborating upon and providing numerous examples to illustrate the distinction between single-authority and multiple-authority situations. There are, of course, many instances of multiple authority in which the earliest surviving texts (earliest in each line) are not equidistant from the lost common ancestor. But Greg's theory operates in such cases, because—in the absence of contrary evidence—one can presume the text nearest the lost ancestor to be the most reliable in accidentals. At times, as in any other copy-text situation, an editor may have reason to believe that some text other than the nearest one is the most reliable, and he would then select it as copy-text; otherwise he would select the nearest one. Unlike a situation of equidistant radiating texts, the editor in these instances has a presumptive authority to fall back on when there is no other means for reaching a decision. In other words, it is the existence of authoritative texts that are equidistant from a lost ancestor, not simply the existence of texts representing independent lines of descent from that ancestor, which poses a problem for the application of Greg's approach.
Bowers calls it "one of Greg's three criteria for determining the authority of variants that when a choice seems indifferent, the odds are in favor of the specific authority of the original reading" (p. 15). Actually Greg does not make this one of the three criteria (as stated on p. 385 of Collected Papers and summarized above, p. 177, in the sentence beginning "That judgment depends partly") but rather a procedure to follow when use of these criteria proves inconclusive (for if they were not inconclusive, the choice would not be indifferent).
This streamlining of the apparatus extends also to the simplification of the symbols employed, utilizing considerably fewer than were envisaged by McKerrow in his Prolegomena.
Such as that in On Editing Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Dramatists (1955), pp. 71-83; "Old-Spelling Editions of Dramatic Texts," in Studies in Honor of T. W. Baldwin, ed. D. C. Allen (1958), pp. 11-12; and Textual and Literary Criticism (1959), pp. 141-142.
Read before the American Literature section of the South Atlantic Modern Language Association on 22 November 1962 and published in SB, 17 (1964), 223-228.
The term often used in connection with Renaissance texts is "old-spelling"; but "unmodernized" is probably better, since it more clearly suggests that the modernizing of accidentals in general, not just spelling, is the point at issue.
The fact that nineteenth-century accidentals are nearer our own than those of the sixteenth century means that the general reader or the classroom student has less difficulty in using an unmodernized text for this period; but it has nothing to do with the fact that a scholar requires a text representing as accurately as possible the author's own accidentals, regardless of the ease or difficulty with which that text can now be read. There are, in fact, a considerable number of differences between nineteenth- and twentieth-century accidentals, particularly punctuation; but, as Bowers says, "one may flatly assert that any text that is modernized can never pretend to be scholarly, no matter at what audience it is aimed" (p. 223). Obviously, if accidentals form part of an author's expression of meaning, one cannot modernize and still have what the author wrote and meant. One can always argue that the authors themselves would not want their punctuation and spelling to be preserved at the cost of not being read; but such an argument has no bearing on the needs of scholars to have before them, insofar as it is possible, exactly what the author wrote. Modernized editions can then follow, when they seem necessary, though they must inevitably be a compromise. Some of the issues involved in the question of modernizing are discussed in John Russell Brown, "The Rationale of Old-Spelling Editions of the Plays of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries," SB, 13 (1960), 49-67; Arthur Brown, "The Rationale of Old-Spelling Editions . . . A Rejoinder," SB, 13 (1960), 69-76; and Jürgen Schäfer, "The Orthography of Proper Names in Modern-Spelling Editions of Shakespeare," SB, 23 (1970), 1-19. See also footnotes 93, 98, and 99 below.
That is, it must result from editorial decisions and not be simply a reprint of one particular text. It could, of course, in rare instances be such a reprint—but only because the editor judged no emendations to be necessary, not because he was committed to reproducing a single document without alteration.
He continued to demonstrate the bibliographical and textual problems raised by nineteenth-century works in "Old Wine in New Bottles: Problems of Machine Printing," in Editing Nineteenth-Century Texts, ed. John M. Robson (1967), pp. 9-36.
But one which, it seems reasonable to assume, is basic, since it can provide the details necessary for use in preparing other kinds of editions.
The use of the Hinman Collator, developed by Charlton Hinman for the detection of variant formes in the Shakespeare first folio, to make collations of copies of machine-printed books from the same type-setting or plates is another instance of the application to later books of methods conceived in connection with earlier ones. For a list of articles dealing with mechanized collation, see the CEAA Statement (2nd ed., 1972), pp. 19-20.
He also emphasizes, like Greg, the practical side of the point: "This distinction," he says, "is not theory, but fact." Obviously the "fact" is not that the editor can always distinguish correctly between the author's and other's changes but that Hawthorne's manuscripts do exhibit many differences from their first printings and that unauthorized changes are likely to enter a text every time it is set in type.
Bowers, using the example of Hawthorne, speaks of reporting all the editions during the author's lifetime. But since the reason for choosing that period is to cover any editions which might incorporate authorial changes, one can infer that any pirated edition—which can be established as pirated and thus as having no connection with the author—can be excluded from the listing. A collation of such an edition, however, is naturally still called for, so that the editor can be sure that the variant readings in it do not suggest authorial revision in spite of the external evidence.
This point again reflects Greg's rationale in its focus on the accidentals of the copy-text. Once the importance of preserving the accidentals of the copy-text is established, the importance of deciding when to retain, and when to omit, copy-text line-end hyphens becomes evident—as well as the importance of informing the reader in this respect, as in others, of exactly what occurs in the copy-text.
