| ||
Greg's "Rationale of Copy-Text"
Revisited
by
Fredson Bowers
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
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
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
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
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
Under these conditions Greg knew that (in a manner impossible in the nineteenth century)[9] the accidents of a printed book would differ
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
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.
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:
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
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.
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]
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.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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]
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)
into myne uncles hands from all my hopes
can I not thinke away my selfe, and die?
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
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
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
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.
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
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.
The pertinent passage in Dr. Robson's essay (Editing Nineteenth Century Texts, pp. 116-117) runs as follows:
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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.
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
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
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
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
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)
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
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.
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
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.
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
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:
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
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).
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
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
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.
Notes
Greg's paper was solicited for a bibliographical section in the 1949 English Institute meetings in New York City, was read in absentia on September 8, and printed in Studies in Bibliography, 3 (1950-51), 19-36. It was reprinted, with a few minor changes, in The Collected Papers of Sir Walter Greg, ed. J. C. Maxwell (Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1966), pp. 374-391. Quotations are taken from this latter source.
A dissenter is John M. Robson, who in 1966 gave a reasoned defence of a choice of the final edition as copy-text for the Toronto edition of John Stuart Mill: see "Principles and Methods in the Collected Edition of John Stuart Mill," Editing Nineteenth Century Texts, ed. J. M. Robson (University of Toronto Press, 1967), pp. 96-122. If I follow correctly the implications of the argument, the grounds for Dr. Robson's disagreement are as much ideological as practical, and—although the comparison is not elaborated—rest on "the differences between printing and publishing practices in the Renaissance on the one hand, and the nineteenth century on the other, [which] suggest a proper divergence in editing procedures, a divergence as justified as that between procedures in editing classical and Renaissance texts" (p. 114). This is a question I propose to discuss. Greg's rationale has not found favor on the European continent. The Soviet Russian textologists seem to be most advanced in the acceptance of the function of editorial judgment acting within the analysis of textual transmission; but it is unclear what their practising attitude is to the matter of accidentals in relation to the rationale's precepts, and thus their acceptance of critical editing procedures appears to be confined to the second half of Greg's propositions without taking in the first. Otherwise, it would seem that the German school, basically one of variorum editing, rules. The best statement in English of this European editorial theory and practice may be found in Hans Zeller, "A New Approach to the Critical Constitution of Literary Texts," Studies in Bibliography, 28 (1975), 231-264.
Warner Barnes, "Nineteenth-Century Editorial Problems: A Selective Bibliography," op. cit., ed. Robson, p. 129. Barnes does not specify, but the views would need to comprise (a) the choice of copy-text on the basis of the authority of its accidentals, not that of the substantives, and (b) in a critical edition the necessity for the editor to exercise his judgment in the selection of substantive readings from more than one authoritative document, not necessarily the copy-text.
In his excellent general survey, combining theory and practice, which should be obligatory reading for all students, G. Thomas Tanselle argues that at least implicitly Greg was aware that his rationale was applicable to literature later than that of the Renaissance: "can Greg's rationale be applied to the products which emerged from the very different publishing circumstances of later periods? Greg's own answer to these questions, I think it can be plainly inferred from his essay, would be Yes," "Greg's Theory of Copy-Text and the Editing of American Literature," Studies in Bibliography, 28 (1975), 181. The point is not an important one, but some clarification may be useful. My personal acquaintance with Sir Walter Greg would lead me to believe that in this essay, as in all his work, he was cautious about asserting that his concepts were applicable to a wider field of evidence than that in which he chose to set them. The reader might endeavor to extrapolate them to test their broader efficacy, but Greg would have hesitated to suggest in any manner that this was his own intention or even wish. I suppose that knowing he was on firm ground in the period of his experience, he disliked to introduce the possibility that doubt might arise about his position if a reader began to make exceptions suggested by his special knowledge of other fields. Obviously, a reader sympathetic with Greg's position has a duty to test it in circumstances not envisaged in the essay; but Greg's personal attitude, I venture to say, would have been that he does so at his own risk. In my view, Dr. Tanselle's evidence for his suggestion that Greg was thinking in broader terms than the set of conditions he was illustrating from the Renaissance is based on a misinterpretation. For instance, one piece of evidence brought forward of Greg's reference to scribes and compositors (p. 181) does indeed suggest, as he asserts, that Greg took it that human beings react similarly whether copying by hand or setting type. But Greg was thinking quite plainly of medieval and Renaissance scribes, and of Renaissance compositors setting by hand. He would have distrusted the application of this generalization, in as precise a way as he had utilized it, to a period, say, of typist copying or linotype setting. The different conditions produce in many respects different kinds and possibly different quantities of error. Other indications that Dr. Tanselle finds of Greg's broader implicit purpose are true enough if one recognizes that Greg is looking back to medieval manuscript texts, many of whose problems are applicable to the scribal copy behind Elizabethan books and present in a few respects relatively close analogies with the hand-setting of type in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Thus, when Greg refers to another period than his own, he deliberately looks back, and not forward as has been suggested.
