Perhaps the most influential textual document of this century has been
Sir Walter Greg's "The Rationale of Copy-Text," dating from 1949.[1] The general acceptance of this
rationale
by Anglo-American editors[2] has led
to a new school of editing, especially of works in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries under conditions remote from the period 1550-1650 to
which he confined himself. The "Rationale" is a theoretical discourse
dissociated from any overall survey of typical problems in the editing of a
group of authors, or even of any single writer, although it is clear that the
Elizabethan drama and its peculiar problems bulked large in Greg's own
experience and helped to shape his thinking. The illustrations, drawn from
Shakespeare, Jonson, and Marlowe, are more of the nature of case-histories
involving the operation of editorial judgment in a few
selected verbal cruxes than a systematic attempt to link example with
precept to illuminate the workings of the rationale in broader terms. Some
of its tone and structure may be laid to the fact that Greg seems to have
thought of it largely as a coda to and correction of one element in a much
larger work,
The Editorial Problem in Shakespeare (1942;
2nd
ed. 1951); moreover, it was written in the form of a paper to be read at a
learned meeting and was published verbatim, with the addition of relatively
few footnotes. Finally, although Greg's experience related to the general
period 1550-1650 in which he set his argument, actually he confined his
examples, with one exception, to plays written within a decade of 1600. He
made no specific claims for application beyond the period of his
illustrations; and indeed he was not equipped by experience to apply his
rationale at first hand to the much more varied conditions of the literary
periods that followed. In some part, also, it must
be acknowledged, Greg had a wide critic's view of Elizabethan editing and
problems of textual transmission (in his day confined almost exclusively to
the drama) but a narrower practical experience in critical editing. His
two-text edition of Marlowe's
Doctor Faustus is a diplomatic
reprint, not a critical edition; and his critical text of the play is a
modernized one. Thus his actual experience in the nuts and bolts of the
editorial process in the period, outside of the
Faustus and a
vast
experience with the Malone Society typographical facsimiles, was confined
to his edition of the manuscript texts of Jonson's masque
The Gipsies
Metamorphosed. However, one must not ignore a very important
influence on his experience, that of dealing with the textual problems of the
manuscripts in the medieval miracle play cycles (1914) and the theoretical
Calculus of Variants (1925) that in some part may have
grown
from this experience.
Greg emphasized, with his usual generosity, that in the first of its two
parts—the actual choice of copy-text—the rationale was chiefly
a
restatement of McKerrow's position in Prolegomena for the Oxford
Shakespeare (1939), and that his own original contribution was
confined to the second part—the eclectic treatment of 'substantives'
and
'accidentals' with their separate authority in collateral-text or in
revised-edition situations. The importance of this second part as
supplementing the first can hardly be overestimated, however, for it was the
capstone of the total theory and (except for Housman in other
circumstances) the most convincing expression written of the principle of
eclectic texts. Combined with the reasoned emphasis he placed on the
choice of copy-text for the authority of its accidentals instead of its
substantives, it is this freeing of an editor from 'the tyranny of the
copy-text' in his choice of substantives when more than one authority is
present
that has exercised
ultimately the paramount influence. Indeed, it may be said that Greg seems
to be more concerned with this matter of editorial freedom of judgment than
he is with the narrower matter of copy-text choice, which he seems to have
regarded as so well established as to require relatively less illustration and
argumentation. On the contrary, in modern editing the choice of copy-text
has bulked as large as questions of its treatment. In one or other respect,
however, Greg's influence has been so marked that in the words of one
scholar, "[Greg's] views have never been publicly refuted."
[3]
In my opinion these views are indeed irrefutable but only when
applied to the specific conditions in which Greg placed them and subjected
to the implicit limitations of these rather special conditions. Yet
unquestionably they have in theory a wider and equally legitimate scope.
Greg himself visualized only a Renaissance textual situation; nevertheless,
it is agreed that most of his conclusions are as pertinent to texts of any later
period as they are to the age of Shakespeare or Jonson whenever the
transmissional conditions are the same.[4] Consequently, for many texts it
has been
possible to edit Dryden, Fielding, Hawthorne
and a number of nineteenth-century authors according to the same rationale
as Shakespeare. This fact is now commonly accepted, but the very success
of the new editorial theory has brought dangers in its train.
[5] In the hands of scholars
knowledgeable
in the conditions of the nineteenth century but with no personal
acquaintance with the Elizabethan textual situations that are familiar to
Renaissance students, the rationale has had a tendency to harden into a
mold without consideration of the inherent flexibility Greg took for granted
within the framework to which he was accustomed. Moreover, the
extrapolation of certain of Greg's statements to conditions other than those
he envisaged has had a tendency to be dogmatic in a manner alien to Greg's
generally permissive attitude for the treatment of exceptional situations. It
is no secret that converts are likely to be more rigid than those born to the
faith.
Attempts to explain the purposes of Greg's rationale and its
application—as well as some unusual circumstances in which it does
not
operate—have appeared from time to time since 1949,[6] but it may still be worth while to
attempt
a more precise analysis than has been available of the Renaissance textual
conditions with which Greg was familiar, the intent being to offer
background discussion to assist scholars of other periods when they apply
Greg's tenets to later literature and different situations. In this process some
analysis may be useful of a few ambiguities and half-lights in Greg's own
presentation that could interfere with an understanding of his basic thought.
Finally, a brief survey may be introduced of a few of the more common
present-day textual problems
that offer difficulty. By these means perhaps a more balanced view may be
obtained to guide future discussions pro and con.
The fairest presentation of Greg's theoretical position, together with
a searching analysis of the development and linking of its several lines of
argument, is that recently made by Dr. G. Thomas Tanselle (see, above,
footnote 4), an essay that removes any necessity for me to repeat the chief
items of the rationale. We can, then, begin in medias res. As
good a point as any for an opening of the matter comes in Greg's discussion
of the reasons why 'accidentals' have a separate authority in a text,
sometimes independent of the 'substantives,' and the consequences that
follow in the necessity to choose as copy-text that early document
containing the most authoritative accidentals without major regard for the
status of its substantives. Throughout Greg's discussion he never mentions
the relative authority of a holograph manuscript as against that either of a
scribal manuscript or of the printed book that ultimately derived from the
holograph with or without the author's
supervision. Since Elizabethan authorial manuscripts of works that saw print
can be counted just about on the fingers of one hand, it seems evident that
Greg saw no point in considering a contingency that was unlikely to arise,
particularly when a simple extension of his principles backward in the
transmission would easily cover the case. Thus Greg consistently writes in
terms of the preservation of accidental authority only in derived documents
which by their very nature must imperfectly reproduce the author's own
system of spelling, punctuation, word-division, etc., if system there
was.
These particular conditions help to explain certain of his attitudes.
First, the overlay of the author's accidentals by the transmissional process
is more extreme in the Renaissance than in later periods, thus diminishing
the authority in this respect of any derived document. Since in its spelling,
standards of capitalization, division, and in the somewhat impressionistic
rhetorical instead of syntactical system of punctuation[7] the language was in a state of flux,
the
widest variety of accidentals prevailed within a general framework of
acceptability. Johnson's Dictionary imposing standards of
spelling was still well in the future. The
manuscripts of the period, except for careful scribal copies for presentation,
may have practically no fixed standards at all, and can be especially
deficient in punctuation, some almost to the point of unintelligibility. Even
the prompt-books for plays are often so erratically punctuated as to leave
almost complete freedom to any compositor if he had set copy from them,
let alone the actor who recited from the parts transcribed from these books.
For many words neither authors nor compositors had any fixed system of
spelling but only a general preference for one form or another, if that.
(Shakespeare—if it was he who wrote Hand D in the
Sir
Thomas
More manuscript—in a brief scene spells
sheriff
in five
different ways.) The accidental characteristics of compositors were likely
to be more advanced than those of authors; it follows that each resetting of
type, whether in transferring a manuscript to print or in reprinting the text
of an earlier edition, was a
modernization.
[8] Systematic
proof-correction by authors was a rarity. Among themselves compositors
differed in their spelling preferences so that a book might exhibit several
different sets of characteristics. Whatever effort a compositor or scribe
might make to reproduce the wording of his copy, no suggestion is present
in the period that any importance was attached to following the author's
ordinary run of accidentals.
Under these conditions Greg knew that (in a manner impossible in the
nineteenth century)[9] the accidents
of a printed book would differ
considerably from those of the holograph, in contrast to the substantives
that a compositor might be supposed to wish to reproduce with reasonable
fidelity. This fact is at the root of his division between the authority of
substantives and of accidentals. The prospects that any printed book (or
scribal manuscript) would reflect to any significant degree the author's
accidentals are uncertain and variable, in most cases difficult to recover,
and if fortuitously recovered difficult to identify.
[10] Hence Greg makes no claims for
specific
recognizable authority in the copy-text accidentals and regards their
reproduction as more significant of the time (and locality of a scribal
transcript) than of the author, at least in any identifiable form. His
discussion (p. 376) of the possibilities in the distant future of establishing
a "standard spelling for a particular period or district or author" is in part
a red herring, applying more to manuscript than to
printed-book texts, and it represents chiefly a cautious attempt to protect his
flanks (that it is necessary, instead, "to choose whatever extant text may be
supposed to represent most nearly what the author wrote and to follow it
with the least possible alteration") from the experiments for synthetic
accidentals that were starting in his day among editors of medieval texts.
It can be ignored with safety. Why he limited his succeeding statement to
manuscripts and did not include printed books in writing "Thus a
contemporary manuscript will at least preserve the spelling of the period,
and may even retain some of the author's own" is hard to understand except
for the speculation that Greg himself felt somewhat more secure about the
facts of manuscript transmission (which he had studied) than about the
specific details of compositorial transmission with which he had only a
general acquaintance.
(The considerable scholarship devoted to the spelling characteristics of
Elizabethan compositors, principally in the First Folio, has developed
mostly since Greg's day.)
At any rate, it is possible to clarify for the modern scholar Greg's
conclusion that "it is only on the grounds of expediency, and in
consequence either of philological ignorance or of linguistic circumstances,
that we select a particular original as our copy-text." This applies almost
exclusively to multiple manuscript texts of the same work and in essence is
of no concern whatever to a nineteenth-century editor. In fact, Greg
introduces this statement mainly as an argumentative ploy to support the
conclusion that the editorial treatment of scribal manuscript accidentals must
be conservative, through ignorance, whereas that of substantives can be
subject to editorial judgment. It has little or nothing to do with the selection
of copy-text for works preserved in print. If one is not to modernize an
early text (and Greg rejects this proposition for scholarly editions), then the
accidentals of some one document must be chosen as a framework for the
substantives. Since in such
manuscripts as he has in mind we are dealing not with holographs but with
documents that may derive from holograph at some distance and will
preserve the author's accidentals only in part (if at all) and in details
unknown to us, we should select that (manuscript) document as copy-text
which best preserves the accidentals of the author's period and district
(when possible). It is granted that because of the derived state of the
manuscripts we do not possess the philological expertise to restore the exact
accidentals of the original period of its holograph. Thus we bow to
expediency in selecting the manuscript that seems best to reflect the original
conditions, including the linguistic circumstances of district. However the
choice of manuscript copy-text is decided, it is based on expediency, in the
sense that whatever selection is made from among various documents will
at best be a compromise that only imperfectly (if at all) can be supposed to
reproduce the holograph's exact
characteristics; nevertheless, once chosen, this document's accidentals are
to be transcribed and retained with a minimum of alteration except as
correction is needed.
What to Greg is the more important point in this discussion then
follows: although the transmission of documents may vitally affect their
accidentals, it affects the substantives in ways that textual and critical
analysis can evaluate, whereas little can be done on the evidence to utilize
such critical techniques to recover authoritative accidentals. Accordingly,
by the full exercise of editorial judgment these original substantives can be
reconstructed on the whole (according to the limits of the evidence) in a
manner impossible for the accidentals.
Greg thus emerges from his consideration of early manuscripts to the
more pertinent examination of the conditions in which book copy-texts
should be selected. In doing so, he comes for the first time to examples that
may apply to later literatures. The grounds of expediency in the choice of
manuscript copy-text with which he introduced his discussion of accidentals
have only occasional application to early printed books[11] and none to those of the nineteenth
century. The reason is that in his analysis of the situation in respect to
manuscripts Greg automatically assumed the presence of a number of
collateral texts for the work, this multiplicity of documents not ordinarily
resulting from the progress of the work through different stages of authorial
revision but instead from the copying on different occasions of a variety of
texts deriving from the lost archetype. Except for a few special cases in the
hand-printing era, these conditions scarcely exist
in later times independent
of revision, which was not primarily in question in the manuscripts Greg
was hypothesizing.
[12]
Note: A collateral manuscript, in the purest sense, is one in a
different independent branch of the family tree from another. That is, it
does not derive in direct line from any other known or hypothesized
example of the manuscript text to which it is collateral. Direct line means
what it says: thus two manuscripts that derive from any two branches
created by radiation from the archetype are not in linear relationship to each
other. The assumption is ordinarily made that the variant texts of two
collateral manuscripts are in the same state; that is, one is not authorially
revised and the other untouched although that proviso is not necessarily a
part of the definition of 'collateral' so long as the central situation of
non-linear derivation is observed. Greg (p. 377) defines a collateral
relationship as one in which each manuscript is "derived from the original
independently, or more or less independently, of the others." Although his
qualification "more or less independently"
takes care of contamination, or the insertion of readings in one line by
reference to another, the definition leaves unanswered the central question
whether "derived from the original independently" requires a collateral
manuscript to be in one or another of the two or more lines that usually, as
reconstructed, diverge from the archetype, or original, in most family trees,
or else in similar divergence but within a single one of these branches.
Despite his language, it may seem that he meant the latter, which is a still
acceptable but less strict usage. For example, an earlier form of a
manuscript can be conjecturally recovered from two documents that have
forked within one of the major textual lines, but not from two manuscripts
which in a direct line derive one from the other. The latter can scarcely be
called collateral, whereas the conjectured antecedent document at the fork
can be recovered from two 'collateral' manuscripts in the general sense,
since it is a form of archetype
for the two manuscripts concerned and indeed would be the archetype itself
were there only one line conjectured from the holograph. Presumably this
antecedent document is what Greg thought of when he wrote 'original' even
though properly speaking a similar antecedent document if there were a
second main line from the archetype might be recovered from 'collateral'
manuscripts and then these two truly collateral recovered hypothetical
documents might be compared with each other to reconstruct the only true
original, the archetype X from which stem the two main divergent lines. A
practical case involving printed editions comes in Stephen Crane's "Death
and the Child." One typescript made from his manuscript, ribbon and
carbon, was the copy for the English magazine and book publication; a
second typescript, ribbon and carbon, made independently from the same
manuscript served for the American magazine and book publication. The
major features of each typescript can be recovered by comparison of
magazine and book, this representing the conjectured document at the fork.
Then the two recovered typescripts can be compared to recover the major
features of X, the manuscript. In the general sense each country's magazine
and book text are collateral since an antecedent document can be recovered
from the two; however, the strict collateral sense could be
applied only to the documents that represented the different typescripts, like
the English magazine and the American book texts, etc.
When a book text is never revised or in any way altered by
comparison with some other authorially-derived document, only one
authoritative document can be identified. Since he ignores holographs, Greg
places this single authority as the earliest printed text, the one that derives
most immediately from the author's lost manuscript and is thus
distinguished from any later series of mere reprints[13] stemming in linear fashion from
the one
primary authoritative preserved document. This is a 'substantive edition':
in the case outlined it is the only substantive edition, and obviously it
represents the sole possible authority both for accidentals and for
substantives (the wording). It is the only form of copy-text that presents to
an editor no problems other than correction.
Greg's use of the term substantive edition is in some
part
misleading. In note 1 on p. 378 he accepts McKerrow's definition as "an
edition that is not a reprint of any other" and states "I shall use the term in
this sense, since I do not think that there should be any danger of confusion
between 'substantive edition' and 'substantive readings'." On p. 379 the
next statement is clear: "Whatever may be the relation of a particular
substantive edition to the author's manuscript (provided that there is any
transcriptional link at all)[14] it stands
to reason that the relation of a reprint of that edition must be more remote."
This is an extension of the original reference on p. 378, "in the rare cases
in which a later edition had been revised by the author or in which there
existed more than one 'substantive' edition of comparable authority." The
distinction drawn here between two kinds of editions needs explanation in
terms of the examples Greg had
in mind if it is to have any application to later periods. In the first case an
author would annotate a copy of an early edition with his corrections and
revisions and send the marked-up copy to the printer. Greg calls this
situation a rare one: it is rare in the years close to 1600 simply because of
a paucity of authorially revised editions, and the only examples that he
mentions are Nashe's Unfortunate Traveller and the Jonson
Folio set from marked copies of the quartos[15] and at least in part seen through
the press
by the author. Technically the Jonson is not a substantive edition according
to McKerrow because, in Greg's phrase, it is a revised reprint of the quarto
copy.