The history of the pamphlet is sketched by Thorpe in his introduction. The MLA's Committee on Research Activities had earlier presented a report (edited by Helmut Rehder) entitled "The Aims, Methods, and Materials of Research in the Modern Languages and Literatures," published in PMLA (67, no. 6 [October 1952], 3-37) and as a pamphlet. The section of that report on "Editing and Textual Criticism" (pp. 15-19), written by Lawton P. G. Peckham, does not mention Greg's rationale and sets forth the idea that "the last edition revised by an author, or published in his lifetime with his consent, is most likely to satisfy literary needs" (p. 16).
The essay appears on pp. 23-42 of the original edition. In 1970 a revised edition was published; Bowers's essay, on pp. 29-54, was enlarged chiefly by the insertion of illustrations from the writings of Stephen Crane (the longest such insertion occurs on pp. 51-52).
In addition to covering, as one would expect, such matters as whether a text is to be critical, whether it is to be modernized, and what role analytical bibliography plays in editing.
Under the revised title Statement of Editorial Principles and Procedures. The revised discussion of proofreading adds a further requirement, based on the experience of several editions: that a final check be made to determine whether printers' errors have entered after the final proofs, by performing a machine collation of the unbound printed gatherings against the last set of proofs.
The seal itself was of course devised as a shorthand way of informing the reader or buyer that certain standards had been met and of promoting a broader general awareness of the need for reliable texts—with the potential result that readers would begin to demand, and publishers to seek, texts which qualified for the seal.
Except for one footnote, which suggests that the "graphic peculiarities of particular texts" should probably not be recorded in the "general apparatus" but "may appropriately form the subject of an appendix" (p. 386). Apparently the "general apparatus" Greg has in mind consists of footnotes; and, since he believes that "in this respect the copy-text is only one among others," he is expressing the view that emendations of accidentals in the copy-text should "probably" not be listed at the foot of the page but rather at the end of the volume—the practice which Bowers adopts in the Dekker. As early as 1760 Edward Capell, in his Prolusions, employed a similar system, in which one category of readings is listed at the foot of the page, and at the end come "all the other rejected readings of the editions made use of" (p. iii). Capell saw the value of making a specific text the "ground-work" of his own and of recording all departures from it as well as variant readings from other editions, so that the reader would have "all the materials that can be procur'd for him," in order to re-examine the editor's decisions.
The only way in which adherence to Greg's theory affects the content of the usual CEAA apparatus is that the historical record of variants normally lists only substantives, not accidentals. There would obviously be no objection to the inclusion of the accidentals as well, but in most cases the number involved would be so great that the effort and expense of listing them would not seem to be justified, in view of the lack of importance attaching to accidentals in later editions under Greg's theory. If someone disagrees with the editor's choice of copy-text, therefore, and wishes to re-edit the work using a different copy-text, he cannot reconstruct the accidentals of that text from the usual CEAA historical collation. Nevertheless, the editor of a CEAA edition explains his choice of copy-text in his textual essay, citing not only external evidence but illustrative readings from the texts; he generally provides enough evidence so that a reader will have an adequate basis for agreeing or disagreeing with his choice. Naturally a person who decides to re-edit the text employing a different copy-text will have to turn to a copy of the edition containing that copy-text; but he should be able to rethink the question of copy-text in the first place on the basis of what is included within the CEAA volume.
Obviously it makes sense to follow established forms whenever there is no particular reason for not following them, so that readers will have fewer adjustments to make as they turn from one edition to another.
For an examination of the variations in apparatus among CEAA volumes and of certain considerations to keep in mind in choosing among them, see G. T. Tanselle, "Some Principles for Editorial Apparatus," SB, 25 (1972), 41-88; and "Editorial Apparatus for Radiating Texts," forthcoming in the Library.
For some discussion, see William H. Gilman, "How Should Journals Be Edited?", Early American Literature, 6 (1971), 73-83.
The CEAA has recently begun to offer a seal for "An Approved Facsimile." The first facsimile to be published under this plan is that of the manuscript of The Red Badge of Courage, edited by Fredson Bowers with extensive introductory material and appendixes and published in two volumes in 1973 by Microcard Editions Books. The next two such facsimiles are to be those of F. Scott Fitzgerald's Ledger and of the manuscript of The Great Gatsby, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli.
The CEAA seal, reading "An Approved Text," is awarded only to editions which contain these two elements. However, when a CEAA text is leased by a reprinting publisher, the "An Approved Text" seal remains on the new volume, so long as the text is faithfully reproduced, even if the apparatus is not also reprinted. Perhaps logically the original CEAA edition should contain a seal for "An Approved Apparatus" as well as for "An Approved Text," since the "Text" seal, when it appears in the originating edition, covers more than the text. Such a seal—reading "An Approved Apparatus"—already exists for a different purpose: it is available to editors who have gone through precisely the same CEAA editorial process but find that publication of the actual text is not feasible (because of copyright restrictions, for example, or lack of interest on the part of a publisher). In these cases the apparatus is keyed by page-line references to the copy-text edition, and a reader, entering the listed emendations on a copy of that edition, can bring its text into conformity with the critical text established (but not published) by the editor. The first apparatus of the CEAA pattern to be published separately from a text was Matthew J. Bruccoli's "Material for a Centenary Edition of Tender is the Night," SB, 17 (1964), 177-193; the advantages of and appropriate occasions for such an approach are discussed in James B. Meriwether's "A Proposal for a CEAA Edition of William Faulkner," in Editing Twentieth-Century Texts, ed. Francess G. Halpenny (1972), pp. 12-27. Bruccoli has recently prepared the first separate apparatus to receive the CEAA seal and to be issued as an independent publication (The Great Gatsby, University of South Carolina Press); see his discussion of it and the proposed series of which it is to be a part, in "The SCADE Series: Apparatus for Definitive Editions," PBSA, 67 (1973), 431-435.