Misunderstandings leading to adverse criticism of Greg's position are perhaps even more common than doctrinaire rigidity in its application. Tanselle (p. 197 and note) remarks that "one cannot help regarding many of the recent discussions (both favorable and unfavorable) . . . as naïve and parochial, and frequently as uninformed or misinformed." For examples, see p. 201 ff., principally pp. 203-204, 207-219.
See my "Current Theories of Copy-Text, with an Illustration from Dryden," "Multiple Authority: New Concepts of Copy-Texts," and "Remarks on Eclectic Texts," collected in Essays in Bibliography, Text, and Editing (University Press of Virginia, 1975); also, "Textual Criticism," in The Aims and Methods of Scholarship in the Modern Languages and Literatures, ed. J. Thorpe (MLA, rev. ed., 1970), pp. 29-54. The textual introductions in a number of editions approved by the Center for Editions of American Authors (now the Center for Scholarly Editions) have made valuable contributions. Dr. Tanselle's important survey article has already been mentioned and the various references in his footnotes offer a useful conspectus of the numerous discussions not mentioned here.
Briefly, although certain syntactical punctuation like a period to end a sentence was recognized, in general the punctuation marks indicate not syntactical units and relationships, as in the present day, but instead a graduated series of pauses rising in weight from comma to semicolon to colon. The present distinctive use of the colon versus semicolon was unknown, and it is highly doubtful that the principle of restriction and nonrestriction was present in anyone's mind for phrases and clauses, apart from pauses: it certainly did not govern the presence or absence of punctuation. The loose Elizabethan syntax and its punctuation work together very smoothly once one becomes accustomed to its flexibility and occasional uncalculated ambiguities. Editors of modernized texts have difficulty fitting the sprawling syntax into neat modern units of syntactical punctuation and find themselves forced into an excessive use of dashes, or into J. Dover Wilson's idiosyncratic use of a series of dots.
Although critics loosely talk about house rules in the Elizabethan printing shop, little evidence exists to support their position. Personal example, and the master-apprentice system, might encourage some degree of uniformity in the treatment of certain accidentals: thus there is evidence that Jaggard's apprentice Compositor E rather quickly acquired many of the prominent characteristics of the shop's premier Compositor B. Nevertheless, the spelling of the First Folio is so individualistic that the exact pages set by each of six compositors can be established on the evidence of their spelling habits, combined with a few idiosyncratic typographical conventions. Hence some compositors could be called more 'modern' than others within the same shop. It follows that at least certain accidental characteristics of any printed book would vary according to the compositor who set the pages, and uniformity of accidental texture within any book is ordinarily non-existent. There was so little house style in Jaggard's shop, even in matters outside of spelling, that no fixed system was enforced in the First Folio about the italicizing or non-italicizing of the names of countries and cities, or of territorial titles. Even simple typographical mechanics were not standardized, as witness Compositor C's habit of setting a space before a comma in certain circumstances.
The printer's housestyling of books in the nineteenth and the publisher's styling as the twentieth century wears on might in some sense impose uniformity of system on an unsystematic author; but this is seldom referable to the spelling, for example, since in most respects general standards of acceptability had been established and the stylization of spelling is largely (although not entirely) a question of the correction of error, with some occasional standardization in the United States according to Webster's. Light or heavy punctuation systems and matters of word-division will bulk larger in the styling of accidental changes, whereas in Shakespeare's day the problems of recovering authorial spelling for its intrinsic interest and as a guide to emendation has proved to be of more concern than ordinary questions of authorial punctuation. For a recent study of the statements in nineteenth-century printers' manuals about the following of copy, see John Bush Jones, "Victorian 'Readers' and Modern Editors: Attitudes and Accidentals Revisited," PBSA, 71 (1977), 47-59. On p. 58 the conclusion is drawn: "Granted the dominant view was that accidentals were the printer's particular concern, nevertheless as early as 1808 Nightingale was advocating at least limited querying rather than arbitrary correction, and after mid-century there was an unsteady but visible progression of opinion toward preserving authorial accidentals." On p. 59 the important distinction is made: "the fact (according to De Vinne) that house styling of accidentals took precedence over authorial intentions in late nineteenth-century periodicals raises doubts about their reliability as copy texts for short works and serialized novels first published in magazines." I have observed this distinction to hold in the essays that William James published in popular magazines like McClure's in the early twentieth century but not in general in the learned journals where his work first appeared.