What Greg had in mind for the second category of two substantive
editions of comparable authority is almost completely an Elizabethan
phenomenon when applied to two printed editions and not to a printed
edition and one or more collateral manuscripts. For the moment to pass
over the matter of bad-quarto texts, including for the sake of argument
King Lear, Greg's second category consists of the Quarto and
Folio editions of Hamlet, Othello, Troilus and Cressida, and
2 Henry IV. In their desire to print the Folio from what they
considered to be the best texts, and perhaps in one case because of
copyright problems, the Folio editors did not merely reprint these plays
from the available good quarto texts without annotation of their own as in
Romeo and Juliet or with minor alteration deriving from the
prompt-book as in The Merchant of Venice, Richard II, or
I Henry IV. Instead, the Folio version of the text derives its
substantives in major part
from the authority of a manuscript in a different tradition from that which
was the setting copy for the Quarto. However, this manuscript was not
itself set by the Folio printer but for convenience he was given a copy of
the Quarto that had been annotated to bring the original printed version into
general conformity with the variant readings of the manuscript. Technically,
therefore, this expedient by the Folio editors disqualified the Folio texts of
these plays for consideration as 'substantive editions' under McKerrow's
definition since the Folio is in considerable part a reprint of the Quarto
except for the marked alterations. On the other hand, if one thinks
exclusively of the literary status of the Folio text, fresh authority has
certainly entered and both Quarto and Folio could be regarded critically
(not bibliographically) as 'substantive editions' even though one text was
not revised from another by the authorial post-publication process that
produced, say, the revised
reprint of the Folio Sejanus from Jonson's Quarto. Instead,
the
divergences in the versions appear to stem from pre-publication differences
between the two manuscripts behind the separate editions, which varied
from each other in the state of their texts. Since the manuscripts were either
written by Shakespeare or else were scribal copies of a holograph even at
some remove—and in at least some of the plays appear to represent
different stages in the development or perhaps in the theatrical application
of the text—each is therefore 'authoritative' and the printed results
represent (again only in a literary and not in a technical sense) two
substantive editions of comparable authority.
The phrase comparable authority has little relation in
Greg's mind to the critical question of the literary merit of the texts.
Instead, authority is a technical term in textual criticism
signifying the derivation of any form from the author, preferably by some
transcriptional link.
Authority may be inferior as when some major contamination in the
transmission has affected the validity of one text, or when the distant
relation of an edition to the holograph suggests the possibility of more than
usual transmissional corruption; or it can be very strong, as when a printed
edition is set directly from holograph. Hence Greg uses
comparable
authority to indicate that, so far as the evidence goes, in the main
the
author had a relatively equal concern in the composition of both versions
and that each is close enough to the author so as not to have been distorted
excessively by transmissional problems. Authorial concern need not have
been revisory, although revision is not by definition excluded.
[16] This is what he had in mind when
on p.
381 he wrote: "McKerrow was, therefore, in his later work quite conscious
of the distinction between substantive readings and accidentals, in so far as
the problem of revision is concerned. But he
never applied the conception to cases in which we have more than one
substantive text, as in
Hamlet and perhaps in
2 Henry
IV,
Troilus and Cressida, and
Othello." Greg uses the
term
substantive edition, or its equivalent, again on pages 384-385,
"But whenever there is more than one substantive text of comparable
authority [footnote excluding 'bad quartos'], then although it will still be
necessary to choose one of them as copy-text, and to follow it in
accidentals, this copy-text can be allowed no over-riding or even
preponderant authority so far as substantive readings are concerned."
Finally, on page 391, "Of both [
Richard III and
King
Lear] much the best text is supplied by the folio of 1623; but this
is
not a substantive text, but one set from a copy of an earlier quarto that had
been extensively corrected by collation with a manuscript preserved in the
playhouse."
A basic confusion is created by the use in these juxtaposed passages
of the term substantive edition (or text) in two
contradictory senses. In his statement on Richard III and
King Lear he is employing the strict McKerrow definition
that
he had promised to observe. This holds for his statement about
Hamlet, which Greg regarded as set in Q and in F from two
independent manuscripts, a view no longer popular. On the other hand, in
his remarks about 2 Henry IV, Troilus, and
Othello
he forgets that he is supposed to be observing McKerrow and instead
reverts to an important modification of the term that he had made in the
Editorial Problem whereby what he called 'mixed texts'
joined
McKerrow's editions (not derived from any other) as a separate category
of an expanded concept of what constitutes substantive texts.
Editions were mixed if one had been used as basic setting copy for a later
but in the process had (a) been
conflated by some agent with a more or less authoritative manuscript in a
different tradition from that used as setting copy for the earlier, or (b) been
revised by the author making his own annotations as Jonson had done in
preparing copy for the 1616 Folio by marking up his quarto plays.
Independently transmitted texts were automatically substantive in the
McKerrow manner. Mixed texts that had undergone scrupulous authorial
supervision (preferably of the printing as well as the preparation of copy),
like Jonson's, were also admitted without other qualification as substantive.
However, for mixed texts resulting in the Shakespeare Folio from conflation
of the quarto with some other manuscript, Greg believed that the criterion
of an alteration in their 'essential character' had to be applied before the
Folio could be allowed as a substantive edition. An example of this
reasoning comes in footnote 1 on page xix of The Editorial Problem
in Shakespeare:
Note: The folio text of Hamlet is certainly, and that of
Othello almost certainly, substantive in its own right [i.e. set
from independent manuscripts]: neither, therefore, comes in question here.
In Troilus it is probable, and in 2 Henry IV
possible, that the folio text was printed from a copy of a quarto that had
been altered by comparison with a manuscript and therefore partakes at
least to some extent of the character of a mixed text, but it is by no means
clear that the alteration was such as to raise the folio to substantive rank,
still less that the folio should be regarded as the more authoritative.
In mid-1949 when the "Rationale" was written it is uncertain whether
Greg had been informed privately by Dr. Alice Walker of her researches
indicating that F Othello had been set from an annotated copy
of Q, although his association of Othello on page 381 not
with
Hamlet but with the two plays he was convinced were mixed
by
conflation would
seem to suggest the possibility, or at the least his concern that other
discussions to the same effect of
Othello had made its mixed
more probable than its independent nature. But at least in respect to
Troilus and to
2 Henry IV there can be no
question
that the Folio could not conform to McKerrow's definition of a substantive
edition. Hence the passage in the "Rationale" specifying the four plays as
substantive represents a lapse in favor of his earlier (1942) inclusion of
mixed editions and contradicts his express statement that he will use
substantive edition only in McKerrow's sense of 'completely
independent.' Thus what Greg is actually saying on page 381 is this:
Hamlet is substantive in both editions because each was set
directly from manuscript; on the other hand, the three other plays, being
mixed texts, come under another criterion for substantiveness—that
of a
change in F from the essential character of the text in Q—and he is
uncertain whether in fact Q and F have been sufficiently modified in their
essential character to warrant substantive status.
[17] In this paragraph, then, he is
definitely
not following his definition of
substantive as on page 391,
[18] and the reader needs a warning to
the
effect. Moreover, the straying here brings in question what he intended in
the other references to substantive texts or editions (there can be no
distinction in kind although one is possible in form), for if these four plays
(including
Hamlet as we now believe) are not substantive in
the
Folio because set from marked-up quartos, then Greg is left with no
illustration of what he had in mind (in the McKerrow sense) in writing of
such dual substantive texts. This is anomalous, for the
exact circumstances that led him to deny substantive status to the Folio
Richard III operate for
Othello and the
rest.
It is an article of faith that in this period a scribe bringing printed
copy into general conformity with a manuscript in lieu of giving the printer
the manuscript as setting copy[19]
would confine himself largely to the transfer of variant words and would
ordinarily ignore accidentals that were not associated with the variant
substantives; hence the accidentals of the Folio, it is believed, are in the
main Jaggard's compositors' versions of the Quarto's and of no authority
since they would lack any transcriptional link with a manuscript that in turn
ultimately derived from Shakespeare. Under these conditions, and editor is
forced to choose the Quarto versions as copy-texts, regardless of any other
considerations (except for 'bad quartos') because they alone have
transcriptional links that ultimately tie them with the holographs.[20] The sole editorial question then
concerns
the authority of the variant substantive readings
taken one by one, in which matter Greg is on relatively solid ground even
though he is silent on the intricacies of the textual problems that might
influence editorial judgment.
Note: The basic question in these plays is (a) whether a variant
between Q and F results from Shakespeare's revision, as has been argued
for
Troilus, or (b) whether one or the other is an error
created
in the course of the transmission as in Greg's example of Q2
fearful but F
fretful porpentine in
Hamlet, or (c) whether both are in error, probably because
the
Q error was not corrected by the scribe annotating copy for F, as seems to
be certain in
Hamlet's QF
good kissing carrion
for
the standard emendation
god kissing carrion, or less certainly
Q1's
dead vast and middle of the night for Q2-F
dead
waste, or (d) both readings go back to a common error in their
copy,
as may
be supposed for
minute's rest in Q and F
The Merry
Wives of Windsor which on the analogy of
Romeo and
Juliet should be
minim's rest. As for the matter of the
definition of a substantive document ('substantive edition' is too precise
when one considers modern conditions of manuscripts and typescripts),
McKerrow's precise limitation needs further analysis since it promotes some
paradoxes. For instance, he does not hesitate to call a memorially
reconstructed bad quarto like
Richard III the only substantive
edition, and the Folio a derived text, simply because the Folio was set from
a copy of Q3 brought into general conformity with a manuscript furnished
by the play-house. One may question whether accidentals are more
important than the words in defining a substantive edition, however,
particularly when in such a case the Q3 accidentals have no shred of
authority anyway. It does seem odd to deny substantive status to F
Othello or to
Troilus on a technicality when it would have been accorded
if
F had been set direct from the manuscript used to annotate Q and when in
either case the wording of F may be taken to represent something very
close indeed to that of the manuscript, regardless of the accidentals. There
are problems, of course. If an edition is to be rated as substantive according
to the variation in its wording deriving from some authoritative source, the
difficulty of estimating the degree of difference in order to achieve
substantive status may be subject to opinion, as Greg found when wrestling
in his
Editorial Problem with the question whether F
2
Henry IV was or was not substantive. It would seem that
McKerrow's definition needs to be modified but that Greg's more general
use is not perhaps entirely satisfactory either. Linear authorial revisions
present a further difficulty. Is Jonson's
Every Man in his
Humour substantive both in Q and in F but
Sejanus
not?
Are not
the differences between Q and F
Sejanus about as important
for
the wording as between the technically substantive manuscript and quarto
of
The Masque of Queens? Should the status of the
accidentals
dictate the definition of substantive text? In another place I have attempted
to offer a redefinition of
substantive that aims at reconciling
these problems (see the reference in footnote 17).
Since a textual critic is now left with no examples in the "Rationale"
of early printed books with variant texts (not authorially revised editions)
set independently from different manuscripts, he will need to supply these
for himself. Within this period the ones I am familiar with require a choice
between the authority of a printed edition and a manuscript version, scribal
as in Beaumont and Fletcher's Beggars Bush, Woman's Prize,
and Bonduca, or authorial as in George Herbert's
Temple; or else a printed edition and multiple scribal
manuscript texts as in the poems of John Donne. An editor can approach
the Beaumont and Fletcher plays as if the manuscript were actually a
printed edition (or the 1647 Folio a manuscript) since only the two
documents are preserved in their different traditions and the choice of
copy-text resolves into the usual question of transmissional closeness to
holograph versus the problem of the early or late date for the reproduction
of
the accidentals.[21]
When various manuscript texts of different degrees of completeness are
preserved of poems, as with Donne, usually no way exists to draw a family
tree for each short lyric, although something can be done in rougher outline
for some of the collections as a whole. An editor is forced to consider the
printed edition merely as the equivalent of the manuscript that was its copy,
substantially subject to the same rules of a reconstructed text that
characterize editions of manuscripts. In order to secure general uniformity
of accidental texture most editors prefer to select the printed edition as
copy-text on just such grounds of expediency as Greg remarked, although
some circumstances might suggest a bolder course even when considerable
disparity between the accidental systems of different poems would result.
However, many manuscript versions of poems would be troublesome to
read without as much editorial tidying up as the original printer gave his
copy; and so unless one is dealing with
holograph, editorial expediency is not necessarily blameworthy since
authentic results are so very uncertain when working with derived
documents.
A reader unacquainted with Renaissance textual conditions must also
be on guard not to draw improper parallels between modern cases and the
implications of Greg's use of Hamlet and the other three
plays
as examples of dual authority. Greg mentions these in context with a
consideration of revised editions and the most suitable treatment for them,
and hence one may believe that he considers these plays to greater or lesser
degree might perhaps come in that category (but see below). He seems most
taken with the Folio Hamlet, although no critic that I recall
has
squarely faced up to the implications of any theory that the alterations that
might seem revisory are Shakespeare's or another's. The best case for
revision can perhaps be made for Troilus and the least good
for
2 Henry IV. At any rate, whether these plays do indeed
represent a special class of authorially revised texts is distinctly moot.
Note: The alterations in the Quartos made by scribal comparison with
some manuscript preserved in the playhouse give to the substantives of the
Folio
texts of this group of plays what may properly be called 'authoritative
status,' provided that
authoritative is not taken as a
comparative
meaning superior to the 'authority' of the Quartos but only that the variants
in both texts have a direct reference back to some authority. To compound
the possible confusion, it seems likely that when Greg writes of a 'revised
edition' he is not, after all, suggesting that the source of the variants in the
Folio lies necessarily with Shakespeare's revisions of a state of the text
known through the Quarto. (For instance, this would not agree with his
views about the transmission of the
Othello text as found in
Q
and F.) What he seems to have in mind, sometimes, is that the Folio editors
from their point of view 'revised' a good Quarto by reference to some
manuscript which in their opinion offered a superior text whether because
of its more faithful transmission from the archetypal holograph or because
it had in the process of
transmission been authorially revised. (With their views about the
pre-eminent authority of prompt-books, the Folio editors might well, also,
have considered that play-house revision improved the text over working
papers.) Thus although never specified, a reader may need to translate
Greg's use of
revised edition some-times but not always to
signify merely a text that reproduces an altered version of some authority
but with no necessary inference that Shakespeare was himself responsible
for both versions by reason of his revisions.
Moreover, what Greg did not distinguish were the differences in editorial
problems between pre-publication and post-publication authorial revision.
Post-publication revision almost automatically requires the hypothesis
(usually demonstrable) that an earlier printed copy has been revised by the
author. When this occurs, as remarked, no question of copy-text arises for
early books because of the assumption that the usual revising author, like
Nashe, would pay small attention to changing the accidentals of the printed
copy that were acceptable by current standards. After all, he knew that the
compositor(s) of the revised edition were going to alter what they set
according to their own wishes and that this result would also be acceptable
by current standards. In his own period, except for Ben Jonson, Greg could
not have conceived of an author—like Walt Whitman or Henry James
(or
William)—closely supervising the details of revised editions for
accidentals as well as substantives.
It is odd that in the "Rationale" as distinct from the Editorial
Problem Greg is curiously uncertain when he treats Jonson, who of
all Elizabethan authors has the best claim to the supervision of most parts
of a revised edition, as in his Folio Works in 1616. Greg
knows
where he stands when it comes to the Folio Every Man in his
Humour which, though set from an annotated quarto, was so heavily
rewritten as to enforce the choice of the Folio as copy-text, it being a labor
of Hercules to work up an apparatus for a text that would endeavor to insert
the
Folio accidental as well as substantive revisions in the original Quarto
texture. What Greg does not mention, and may even not have recognized,
was the fact that for choice of copy-text it was not the question whether
Jonson's revision of the Folio accidentals in this play made them on the
whole more authoritative than those of the Quarto (a proposition that could
be readily paralleled in modern times). Instead, he accepts the Folio as
copy-text on what turn out to be grounds of expediency: because of the very
thorough substantive rewriting, the accidentals that accompany the altered
wording must of course be accepted, and these are so numerous as to make
it almost impossible to attempt with any consistency to preserve the Quarto
accidentals when revision of the substantives would not necessarily have
affected their variation. In this particular example there is nothing wrong
with expediency (although Greg does not call it that) as a practical matter,
but expediency can seldom operate
as a principle. Thus when he comes to other of Jonson's revisions his
gingerly treatment is likely to mislead a reader who does not know enough
about the circumstances to recognize that at bottom Greg is also applying
expediency to cases that are not at all parallel and should have been subject
to principle.
In dealing with the Jonson Folio as a unit, Greg notes that although
it has been disputed whether Jonson revised the proofs, Simpson was most
likely correct in assuming that he did so; but there can be no question that
Jonson was responsible for the numerous corrections made while the sheets
were in process of printing. He continues: "Simpson's consequent decision
to take the folio for his copy-text for the plays it contains will doubtless be
approved by most critics. I at least have no wish to dispute his choice" (pp.
390-391). He then appends to this last sentence the footnote "Simpson's
procedure in taking the 1616 folio as copy-text in the case of most of the
masques included, although he admits that in their case Jonson cannot be
supposed to have supervised the printing, is much more questionable." This
position about the Folio is difficult to equate with Greg's principles for the
choice of copy-text as illustrated by Nashe's Unfortunate
Traveller—that identified
substantive revision should be introduced into the accidental texture of the
earliest edition. It is this pronouncement about Nashe that has been taken
by modern critics as an absolute, without sufficient understanding of the
complex reasons (including expediency) that led Greg to take the opposite
position for Jonson, and not necessarily just for Every Man in his
Humour.