"Practical Texts and Definitive Editions," delivered on 16 February 1968 and published, along with a paper by Charlton Hinman, in Two Lectures on Editing: Shakespeare and Hawthorne (1969), pp. 21-70. Bowers's essay includes (footnotes 8, 9, 11, 16, 17, on pp. 36-39, 42, 46-48) some comments on Richard H. Fogle's unfavorable review of the Hawthorne edition in American Literary Scholarship: An Annual, 1965, ed. James Woodress (1967), pp. 21-27; Fogle's comparison of the Ohio State edition of The House of the Seven Gables with a classroom edition (Riverside) prompted Bowers's decision to elaborate on the differences between the two kinds of editions: "without the stimulation of his confusion of the true issues it is unlikely that this paper would ever have been written" (p. 38). Bowers has continued to discuss the differences in later articles, such as "The New Look in Editing," South Atlantic Bulletin, 35 (1970), 3-10 (which also comments on Jesse H. Shera's review of the Hawthorne edition in American Notes & Queries, 1 [1962-63], 159-260); and "The Ecology of American Literary Texts," Scholarly Publishing, 4 (1972-73), 133-140. Joseph Katz discusses the shortcomings of certain practical editions in "Practical Editions: A Bad Resource for American Literary Study," Resources for American Literary Study, 3 (1973), 221-229 (which includes references to the Proof articles surveying the practical editions of individual works).
This point has been well put by Leon Howard in his review of the Hawthorne edition in NCF, 22 (1967-68), 191-195, when he remarks that, "even though textual theory might change, the work has been done and the information made available for every serious student of American literature" (p. 193). Of course, new information can turn up later, as Bowers recognizes when he says that "definitive" is "only a comparative term, since we must always believe that from time to time the accumulation of scholarship will enable an editor to improve on the work of his predecessors" ("Old-Spelling Editions of Dramatic Texts" [cited in footnote 18 above], p. 13). Similarly, he begins his discussion of "Established Texts and Definitive Editions," PQ, 41 (1962), 1-17, by noting, "Nothing but confusion can result from the popular assumption that only one form of an established text can ever exist, and hence that a definitive edition of a single form of a literary work is invariably possible."
Although I shall be commenting here principally on essays which take an adverse view of Greg's theory and the CEAA (since they naturally bring into sharpest focus the issues involved), it is clear that some of the reviewers who have written favorable, but often perfunctory, notices of CEAA volumes have no real conception of the aims of those editions. References to some of the more significant reviews are made in the CEAA Statement (2nd ed., 1972), p. 23; a number of other reviews, principally from 1969, are listed (along with other CEAA publicity) in CEAA Newsletter, No. 3 (June 1970), pp. 36-38. Although a few of these reviews, and some others, are referred to in these pages, I do not take up individual reviews in any detail, since the questions they raise usually involve judgment of particular cases rather than general principles and procedures.
In the 26 September installment (pp. 7-10), headed "Their Wedding Journey," he comments not only on this volume of the Indiana Howells edition but also on Typee in the Northwestern-Newberry Melville and The Marble Faun in the Ohio State Hawthorne; on 10 October (pp. 6, 8, 10, 12, 14) he limits himself to "Mark Twain," taking up three volumes of the California edition of Mark Twain papers—Satires and Burlesques, Letters to His Publishers, and Which Was the Dream?
The New York Review of Books for 19 December 1968, pp. 36-38, contained letters from William H. Y. Hackett, Jr., and Theodore Besterman, which Wilson prints in his postscript; letters from George B. Alexander, Ronald Gottesman, and Paul Baender, which Wilson refers to; and letters from Frederick Buechner and Frank J. Donner, which Wilson does not mention (but whose correction of "Albert Payson Terhune's" to "Albert Bigelow Paine's" is incorporated in the text at 189.6).
As Wilson notes in the 1968 pamphlet, the article had originally appeared "in a slightly different form." For pamphlet publication a number of stylistic revisions were made (e.g., "persistent" for "acute" at 179.21 [all page references are to the 1973 volume, as the most accessible text]), some errors were corrected (e.g., the comments on the Constable Melville and the Russell & Russell reprint at 191.6-9), some additions were incorporated (e.g., the parenthetical sentence at 172.8-11), and five footnotes were added (those on pp. 164, 166, 182, and 186, and one not retained in the 1973 book: attached to the sentence ending at 156.4, it read, "These volumes now range in price here from $10 to $14"). Three of those footnotes cite information supplied by correspondents (those on pp. 164 and 166 based on Gottesman's published letter, and that on p. 186 credited to Alexander's published letter). As Wilson points out in his postscript, other revisions were based on comments in letters, particularly Gottesman's (though in describing one of the corrections—"Reedy" to "Rudy" at 164.5—he reverses the two words); but some corrections available to him in letters were not in fact utilized (see footnote 49 below). The 1973 volume incorporates a few more corrections (e.g., "Newberry" for "Newbury" at 163.22) and omits one footnote (as noted above).