Since Greg's day the science (or art) of identifying compositors by their spelling and sometimes by certain mechanical characteristics has advanced rapidly. But the further step of identifying the underlying characteristics of the copy is still awaiting more information. When no sample of autograph manuscript is preserved, to identify an early author's variable accidentals as distinct from the compositor's is conjectural at best.
As, for instance, in the mainly collateral texts of such plays as Hamlet, Othello, and Troilus and Cressida, in which two different authorities are represented by the early Quarto and the later Folio texts. Regardless of the substantives, an editor will choose the Quartos as copy-text because the accidentals reflect a texture more nearly contemporary with Shakespeare whereas the Folio's texture is posthumous and modernized. (This is to ignore other considerations such as the physically derived nature of the Folio from the Quarto texts owing to the use as Folio printer's copy of a Quarto brought into general conformity with a second authority by scribal annotation.) The question of these collateral texts will be discussed later, as well as the somewhat confusing use that Greg makes of 'bad quartos' as illustration of revised texts. At the present, however, it may clarify matters to point to Greg's speculation (p. 381) about McKerrow's position if he had lived to apply the Prolegomena form of his editorial theory to plays with more than one authoritative text "as in Hamlet and perhaps in 2 Henry IV, Troilus and Cressida, and Othello." What Greg has in mind here is the uncertainties of his own day about the authority of the variant texts of 2 Henry IV, Troilus, and Othello as against the then certainty that the Folio version of Hamlet represented a substantially different authorial text from that of the Second Quarto. At the present time scholars are inclined to believe that, perhaps even more than in Hamlet, the texts of Quarto and Folio Othello possibly, and certainly of Troilus, are different in their origin more by reason of the author than of the conditions of transmission, with QF 2 Henry IV considerably more in doubt as of true independent authority. However, Greg does not have in mind in his distinction the bibliographical question whether, in using an annotated quarto as printer's copy, the Folio text can properly be called 'substantive' in a pure sense in comparison with a play that exhibits no physical derivation. Here only 2 Henry IV among Shakespeare's non-bad quarto texts is any longer seriously in question whether the Folio was set from manuscript or from a marked-up quarto. It must be admitted, however, that although 'bibliographical links' establish the derivation from the Quarto of the Folio texts of Troilus and of Othello, these links have not been so firmly demonstrated in Hamlet. Hence at least in theory the anomalies produced by the Folio reproduction of the Hamlet Second Quarto's substantive errors are susceptible of conjecture that they derive from some common lost manuscript. If the Second Quarto were indeed set from Shakespeare's working papers (for which again there is only a belief based on the unusual spelling and the apparent difficulties in legibility of the manuscript), then the notion of the derivation of common error is more difficult to maintain, for it would require the scribe making the copy that ultimately produced the Folio to have mistaken various words in the identical manner as did the compositor of the Second Quarto—more of a possibility than a probability.
Renaissance scholars always have in mind the possibility if not the probability that a scribal transcript may intervene between the holograph and the printed book, and sometimes more than one. Hence among the problems in assessing the accidental authority of an early printed text is that of the difficulty of finding evidence as to whether the printer's copy was a holograph or a derived scribal manuscript. A late nineteenth-century parallel would be the question of setting from holograph or from professionally made typescript; in the twentieth century the question may arise whether a book were set from an authorial typescript or from a professional one ordered by the author's agent and very likely never looked over by the author before type was set from it. It is true that some international publishing conditions may in later times reproduce a few of the problems of early collateral manuscript texts, as in the quadruple transmission of Stephen Crane's "Death and the Child" without authorial revision accounting for this multiplicity of documents. But the special medieval conditions of copies being made from other copies at different removes is not present.