In the first place, Greg certainly thought of Jonson's care to supervise
the printing of his works as an exception to ordinary Elizabethan authorial
procedures. For the Folio Greg mentions three stages of supervision
of the revised edition: Jonson's marking of alterations in the copy sent to
the printer; Jonson's revision of the Folio proofs; and finally his correction
of the sheets while they were in process of printing. The first and third of
these are incontrovertible, whereas the second (which could be argued was
perhaps the chief reason for Greg's acceptance of Simpson's choice of the
Folio) is so conjectural as to be of small value as a basis for editorial
principle. A distinction exists between the second and third that is a product
of hand printing only. A scrupulous author could indeed require
pre-printing proofs, but they were not at all common chiefly because they
delayed production of the volume and in some cases even the output in
other respects of the printing shop. That is, since type was in short supply
and had to be distributed before the next sheet (in general) could be
completely typeset, composition of the Folio would have been suspended
while Jonson read such special proofs.
Under these circumstances printers ordinarily required authors, instead, to
attend the press. This term meant that an author would drop by the printing
shop each day and would read whatever proof was handy. Sometimes it
might be newly-set type-pages if available, but ordinarily the author picked
up a sheet being printed, marked any changes he wished, and the press was
stopped while the changes were made, to be incorporated in all subsequent
sheets printed. Collation of multiple copies, as was done with the Jonson
Folio, will reveal the majority of such in-press alterations, which indeed
were the usual method of proofreading even by the printer's own reader.
Note: For the usual methods of making in-press corrections, see my
"Elizabethan Proofing,"
Essays, pp. 240-253. Simpson's
slightly
vague language may just possibly have misled Greg into thinking that a
claim had been made for substantially more authorial proofreading than the
at-the-press correction that Simpson recognized took place. In the textual
discourse on the 1616 Folio as a whole, Simpson contents himself
(
Works, IX, 51-52) with the statement that "It was the
exception, not the rule, for a seventeenth-century printer to send out proofs
to an author. The author dropped in at the press once or twice a day,
looked over the newly taken pulls, and corrected such errors as caught his
eye in a cursory reading." This comes in a discussion of the in-press
corrections and by no means implies that Jonson worked differently.
Writing of
Sejanus (
Works, IV, 339) Simpson
states
only, "Jonson's proof-reading was probably done at the printing-house from
fresh
pulls supplied him on the spot" and he continues with a discussion of the
number of errors not altered by the press-correction because of these less
than ideal conditions. The equation of 'newly taken pulls' and 'fresh pulls'
would seem to indicate that Simpson was not describing the special
conditions of formal proofs sent to Jonson while printing was suspended but
instead the normal attendance of an author at the press which would
produce the visible
variant states of the printed sheets and not invisible and unknowable
preprinting correction. Indeed, on the evidence, this latter pre-printing
correction is unlikely, for if Jonson had read proofs at his leisure before
impression of any sheet was made, he should have had no occasion to make
so many as the six hundred odd changes that mark his press-correction of
the Folio.
[22]
If, then, any suggestion can be dropped that Jonson read proofs other than
at the printer while the sheets were being machined, an editor is spared
having to take account of quite unassessable evidence and can approach the
task of comparing the printed Quarto with the Folio in its uncorrected and
corrected formes in a rational endeavor to estimate, as an editor must, how
much of the accidental variation was due to Jonson and how much to the
printer. The choice of copy-text will depend upon his answer.
In the nature of the case we have no means of knowing precisely to
what extent Jonson marked the accidentals for change in the original copy
for each separate play; but in certain plays like Sejanus
Simpson
can point with certainty to Jonson's idiosyncratic attempts to impose a
classicizing spelling system on Greek and Latin derivatives and to utilize the
apostrophus, a metrical punctuation designed to mark the presence of an
extra syllable to be lightly sounded in the line (IV, 337-341). He also gives
examples, which appear to be buttressed by the evidence of Jonson's
holographs as well as his press-corrections, illustrating some of the
subtleties of Jonson's punctuation alterations (IV, 342; IX, 73).
The important question then arises of the degree, outside of the
preserved evidence of the press-corrections, to which Jonson was able to
enforce the compositors to follow copy in the details he had presumably
marked for alteration as well as in those he had not. The evidence suggests
that he had the usual Elizabethan luck, meaning that the compositors despite
what may have been good intentions by no means followed copy in anything
approaching the manner one would expect in
modern times. The evidence is of two kinds: first, the extraordinary amount
of press-correction required when printing was in progress (presumably to
correct departures from copy in at least some part); and second, the large
number of idiosyncratic accidentals lost in the transition from Quarto to
Folio even though some were added, not only the classicized spellings but
particularly the apostrophus, which Simpson was forced to supply from the
Quarto in perhaps half of the total occurrences. Especially when it is
considered that in
Sejanus specifically, and in general in the
other plays also, Jonson did nothing in the press-corrections about the Folio
departures from his ordinary spellings (and these were fairly numerous), a
problem does indeed arise whether the supervision that he gave the play
both in the preparation of the marked Quarto copy and in the Folio
press-correction is sufficient to elevate the Folio to copy-text status for
plays (unlike
Every Man in his
Humour) where the amount of substantive revision was markedly
less
and so had little or no effect on the separate problem of the accidentals that
were independent of revision. In this connection Greg's footnote about the
masques is surprisingly mild. It does not seem 'questionable' to accept the
1616 Folio as copy-text for portions that Jonson admittedly did not
supervise in the printing: it seems quite contrary to Greg's whole position
since for the masques, at least, the line is a thin one between the case of
The Unfortunate Traveller except for the hypothesized
marking
of the masque copy. That is, if the control that Jonson exercised by
press-correction is missing (and this should have no bearing on matters of
copy-text), Greg's mere questioning of Simpson's choice of copy-text for
the masques implies his at least partial acceptance of the proposition that
Jonson's marking of his copy was sufficiently detailed to change the texture
of the Folio accidentals from derived
to 'substantive' status. Such a view needs more evidence than has been
advanced: it is basically most improbable.
Some hint as to Greg's seemingly paradoxical reasoning may be
extracted from a statement he made about Sejanus. Although
this play comes in a part of the Folio where Jonson did exercise what
control he chose over the printing as well as the copy, Greg allows that "In
the case of a work like Sejanus, in which correction or
revision
has been slight [in comparison with Every Man in his
Humour],
it would obviously be possible to take the quarto as the copy-text and
introduce into it whatever authoritative alterations the folio may supply."
He then adds, "and indeed, were one editing the play independently, this
would be the natural course to pursue." The coda indicates that somehow
Greg felt it was suitable to choose the Folio as copy-text for
Sejanus in an edition within the Works that
(rightly
or wrongly) had opted for the Folio as
the more convenient or even authoritative copy-text document as a whole,
even though if one were editing the play independent of its place as a Folio
play, the Quarto would be the natural copy-text. Since
Sejanus
is by no means an exception but rather the rule within the Folio, this seems
to me to exemplify either a singularly uncharacteristic waffling in the matter
of the Herford-Simpson edition or a complete disregard of his own acute
and important distinction between editions of particular authorities and
editions of works (p. 384). The Herford-Simpson Jonson was ostensibly an
edition of the works which by a mistaken choice of copy-text for many
parts turned itself into an edition of the Folio. That Greg gives simultaneous
approval to two contradictory positions in respect to the same play confuses
the more general application of his principles. And his return, after the
discussion of
Sejanus, to
Every Man in his
Humour
as a revised edition does not assist
matters, since this is admittedly an exceptional case, one in which the
Folio's authorial accidentals are dependent upon the amount of substantive
revision, whereas in
Sejanus, the other plays, and the
masques,
the substantive revision is insufficient to affect the central copy-text
question of how much Jonson was able to impose his wishes (assuming that
he had such comprehensive wishes, for which the evidence is partial) upon
the accidentals of the Folio text, regardless of the substantives.
On page 390, in which the discussion of Jonson is concluded, Greg
in effect decides that in cases of revision no hard and fast rule can be laid
down as to when an editor should take the original edition as his copy-text
and when the revised reprint. This is not very helpful nor is it necessarily
true. What is less than satisfactory is that in the end, given the
contradictory state of the Jonson discussion, Greg leaves the reader with a
generality and no guidelines except for the almost unique case of
Every Man in his Humour and the elementary case of
The
Unfortunate Traveller. The general impression is that he has not
himself thought through the situation, with enough concrete examples in
mind over a broad enough scope, to afford the reader any material
assistance, even in formulating rules of thumb. It cannot be sufficiently
emphasized that Every Man in his Humour is not a useful
example of revision either in its own day or later,[23] and what holds true for it need not
hold true for other revised editions in which the rewriting of the
substantives has
not throughout so vitally affected the forms of the accidentals. Most revised
editions have not been subject to such thorough rewriting; hence the
editorial problem for them is the extent to which within the areas of
unchanged substantives the differences in accidentals in a revised edition
may be referred to the author. It is this question, and this question only, to
which the choice of original or of revised edition as copy-text must be
directed.
Note: No one can speak with authority who has not studied the textual
transmission of Sejanus in depth and with careful attention to
the Jonsonian accidentals of the preserved holographs of other works. I can
offer only a theoretical opinion after a cursory run-through of the Simpson
apparatus and the Jonsonian manuscripts. The press-correction of
Sejanus is insufficient to produce all of the authentic variation
between the two editions, and we must assume that Jonson marked the
printer's copy in various respects. How minutely this was done is open to
question except for certain specific Jonsonian idiosyncrasies, but there is
seeming evidence that, in addition to the classicizing spellings and the
added examples of apostrophus, plus a general tendency to reduce capitals
and to tinker with other typographical conventions that Simpson remarks,
a not entirely comprehensive revision of the punctuation was undertaken,
how thoroughly is difficult to determine (see footnote
22 above). As in the apostrophus, there are in some respects debits in the
Folio general punctuation running contrary to the more characteristic forms
in the Quarto, these being indicative of Folio compositorial variation from
copy. Thus whether on the whole the Folio punctuation in the uncorrected
states of the formes represents Jonson's revising wishes better than the
Quarto is probable but not demonstrable without closer study than the
matter has received, and even then many cases of variation would no doubt
be unassignable.
If the spelling is taken as the main determinant (as is customary in
Elizabethan editing) and if (subject again to closer study) the normalized
Folio spelling forms are on the whole compositorial save for the
recognizable idiosyncrasies which present no difficulty, then it would be
practicable to take the Quarto as copy-text in order to preserve its generally
superior texture of ordinary spelling forms and to treat the idiosyncratic
accidentals of the Folio like the substantives by incorporating such as the
editor believes were authentic Jonsonian alterations in the printer's copy
plus those that he knows are Jonson's by reason of Folio press-correction.
This would make for a relatively long emendations list in which the few
variant substantives would present no problem. The movement of such an
apparatus would be forward in that it would provide a reader with a
conspectus of recoverable Jonsonian markings in the Q copy and in the F
(and Q) press-correction. If F were chosen as
copy-text instead, the list of emendations would comprise a return to such
Q spellings as the editor believed, on sufficient evidence, had been
unauthoritatively altered by the compositors, plus punctuation in the same
category, plus the numerous idiosyncratic accidentals in Q normalized
or corrupted in F. The movement would be backward. Instead of reflecting
the Jonsonian revision of the text, the apparatus would record the correction
of unauthoritative changes made in the printing-house from what is taken
to have been the marked Q from which F was set.
The specific editorial problems in each would differ. When F is taken
as copy-text, the reverse possibility exists, that the editor will allow
compositorial variation to remain in the text and not correct it from Q. In
the first case, it could be argued that the odds favor the retention of original
Q authority even at the expense of some overlooking of F correction,
whereas in the second the more frequent retained readings of the F
copy-text that were compositorial would be unauthoritative. At least
theoretically, then, the skilful treatment of Q as copy-text would reproduce
more quantitative authority than the same skill applied to purifying F as
copy-text, even though the authority of Q had in turn been modified by
fresh authority. (This is to assume of course that on the whole the retained
Q readings were not in themselves variants from the lost manuscript copy:
whether they were or not so variant would be at best conjectural since in
the absence of the manuscript Q constitutes
the only basic authority we have.) Some analogy is furnished by my
statistical survey of the special evidence for Dryden's revision of the
accidentals in the first and second editions of The Indian
Emperour, with the conclusion that if the revised edition had been
taken as copy-text a far greater number of unauthoritative accidentals would
have been accepted than (unidentifiable) revised ones preserved ("Current
Theories of Copy-Text," Essays, p. 287). However, the
analogy
may be more suggestive than exact since it would seem that Dryden's
concern for the accidentals in his press-alterations (and presumably in the
marking of copy) was less than Jonson's, although careful by ordinary
standards of his day.
Any question of copy-text cannot ignore the fact that the chosen text
must be given general authority for the indifferent accidentals. Critical
judgment may succeed relatively well in the choice of variant substantives
from an original and its revised edition, but many
accidentals—chiefly
punctuation—are less subject to critical analysis and certainty. It
follows
that if Q Sejanus were chosen as copy-text, only certain
well-established categories could be identified by consensus as accidental
revisions in F, to be adopted as emendations: the F reduction of Q capitals,
the additions of a few more examples of apostrophus and of classicized
spellings in F come to mind as the simplest transfers on a group basis, to
which might be added hyphenations in compounds. But the determination
of the numerous other punctuational differences would be subject to the
editor's discretion on a less firm judgmental basis than the substantives or
the agreed-upon groups of accidentals.
Otherwise—and especially in the spelling—the general texture
of Q
would be retained on the theory that Jonson (on the evidence of
press-corrections in F) seldom concerned himself to alter spellings except
to conform to his identifiable classicizing intentions. With due regard for
the evidence of category and intention in the press-corrections, some
attempt might be made to restore from F what could be taken as Jonson's
specialized comma or other punctuation.
If we concentrate only on the matter of spelling, we can see that if F
were the copy-text an editor would have a difficult task correcting the F
compositorial departures from Q copy, which would presumably represent
readings not marked by Jonson. The corpus of Jonsonian holographs is not
large and comprehensive enough to furnish material for many decisions.
For example, if one takes the non-classicizing spelling variants between Q
and F in the first two acts of Sejanus, the following words in
Q agree with holograph forms although they have been altered in F to
uncharacteristic spellings: Q favor] F favour; honor] honour; labor] labour;
rumor] rumour; fervor] fervour; terror] terrour; fruicts] fruits; remoove]
remove; coulor or coulour] colour or collour;
disseignes or dissignes] designes; commaund] command;
inough] enough; encrease] increase; enlarge] inlarge. (Doubtless there are
others; these happen to be the ones I have noted.) This is not much of a
bag, of course, if with an F copy-text one were restoring known holograph
spellings from Q. On the other hand, in these same two acts appear the
following additional variants (excluding classicizing spellings going either
way): Q cossen or cosin] F cousin; loose] lose; to] too;
grouth]
growth; phisitian] physitian; graunt] grant; shal] shall; woes] wooes; here]
heere; breath] breathe; whether] whither; mind] minde; blist] blest; where]
were; forth] foorth; opportunitie] oportunity; daungers] dangers; approach]
approch; of] off; sinewes] sinnewes; duety] dutie; hould] hold; tast] taste;
knowe] know; ould] old; chord] cord; togither] together; paralells] paralels;
begonne] begun; donne] done; lets] letts; guest] ghest; thether] thither. A
more careful search of the holographs might identify some of these and
authenticate such forms as graunt, daungers,
hould, and ould; but on the whole they need to
be
taken on faith, since at best they represent only
what the Q compositor set when he worked from holograph. However, the
odds would appear to be somewhat more in their favor than the
corresponding F spellings, which in their turn represent only what the F
compositor set as he worked from Q —assuming that these are not
the
sort of spellings that Jonson would have marked for alteration.
If Q were the copy-text, these spellings of unknown but generally
presumptive authority would be retained; if F were the copy-text, it would
be a bold editor who would accept many of them from Q as emendations
when not confirmed by holographs, and hence the critical text would
reproduce what on the whole are more likely than not to be the Folio
unauthoritative normalizations. The evidence of this enlarged group of
'normal' spellings, therefore, suggests the acceptance of Q as copy-text if
the prime purpose of the copy-text at this period is to preserve the spellings
that are closer to authority than in a revised reprint. When even
idiosyncratic spellings like Q
aequall are corrupted in F to
equall, it may be suspected that by and large the variant F
spellings of
Sejanus derive from the compositor. On the other
hand, with Q as copy-text an editor must be prepared not just for the
relatively simple task of isolating specific Jonsonian accidental
idiosyncrasies
in F in order to transfer them to the copy-text but also for the more
complex decisions in respect to the variant punctuation. My uninformed
guess is that more often than not an editor who carefully studied the
Jonsonian press-corrections
in the Quartos and in the Folio for a precise view of what Jonson wanted,
and then related his findings to the holographs, could make shift to emend
Q in these respects from F more accurately and comprehensively than if he
attempted to correct the F copy-text from Q. In short, the odds may seem
to favor an editor's ability to recognize Jonsonian annotation of Q better
than compositorial variation in F.