Epstein and John Thompson submitted a proposal—for a series of editions of the kind Wilson desired—to various foundations and eventually to the National Endowment; in 1966, at the time of the initial award of $300,000 to the MLA, $50,000 was to be made available for the Wilson plan whenever facilities for administering it were developed (they never were). The New York Review of Books, edited by Epstein's wife, had included, eight months before Wilson's article, another review critical of a CEAA edition—Lewis Mumford's "Emerson Behind Barbed Wire" (18 January 1968, pp. 3-5). Mumford objected to the Harvard edition of The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson because of its inclusion of material discarded by Emerson and its use of editorial symbols within the text to record Emerson's revisions. The Mumford piece provoked considerable correspondence, including a letter from Wilson criticizing the MLA "stupid academic editions" and describing his Pléiade idea. The issue of 14 March 1968 (pp. 35-36) contained letters from (besides Wilson) Lewis Leary, William M. Gibson, and G. S. Rousseau, and a reply from Mumford; another letter, from M. H. Abrams and Morton W. Bloomfield, along with another reply from Mumford, appeared in the issue of 23 May (p. 43). Mumford's review, of course, does not touch on the subject of Greg's rationale, since the choice of copy-text is not an issue in connection with Emerson's manuscript journals.
For example, he approves the inclusion in the Pléiade Proust of "an omitted episode" and the restoration in the Soviet editions of Pushkin and Tolstoy of "cut or altered passages," and he looks forward to a complete edition of Mark Twain's Autobiography, since "we have never had the whole of this work"; yet he believes that one of the pieces included in Which Was the Dream? ("Three Thousand Years among the Microbes") "might well be omitted from the canon" because "it turns out to be disappointing" (p. 178).
Gibson's essay, "The Center for Editions of American Authors" (pp. 1-6), was reprinted from Scholarly Books in America, 10 (January 1969), 7-11. Two of the letters (pp. 7-12), by Ronald Gottesman and Paul Baender, had previously been published in the New York Review of Books (19 December 1968); two others (pp. 13, 17-19), by Frederick Anderson and Oscar Cargill, also addressed to the New York Review, had not been published before; and a fifth (pp. 14-16), by John C. Gerber, had been sent directly to Wilson and had not been published. (A footnote to Gerber's letter points out that Wilson did not correct in the pamphlet his misstatements about the Mark Twain Papers and Works noted here.) Fisher's essay, "The MLA Editions of Major American Authors" (pp. 20-26), besides providing a historical account which includes information about Wilson's "Pléiade" plan, makes some response to Wilson's articles. The pamphlet ends with "A Calendar" (pp. 27-28), listing relevant events back to 1947. Bowers's comments on Wilson's articles appear in Two Lectures on Editing, pp. 23-25 (footnote 2) and p. 70 (footnote 30). Benjamin DeMott's "The Battle of the Books," in the New York Times Book Review, 17 October 1971, pp. 70-72, offers a journalistic account of the controversy.
It is symptomatic that Wilson, and Mumford before him, both try to divorce these editions from humanistic learning. Mumford says that the culprit behind the Emerson edition is the "Academic Establishment," fostering "the preconceptions and the mock-scientific assumptions governing the pursuit of the humanities today" (p. 4). Wilson makes disparaging remarks about editors who are not interested in literature (p. 170), exaggerates the technical language employed (p. 169), and prints with obvious delight a letter from W. H. Y. Hackett, Jr., ridiculing, among other things, the Hinman Collator (pp. 198-99). Ray's comment, though printed without a citation of source, is taken from his "Foreword" to The American Writer in England: An Exhibition Arranged in Honor of the Sesquicentennial of the University of Virginia (1969), p. viii.
The other of his principal illustrations deals with collateral texts, deriving independently from a lost common ancestor; in these situations he believes that it would be "misleading" to denominate one of the collateral texts a "copy-text." An editor's statement, however, ought to make clear the reasons for selecting a particular text as the basic one, so that the reader will not find the label "misleading." If the collateral texts are equidistant in descent from the lost common ancestor, of course, it is true that there may be no basis for selecting one over another, and the editor must then construct a copy-text on the basis of all these texts, as Bowers has explained in his discussion of "radiating texts," referred to above (footnote 13); but from that point on Greg's theory of copy-text applies as usual. And if the collateral texts are not equidistant from the lost common ancestor, the editor is able to follow Greg's rationale directly, by selecting the one nearest the ancestor unless he has strong evidence pointing toward another choice.
My views on Baender's argument are set forth in greater detail in "The Meaning of Copy-Text: A Further Note," SB, 23 (1970), 191-196. See also Bowers's comment in "Multiple Authority" (cited in footnote 13 above), p. 82 (footnote 1).
Although Pizer continually refers to "the" theory of copy-text, it is obviously Greg's theory which he is discussing. One should understand, however, that an editor necessarily has a "copy-text," whatever he may call it, and that Greg's is only one among many conceivable rationales for selecting a copy-text.
That the result might be "complex and bulky" is undeniable; that it is therefore "all but unusable" does not follow. Anyone who wishes to comprehend a complex textual history would presumably not expect to find the evidence as easy to follow as it might be in less complicated situations.
Pizer is particularly worried about the future republication of CEAA clear texts without accompanying apparatus: "It is a nice point," he believes, "whether a clear-text critical edition sans apparatus is any different from an unedited text"—because "in either case the reader must go to considerable effort to check the evidence" (p. 152). A critical text exists to present an informed reconstruction of an author's intended text, based on an examination of all known evidence and on critical insight into the author's aims and methods; a text which is "unedited" (presumably edited only by the original publisher's editor or reproduced from a contemporary printing by a later editor) does not purport to serve this purpose. There is nothing similar about the two except that they are texts of the same piece of writing and that they are texts as opposed to apparatuses. If a reader wishes to consult the documentation which an apparatus provides and finds no apparatus accompanying his text, he may be somewhat inconvenienced by having to go to a library to examine a CEAA edition (text plus apparatus), but surely less so than if he had to collect the evidence himself with which to judge an "unedited" text.
