Scholarly editors may disagree about many things, but they are in
general agreement that their goal is to discover exactly what an author
wrote and to determine what form of his work he wished the public to
have. There may be some difference of opinion about the best way of
achieving that goal; but if the edition is to be a work of scholarship—a
historical reconstruction—the goal itself must involve the author's
"intention." The centrality of that concept to scholarly editing can be
illustrated by W. W. Greg's "The Rationale of Copy-Text,"[1] which, in the quarter century since it first
appeared, has established itself as the most influential document in modern
editorial theory. What Greg succeeded in accomplishing was to provide a
rationale for selecting, and then emending, a basic text in those cases in
which the choice was not made obvious by the historical,
biographical, bibliographical, and linguistic evidence available. In such
instances, an editor requires some guiding principle by means of which he
can maximize the chances of adopting what the author wrote and minimize
the chances of incorporating unauthorized readings into his text. Greg's now
celebrated solution rests on the position that, if a finished manuscript of a
text does not survive, the copy-text for a scholarly edition should normally
be the text of the earliest extant printed edition based on the missing
manuscript, for it can be expected to reproduce more of the characteristics
of the manuscript than any edition further removed; variants from later
editions which are convincingly shown to be revisions by the author can
then be incorporated into this copy-text. Because authors who revise their
work do not always give as much attention to what Greg calls "accidentals"
(matters of spelling and punctuation) as to "substantives" (the words
themselves)—and because such
attention is in any event extremely difficult to determine—the copy-text
usually remains the authority for accidentals; and if an editor adopts as
authorial certain substantive variants in a later edition, he need not adopt
all the other variants in that edition. Following this plan, the editor has a
rational means for deciding among indifferent variants (he retains the
copy-text readings); and the resulting critical text should be closer to the
author's intention than any individual surviving form of the text.
Although Greg did not address himself to the question of a precise
definition of "author's intention," it is clear from such a summary that he
considered the goal of an edition—and he was speaking of an
"old-spelling critical edition"—to be the reconstruction of a text
representing the author's final wishes about the version of his work to be
presented to the public. In Fredson Bowers's words, the task is "to
approximate as nearly as possible an inferential authorial fair copy, or other
ultimately authoritative document";[2]
or, as he put it another time, following Greg's theory will produce "the
nearest approximation in every respect of the author's final
intentions."[3] If an author can be
shown to have gone over his work with scrupulous care for a revised
edition, examining accidentals as well as substantives, the revised edition
(as the closest edition to an "ultimately authoritative document") would
become the
copy-text. Such a situation does not arise in most
instances, but Greg recognized its importance: "The fact is," he said, "that
cases of revision differ so greatly in circumstances and character that it
seems impossible to lay down any hard and fast rule as to when an editor
should take the original edition as his copy-text and when the revised
reprint" (p. 390). In other words, an editor cannot avoid making judgments
about the author's intention on the basis of the available evidence; the
strength of those judgments, in turn, will depend on his historical
knowledge and his literary sensitivity.
[4] The job of a scholarly editor, therefore,
can be stated as the exercise of critical thinking in an effort to determine the
final intention of an author with respect to a particular text.
[5]
Just what is meant by "author's final intention," however, has not
been made entirely clear, although at first glance the concept may seem so
self-evident as not to require formal definition. Its use in connection with
editing suggests that an editor's task is not to "improve" upon an author's
decisions, even when he believes that the author made an unwise revision,
and that an editor's judgment is directed toward the recovery of what the
author wrote, not toward an evaluation of the effectiveness of the author's
revisions.[6] Furthermore, the
concept, as a goal of editing, would seem clearly to imply that, when an
editor has strong reason to attribute a revision to the author, he will accept
that revision as "final" on the grounds that, coming second, it represents the
author's considered and more mature judgment. Greg suggests that this
procedure is equally valid for dealing with wholesale revision when he
writes, "If a work has been entirely
rewritten, and is printed from a new manuscript, . . . the revised edition
will be a substantive one, and as such will presumably be chosen by the
editor as his copy-text" (p. 389).
It is true that, in many instances, the simple interpretation of
"final intention" to mean that intention reflected in the last alterations made
or proposed by the author is workable enough and results in no ambiguity
as to the aim of the editorial process. Nevertheless, such an interpretation
does not answer certain theoretical questions which can assume practical
importance in the remaining instances. Two basic kinds of situations
particularly require further consideration: cases where the editor must
distinguish authorial alterations from alterations made by someone else and
must decide what constitutes "authorial intention" at such times; and cases
where the editor faces alterations unquestionably made by the author but
must still decide which readings represent the author's "final intention." In
what follows I shall offer some preliminary comments on these two
situations. But it is necessary to begin with at least a brief consideration of
the meaning of "intention" for this purpose and with some recognition of
the critical implications of
attempting to discover "authorial intention."