A practical consideration also arises. In some critical editions when
an early edition has been chosen as copy-text the accidental variations
adopted from a later revised edition are recorded under Emendations but no
record is made in the Historical Collection of those not accepted, the
ground being that they have been assessed as presumptively unauthoritative
and that the weight of a mass of unauthoritative accidental minutiae is too
much for the apparatus (and the reader) to bear. On the other hand, if an
editor chooses a later edition as copy-text, nevertheless any earlier
substantive edition (or even revised reprint) has general authority in its
accidentals also, and an editor who does not record the unadopted originals
in his historical collation could be open to the charge that he has failed to
supply the reader with maximum information about the variants in the
substantive text, certainly a matter of major interest. This has been the
attitude adopted in the William James
edition, which generally selects the later authorially revised editions as
copy-texts and records the unadopted accidental as well as substantive
variation of early periodical versions and of manuscripts. The theory is that
if an original edition is not the copy-text but instead a revised reprint, the
apparatus should enable a reader to reconstruct the original manuscript or
substantive printed edition without parallel texts. Ideally, of course, a
reader might like to have similar information about a revised reprint when
an earlier substantive edition is the copy-text, for otherwise he has no
means of evaluating the editor's failures to emend. This gap in the
provision of full information would signify little in the Renaissance when
the proliferation of accidental variants in reprints is certainly compositorial
and of no value to record save in some special case like Ben Jonson, and
it is perhaps always a matter for editorial judgment even in much later
times. If there appears to be a
good chance that a revising author did in fact concern himself intimately
with altering his accidentals, then a full list is advisable, as in the James
edition. This was the judicious attitude of Professor Peter Nidditch in his
Clarendon edition of Locke's
Of Human Understanding
(1975).
Because he felt that the fourth edition of 1700 had been scrupulously
revised by Locke both in accidentals and in substantives by marking a copy
of the similarly revised second edition of 1695, and seeing it through the
press, he chose this fourth as copy-text. He then felt it incumbent to record
all accidental as well as substantive variants in the first and second editions;
but he omitted unique accidental variants in the third, an edition that he felt
had no authority. He then faced a problem approaching that of Jonson in
the fifth edition of 1706, which Locke had begun to prepare as a revision
of the fourth but died before completion. Professor Nidditch makes a
compromise here in that he
does not adopt in his text any accidental readings unique with the fifth on
the ground that he cannot be sure that they were authorial,
for Locke did not supervise the printing; on the other hand, he does record
these unique accidentals in what corresponds to his historical collation
despite their uncertain status. In doing so it is clear that he is often listing
what are simple compositorial modernizations of no authority whatever.
And since he does not trust their authority sufficiently to adopt any as
revisory emendations in his critical text, it may be that it was superfluous
to record them even though they have a slightly different status from those
of the third edition. (For a discussion of the methodology of this significant
old-spelling edition of Locke, see my review in
The Library,
31 [1976], 385-395.)
This question of the extent and purpose of the apparatus is not to be
ignored and merits more attention than the rather casual remarks about what
may or may not be emended or recorded that Greg provides (pp. 385-386),
for the problem of the apparatus could in some cases have a bearing on the
choice of copy-text. At the moment it may be said that an editor of
Sejanus would have an extensive emendation list (especially
in
punctuation and capitalization variants) if he chose Q as copy-text, whereas
if he chose F he would have a smaller (although still extensive) list of
corrections as emendations but the historical collation would be enlarged
over that for a Q copy-text if it should (as it should) contain all rejected Q
accidentals: if necessary the Q copy-text historical collation could, in
addition to the same number of substantives, contain only the rejected F
semi-substantive accidentals if an editor felt confident that not much would
be gained by a fuller record of all
rejected F accidentals.
Some readers might feel that separate layers of early and late
accidental texture according to the state of a reconstructed text would be
distracting and that a relatively uniform system (given normal compositorial
variation) adopted from the Folio would be preferable to any necessarily
mixed style. For Jonson, at least, this is unlikely to be a valid criticism nor
need it be necessarily so for other authors: it is conditioned by the
hankering after editions of particular authorities instead of works, and so
does not affect principle. Of course, there are always exceptions.
Marlowe's Massacre at Paris is known only in a bad quarto,
but
eleven verse lines from what is almost certainly an authorial manuscript are
preserved, providing the correct text for lines 806-820 in the corrupt printed
version. In editing this play I thought it better to retain the corrupt text for
these lines, uniform with the state of the rest of the play, and to furnish the
good manuscript version in
a footnote on the same page, especially since the scene continues after the
manuscript ends. One reviewer disapproved of this procedure but I am
unrepentant. Just possibly I might have felt differently if the good text had
been more extensive or if it had contained a complete scene. These are
matters of opinion.
Greg's "Rationale" presents some difficulties even in dealing with the
texts of his own day. The first has little or no relevance to modern textual
problems and can be passed over quickly with only a few words of
explanation of Greg's position. On pages 384-385 he remarks that
whenever there is more than one substantive text of comparable authority,
then although one of them must still be chosen as copy-text, the substantive
readings of this chosen edition have no preponderant authority over those
of the other substantive text. To this he adds a footnote stating that he
inserts the proviso that two substantive texts must be of 'comparable'
authority in order to exclude the so-called 'bad quartos' of Shakespeare and
other reported texts whose testimony can in general be neglected.
[24] He should then have emphasized
on page
391 that his examples of
Richard III and
King
Lear
are commonly taken to represent 'bad quartos' and hence that 'revision' of
these texts in the Folio is on a very different basis from what a modern
reader might suppose. As a result, there is no proper analogy between them
and examples of post-publication authorial revision as represented by
Nashe's
Unfortunate Traveller or Jonson's
Sejanus, or by the second and third editions of Dryden's
Indian Emperour and the fourth edition of
Tom
Jones.
[25]
Richard
III
and almost certainly
King Lear, then, should never be cited
by
modern textual critics as Elizabethan examples of revised texts in the usual
sense that an earlier satisfactory state of the work has been worked over by
an author in order to incorporate improvements and corrections.
Note: Briefly, a 'bad quarto' is a memorial version of a work, a
reported text. It is usually taken that most came into existence by the efforts
of small companies touring the provinces and wanting to act the latest
popular London plays. In some cases, at least, it seems relatively certain
that (as with the actor who doubled Marcellus and Voltemand in
Hamlet) a member of the company had participated in a
London
performance and knew something of the play. Other bad quartos may have
been communal reconstructions
as has been conjectured for
Richard III. However they may
have been formed, they represent texts of considerable corruption that can
scarcely be taken to reproduce a recognizably authorial version, as may be
seen by comparing the preserved fragment of manuscript from a good text
of Marlowe's
Massacre at Paris with the parallel text in the
bad
quarto. If a good text were subsequently published, convenience dictated the
method. For
The Merry Wives of Windsor the Folio printer
was
given an authoritative manuscript, which he set with no reference to the bad
quarto. The unannotated bad quarto of
Hamlet seems to have
been consulted in the first act, where its reporting was best, to help the
compositor of the good Second Quarto decipher the difficult manuscript
from which he was setting. On the other hand, the third edition of
Richard III's bad quarto was brought into general conformity
with a playhouse manuscript by some agent and the result was used as
setting copy for the Folio. Only by courtesy could this action be called
'revision,' for the copy was made up in lieu either of sending a manuscript
to the printer that could not leave the playhouse, or by the printer as
affording a quicker setting copy for his compositors than the manuscript
furnished him. In no sense was an unauthorized bad text 'revised'; instead,
a good text was substituted for it in toto—at least that was the
intention.
No comparison with a bad quarto can or should be made—in
respect to copy-text—with such plays as Hamlet
(presumably)
but certainly Othello and Troilus which were
also
set up in the Folio from an annotated quarto that had been conflated with
some manuscript. In these plays the original quarto text derived from an
authorial manuscript, whether or not at some remove; hence its accidentals
have a link with authority as well as its substantives. However, because of
the memorial transmission of the text in a bad quarto, the transcriptional
link with the author's manuscript is broken and its accidentals can have no
possible authoritative origin. Under these circumstances it would be largely
pointless to choose a bad quarto as copy-text and insert in its texture the
more authoritative substantives of the good text. Naturally, the Folio's
accidentals of Richard III have no presumptive authority
either,
except as the scribe may have been influenced by his
manuscript in new text or (perhaps improbably) in collating fairly close
passages that required less annotation. But however doubtful the authority
may be, it is at least better than that of the Quarto, which in the case of
Richard III does not even represent the period of the original
printing. It follows that a reader could be misled at first when Greg writes,
"So great and so detailed appears to have been the revision that it would be
an almost impossible task to distinguish between variation due to the
corrector and that due to the compositor, and an editor has no choice but
to take the folio as copy-text." This criterion has no applicability whatever
(as it has in Every Man in his Humour) and the case is not
altogether set to
rights when Greg immediately adds, "Indeed, this would in any case be
incumbent upon him for a different reason; for the folio texts are in some
parts connected by transcriptional continuity with the author's manuscript,
whereas the [bad] quartos contain, it is generally assumed, only reported
text whose accidental characteristics can be of no authority whatever" (p.
391).
This whole discussion of Richard III and of King
Lear as examples of occasions when "a reprint may in practice be
forced upon an editor as copy-text by the nature of the revision itself, quite
apart from the question whether or not the author exercised any supervision
over its printing" is useless for principle since its practice is so limited and
the custom of treating these bad quartos is so established as not to require
comment. They have no value in establishing a classification (to set against
Every Man in his Humour) of textual situations where the
nature of the revision may force upon an editor a reprint as copy-text,
"whether or not the author exercised any supervision over its printing"
since the choice of copy-text in good texts versus bad memorial versions is
established not by the quantity of the revisions but by the nature of the bad
original, without authority for its accidentals. The point lies
elsewhere.[26] What
Greg needs to strengthen his argument are not hypothetical examples to add
to Every Man since its editorial problem will so seldom arise;
what in fact need illustration are (a) cases of true substantive collateral texts
(for which no examples are given) and (b) further analysis of authorially
revised editions not conforming to the quantitative criteria necessary to
apply to Every Man but instead to the qualitative criteria
applicable to Sejanus.
It is particularly unfortunate that the first of these is neglected, for in
modern times various combinations of (a) and of (b) may arise to plague an
editor. What emerges is that Greg is not very satisfactory in dealing with
texts of multiple authority when both are printed editions, and he omits
entirely any discussion of the more common case of dual authority when
one text is a printed edition and the other a manuscript. One problem that
he did not face squarely is that the familiar examples of Elizabethan dual
authority in printed editions are mixed, not independent; thus questions of
copy-text are not much involved with the examples he gives but instead
editorial judgment in the selection of the substantives as between the
variants in the two editions.
In fact, Greg does not rule on the copy-text that should be chosen for
Hamlet, Troilus, Othello, and
2
Henry IV, and his paragraph about McKerrow's lack of attention to
these plays is without point for his argument although he comes to lean on
it. In context we may take it that he raised the issue of these plays because
in discussing problem texts of the two authorities, and the treatment of
readings, McKerrow's Prolegomena had practically confined
itself to Richard III. Greg certainly approved of McKerrow's
decision to use the Folio as copy-text for Richard III and in
general to throw the weight of authority for the substantives on the Folio
version as well; but he is interested in what McKerrow's views would have
been about the substantives if he had lived to encounter the problems of
Hamlet and the rest. Although Greg does not say so, it would
seem that he believes McKerrow would have chosen the Quartos as
copy-texts and
would shortly have found that his rule would not have worked that in
essence forbade a choice among the substantives, for he implies that
McKerrow would have preferred many Folio substantives for these plays
and would have run into trouble when he encountered, also, manifestly
superior Quarto readings. Any real application here to copy-text is remote.
For instance, on page 387 Greg starts to deal with true revised texts and
notes McKerrow's position as earlier described on pages 378-381 but only
in respect to The Unfortunate Traveller and according to a
principle that McKerrow abandoned; and in contrast he refers the reader to
his own emendation of McKerrow's rationale on pages 381-382. However,
these pages mention only Hamlet and similar plays and
immediately go on to illustrate the tyranny of copy-text in respect to
substantives; it follows that his recapitulation on page 384 of his own
position is in some part colored by the special cases of texts like
Hamlet
and the rest where questions of actual revision enter less frequently than the
corruption of the lost original copy in the process of multiple transmission.
It is once again the lack of distinction on Greg's part between variants that
arise in the course of pre-publication transmission and those that result from
post-publication transmission that causes difficulty. As a result the one clear
statement (apart from the Jonson discussion on pages 389-390) that he
makes about the problems of revision, on page 387, is less than
comprehensive. He supposes that normal revision for a new edition will be
made by an author sending a list of changes to the printer or else a
corrected copy of an earlier edition. He then lays down a set of syllogisms
to guide an editor in the choice of substantive variation, with one of
which—the lesser authority of a revised edition in cases of
doubt—I
have a serious quarrel. But these syllogisms apply literally only to editions
in linear relationship to each
other, like the four revised editions of
Joseph Andrews. They need modification (where Greg gives
no
guidance) for multiple pre-publication authority in textual situations like
Hamlet, or
Beggars Bush and
Womans
Prize, or (to jump ahead) Stephen Crane's
Red Badge of
Courage but more particularly, because of its simultaneous problem
of copy-text and substantive authority, Crane's
Third Violet,
to
say nothing of his "Price of the Harness," "Death and the Child," and "The
Revenge of the
Adolphus."
It is time to recapitulate and to see what emerges for editors of
modern documents. Greg's rationale distinguishing the authority of
substantives and accidentals is a sound one. However, a modern editor must
always be aware that when he follows Greg he is not necessarily dealing
with the same conditions and that the frame of reference may therefore alter
in subtle ways that end with important differences. For example, when Greg
writes "the historical circumstances of the English language make it
necessary to adopt in formal matters [accidentals] the guidance of some
particular early text" he is considering a problem of no application to late
nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature. In Greg's early period in
matters of accidentals the language was much more idiosyncratic and in
process of flux than is true at the present time when standards of
correctness exist that are relatively stable and simple to apply. Given the
circumstances of transmission, Greg tacitly has little
faith that in most cases more than the general characteristics of the period
will be preserved by an insistence on the superior authority of the
accidentals in the document closest to the lost manuscript. In multiple
manuscripts it is clear that he has no faith at all that authorial characteristics
can be recovered. In printed documents he recognizes the chance that
something may come through, but it is clear he is not optimistic. The
uncertainty about the effect of transmission has its effect on his discussion
of the copy-texts suitable for Jonson according to his rationale. In contrast
to Nashe, he recognizes that Jonson had some concern for the accidentals
of a revised edition in a work like Sejanus and this leads him
to sympathize with Simpson's selection of the Folio as copy-text although
in the next moment he notes that in many respects the Quarto is the more
logical choice. In opting for the Quarto in an independent edition he reflects
his general position about
Elizabethan accidentals in revised editions; in accepting Simpson's choice
of the Folio he indicates his uncertainty as to how much of Jonson's
marking of the Quarto as setting copy (and possibly of proof before printing
began, as he thinks) might not have come through even though in such an
unidentifiable form that it would not be practicable to isolate and transfer
editorially from the Folio back into the Quarto copy-text as
emendation.
This indecision is symptomatic, it would seem, of a general view that
the choice of copy-text on the basis of its accidentals is more a formal than
a basically meaningful proposition, a convenience but not a great deal more.
No editor of modern literature could feel in this way: in contrast to
Elizabethan, the linguistic interest in the spellings of a modern author is
minimal; what impels an editor of later works to concern himself with
copy-text is the conviction that the accidentals are an inseparable whole
with the substantives in transmitting the author's total meaning. That they
have a literary interest, not merely a philological, marks a considerable
difference in the point of view and very likely in the rationale for the
selection of copy-text when revised editions are concerned, as well as the
treatment of this copy-text once selected.
Other differences are involved, however. A present-day editor who
does not wish to normalize the accidents of his text chooses his copy-text
and then generally retains its system not as a convenient guide but in the
belief that he is relatively near to the formal features of the lost copy (in
case of a first edition as copy-text) or the conviction (if he selects an
authorial typescript or manuscript) that he is preserving an authentic
example of the writer's own system. Ordinarily he will be right. However,
if we inquire in what respects he believes the author's intentions are best
preserved (apart from certain habits like word-division), an editor will
ordinarily be forced to admit that he is basically referring to the punctuation
as a significant guide to, and controller of, shades of meaning. (This is to
omit consideration of alterations in syntax that properly come under the
heading of substantives or at least semi-substantives.) Some authors may
have highly idiosyncratic
occasional spellings like Hawthorne's cieling (perhaps best
emended, given his period); in other cases the idiosyncrasy is mild and
easily preserved, as in the tendency for nineteenth-century American
authors to adopt the -our spelling in the English manner for
some words but not for others,[27]
or to use
s for
z as in
recognise,
or
connexion for
connection, and so on. Rarely
an
author comes along like William James with a few pronounced views on
spelling, such as his 'reform'
tho (not the correct
tho') or
excentric, and the like. In short,
spelling is
not ordinarily a part of an author's individual method of expression,
whereas in Elizabethan times it is of especial importance to a scholar to
attempt to reconstruct because of the possibility that phonetic spellings will
guide us to clues about pronunciation or will offer evidence to assist the
emendation of compositorial misreadings of peculiar forms.