If Pizer is concerned (as he seems to be in his proposal of "textual organicism," pp. 152-153) to preserve as a respectable possibility the idea of a collected set which includes some "definitive editions" along with some "practical editions" (to use Bowers's terms), all one can say is that there is no theoretical objection to it, so long as each text is clearly labeled for what it is.
Pizer, in his footnote 5 (p. 148), gives the impression that he has not fully grasped Greg's central insight: that there is no reason to expect authority in substantives and authority in accidentals to reside in the same text. What Pizer says is that the "suspicion of later texts . . . affects the entire matter of the choice of copy-text while receiving explicit expression primarily in relation to accidentals." That is of course just the point: the potential authority of a later text in respect to substantives is in no way affected by the choice of an early text as the authority in accidentals.
Pizer's sixth footnote (p. 148) recognizes this fact and is a more trenchant discussion of the issue than what appears in the body of his article: "I should note my awareness of the great range of variation possible within the publisher-author relationship and of the consequent need for editorial knowledge and discretion in determining the degree of authorial acceptance of a publisher's changes."
While it is possible to argue that the change of even a single word in a text produces a new work, critical discrimination has not advanced very far which makes no attempt to locate that point along the spectrum of revision where alterations to improve the expression of one conception give way to alterations that shift the conception itself.
Grabo, "Pizer vs Copy-Text," BNYPL, 75 (1971), 171-173; Parker, "In Defense of 'Copy-Text Editing,'" 337-344. Bowers makes a few remarks on Pizer's article in "Multiple Authority" (cited in footnote 13 above), pp. 86-87 (footnote 11).
"How Not to Edit American Authors: Some Shortcomings of the CEAA Editions," BNYPL, 75 (1971), 419-423.
Because Freehafer cites Hershel Parker's reply to Pizer in connection with this discussion, Parker makes a further brief comment in "Historical Introductions vs Personal Interpretations," BNYPL, 76 (1972), 19. Freehafer's statement that "those who cannot successfully criticize an author ought not to edit him" (p. 420) seems not to recognize editing as a critical activity itself; what constitutes "successful" criticism is of course an open question.
As for explanatory notes, the CEAA editions have not by any means uniformly excluded them, and the CEAA Statement encourages them for certain kinds of works. In any case, Freehafer's belief that an editor who does not provide explanatory notes will be less likely to detect, for example, errors in the spelling of proper names is merely questioning editorial competence in general; any responsible editor investigates the spelling of names of persons and places as a routine part of his job, and, if he makes a mistake in a given instance, the fault surely cannot be traced to the fact that he was not obliged to write explanatory notes.
The view that the CEAA editions "will probably be looked upon in the future as a monument to a temporary overemphasis on an imperfectly borrowed and excessively bibliographical style of editing" (p. 421) is puzzling. The "bibliographical" emphasis is an emphasis on establishing the history of each text, and the CEAA editors could be charged with "excess" in this regard if they claimed that all future editions of these works should have the same emphasis; but it is odd to regard as "temporary overemphasis" the effort to put on record information which will be useful in the future for producing different kinds of editions with texts based on other principles.
"The Marble Faun and the Editing of Nineteenth-Century Texts," Studies in the Novel, 2 (1970), 487-503. This article is a detailed review of the Ohio State edition of The Marble Faun and makes fewer general observations than the title might suggest. It represents the kind of close examination of a CEAA volume which has been all too infrequent, but for the most part it is concerned with the evaluation of particular emendations rather than with questions involving the use of Greg's rationale. One paragraph (pp. 498-499), however, does say that, because Greg's theory seems to work in connection with The Marble Faun manuscript, it does not follow that the theory can be applied "to all fair-copy manuscripts of the nineteenth century," since certain authors (several are cited) are known not to have punctuated their manuscripts for publication and others (Henry James) are known to have carefully revised their punctuation for later editions. It should not be necessary to repeat that Greg's theory does not demand the use of manuscript as copy-text when there is convincing evidence favoring another course. Freehafer makes some of the same criticisms of the Hawthorne edition, especially in regard to emendations resulting from a policy of "normalization," in his reviews of Hawthorne scholarship in Jahrbuch für Amerikastudien, 15 (1970), 293-294, and 16 (1971), 268-269.
"'On the Editing of Modern American Texts': A Final Comment," BNYPL, 75 (1971), 504-505. Pizer has published remarks on CEAA editions or on Greg's theory in a number of other places. For example, he has commented unfavorably on the Crane edition in a review in MP, 68 (1970-71), 212-214, and in his survey of Crane scholarship in Fifteen American Authors before 1900, ed. R. A. Rees and E. N. Harbert (1971), p. 100 (the edition reflects "the present emphasis on critical texts and common sense be damned"). And his Rosenbach lecture, "Dreiser's Novels: The Editorial Problem" (published in Theodore Dreiser Centenary, 1971), asserts that Greg's theory, by causing editors to focus on that prepublication state which is "at once chronologically closest to the printed book and still completely sanctioned by the author" (p. 10), results in neglect of earlier prepublication states. A twentieth-century author, he says, "was more apt than his fellow novelist of a hundred years earlier to find that what appeared in a first edition was indeed what he wanted to appear in that edition" (p. 11); as a result, the real editorial problem becomes—for Dreiser, at any rate—"not to determine his final intention but to use the material at hand to demonstrate how he reached that intention" (p. 12). Most editors, however, unless they have decided to edit a particular early version of a work, are inevitably concerned with "final intentions"; but that concern does not mean that their editions cannot include data relevant to a genetic study of the prepublication stages of the work, and indeed the CEAA Statement urges editors to include a record of at least the substantive pre-copy-text variants. (The principal difference between the two approaches is that Pizer prefers printing selected passages from earlier states as footnotes to the main text, whereas the CEAA Statement recommends a discussion, illustrated by quotations, of the nature of the various stages of prepublication revision.)
Proof, 1 (1971), 122-155. Peckham's ideas had earlier appeared, in compressed form, in the discussion of "General Textual Principles" in the first and second volumes of the Ohio University edition of Robert Browning (1969, 1970), pp. vii-ix; beginning with the third volume (1971) this section is somewhat expanded (pp. vii-xiii) and contains a reference to this Proof essay.
It is not clear, however, why "sparse and inconsistent" punctuation in itself justifies the separate treatment of substantives and accidentals. Similarly, Peckham states in the next paragraph, "Greg's distinction rests upon the fact . . . that nobody but Ben Jonson [among Renaissance dramatists] took writing for the public theater seriously" (p. 125). Does this imply that later writers of "serious" literature normally managed to exert careful control over the printed forms of their work? And does it imply that for works of later periods editing usually involves only the correction of obvious errors in a text which otherwise embodies the author's final wishes in every respect?
When Peckham says that "what to do about punctuation is an empirical matter, not a theoretical matter, not a matter of editorial principles or rules" (p. 126), he is actually agreeing with Greg's position that each situation must be examined on its own terms; Greg was providing a "rule" only for those situations in which empirical evidence does not convincingly settle the question.
Of course, errors are made in the transmission of substantives as well as accidentals. David J. Nordloh, in "Substantives and Accidentals vs. New Evidence: Another Strike in the Game of Distinctions," CEAA Newsletter, No. 3 (June 1970), pp. 12-13, cites an instance in which a substantive variant between a manuscript and a magazine text can be shown to have resulted from a typist's error in the intervening typescript. It may be that without the typescript an editor would have taken the magazine reading as the one intended by the author; but the existence of such instances does not affect the general proposition that substantives as a class have normally received more careful treatment in transmission than accidentals.
Peckham's recollection of having heard, as a boy, stories about the serious consequences of incorrect punctuation in government documents (p. 125) does not really illustrate any common awareness "that punctuation cannot be separated from words," for the point of telling such stories is that the situations involved are exceptional and contradict everyday experience. Similarly, the "shift from rhetorical to syntactical punctuation in the first half of the nineteenth century" is not convincing evidence of such an awareness; both approaches support Peckham's view that punctuation consists of written signs for juncture, pitch, and stress and thus is part of the meaning, but he does not make clear why the shift from one to the other reflects a general awareness of this point.
One further observation of Peckham's on accidentals deserves notice. A logical consequence of his view that accidentals and substantives are inseparable is to deplore the absence of accidentals variants in the historical collations in CEAA volumes. The CEAA Statement naturally does not prohibit their inclusion; but it is undeniable that their absence springs not merely from the great expense that would be incurred in most cases by listing them but also from the emphasis of Greg's theory itself on the lack of significance of post-copy-text accidentals. As Peckham points out, a record of variants in accidentals would be important for the historical study of punctuation, and in addition, of course, it would give the reader a still fuller picture of the evidence which the editor had at his disposal. My own view is that variants in accidentals ought to be included whenever feasible (and particularly when the copy-text is a manuscript); but the time and money involved may in many—perhaps most—instances seem out of proportion to the amount of use that would be made of such information. See also footnote 35 above.
Peckham uses the word "change" as more neutral than "revise," for he is under the impression that "'revise' now generally means to change for the better" (pp. 138-139).
As I called it in "Textual Study and Literary Judgment," PBSA, 65 (1971), esp. 113-114. I do not mean that "scholarly" editing is not also creative in a general sense but am using "creative editing" as a shorthand way of referring to editing which has a different aim from that of historical reconstruction. Lewis Leary, who uses the term in "Troubles with Mark Twain," Studies in American Fiction, 2 (1974), does not, in my view, sufficiently distinguish between the editor who adopts a reading which seems "best" to him and the editor who selects what he thinks would have been regarded as "best" by the author.
In the section of his essay on analytical bibliography and science (pp. 129-136), Peckham recognizes that the analytical bibliographer is a historian; see Tanselle, "Bibliography and Science" (cited in footnote 70 above), pp. 83-87.
Whether one is attempting to reconstruct his first, or last, or some other, intention is an important matter but is beside the point until one grants the goal of reconstructing authorial intention of some sort. The question of "original" versus "final" intentions is helpfully illustrated by examples from Melville in Hershel Parker's "Melville and the Concept of 'Author's Final Intentions,'" Proof, 1 (1971), 156-168.
When Peckham says that "textual editing" is "logically independent of problems of aesthetics" (p. 136), he means that the artistic status of a work (whether or not it is generally considered to be an effective work of art) has nothing to do with the process of editing the work. But that does not mean that critical or aesthetic judgment is not involved in the editor's assessment of the evidence. At another point (p. 151) Peckham states, "The notions of text and author have been responsible for the fact that a discipline which came into existence as a reaction against textual eclecticism has returned to textual eclecticism"; but the more likely explanation would seem to be simply the growing recognition that it is foolish to attempt to eliminate critical judgment from historical research.