Note: It will be observed that Greg talks always in terms of spellings
and not of the interest that may lie in the preservation of the punctuation of
the period; in fact, on page 385 he suggests that if the copy-text punctuation
is persistently erroneous or defective an editor may prefer to scrap it
altogether for a system of his own. This comes after a statement that he
sees no reason why an editor may not alter misleading or eccentric spellings
"which he is satisfied emanate from the scribe or compositor and not from
the author" (p. 385),
[28] and indicates
not only the lack of importance that he attaches, in comparison, to
punctuation but also his apparent belief, shared by most scholars of the
period, that whereas some distinctive manuscript punctuational
characteristics filter through into printed texts (as witness the Ralph Crane
parentheses in the Shakespeare Folio plays this scribe prepared), by and
large whatever influence the accidentals of
the copy might exercise on a compositor was more likely to be represented
by the variable spelling. (It must also be confessed that some authorial and
even scribal punctuation is so erratic as to be almost meaningless to
preserve verbatim except in cases of possible ambiguity. Taking account of
this condition, Moxon's seventeenth-century printers' manual advised the
compositor to read ahead in the copy and to consider the sense carefully so
that he could punctuate it properly when he came to set the type.) The
transmission of spelling is most uneven, of course, depending upon the
compositors. Compositor B of the First Folio is so firmly fixed in his ways
that very little information about the underlying copy can be procured from
his stints. On the other hand, the same two compositors who typeset the
first edition of
The Merchant of Venice in relatively
conventional spelling also set the Second Quarto of
Hamlet
with
rather eccentric spelling, this difference leading to
the conjecture that Shakespeare's own papers may underlie the
Hamlet print but probably a scribal manuscript the
Merchant First Quarto (this last a new concept). Yet
All's
Well that Ends Well, also set almost certainly from Shakespeare's
holograph, emerges at the later Folio date and in the work of three different
compositors with spelling characteristics unlike those of the Second Quarto
Hamlet. Nevertheless, how much spelling differences in the
copy may in fact be reflected in the print, if one is fortunate, can be seen
from a passage in the Beaumont and Fletcher 1647 Folio text of
Beggars Bush. Because of an irregularity in the manuscript
copy
caused by the insertion of a speech on a separate piece of paper, the
character Bertha is given a set of repeated lines, one from the original
manuscript and the other from the added leaf by another hand. The
accidentals differ significantly in the two versions, proving in this case the
influence of copy upon the compositor:
Ber.
O I am miserably lost, thus falne
Into my uncles hands from all my hopes,
Can I not thinke away my selfe and dye?
O I am miserably lost; thus fallen
Into my Uncles hands, from all my hopes:
. . . . . . . .
Can I not thinke away my selfe and dye? (V.i.84-85, 98)
A preserved scribal manuscript, probably at two removes from the original
underlying the Folio, reads:
O I am miserablie lost, thus faln
into myne uncles hands from all my hopes
can I not thinke away my selfe, and die?
a good example, too, of unsatisfactory manuscript punctuation.
Modern editing and Greg's rationale join in the wish to preserve as
much as possible of the authorial accidentals,[29] but they do so for different
purposes
(critical versus philological)[30] and
with markedly different results, even granting the information from
preserved holograph documents about the accidents of a modern author
available to the editor. It is a fair interpretation that so long as his major
interest in editorial freedom of judgment was satisfied,
Greg—knowing
the uncertain basis of transmission—was prepared in general to
accept as
copy-text any document with reasonable claims to authority. He is firm, of
course, that in a series of linear reprints without revision only the first
edition will do, and he is firm that in cases where the revising author may
be supposed to have paid little or no attention to the accidentals the first
edition is also the proper copy-text. But for a situation like
Sejanus in which
there is evidence for the author's attention to the formal features in marking
up the revised printer's copy, he is so much the reverse of doctrinaire as to
be almost indifferent whether an editor chooses the Quarto or the Folio.
This being so, modern critics are mistaken who apply Greg's rationale
narrowly to revised texts and insist that the rationale
requires
the selection of the first edition (or of a manuscript or typescript) as
copy-text, followed by the insertion of revised substantives into this earliest
accidental texture. Greg does not lay down the law and is much more
permissive than is generally supposed by those who take his remarks about
The Unfortunate Traveller as the sole guide. More typical is:
"The fact is 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. All that can be
said is that if the original be selected, then the author's corrections must be
incorporated; and that if the reprint is selected, then the original reading
must be restored when that of the reprint is due to unauthorized variation.
Thus the editor cannot escape the responsibility of distinguishing to the best
of his ability between the two categories. No juggling with copy-text will
relieve him of the duty and necessity of exercising his own judgement" (p.
390).
[31] Modern editors must
understand, however, that in Greg's view this emancipation applies only to
the treatment of the substantives and that the copy-text accidentals are to be
followed conservatively, as a convenience, except in the case of
error.
Once again it must be emphasized that to Greg Elizabethan
accidentals are not really a part of the total meaning of a work in the
modern manner of thought. This important distinction between the concepts
has at least two consequences of importance for the present day. First, since
the general texture of the accidentals at the present time is much more
uniform than in the period with which Greg was concerned, the choice of
copy-text transcends the grounds of expediency and must
be recognized as having a critical significance beyond that which Greg
conceived. Second, it follows that given the generally greater information
about an author's accidentals possessed by an editor of modern documents,
and often the wider range of preserved transmitted documents starting with
drafts and ranging through typescripts and sometimes even proofs, an editor
may be able to exercise his judgment in the choice of accidentals between
competing authorities in a manner impossible for Greg to envisage as
applying in the early period. It is true that the kind of accidental material
on which an editor's critical judgment can operate is less susceptible of
demonstration from the test of meaning than that applied critically to
substantives. Nevertheless, although certain areas of accidentals may seem
generally to be so indifferent in their variation as not to be subject to
reasoned choice, a knowledgeable editor can deal with other areas on the
same basis that Greg urges for the
substantives. This new condition presents fresh problems that have not been
much explored and where Greg can offer little guidance.
Generalizations about the fidelity of the printer to his copy are
dangerous in any age; but it is at least allowable that from the late
seventeenth century when more uniformity in spelling and in standards of
punctuation began to be imposed on compositors, the uncertainty that
attaches to Elizabethan conditions of transmission begins to clear. Of
course, all conclusions based on compositorial fidelity to setting from
printed copy (the usual evidence) are not necessarily applicable to setting
from manuscript: in any age printed copy, having been styled already, will
be followed more faithfully by a compositor than he is likely to reproduce
a manuscript which (until comparatively recent times) it was his duty to
style on the author's behalf.[32]
Nevertheless, the practical
hopelessness an Elizabethan scholar feels about the problem of identifying
authorial accidental characteristics imbedded in the variable systems of
different compositors can begin to yield to modified optimism by the
twentieth century, it would seem, and sometimes considerably earlier
according to special conditions. With the change come certain modifications
that may need to be applied to the popular interpretation of Greg's
rationale.
Obviously, when no anterior documents are preserved, the first
edition is the substantive text and in lieu of further revision must become
the copy-text instead of any later reprint. When revised editions are present,
the modern editor has the same problem that exists in the Elizabethan
choice of editorial method to deal with revision as between Thomas Nashe
and Ben Jonson; that is, he must attempt to find evidence that will permit
him to evaluate whether the author confined himself chiefly to the revision
of substantives or else included accidentals as well and on more than a
casual basis. If the evidence suggests that substantives were the author's
major concern, then it is probable that the edition nearest to the lost
holograph—that is, the substantive first edition—should be
retained as
the copy-text. In this event the accidental variants can be winnowed for
possible authorial changes as against publisher's and printer's, these
assumed authorial markings to be inserted in
the copy-text on the same basis as the revised substantives. The process is
materially aided in the twentieth century by the fact that generalizations
about transmissional variation appropriate for the age of Shakespeare are of
lesser validity now.
Note: One must also consider the differences in the kinds of
departures from copy (questions of styling aside) that result from machine
versus hand typesetting. The hand compositor memorized a certain portion
of the text and then turned to his cases to set the types in his composing
stick. Under these conditions his memory might betray him and it was easy
inadvertently to substitute one word for another with the same general
meaning, or to set the wrong word because of memorial contamination with
other text in the memorized portion—the possibility of corruption
increasing toward the end of the memorized piece of text. He was instructed
carefully to consider the text before beginning to set it so that he could
punctuate it properly according to the sense; but in addition the fact that
setting was done with the eye off copy encouraged the substitution of
compositorial for authorial accidental characteristics. On the contrary, the
modern typesetter sits at his machine and sets copy
like a typist with his eye constantly on the copy and ordinarily
with comparatively little regard for the sense (which had to be paramount
in hand setting). A good typesetter, or typist, transfers the symbols in his
copy to his machine with his fingers almost by reflex action in automatic
reproduction of what he sees, not necessarily reads in the usual sense of
comprehension, the transference of thought as an act of will. As a result
memorial errors are fewer, and although the omission of words (a common
error) and occasional contaminations may plague an editor, many setting
errors are mechanical and easily corrected. If one is fortunate, substitution
or misreading may be confined to such examples as
difference
for
different, like for
unlike, and so on.
When an editor decides that an author revising an edition has
concerned himself in a meaningful way with marking accidentals for
alteration, he has Greg's blessing for choosing the revised edition as
copy-text. This choice is not one to be made lightly, however, nor without
concrete documentary evidence relating either to the work itself or to other
works with which the text under consideration shows common
characteristics presumably arising from similar causes. For instance, a few
examples of the marked periodical copy are preserved that William James
used for his book collections, enough to demonstrate that he was every bit
as concerned to modify his accidentals as his substantives before typesetting
began. However, when the book shows further accidental as well as
substantive changes from this revised copy, an editor must decide whether
the accidental changes are again of a piece with the substantives or else may
be mainly attributed to the printer. Comma for comma no editor
can demonstrate that every individual difference is authorial; but enough
general Jamesian idiosyncrasies come through to indicate that James was in
the habit of heavily revising his book proofs even after he had carefully
marked the printer's copy, and that these proof changes concerned the
accidentals as well as the substantives.[33] As a result of a full analysis of
James's
revisory methods, in the James edition the volumes in which the periodical
articles constitute the original texts and a book the revised reprint of these
articles offer a critical text based on the final revision as copy-text.[34] Evidence for any one of these
works is
buttressed by identical evidence for the others. In its nature, for example,
the evidence revealed by the collation of journals and book is practically
interchangeable between Pragmatism and The Meaning
of Truth, indication of James's customary scrupulous revision of
book
copy and then of the proof of both volumes, even though no corrected book
proof-sheets have been preserved as documentary evidence.[35]
It can be said, then, that the important evidence should be sought in
two parts before a revised edition can be made the copy-text with any
confidence: first, firm evidence that the author revised the formal features
of his text as well as the substantives whether in the press copy or in proofs
or in both;[36] and, second, some
evidence when obtainable about the degree of fidelity given by the printer
to the press copy, this as an assistance in estimating the influence of the
author on the altered accidentals.
Note: This analysis of the printer's share in variant accidentals is also
an assistance if the editor proposes to emend the copy-text in favor of
known authorial forms whenever the printer has imposed his own
identifiable and contrary styling. For example, it was the Riverside Press's
housestyling in the early 1900s to enclose all quotations in single quotation
marks whereas James preferred double. One or more of the Riverside
compositors spelled more words with the
-our ending than
James, who confined himself to
colour and usually to
honour. Compositors at the Riverside and also at the
University
Press in Cambridge at this time generally set a comma before a dash
although James seldom writes a comma except inadvertently when in his
manuscripts he has altered a comma to a dash and forgets to delete the
original mark. Matters like these need not influence the selection of
copy-text away from a revision, for they are easily identified and emended
by reference to
the setting copy or else they may be 'normalized' when present in what
have clearly been holograph additions in the preparation of copy for a
revised edition. In short, when a writer's accidentals are familiar to an
editor, in certain clearly delineated respects much can be done to evaluate
the authority of at least some classes of variants in a revised edition. If a
writer has unfortunately chosen some other copy than a substantive one to
annotate in preparation for a revised edition, and if this selected text is
suspect in its accidental differences from the first (as if it is a mere reprint
of the substantive without
authority or if the writer in its preparation had revised a few readings but
had paid little if any attention to the accidentals), certainly an editor may
wish to work over the latest revised-edition copy-text by correcting back to
their first-edition forms those accidental variants that originated in the
unauthoritative press copy and were passed on to the revision, this despite
any suggestion that by failing to alter them in the revision the writer was
'approving' them. One may grant that perhaps only the tip of the iceberg
can be sawed off by such a procedure: the accidentals in a revised edition
demonstrably stemming from the printer and hence subject to correction
may comprise only a few categories; nevertheless, in my own view any
such purification of a text by substituting the authorial for the printer's style
is worth the effort.
In many respects I admire John M. Robson's account of his solution
of the various editorial problems that arose in the John Stuart Mill edition.
From the little I know of the matter I am not inclined to quarrel with his
bold choice of the later revised editions as copy-texts even though I am
concerned that expediency may have bulked too large in his defence of the
procedure. But I am made uneasy by his general acceptance of Greg's
Elizabethan principle of following the accidentals of a chosen copy-text
conservatively and altering them only for positive error. (For a modern
editor 'error,' I believe, must include any printer's identifiable departure
from an author's form of accidental, although Greg would certainly not
have wished to extend the definition this far.) The confinement of editorial
activity largely to the substantives is a strictly Elizabethan editorial attitude
fostered by the frank admission that in most early texts no means exist to
identify authorial accidentals.
However, it does not seem to me to be an appropriate position to take, no
matter what the age, when the authorial form is known. For example, in
my view it was a Folio 'error' in Sejanus to print
equall when the Quarto copy read aequall since
Jonson could never have approved or marked such a change in his copy; in
these circumstances Herford-Simpson were ill-advised to retain
equall in their critical text simply because they had chosen the
Folio as copy-text. Correspondingly, if a book printer of William James set
though or eccentric when the periodical copy
read
tho and excentric, not to correct the revised
copy-text to agree with the certain authorial preferred form seems to me
indefensible. If so, it may seem equally indefensible not to emend book
though in the same essay if encountered in a passage that
would
have been added in autograph to the revised copy, for the copy-text 'error'
is just as evident. I argue this
not alone on grounds of uniformity—of the anomaly in a modern
critical
text (though not in an Elizabethan one) of two different spellings within the
same unit—but also on the grounds that to follow the copy-text
though is to perpetuate an 'error' that the editor would reject
were it a substantive. Editors are inclined to treat accidentals as
second-class citizens: I do not agree whenever the individual case is such
that an editor has as good (if not a better) basis for a reasoned choice as
that he enjoys for the emendation of the copy-text's substantives.
The pertinent passage in Dr. Robson's essay (Editing
Nineteenth
Century Texts, pp. 116-117) runs as follows:
Simply . . . we have held that [the accidental texture of the revised]
version in Dissertations and Discussions is given sufficient
authority by Mill's approval of it. There can be little doubt that the
normalization that occurred in the revised versions is a result both of Mill's
and the printing-house's actions; I am convinced that he also had a hand in
the altered punctuation. That he is solely responsible is an untenable view,
but the irregular variations in accidentals in the periodical versions indicate
as strongly as anything could that what is found in them seriously differs
from Mill's intention through editorial and compositorial practices and
carelessness. I should myself like to go back beyond the Ur-text to the ideal
Platonic text that never found concrete embodiment, but we have not found
it practicable—nor do we think for our purposes it is
necessary—to
make as detailed a study of printing-house and compositorial habits and
practice as would permit a more
informed guess about responsibility for particular accidentals and patterns
of accidentals. Electronic aids may eventually make such a study
practicable, but we have not stayed for an answer to the question which we
believe is in Mill's case relatively unimportant.
My unease is really with the argument that Mill's 'approval' constitutes
such overwhelming authority in a revised-edition copy-text that an editor
may decline to emend by reference to earlier authority such accidentals as
he felt were demonstrably not Mill's. This is a far cry from a computer
concordance that might or might not serve as the evidential basis for an
overall attempt at deciding each and every detail between the printer and
Mill. I seriously doubt that for punctuation such an 'ideal Platonic text' is
possible for any author. I am suggesting, chiefly, that half a loaf is better
than none
if one takes accidental authority as seriously as substantive
authority.
[37] If an editor
chooses to apply to modern authors the criterion of linguistic expediency
Greg felt forced to defend, then our positions are so far apart that argument
can scarcely be heard across the gap. It does seem to me, however, that if
in Mill's case the accidentals are
'relatively unimportant,' the assertion should be illustrated and the text
modernized. Certainly if there is to be one rule for creative writers and
another for economists and philosophers and historians, perhaps the subject
is worth some interested discussion to clarify the respective positions. In my
own experience, I should say that the accidentals are more important in the
text of the philosopher William James than in the several prose fiction
writers I have edited; that is, if the attention James paid to them in print in
contrast to the others is a criterion.
If any discussion about the importance of accidental fidelity in
editions of writers of different kinds were to develop, one of the first
problems would be to clarify the role of 'authorial approval.' Strictly
speaking, all a proponent can assert is that the writer has tacitly 'approved'
the accidentals of
the press copy by declining to alter them in the preparation of a revised
edition.
[38] This is a severely limited
but logically defensible position although painful to anyone who would like
to see identifiable authority in accidentals restored. However, the printed
result may differ from the setting copy. In some cases variation may be so
indifferent that no decision is possible whether the writer or the printer was
on the whole responsible (although in such neutral circumstances the printer
is usually blamed). In others, an editor may feel strongly that the writer has
intervened, whether in the lost copy or in proof. In still others, the variation
is of a nature readily assignable to the printer. In this last category, and
perhaps in the first, the question then arises whether by the act of reading
proof (if this act can be established) and failing to alter the printer's
differences from the original 'approved' copy the author has made a further
act of
approval that can cover these variants, on the simple ground of
non-interference whether or not in fact he may have noticed their
variation.
[39] I believe this second
proposition is less defensible than the first; nevertheless, it is equally
pertinent and hence affects the first. The question often overlooked by
advocates of authorial blanket approval is this: which style was
approved—printer's copy or final result? What if an author did not
read
proof for a revised edition but was confident that the publisher could handle
the situation. Is he then responsible for having 'approved' the printed result
as well as the press copy? The whole matter goes much deeper, however,
and into areas too large to discuss here. Prominent is the question whether
an author's acceptance of publisher's or printer's styling constitutes
'approval' sufficiently valid and meaningful to be utilized by an editor as
a basis for judgment about copy-text.
More copy-text problems are raised by the preservation of
manuscripts and typescripts than can be covered here, especially since the
textual situation may be complicated by a subsequent revision of the
original substantive document. Textual situations may range from editions
produced directly from holograph or from authorial typescript
with little authorial attention in proof, to professional typescripts with their
peculiar problems of authority and 'approval,' and on to circumstances of
extreme complexity in which an author may so rework a manuscript by
revising the typescript made from it as to destroy in major part the efficacy
of manuscript authority except for a casual accidental here and there, as
with D. H. Lawrence's
The Rainbow (private information
from
Dr. Charles Ross). Or as happened with James's
A Pluralistic
Universe, the author may have revised the typescript of the book
once, and then independently further revised parts of another copy of the
typescript to prepare copy for the periodical publication of some of the
lectures before the book was issued, and finally read proof on each form
without reference to the other. The manuscript of
A Pluralistic
Universe is the only pre-publication document preserved; but
James's
treatment of it, as manifested in the considerably altered
journal and book texts, suggests the view (supported by other parallels) that
he really regarded his manuscripts as drafts both for substantives and for
accidentals, to be revised and perfected by reworking any typescripts made
from them but with the major revision likely to occur in galley proof (those
being spacious days). Under these conditions (as worked out in detail in the
ACLS edition for the Harvard University Press, 1977), the finally revised
book was selected as the most appropriate copy-text.
It will be seen that we are here in an area of substantially different
problems (not always so recognized, as remarked in the discussion of
Greg's examples of revision) in which revision is pre-publication and not,
except as a separate problem, represented by such post-publication revision
as is found in James's Pragmatism or in Mill, or in Nashe
and
Jonson as against the example of pre-publication revision in Troilus
and Cressida. In pre-publication revision one may need to deal with
such transmissional variation as that created by one or more typescripts
(Stephen Crane's Active Service) and, inevitably, with
variation
from manuscript or typescript due to the compositor(s) of the first edition
(The Red Badge of Courage), with an eye out for publishers'
readers. Frequently documentary links in the chain of transmission are
wanting and their reconstruction difficult if not impossible except on such
a hypothetical basis as to be nearly valueless for
evidence. Under the more extreme of these circumstances, any preserved
manuscript or early typescript material assumes an almost overriding
importance unless it appears to the editor that the author has entered the
transmissional process at a later stage than the preserved documents and in
such a significant manner affecting the accidentals as to promote some
perhaps final document like the first edition to superior overall authority in
the choice of
copy-text based on the accidentals in the classic Greg rationale. This last
was the case with
A Pluralistic Universe, and it resulted in
the
defensible choice of the first edition as copy-text over the manuscript on the
grounds that the evidence indicated that the majority of the accidental
differences could be imputed to the author. On the contrary, this evidence
was wanting in the textual history of Hawthorne's romances
The
Blithedale Romance,
The House of the Seven Gables,
and
The Marble Faun.
The reasons for the selection of the manuscripts as the copy-texts for
editions of these Hawthorne works have been fully discussed in the textual
introductions of the Centenary Edition and pinpointed further in my
"Practical Texts and Definitive Editions," Essays, pp.
412-439).
Basically, several thousand accidental differences in each text appeared
between the printer's-copy manuscript and the first edition. On the whole
these could not be imputed to Hawthorne (a) since they often ran contrary
to the established uniform characteristics of all the manuscripts taken as a
group, (b) since even without reference to the above it would be absurd
anyway to believe that Hawthorne made so many accidental alterations in
proof, and (c) since the amount of accidental variation from manuscript
differed among the identified compositors who set the first editions. The
general authority of the manuscript accidentals as against those of the first
edition thus being established as a working
hypothesis, and the manuscript selected as copy-text, the copy-text
accidentals were reproduced with relatively few exceptions—these
deriving mainly from first-edition correction of positive errors and
oversights and from a few forms that seemed characteristic of Hawthorne
and conjecturable as his proof-alterations like the similarly slight alteration
in proof of the substantives. In these examples of direct linear derivation,
the editor had two primary documents of printer's-copy manuscript and
printed book. Missing, and their details to be reconstructed by conjecture,
were the intervening proofs. Since Hawthorne was not a copious rewriter
of his works in proof, the want of these was not such a serious loss as with
an author of a different kind. The evidence of the proofs was not really
required to demonstrate how much the compositors had altered Hawthorne's
intricate parenthetical punctuation system in the interests of simplification
although they would have been useful, of
course, in positively identifying whatever few accidental (and substantive)
changes he did make.
Other examples may hold as well even though the linear transmission
has not been so fully preserved in the documents. Stephen Crane's
manuscript of The Red Badge of Courage was professionally
typed; a copy of this lost typescript, further revised by the author and
probably looked
over by Ripley Hitchcock, the Appleton editor (although the depth and
extent of any correction are obscure),
[40] was given to the printer of the first
edition. Missing are not only the proofs (only a negative loss since Crane
was a careless and reluctant proofreader) but, more important, the
marked-up typescript the original of which certainly contained corruptions
that were passed on to the first edition.
[41] Viewed as a whole, the first
edition is
more likely than not to smooth over the idiosyncrasies of Crane's
accidentals. It follows that the manuscript reproduces in a more faithful
manner than any other preserved (or conjecturally reconstructable)
document the peculiar characteristics of Crane's accidentals, eminently
worth saving for their flavor and their stylistic effect—often affecting
rhythm and pace—and hence it is the most suitable copy-text. In this
particular example the existence of the collateral newspaper
texts does not affect the copy-text authority, for these stem from a second
copy of the typescript in an unrevised state and are at best useful when they
agree with the manuscript against the book, or with the book against the
manuscript, in establishing the typescript readings and thus in helping to
isolate post-manuscript alteration as authorial or as unauthoritative. These
newspaper versions have been so seriously condensed from the full version
and in part editorially rewritten as to be of little use in emending
accidentals, as are the newspaper versions of Crane's
Third
Violet, however.
The above examples concern different aspects of authorial
prepublication intervention in the transmission of a text which has a direct
linear relationship between the preserved authorities, even with
missing intermediate documents whose essential features can be
reconstructed without insuperable difficulty. Greg's rationale, based on
post-publication revision, operates with equal efficiency on simple
conditions of pre-publication revision as in Hawthorne; but for more
complex cases one must include his recognition (even though generally
expressed) that conditions may enforce the selection of a later revised
document over an earlier authority if the accidentals appear to be more
authoritative. However, questions of multiple authority, as remarked in his
references to
Hamlet and allied Shakespearean plays, are not
satisfactorily resolved in the "Rationale." In multiple authority as found in
modern editorial problems the main point of investigation is to establish as
specifically as possible whether diverse authority is what may be called
technical (or mechanical) in the sense that variation is due exclusively to the
transmissional process or whether one branch is weighted by
authorial revision. In the first case all documents may be technically of
equal accidental authority if at equal distances from the archetype; or they
may be of unequal technical authority if some documents are further
removed than others. But no matter how equal or unequal the distances, no
fresh authority has entered the transmission at any point either directly or
by reference. In the second case, a decision needs to be made whether
authorial intervention has increased the authority of one line chiefly in
respect to the substantives (only casual attention probably having been given
to the accidentals) or whether there is evidence that the alteration of
accidentals bulked sufficiently large so that accidental variation must be
treated with as serious a scrutiny for authority as substantive
differences.
The purest example of technical multiple authority that I know of
comes in Stephen Crane's "The Price of the Harness," sent in manuscript
(now lost) from Cuba to his agent in New York who had a professional
typescript (now lost) made from it. One copy of this typescript was sold to
the Cosmopolitan in the United States and the other to the
British magazine Blackwood's. Crane could have read proof
on
neither. Because of their immediate radiation from the same typescript with
no opportunity for authorial revision, both printed versions have technically
the same authority for the accidentals (and in this case for the substantives).
The choice of copy-text is one of convenience only and meaningless in
principle. It follows that the accidentals of the critically edited text must be
drawn freely from both versions according as the editor judges one or the
other to reproduce Crane's particular characteristics (as filtered through the
typescript) the more faithfully. The
same freedom of choice is required for the accidentals as Greg adjures for
substantives, and the reproduction of the accidents of one authority
in Greg's and the modern conservative manner would be illogical and
anomalous.
[42]
Crane's novel Active Service in some part illustrates
unequal authority in two arms of radiation. One copy of the typescript that
Cora Crane made from the lost manuscript is preserved, this being the
setting copy used by Heinemann for the first English edition. A second
copy was sent to the publisher Stokes in the United States,
who—dissatisfied with Cora's bad typing—had a fresh
typescript made
from it to use as setting copy for the American edition. The manuscript
being lost, the preservation of one copy of the original typescript is
basically all that matters to an editor; since Crane's proof-corrections are
few or nonexistent, the typescript must be the copy-text and there is no true
radiation by the American branch but only derivation. Hypothetically, of
course, if the typescript had not been preserved, the two editions would
have radiated from this lost document, which would need to be
reconstructed from the evidence of their multiple authority, although with
lesser weight given to the Stokes edition because of its more distant
relationship to the archetype (if this fact could itself have been recovered).
Actually the case is more complicated than the preservation of the typescript
suggests. From time to time the preserved typescript copy-text is wanting
or defective, at which points the Heinemann edition becomes the copy-text
as one step nearer to lost authority than the Stokes; but in these places it is
proper to correct the Heinemann copy-text by reference to the accidentals
of the radiating American edition if these are thought to preserve the formal
features of the typescript more faithfully than the English. In Chapter V of
the novel by an extraordinary accident the Heinemann typescript is entirely
missing but is replaced by the corresponding pages of the American
transcript, which had been used in this place as the setting copy for the
English edition, the American edition by mirror image being printed from
the lost section of the
original typescript. In this chapter both the preserved typescript and the
Stokes edition radiate at equal removes from the lost original and, as in all
situations of multiple authority, the choice of copy-text becomes one of
expediency (or convenience)—in this case the American typescript
may
be taken to have preserved the accidental features of the original more
accurately on the whole than the Stokes edition set from Cora's
original.
Whenever Cora's typescript is preserved, questions of authority may
slightly weight the matter of copy-text even though—for Crane,
whose
revision of accidentals was minimal either in the pre- or post-publication
stage—these are likely to concern the substantives more than the
accidents. That is, the early ribbon part of the original typescript has no
written-in authorial revisions, whereas the later carbon section is
occasionally corrected and revised. Because this revision agrees
substantially with the distinction between ribbon copy and carbon, there is
a chance that the copy sent to the United States (although in batches)
contained such revisions in its early carbon section which would have been
perpetuated in the American edition. One may still feel slightly
uncomfortable about this possibility since some of the evidence is
contradictory although on the whole against the presence of such authority
in the earlier part of the Stokes edition. Even if authority were to be
demonstrated, however, the likelihood of Crane's formal alterations, such
as they would be, being recognizable after passing through another typing
and then the American compositor(s) is so minimal as not to disturb the
choice of the preserved typescript as copy-text throughout except for
Chapter V and a few minor gaps.
Distance from the archetype is not an automatic rationale to apply
without a full evaluation of the evidence. For instance, one copy of the
typescript of Crane's Third Violet was sold to a newspaper
syndicate which set it up in proofs that in turn were distributed to six
known subscribing newspapers as setting copy for their compositors. The
other example of the typescript, almost a year later, was used to set the
book, somewhat revised by Crane in the interval. In editing this work it
was most convenient to choose as copy-text the radiating arm represented
by the book, in part because it was one stage closer to the lost typescript
than any newspaper, in part because during the revision Crane could have
altered any of the typescript accidentals that he did not like (not a probable
hypothesis for any extensive alteration but still a possibility), and in part
because of the difficulty of utilizing as copy-text a synthetic reconstruction
of the lost syndicate proofs made from
the evidence of the six newspapers. This latter operation would yield an
exact account of the substantives but a less exact even though tolerably full
account of the accidents. (Of course, insofar as the syndicate proofs can be
reconstructed, they and the book are at equal distance from the typescript:
the only problem remains the fact that we know the book's accidentals
precisely, whereas in various details some of the proofs' punctuation, for
example, must remain conjectural owing to the newspapers' conflicting
evidence.) On the other hand, the book shows the effects of publisher's
editing (probably) and of compositorial styling (certainly); as a result, in
many respects the accidentals of the newspapers reconstructing
the lost proofs are closer to Crane's characteristics than the book's despite
the latter's more immediate derivation. As a result, a critical text produced
from such radiating authority had to be very much a combination of book
and reconstructed syndicate proofs, the total evidence attempting to
reproduce as closely as possible the accidents as well as the substantives of
the lost typescript, the farthest back a reconstruction can penetrate.
In similar manner the periodical texts of four of William James's
Pluralistic Universe lectures in the Hibbert
Journal
could be balanced against the book to reconstruct in many respects the
accidentals of the lost typescript from which each derived at equal distance.
Any choice between journal and book as copy-text for this work would be
superfluously theoretical; nevertheless, in the editing process the
reconstructed accidental characteristics of the lost typescript were of real
concern since some of their variance from the preserved manuscript could
be attributed to James's own revision.
It may now be possible to sharpen some of the essential differences
between the Elizabethan conditions with which Greg's rationale was
contrived to deal and those of later periods to which editors now attempt to
apply the formulas, with whatever conclusions can be drawn about the
modifications that appear to be required in principle or in procedures.
Insofar as the single matter of copy-text is concerned, Greg's rationale and
his illustrations are centered on the problem whether a linear
post-publication revised edition or the original substantive edition makes the
superior copy-text, this choice having nothing to do, however, with the
second matter of the editorial judgment that will select the most
authoritative substantives from the two editions. Throughout he ignores the
question of holograph versus first edition as copy-text simply because in his
period this problem seldom arises. Even so, an example lay to his hand in
the Jonson Masque of Queens which Simpson had
edited in volume VII of the Works (1941) in a diplomatic
transcript of the holograph. The problems in The Masque of
Queens in effect differ little from those facing an editor of
Hawthorne's House of the Seven Gables, even though the
transmission of the text is not the same and there are added complications
in the Jonson: in each the question arises of the extent to which accidental
variants that appear to be authoritative can be identified in a restyled printed
text and utilized in a critical edition that takes the manuscript as copy-text.
In Hawthorne these are the proof-alterations he made; in Jonson the
revisions occurred in the ancestral working papers he sent to the printer
after making the
preserved fair copy from the unrevised text,
[43] with some chance that he also read
proofs. The same also applies to the problems met with in
A
Pluralistic Universe when a manuscript is preserved but not the
printer's-copy typescript made from it, a typescript that contained accidental
as well as substantive revision in James's hand (corresponding to Jonson's
revisions in his working papers except that the James is the more complex
problem owing to the intermediate non-authorial typescript whose details
are only partly reconstructable where they differed from the manuscript).
In the Hawthorne the editor chose the manuscript as copy-text since the
identifiable and even the probable authorial accidental revisions in proof
were vastly outnumbered by the printer's variants from the manuscript
copy. On the contrary, the editor of James chose the printed edition as
copy-text on the mirror-image of this situation; that is, the evidence that the
printed
edition was the culmination of a series of authorial revisions during its
pre-publication transmission from original manuscript and constituted a
more authoritative document, on the whole, than even the holograph
representation of the accidentals. Naturally, possibilities of this nature could
not have been contemplated by Greg even if he had tackled the more
elementary cases of holograph versus printed edition as, in some part, in
The Masque of Queens. It follows that any modern attempt
to
impose an absolute rule that an author's manuscript is sacrosanct as
copy-text finds no support in Greg and has been extrapolated from his
illustrations of the transmission of accidentals from one printed edition to
another, a quite different matter.
Indeed, Greg less understandably (since these are in greater supply
in his period) fails to mention the problems of copy-text that arise in the
choice between a printed edition and a scribal manuscript as in Fletcher's
Beggars Bush, Woman's Prize, and
Bonduca, as well as Suckling's Aglaura. Again,
these occur in the considerable area in which a reader draws a blank in
Greg—that of pre-publication textual history that may or may not
involve
authorial revision but that ends in producing at least two different
documents with claims to authority as copy-text.
This leaves wide open for an editor any Elizabethan parallels between
scribes and modern typists, or other interveners in the transmission of a text
such as the friends who assisted T. S. Eliot or Charles Dickens in the
reading and alteration of proofs. The limitation of problems of copy-text to
the specific post-publication circumstance of an author revising one edition
to produce another fails to offer any guidance in the important questions of
multiple authority affecting decisions of copy-text as found either in
Fletcher's plays or in Crane's
Third Violet. In these days in
which recording media are joining print as authoritative documents, and a
poet reading his own verses may be subject to unofficial as well as official
tape recording, something of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century
conditions of multiple copies of variant texts, with their derivatives, are
being reproduced although it is true that these have only a tangential
relationship to accidental variation
except as it could be reconstructed from pauses and the like. Nevertheless,
questions of copy-text based on the matter of accidentals may not prove so
simple in these cases.