Let me repeat: I recognize that Peckham is asserting the essential identity of all "editorial" actions and that the scholarly editor I am speaking of cannot avoid, in Peckham's terms, producing his own version of a work. I am not disagreeing with Peckham on this point but am trying to show that there are valid discriminations to be made nevertheless among the versions produced and that it is not meaningless to regard some as approaching more closely than others to an "authorial" version, even if what is "authorial" must be to some extent a subjective judgment. (A "critical" edition, of course, by definition involves an editor's inferences about authorial intention, as Bowers makes clear by using the word "inferential" in his description of an editor's aim as "an attempt to approximate as nearly as possible an inferential authorial fair copy"—in "Textual Criticism" [cited in footnote 30 above], p. 33.)
Their whole approach shows their recognition of the impossibility of a definitive text, even though they, too, sometimes contribute to the confusion by an imprecise use of the words "text" and "edition."
I have commented in somewhat more detail on these parts of Thorpe's argument in "Bibliography and Science" (cited in footnote 70 above), pp. 78-80. Thorpe devotes an entire chapter, "The Province of Textual Criticism" (pp. 80-104), to setting forth the view that the "bibliographical orientation" of textual criticism is excessive; and his discussion of textual criticism as a "science" occupies the second section (pp. 57-68) of his chapter on "The Ideal of Textual Criticism" (this chapter was originally read on 8 February 1969 at a Clark Library Seminar and published that same year, along with a paper by Claude M. Simpson, Jr., in a pamphlet entitled The Task of the Editor, pp. 1-32).
Thorpe believes that the title Statement of Editorial Principles should be "Statement of Editorial Methodology" (p. 73), and he takes the title to be indicative of a confusion between aims and techniques. Actually the CEAA pamphlet deals with both, as the title of the 1972 revised edition (Statement of Editorial Principles and Procedures) attempts to indicate.
Thorpe is correct in saying that "actual collations never provide more than some facts on which the trained intelligence can work" (p. 73); but the point he misses in the Statement's remark that relevance is decided by collation is simply the fact that external evidence (e.g., an author's statement that a particular edition is a piracy) must be tested by what appears in the text itself (e.g., the presence or absence of differences that could reasonably be regarded as authorial revisions). See footnote 27 above.
If Peckham needs evidence that people still do react differently to accidentals than to substantives, Thorpe's statement here (and elsewhere, as on p. 74) provides a good illustration. Philip Young, like Thorpe, seems to judge the worth of editorial labor by how dramatically the text is altered, when he remarks that he "cannot find a single really significant difference between the new text [Ohio State Scarlet Letter] and that of the Riverside Edition (1883), regularly referred to in the bibliographies as Standard" ("Hawthorne and 100 Years: A Report from the Academy," Kenyon Review, 27 [1965], 215-232; reprinted as "Centennial, or the Hawthorne Caper," in Three Bags Full [1972], pp. 79-98). Young's discussion fails to recognize that what he regards as insignificant may appear significant to another critic and that the evidence, whatever it is, should be available in print for all to consult.
This statement occurs in a paragraph which was not present in the 1969 published version of this chapter.
The CEAA Statement does not take a great deal of space to make this point, nor does Thorpe, who says, "The sources of such information are so various that it is hardly worth mentioning any, except as examples" (p. 181).
This chapter is an expanded version of a paper read at the University of Kansas on 30 April 1971 and published later that year as a pamphlet entitled Watching the Ps & Qs: Editorial Treatment of Accidentals.
Additional evidence of the freedom with which nineteenth-century compositors altered accidentals is offered in two of James B. Meriwether's contributions to the CEAA Newsletter: "House-Styling, Vintage 1856," No. 3 (June 1970), pp. 11-12; "'On Careless Punctuation,'" No. 5 (December 1972), p. 3.
Thorpe's position on this question is criticized by Peckham, who points out (p. 152) that "intention" about past events must inevitably be a reconstruction, for which an author's statement is only one piece of evidence. In an essay called "The Intentional? Fallacy?", included in The Triumph of Romanticism (1970), Peckham states the point more fully: "Briefly, an inference of intention is a way of accounting for or explaining the generation of an utterance; it can never be a report. The speaker of an utterance has greater authority than anybody else in his so-called intentional inference only because he is likely to have more information for framing his historical construct, not because he generated the utterance" (p. 441). See also footnote 81 above.
Although Thorpe says, "The basic principle is that the author's intentions with respect to accidentals should be carried out" (p. 198), he also asserts, at the end of the same paragraph, "Whether the text should be presented in old-spelling or in modernized accidentals is mainly a matter of convenience for the intended audience"—as if there is no contradiction involved. He surveys the arguments for and against modernizing accidentals on pp. 134-140 and pp. 169-170 and concludes, "I can say that the losses from modernization seem to me less than most textual scholars assume" (p. 170). Nevertheless, despite his reluctance to distinguish clearly the purposes and implications of the two kinds of texts, the primary focus is on the author's own wishes: "Our task is, I believe, to fulfill the intentions of the writer in these small details [accidentals] as well as in greater matters" (p. 165).
For Bowers's criticism of Thorpe's position, see footnote 6 in "The New Look in Editing," South Atlantic Bulletin, 35 (1970), 8; for Peckham's, see Proof, 1 (1971), 122, 135-138, 152. See also the reviews by John Feather, in MLR, 68 (1973), 381-382, David J. Nordloh, in Resources for American Literary Study, 3 (1973), 254-257, and G. R. Proudfoot, in Library, 5th ser., 28 (1973), 77-78.
Bowers, in his review of Gaskell, "McKerrow Revisited," PBSA, 67 (1973), 109-124, speaks of Gaskell's "rejection of Greg's classic theory of copy-text" (p. 122). But Gaskell does not reject it totally: his explanation of the difference between substantives and accidentals and of the reason for choosing an early text as authority for accidentals is obviously derived from Greg. What Gaskell rejects is the logical extension back to the manuscript of the steps that led to the choice of the first edition over a later edition as copy-text. Cf. my review in Costerus, n.s. 1 (1974).
The separate question of whether different versions of a work exist, each deserving to be edited separately from different copy-texts, is touched on by Gaskell in a somewhat confusing way. Near the beginning of the chapter he calls it "an anomaly of bibliographical scholarship today" that "much effort is expended" on editing works "of which the early texts differ from each other only in minor and frequently trivial ways," while "books of which we have texts in several widely different forms are either avoided by editors or edited in a single version" (p. 337). If "single version" means one of the author's versions, the process would seem to be what the situation probably calls for; if it means (as the context suggests) an eclectic or "critical" text, one would have to say that such a text might be, but would not necessarily be, inappropriate—depending on the way in which the forms of the work are "widely different," whether as a result of a large number of changes or as a result of the nature of what changes there are. That Gaskell is thinking primarily in quantitative terms is shown later in the chapter. In discussing authorial revision of printed texts (p. 341), he states that the first edition remains the copy-text, provided that the author did not revise the punctuation and provided that "the revision [of substantives] is not extensive (say no more than a word or two in each paragraph)." Similarly, after describing the extensive revisions of Pamela (citing 8400 changes in the first two volumes of the last version), he asserts, "Here it would obviously be impossible for an editor to incorporate the first, the intermediate, and the final versions of the novel in a single critical text" (p. 342). Maybe so, but the reason is not the sheer number of changes; for only the nature of the differences, and not merely their quantity, can justify regarding two versions of a work as, in effect, separate works. I discuss this point further in my forthcoming article on "The Editorial Problem of Final Authorial Intention."
Of course, "rigidly" prejudices the case, since an editor who "rigidly" followed the manuscript, or any other text, without regard for the specific evidence involved would plainly be in the wrong.
That regularizing or normalizing amounts to modernizing has been made clear by Hershel Parker in "Regularizing Accidentals: The Latest Form of Infidelity," Proof, 3 (1973), 1-20. Furthermore, as he says in his cogent concluding section on the dangers of modernizing, "Normalizing to satisfy an editor's instinct for tidiness or to make smooth the way of a reader is ultimately demeaning for the editor and insulting to the reader." I have made some further comments on regularizing in "Bibliographical Problems in Melville," Studies in American Fiction, 2 (1974), 57-74, and in "The New Editions of Hawthorne and Crane," Book Collector, 23 (1974), 214-229.
A third book of a general and introductory nature which appeared in 1972 is F. W. Bateson's The Scholar-Critic: An Introduction to Literary Research. Although not limited to bibliographical and textual matters, as Thorpe and Gaskell are, it contains a chapter on "Textual Criticism" (pp. 126-146) which belittles the "'biblio-textual' school" of Greg and his followers (for supposedly attempting to eliminate literary judgment from editing) and endorses modernized texts. His argument for modernization seems strangely inconsistent with his own general position. He begins by labeling as a fallacy the view that "the ability to compose great literature necessarily carries with it the ability to spell and punctuate it correctly" (p. 139). But he later makes the sensible distinction between "good English" and "correct English," and it would seem that the attempt to enforce "correct" punctuation (by whatever standard) on an author's work would reveal as petty an attitude as to wish that he had been more "correct," and perhaps less effective, in his wording. And if printed literature is to be considered a recorded form of oral language—as Bateson describes it in "Modern Bibliography and the Literary Artifact," in English Studies Today, 2nd ser. (1961), pp. 67-77, from which part of this chapter is drawn—it would seem that punctuation would have to be regarded as an inextricable part of the effort to convey nuances of meaning in print. When he recommends that accidentals "should always be modernized" except when "such a process affects the meaning" (p. 142), it does not seem unreasonable to conclude that his statement amounts to saying that accidentals should never be modernized. That we can understand Shakespeare without reading him in his own pronunciation—a point cited by Bateson in support of his position—is irrelevant; for, while the pronunciation of words does not, within limits, seriously affect their meaning, the way in which we are directed to speak them by the punctuation does frequently affect it. (Bateson has also expressed his view of modernizing in a letter to the TLS, 1 January 1971, pp. 14-15.)
While the present paper was in proof, another essay critical of Greg's theory appeared. Vinton A. Dearing, in "Concepts of Copy-Text Old and New," Library, 5th ser., 28 (1973), 281-293, argues that Greg's procedure, by emphasizing an early text rather than a later one, "implies that a scribe or compositor regularly puts more errors into a text than the author takes out of his copy" (p. 293). Actually, of course, it implies no more than that errors do creep into a text as it is transmitted; each variant must still be given careful individual attention. Dearing's proposed solution raises many more questions than it answers: "Count the changes certainly made by the author and those certainly made by the scribe or compositor, and assign the rest to the cause with the greater total." I trust that it is unnecessary to enumerate the difficulties which such a statement involves. Still another relevant essay which appeared too late to be cited above is "The CEAA: An Interim Assessment," by Hershel Parker with Bruce Bebb, PBSA, 68 (1974), 129-148, which offers succinct evaluations of the CEAA editions in respect to design, arrangement of material, textual policies, and the provision of historical essays.
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