What we come down to in the end is the conclusion (which actually
has far-reaching consequences for the relation of the "Rationale" to the
editing of modern authors) that Greg's interest in the accidentals of a text
was minimal compared to his concern for the free exercise of editorial
judgment in respect to the substantives. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century
conditions of transmission, whether through scribes or compositors, left
small chance, or at least much uncertainty, that very much of the authorial
accidental characteristics were preserved in a print—and the usual
absence of authorial manuscripts to act as a guide meant that what had been
preserved could not be distinguished from compositorial accidentals. In
these circumstances there is little choice but to take as copy-text the
document (it is simpler to think basically in terms of documents and not of
editions) that is closest to authority in these respects, obviously the first
edition when all antecedent documents
(scribal or authorial manuscripts) have not been preserved. After this
decision Greg's subsequent concern is only with the specific case of
Every Man in his Humour in which extensive authorial
revision
has so altered the substantives as to enforce general acceptance of the Folio
accidentals that accompany the altered wording. (All procedures for bad
quartos which Greg considers are basically of no value as evidence for the
present day.) The general conditions of Greg's period, then, encouraged his
view that the chief importance of the formal features of the copy-text
outside of their unknown and unknowable relation to the author was to
establish the most linguistically suitable texture for the
substantives—not
the most authoritative accidentals on a demonstrable
basis but the nearest to the general texture of the period of the work's
composition. This attitude then leads to the principle that an editor can even
scrap the copy-text punctuational system and substitute his own, although
he should give "due weight to the original in deciding on his own."
[44] "Much the same applies to the use
of
capitals and italics" (p. 385). This contrast helps to point the difference
between the linguistic interest for Greg of the spelling and the lack of
critical interest in punctuation and rest. It is interesting to notice that for an
editor of later literature the importance of these two concerns has been
precisely reversed.
Greg's natural pessimism about the specific authority of accidentals
tends to widen the gap between the editorial treatment he envisages as
suitable for them and for substantives and ends by removing the accidentals
in major part from the function of the editorial judgment appropriate for the
substantives. Once again, Greg's concern for the post-publication
transmission of texts in linear revised editions prevents him from
considering other conditions (even though they may seem to constitute
special cases) in which something can be done with the choice of copy-text
between two competing non-linear authorities as in the manuscripts and the
printed texts in the Beaumont and Fletcher 1647 Folio, and in the
possibilities for emending the copy-text accidentals from other authority. In
this latter respect he shows practically no interest in the emendation of the
accidentals that should demand editorial attention even in the linear original
and revised texts of Sejanus. It is this
ignoring of the possibilities that exist in some early works for the
judgmental treatment of certain classes of accidents on a par with the
substantives that creates the gravest difficulties when the "Rationale" is
narrowly applied to the editing of modern works. One can be a rebel to
Greg's general though not absolute advice to seek one's copy-text in the
earliest authority, as is Dr. Robson's editorial board for the Mill's edition,
and still fall into the trap of preserving Greg's conservative views on the
opportunities for authoritative emendation of the copy-text
accidentals.
This attitude has had, apparently, a serious effect on modern editing
where the amount of information available about authorial characteristics
equals and normally surpasses that preserved for Jonson and puts matters
on quite a different plane from Shakespeare and other
typical early writers who bulked large in Greg's mind. The effect is found,
of course, precisely where Greg's own gaps occur: the possibility that the
accidentals of a revised edition may be more authoritative than those of an
earlier edition closer to lost original authority, and even that a printed first
edition may be more authoritative in its formal features than the holograph
manuscript from which it ultimately derives. That either exception is
possible save under the rarest and most special of circumstances has been
vigorously denied by some modern converts to Greg's textual theories. In
fact, this denial is justified only in cases of a limited authorial interest in the
revision of accidentals, these being the commonest conditions an editor may
encounter in dealing with revisions. But the less common although by no
means highly exceptional examples of the contrary, as occur in the writings
of Walt Whitman and William James, are being supported as more editors
tackle writers
outside of the limited scope of nineteenth-century American fiction. James
Joyce and D. H. Lawrence come to mind.
Until editors have had more experience with the special cases of
revised editions as copy-texts it is not possible to lay down more than a few
specific guidelines, with the advice to seek out and study the examples of
this editorial procedure in order to acquaint oneself at first hand with its
theory and practice. However, it would seem that several criteria must be
satisfied before a revised edition can become a superior copy-text.[45] First, evidence must exist, or be
conjectured with major probability, that the author revised his text not only
in the substantives but with more than casual attention to the accidentals;
second, evidence should be sought that the printer of the revised text was
relatively faithful to his copy, or was made so by scrupulous authorial
proofreading, so that the author's accidental texture has not been restyled
in any thoroughgoing way. If these two criteria are met, then a third may
be examined. Briefly, an editor needs to
examine his collations of the variant accidentals to determine what
categories are manifestly authorial and what are manifestly compositorial.
These two groups should be isolated, for since they constitute the classes
of accidentals that are as
subject to critical selection or discard as are the substantives, technically
they need have no more influence on the choice of copy-text than do the
substantives. This is an important point in the revised rationale I am
suggesting.
The copy-text is chosen on the basis of its accidentals according to
Greg, for in his opinion these constitute a body not subject to the selective
judgment he advocated for the substantives. The choice based on the
accidentals is still (and no doubt invariably) sound in my opinion for any
period although the reasons for the significance of accidentals in a text have
shifted materially since the Elizabethan period. When conditions in later
authors approximate those that influenced Greg to advocate as a general
rule the earliest document (meaning the one closest to the authorial
archetype), the rationale is also valid in both its parts. For instance, the
evidence strongly suggests that in collecting the 1837 Twice-Told
Tales from their various newspaper and magazine appearances
Hawthorne performed a minimum of revision in the printer's copy and in
proof; hence the accidentals of the originals, set from holograph, are more
authoritative than those of the book reprint, although
not necessarily reproducing exactly what would have appeared in the lost
manuscripts.[46] This was
post-publication revision of the kind that Greg recognizes. In
pre-publication revision, the evidence suggests that the vast majority of the
variant accidentals in the printed texts of Hawthorne's romances belong to
the compositors and that some of the relatively few accidental alterations he
may be supposed to have made in proof from the forms of the
printer's-copy manuscripts are often unrecognizable. In earlier literature the
case of the revised second and third editions of Dryden's Indian
Emperour may again be cited as examples under (b) of an author
whose accidental revisions may be thought (on some concrete evidence from
the press-corrections in one forme of the second edition) to have been
significant from time to time; but they are insufficiently idiosyncratic to be
recognized among the far larger
number of compositorial variants, and therefore the best copy-text is either
the scribal manuscript of a slightly earlier version or else the first
edition.
[47]
Again in earlier literature, it would seem that whereas
Sejanus meets the first test, in that Jonson may be taken to
have
revised copy for the Folio with some care for its accidentals, the second
test—the general fidelity of the Folio printer—appears to be
failed.
Thus a doubt is raised, although somewhat less than with Dryden, about the
amount of compositorial departure from copy in the Folio text. When one
proceeds to the third test, in order to see if the doubt may be resolved, an
editor finds it possible to isolate several ranges of Jonson's idiosyncratic
accidentals that beyond question represent his markings in the Quarto
printer's copy. These may be put aside (like the F press-corrections) since
for the moment they should not affect the selection of copy-text. The
clearcut compositorial variants are less useful, representing as they do only
the Folio departure from recognizably Jonsonian characteristics found in the
Quarto copy. At this point an editor may
discover that the remaining accidental variants (chiefly punctuation) are still
fairly numerous. If surveying these he comes to believe that on the whole
they are more likely than not to represent the F compositors' variants, then
he should choose Q as his copy-text since the Q accidentals in this
particular category will probably reproduce more authority as a group than
those in F. The set-aside idiosyncratic accidentals can then be inserted in
the Q copy-text as authorial revisions holding the same status as the F
authoritative substantive variants. On the other hand, if the editor is still
uncertain about the neutral category of the accidentals and has some
evidence from parallels to take it that, although each separate one is not
identifiable, the probability rests that on the whole they are more likely in
F to reproduce Jonsonian markings in copy (and perhaps undetected
proof-correction changes if this evidence has not been exhausted)
than compositorial variation from Q, then revised F becomes the natural
copy-text. If so, it is the duty of the editor to correct those accidentals in
F that appear to be unauthoritative by drawing on Q for the corresponding
versions.
To repeat, the probability on what evidence is available about the
author and his characteristics (and the printer) that a majority of the
generally unassignable accidental variants is authorial or compositorial
should be the ultimate determinant in the selection of copy-text as between
two authorities, whether an original and a revised edition, or two collateral
editions.[48] For example, it was this
general sense of the authority of the indeterminate class of accidental
variants between the partially reconstructed syndicate newspaper proofs and
the first edition of Crane's Third Violet that finally dictated
the
selection of the first edition as copy-text. Under other circumstances when
no question of revision was present, the Boston Museum
version
of Hawthorne's "Ethan Brand" appears to have received less house-styling
than another publication in the Dollar Magazine (both
radiating
at equal distance from lost printed sheets from
an unpublished magazine set from manuscript). Although the Dollar
Magazine clipping was the printer's copy for the later appearance
in
The Snow-Image (1851), no evidence is preserved to indicate
that Hawthorne had prepared it with any revisions. Hence an editor may
believe that the copy-text offering maximum general authority, such as it
is, is the Boston Museum (Centenary Edition, XI, 417-419).
Compositorial studies showing unequal levels of variation from copy
according to the stints were among the other evidence in Hawthorne's
romances that led to the establishment of the manuscripts as the most
trustworthy source for the accidentals as a whole. With a more complicated
transmission from preserved manuscripts (in large part) through periodical
publication to book collection, despite considerable substantive revision in
the process the manuscript accidentals for Hawthorne's Our Old
Home (1863) remained on the whole the more authoritative, also.
In
another
situation the grave
difficulty of accepting in the first edition of
The Red Badge of
Courage a number of what appeared to be sophisticating accidentals
not necessarily Crane's and far more numerous from the manuscript than
could be attributed to his marking of the typescript printer's copy and the
book proofs, led to the selection of the manuscript as on the whole the best
repository of the authoritative accidentals of this work.
As a marked contrast, when one approaches such a typical William
James text as A Pluralistic Universe, each criterion for
copy-text may be satisfied in favor of the general authority of the revised
edition's accidentals. Briefly, preserved documents for other works in its
period demonstrate the frequency of James's attention to accidentals in
preparing printer's copy and in the revision of a book's galley-proofs.
Second, the evidence of Some Problems of Philosophy
indicates
that the Riverside Press was exceptionally faithful in setting the accidents
of his copy except for a few categories of housestyling that can be readily
isolated. In the third test, although some of James's idiosyncratic
accidentals had clearly been inserted in the book as deliberate alterations of
the typescript (and manuscript), a large number of the book's punctuation
changes could not be so precisely assigned to James in clearly defined
categories; nevertheless, in the majority of cases they
were either consistent with his favorite although not invariable practices or
else were, at the least, not inconsistent. Various of the book's changes
could be easily interpreted as James's attempts to make consistent and
formal the more informal system of a manuscript that was in effect not
much more than a draft which James had always intended to revise
thoroughly before publication. Since evidence within the book and the
journals existed for James's concern in revising his accidentals during the
stages of the copy's transmission from manuscript through typescript to
final print, and since the majority of the relatively indifferent variants did
not seem to be assignable to the printer either on internal or external
evidence, the book became the natural copy-text. The chief editorial
problem for the accidentals, then, was the identification of the Press's
styling so that it could be removed in favor of the authorial forms from the
manuscript but with some reference as well to the
possibility of post-typescript revision in the Hibbert Journal
publication not transferred to the book. All this was pre-publication revision
of course. Post-publication revision of the same nature and with the same
problems occurs in the essays in Pragmatism, The
Meaning of Truth, and The Will to Believe in which
journal articles were revised to serve as printer's copy for the book and the
revision of the text in both its aspects continued in the book's
galley-proofs.
Note: An interesting small case of pre-publication revision involving
copy-text occurs in the first edition of Fielding's
Tom Jones
(1749) ("
Tom Jones Plus and Minus: Towards a Practical
Text,"
Harvard Library Bulletin, 25 (1977), 101-113). In the
third volume, sheet O has been shown by Dr. Hugh Amory to be a
cancellans sheet. By an extraordinary accident the unrevised third edition
set from the first used as copy a volume with the lost original cancellandum
text. The cancellans in the first edition was set from an authorially revised
copy of the cancellandum and so is at one remove from the original
typesetting. Likewise, the third edition is at one remove, having been set
from an unrevised copy of the same sheet. Technically, therefore, both first
and third editions have equal authority in the accidentals of the unrevised
portions of the text in this sheet. A decision between them needs to be made
from partially contradictory evidence. If one compares the
number of accidental changes (chiefly punctuation) made unauthoritatively
in the adjacent sheets by the third edition setting from first-edition copy,
one will observe that these are fewer than the number of differences in
sheet O. If the third edition had set the cancellandum sheet with equal
fidelity, the extra variants could represent first-edition unauthoritative
departures from the same copy or a combination of these with any changes
that Fielding may have (undemonstrably) made while he was working over
the sheet and giving some of its pages a general revision. In a very small
amount of text, however, within a few pages elsewhere in which the
first-edition workmen reset Fielding's revised text in separate cancellantia
leaves, the reproduction of the accidentals in the reset text from the
preserved cancellanda is remarkably faithful. This is the only evidence that
exists from which one may gain any notion of the faithfulness of the first
edition workmen to their copy, and it is
too limited to be of singular service. Balancing the conflicting evidence,
therefore, an editor might feel that on the whole there was something to be
said for the third edition's version as copy-text for this sheet, regardless of
the revised substantives of the first-edition text and the quite unknown and
unknowable question of Fielding's alteration of accidentals in unrevised text
as he worked over the cancellandum sheet to provide copy for the
cancellans found in the first edition. But a third range of evidence casts
doubt on this assumption. Although within sheet O the first edition has a
few punctuation differences from the third where it is somewhat easier to
believe that it is reproducing its copy instead of departing from it (as in neat
parenthetical commas found in the third edition but not in the first), various
of the third-edition variant punctuation readings in this sheet seem more
typical of Fielding than in their first-edition form, at least to the extent that
similar
forms to the third are found in the adjacent sheets set by the first edition
from manuscript. An example would be the use of a colon followed by a
capital instead of a semicolon and lower case, or the heavier use of
semicolons for commas sometimes in the manner of rhetorical pointing.
Unfortunately, however, these seemingly characteristic devices are also
found as unauthoritative changes made by the third edition from its
first-edition copy in adjacent sheets; hence they have no value as evidence
in sheet
O and if anything work against the hypothesis that the third edition in its
variants in this sheet is reproducing the lost cancellandum copy with
superior fidelity. The upshot is that an editor finds he has no trustworthy
evidence about the accidentals in either edition although he may have a
generalized suspicion of the third's variants; in which case it seems to me
he would be better advised to play the odds that Fielding may have made
some changes in the accidentals and since the case is otherwise almost
completely indifferent to opt for the revised first-edition sheet as
copy-text.
[49]
Pre-publication revision during transmission can affect the choice of
copy-text when the option lies, as usually, between a preserved manuscript
or typescript and the first edition. (Marked proofs for a book are preserved
much less frequently than other antecedent documents, but even unmarked
early proofs may be valuable for demonstrating what differences from the
setting copy resulted from the transmission.) The authorial revision in some
intermediate stage(s) needs then to be reconstructed. In the simplest cases
when a manuscript was the printer's copy as in the Hawthorne romances or
in Lectures VII and VIII of James's Pragmatism, this may be
no more than the reconstruction of the proof-alterations. In more complex
cases, as in James's Pluralistic Universe, a lost worked-over
professional typescript plus extensive authorial proof-alteration needs
reconstruction as well. In post-publication revision, ordinarily only the two
printed documents (original and revised)
are available, as in Fielding's Tom Jones or Joseph
Andrews, Hawthorne's Mosses from an Old Manse,
or
Lectures I-VI of Pragmatism. Here the problem is to
reconstruct
the lost authorially prepared printer's copy and to attempt to evaluate the
role of subsequent proof-corrections, if any. (Normally these
proof-corrections could not be distinguished in the book's text from the
marking of printer's copy, of course.) The circumstances will dictate the
choice of copy-text. If with Hawthorne's Marble
Faun—where bibliographical analysis can distinguish between
Hawthorne's proof-correction and the printer's variants for major parts of
the first edition—the decision is made that the printer's departures
from
copy in the accidents completely outweigh the possibility of the author's
proof-alterations, the manuscript becomes the copy-text. If with James's
Pluralistic Universe the decision is made that James's
alterations
in the typescript and in the
proof are more numerous than the printer's departures from copy not only
in respect to the idiosyncratic and hence identifiable accidentals but also to
the more
neutral forms, the first edition becomes the preferred copy-text over the
manuscript. If with Locke's
Of Human Understanding the
decision is made that Locke not only revised the accidentals as well as the
substantives for the second edition but also used this revised text as the
physical basis for a further revision of both features by marking copy and
reading proofs for the revised fourth, then with Professor Nidditch one
would choose this fourth edition instead of the first as copy-text.
Note: It is always an individual matter how much the presence of
identifiable idiosyncratic accidental revisions may be taken to imply the
existence of more indifferent and unassignable alterations. In
Sejanus most editors might take it that in marking Q copy the
special attention Jonson clearly gave to adding examples of apostrophus,
correcting English to classicized spellings when appropriate, and reducing
his earlier heavy capitalization system to lower case need not hold equally
for his ordinary spellings or the general run of the punctuation save for a
few specific categories, generally identifiable, and thus that the
punctuational system of Q is probably more authoritative on the whole in
its indifferent pointing than that of F, and so with the ordinary spelling.
This is because Jonson was intent only on certain theories, not on general
improvement of satisfactory results. On the other hand, with William James
and probably with most authors (Yeats seems to be an
example too), it is a matter of where there is smoke there is fire: once his
hand may be detected by idiosyncratic spelling and syntactical changes, the
full complement of general improvement in the punctuational system may
be expected. The relationship between the qualitative (assignable) and
quantitative (indifferent) accidental variants may change not only between
authors but according to transmissional agents and their ways. An
Elizabethan compositor is more likely to reproduce an author's
eccentricities than his conventional forms whereas a more modern
compositor may be inclined to reduce the unusual to standard practice and
to follow copy more faithfully when the styling is indifferent.
As every editor knows, the choice of copy-text is important not only
as a means of preserving major authority in the accidents as a whole but
also as providing an editor with a working hypothesis to that end when he
is faced with transmissional variation whether pre- or post-publication. Greg
believed that the pull of the copy-text authority could operate with the
substantives as well, and he advised an editor to rely on the copy-text
instead of a revised edition in cases where the choice of a substantive
reading was perfectly balanced. This is often sage advice in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries when the incidence of compositorial substantive
error is high and any revised edition is likely to be a mixture of wrong and
of right readings.[50] It may be less
useful later.
The emphasis must rest, of course, on the complete neutrality of the
readings, making it impossible in the editor's opinion to select one or the
other on reasoned critical grounds. In such cases of exact balance Greg's
mistrust of Renaissance compositors leads him to favor the original reading.
We may suppose he had in mind the hypothesis that the original was
presumptively authorial. If one then deliberately chose the indifferent
reading of a revised edition, the chance entered that one was rejecting
authority for a compositorial misreading or memorial contamination,
especially since an apparent motive for authorial revision may seem to be
wanting. Since the critical judgment could not affirm the authority of the
new reading, it would seem better to stick with the authority one knows
than to gamble on the unknown quality of the variant which, moreover,
offered little incentive to forsake the comfort of the assumedly authoritative
known. This line of reasoning gambles, in effect,
that the original reading was not a misprint or corruption and the revised
reading an authentic correction, but the reverse.
Note: What is an 'exact balance' (in Greg's phrase) between two
readings may vary from editorial temperament to editorial temperament, of
course, an inevitability that need not interfere with Greg's principle.
However, in
The Editorial Problem in Shakespeare, pp.
xxxiii-xxxiv, Greg most acutely illustrates how an editor should exhaust
every possibility affecting a decision, for when other grounds may be
present (even though conjectural), simple critical judgment is not enough.
He mentions the case of an editor taking the
Hamlet Second
Quarto as copy-text and finding the reading there at I.v.20 "Like Quills
upon the fearful porpentine" whereas the Folio reads
fretful.
If
he were puzzled by two such excellent competing readings, Greg suggests
that he can find some comfort by considering (a) one or other version is
bound to be a misreading, an error, not a revision; (b) "this is one of
several variants (common to F and Q1) to which the same explanation
might
apply, but which are all characterized by a similarity of graphic outline .
. . an editor, while basing his text upon the quarto, should nevertheless
adopt the folio reading . . . because the quarto is known to be very
carelessly printed, so that when it is a case of a simple misprint, the folio,
though at least one step further removed from the autograph, may yet be
the better authority"; (c) the reading
fretful in the bad Q1
establishes the reading of the prompt-book. The coincidence of Q1 and F
does not necessarily prove that the prompt-book had not been corrupted
(and the error thence passed on to Q1 through the actor's memory and
finally to F). Nevertheless, if the question resolves down to an error made
in one or other printed text, the establishment through Q1 of the Folio
fretful as not a misprint by a compositor
who should have set the reading of his copy assists in the conclusion that
it was the Q2 compositor who misread his handwritten copy, not the F1
workman. This is not entirely a pure case, of course, because the evidence
of Q1 is of considerable importance; nevertheless it suggests a line of
thinking that results at least in a working hypothesis instead of a flip of the
coin.
It must be emphasized that in this matter of advocating the authority
of the copy-text for evenly balanced substantive variants Greg was writing
theoretically and he offered no illustrations. However, one may speculate
that what he actually had in mind was less likely to be examples of linear
revised relationship as in Nashe or Jonson but instead the more serious
problems found in plays like King Lear where the Folio
copy-text readings do not always seem superior to those of the Bad Quarto,
and where there are a number of cruxes on which editors divide. Like
King Lear Shakespeare's Othello involves
transmissional prepublication problems, although of a different sort, that
involve scribes as well as compositors, and was probably also in Greg's
thought. However, the complexities of bad quarto and 'revised edition' have
no relation to modern problems, nor is the Othello situation,
or
that of 2 Henry IV (as we dimly conceive them) very likely
to
arise. For any pertinence to other than special Renaissance problems one
must confine the case, practically speaking, to linear transmission, either
from manuscript or typescript to printed edition or else to an edition revised
from the text of an earlier. Under these conditions, the closer one comes
to periods where compositorial accuracy improves—especially in the
setting from printed copy—the more the authority grows in favor of
variants in a revised edition and the more likely it is that an indifferent
variant in the revised text is authorial, not compositorial.[51] If so, a very real question arises
whether
Greg's advice is a good editorial principle to adopt under changed
conditions from those of Renaissance compositorial and scribal
free-wheeling.
Evidence for either position is hard to find that can be called
demonstrable, for if the answer is known between two seemingly balanced
variants then they are no longer truly balanced and the case becomes
hypothetical. For instance, since neither occurs in his holograph papers it
would take the evidence of a computer concordance of Fielding to learn
whether in Joseph Andrews Fanny had more likely 'laid hold
on
the Girdle which her Lover wore for that purpose' (273.13-14) or, as the
revised third edition has it,
laid hold of; or whether between
the
first and third editions Fielding had come to feel that 'was the Subject of
your Contention anywise material' had better be changed to
anyways (and then in the fifth edition to
any
ways).
Ultimately these difficult decisions involving idiom may come to be less
conjecturally based than what songs the sirens sang;
[52] but more certainty is possible in
other
matters that might at first sight appear to be equally balanced. For example,
beginning with this revised third edition a number of alterations affecting
small irregularities of modification and coherence are improved, such as
48.21 first edition 'She was a poor Girl, who had formerly been bred up in
Sir
John's Family' altered in the third to
been formerly
bred up, a change seemingly of some indifference and possible as
the
compositor's memorial failure. A more obvious example of the same is the
original 'whom he observed not to be fallen into the most compassionate
Hands' (61.25-26) which appears in the third edition as
to be fallen
not into; or 'If it was only our present Business to make Similies'
(45.30) altered in the third to
was our present Business only to
make. If an editor stuck to the copy-text in such readings, taking it
that the third-edition order resulted from memorial failure or a purist
compositor intent on making the style more formal, he would quite
definitely be wrong, for (a) the third edition exhibits half a dozen more
cases scattered sufficiently to make it unlikely that all were the doing of one
compositor,
[53] (b) similar
improvements are made in the fourth and even in the revised fifth edition,
(c) the identical kind of alteration is a feature of the revised fourth edition
of
Tom Jones.
Contiguity may play a part in the evidence an editor seeks, for in a
revised edition it may seem more likely that a cluster of variants results
from authorial marking than from a sudden spate of compositorial error.
For instance, in Joseph Andrews 57.8-18 the text of the first
two editions reads:
Tow-wouse, (who notwithstanding his Charity, would
have given his Vote as freely as he ever did at an Election, that any other
House in the Kingdom, should have had quiet Possession of his Guest)
answered, 'My Dear, I am not to blame: he was brought hither by the
Stage-Coach; and Betty had put him to bed before I was
stirring.' 'I'll Betty her,' says she—At which, with
half her
Garments on, the other half under her Arm, she sallied out in quest of the
unfortunate Betty, whilst Tow-wouse and the
Surgeon went to pay a Visit to poor Joseph, and enquire into
the Circumstance of this melancholy Affair.
In the revised third edition three substantive variants occur:
ever
he for
he ever,
should have for
should
have had, and
Circumstances for
Circumstance. Each one of these seems about evenly balanced
but their clustering pyramids the advisability of adopting the third-edition
readings as authorial alterations.
An author's special revisory interests will sometimes indicate that one
or other of a choice—revised edition or original copy-text—is
the more
authoritative. Fielding's concern for clarifying his modification was only
one of his interests in revising both Joseph Andrews and
Tom Jones. Another was to weed out certain old-fashioned
usages in the preterites of verbs, like altering bid to
bad (five times) and begun to
began.
This is also a feature of the revision of Tom Jones in the
fourth
edition, in which tore is changed to torn,
bore to borne, and begun to
began (four times).[54]
Other concerns manifest themselves in revisions. In Tom
Jones
the first-edition copy-text reads, 'yet so discreet was she in her Conduct,
that her Prudence was as much on the Guard, as if she had had all the
Snares to apprehend which were ever laid for her whole Sex'
(36.9-37.2). This seems unexceptionable, and the revised fourth edition's
if she had all could easily be an eyeskip. An editor might be
tempted to retain the copy-text unless he had observed that the fourth
edition alters had had to had nine additional
times:
clearly Fielding was making a special revision throughout the novel. On the
other hand, when in Joseph Andrews or Tom
Jones
the revised editions slip and substitute has for
hath,
or does for doth, an editor may safely retain
the
copy-text, there being dozens of examples in the two novels of Fielding's
revision to his preferred forms
hath and
doth.
Not only substantives but forms of words ordinarily classed among
the accidentals but better listed as semi-substantives because of their
linguistic interest may offer serious problems because they are as subject to
compositorial as to authorial modernization. In Tom Jones
whether the first edition Recipe or the revised fourth's
Receipt is authorial cannot be known in the absence of the
word
in preserved holographs. In the fourth edition Fielding seems to have been
concerned to alter older and ambiguous forms to modern, as in
Council to Counsel, and errant
to
arrant (see the textual notes to 111.39 and 190.15 on p.
1014),
although he missed wave for waive (212.2).
This
being so, the question arises whether the invariable change (except for its
single use as a name) of Ostler to Hostler in the
fourth edition is compositorial. In earlier works the word had been printed
as Hostler, but it is hard to
believe that the workmen setting the first edition in different places altered
manuscript Hostler to Ostler. Since there seems
some reason to conjecture that Ostler was what appeared in
the
manuscript, it is difficult to know whether the fourth edition's changes
represent Fielding's or the compositors' modernization, and the same for
the change from hollowing to hallowing some
half
dozen times, especially since hollowing is the form printed
in
Fielding's earlier works. A conservative editor may prefer to stay with his
copy-text, a more adventurous one to suspect that Fielding may have been
the modernizer.
In any large work like Tom Jones or even Joseph
Andrews, intermediate between Elizabethan and modern printing,
small verbal differences will of course occur that seem to be perfectly
balanced especially when the differences are slight. An example might be
cited in Joseph Andrews (27.25-26) where the first-edition
copy-text reads, 'She plainly saw the Effects which Town-Air hath on the
soberest Constitutions' but in the revised second edition the
Town-Air, an easy printer's sophistication but a possible authorial
correction or revision. In Tom Jones the ubiquitous problem
of
these and those rears its ugly head, as at 54.32,
74.28, 385.10, etc., variants that seem paralleled by Joseph
Andrews 242.2, which may or may not support the otherwise more
doubtful variant in the same work at 126.12. It is particularly difficult to
attack such problems, often of misreading, when the compositors cannot be
identified. A misreading problem
in which one word is very likely right and the other wrong is posed in
Joseph Andrews when the captain pulled the chair from under
Parson Adams as he was sitting down, so that 'he fell down on the Ground;
and thus [or this as in 4-5] completed Joke the first, to the
great
Entertainment of the whole Company' (245.37).
Perhaps in the category of Fanny's having
laid hold on or
of Joseph's girdle but slightly more possible as an authorial
revision is the question whether Lady Booby's soul was 'tossed up and
down by [
or with
in 5] turbulent and opposite
Passions' (287.6). When choices of reading involve such exquisite factors,
and the problems of compositorial misreading or memorial corruption in
original or revised edition are complicated by the possibility of finicky
authorial revision, the presumption of error in the reading of the revised
edition that led Greg to suggest the advisability of retaining the copy-text
is not quite so firm even though it may sometimes be operative.
The differences may be observed in the Wesleyan-Clarendon editions
of Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones. For the
first, in
my role as textual consultant I recognized that each edition through the fifth
had been revised—not in any sense thoroughly but by a polishing and
refinement of the language and syntax not always in a conspicuous
manner—yet it also seemed clear that the fidelity of the compositors
was
suspect beginning with the third edition, the doubt increasing as the
identifiable authorial revision dwindled in the fourth and fifth editions. This
uneasiness about the authority of various small changes, combined with the
powerful influence Greg's precept about indifferent choices then exercised
on my thinking, led me to suggest the advisability of marked caution in the
acceptance of minor differences in the revised editions, advice that I now
see led to too many retentions of copy-text authority and too few inclusions
of neutral-seeming revisions. Later, doing
the Tom Jones text from scratch as my own responsibility,
I
conceived a higher opinion of the fourth edition's faithfulness to copy
despite a number of small lapses by its workmen, and a lower opinion of
the value of Greg's advice in periods later than the Renaissance, especially
as applied to linear revised editions set with greater general accuracy than
is expected in Elizabethan reprints. As a result, in Tom Jones
proportionally far more indifferent variants are inserted from the revised
edition into the first-edition copy-text than in the conservatively treated
Joseph Andrews, although still perhaps not quite enough
(because it is difficult not to suspect small idiomatic changes in a revision).
In short, eighteenth-century are not Elizabethan compositors; and from this
experience I conceived a distrust under some circumstances for the general
principle of retaining the copy-text reading in cases of balanced variants.
In later periods it is even possible that
the advice is dangerous since it may foster an attitude too conservative for
the changed conditions. When a modern author gives evidence in his
revision that he has been concerned with small things as well as great, I
now believe that an editor is better advised to give the benefit of the
doubt to the readings of the revised edition provided he has some
reasonable faith in the general fidelity of its compositors to copy
[55] and believes that the author was
capable
of making the changes in question. On the whole, this applies to accidentals
as well as to substantives and hence may lead to a selection of the revised
edition as copy-text, in which case an editor may return to Greg's
conservatism but in the reverse direction.
In the Elizabethan period the nature and extent of authorial revision
is sometimes in doubt, and variation between editions representing some
authority (as possibly in Hamlet or Othello)
may
arise not from authorial intervention at some stage but from different textual
traditions complicated by scribal transcripts (and in the drama by theatrical
tinkering). Under such circumstances one needs to be conservative and to
require a possible 'revision' (especially arising in prepublication
transmission) to cross the balance line before a supposedly authoritative
original is to be altered—like fretful for fearful
porpentine. But the climate of opinion changes with post-publication
authorial revision of an earlier print. Joseph Andrews and
Tom Jones in the mid-eighteenth century offer a halfway
house
for the work of a practising author in ordinary conditions whose copy was
transmitted by compositors still subject to the faults inherent in hand
setting. (Alexander Pope's careful attention to his revised texts in
preparation and in proof is quite another matter, just as Walt Whitman is
another matter.)
By the time one reaches the nineteenth century, although still in the
period of hand setting with its greater opportunities for compositorial
sophistication, the accuracy in following copy increases for the substantives
and with it the odds that these variants in a revised edition are the more
likely to be authorial in an overwhelming majority of cases. In Hawthorne's
Twice-Told Tales, for instance, in "The Gray Champion"
seven
authorial substantive revisions appear to have been made in the 1837
collection from the periodical copy but no other variants, and the tale was
reprinted in three other editions to 1853 without further substantive
difference. In "The Minister's Black Veil" the only unauthorial substantive
variants are two that crept into the fourth-edition
reprint; in "The May-Pole of Merry Mount" seven substantive revisions
appear in 1837 as against one misprint; in "Mr. Higginbotham's
Catastrophe" Hawthorne made twenty-nine revisions in 1837 although here
an estimated four printer's errors appear simultaneously; in "The Great
Carbuncle" five revisions appear but no unauthorial substantive changes in
1837 (four occur in the unrevised third edition of 1851), and so on. By the
time one reaches William James, no more than one or two unauthoritative
substantive variants (if that) are likely to appear in any one of his
collections revised from journal articles, although there is a good possibility
that in the revised
The Will to Believe (1897) it was the
printer
who was responsible for the consistent change of
amongst to
among.
In fact, it is not until one encounters a textual situation as in James's
The Meaning of Truth in which the revised edition is itself
the
copytext that Greg's advice, paradoxically, proves to be sound for modern
literature, since the cases are few in a carefully proofread book like this
where the substantives of the text (and not just some accidentals) may need
correction by reference to an earlier authority. However, the scrupulousness
of a James does not seem to be required to reverse Greg's principle for any
period after the Renaissance—and it may be that even in this period
the
application needs more testing with the readings of authorially revised linear
editions. One may flip a coin or for lack of a better reason adhere to the
copy-text with a complicated textual situation like that in
Othello, or King Lear,[56] but for normal conditions when in
genuine
doubt the odds may be taken to favor the in-line revision over the
reading of the earlier copy-text. The wheel comes full circle, of course,
when the revised edition is the copy-text.