The use of the word reprint in Greg's essay is subject to some possible confusion. In a strictly textual sense it means a resetting of an earlier printed edition that has not been subject to authorial correction or revision and hence is completely unauthoritative in every respect. In a looser sense it is often employed to mean any edition reset from another, whether or not the author or some other agent had altered the copy from which the later edition was typeset or had similarly intervened during the course of printing as by proof-correction. The modern reader must be on the lookout for the different shades of technical meaning in writings on textual matters. In hand printing a reprint normally implies a resetting of the type; but the word is also used (instead of reimpression) for the rare cases of another printing from standing type, corresponding in modern terms to the 'reprinting' of a book from the same plates. The confusion derives from the fact that in one sense reprint is a textual word with certain important critical implications; in the other it is a mechanical term for the printing process. A purist would confine reprint to the first and reimpression to the second; but many textual critics employ the term in its mixed or general sense, trusting to the context to prevent misunderstanding. Greg's objection on p. 379, note 1, to McKerrow's very loose use of reprint to describe a modern old-spelling edition based on an early copy-text is not nitpicking, for McKerrow's choice of the term is in fact misleading for anything other than a diplomatic reprint, or transcript, of some early authority. Greg usefully writes 'revised reprint' for a reset edition modified by the author or by reference to some other authority.
The parenthesis refers exclusively to reported texts, or 'bad quartos,' which are memorial reconstructions by some agent(s) other than the author and hence break the transcriptional link with a holograph since their accidentals can have no relation to those of the original text being memorially reproduced.
This is the conventional method in all ages for authorial revision. In the seventeenth century John Dryden marked up a copy of the first edition of The Indian Emperour to serve as printer's copy for the revised second, and he did the same with the second edition to produce setting copy for the revised third. Henry Fielding not quite a hundred years later annotated a copy of the third edition of Tom Jones to provide the printer's copy for the only revised edition, the fourth. William James in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries customarily annotated pages from his periodical articles when he reprinted them in revised form in a book collection. I do not know of examples, but I can imagine that at the present day if the authorial annotations were very copious and difficult to read, to spare expense in the printing some publishers (or agents) might make up a typescript of the authorially marked printed copy for the printer's convenience. Especially if the author were not informed of this fact (as is probable he would not be) and so could not recollate the entire typescript text, not just his annotations, typist variations could enter the transmission indistinguishable from printer's variants not caught and altered in proof unless the typescript (and original copy) were preserved as evidence for future generations of textual scholars. There is an unsubstantiated rumor that for at least one or two plays in an early volume of the Cambridge University Press's critical edition of Beaumont and Fletcher's dramatic canon (1966—), the Press made such a typescript from the difficult marked-up xeroxes of the original copy-texts although, if so, the editors were given back only the xeroxes for proofreading copy.
Actually, within this group the technical authority is by no means comparable in anything but a general sense. How much of the differences between the Quarto and Folio texts of 2 Henry IV stem from the scribe who copied the manuscript behind the Folio text is unknown; indeed, the whole lost history of the transmission of these texts before print is highly conjectural. Although the Second Quarto text of Hamlet may have been set from Shakespeare's own working papers, it seems clear that the Folio version derives from a prompt-book that from time to time had been adjusted for performance and may not even be the original book; hence in practical terms few modern editors have taken the Folio Hamlet as literally of comparable authority with the Quarto for the generality of its readings. There is some chance, however, that the two versions of Troilus have an immediate or very close relationship to Shakespeare and in the technical sense are comparable for their substantives. Even if one stemmed from a fair scribal copy and the other from Shakespeare's own papers, I fancy the overall authority is little disturbed, no matter how one might view the formal details of the scribal copy, principally because the odds seem very good that an original and a revised Shakespearean document lie behind the two forms. My intentionally neutral statement that the author 'was equally concerned in the composition of both versions' would also cover the case of Othello (albeit in a quite different sense) if Greg is correct (and not Walker) in his estimate that Quarto and Folio each derives from the versions produced by two scribes copying the same Shakespearean manuscript for different purposes.
For an extended analysis of McKerrow's definition of 'substantive' edition and of Greg's subsequent expansion of this term to include mixed texts like Richard III, Troilus, or Jonson's Catiline, whether resulting from scribal conflation with another authority or from authorial revision, see my "McKerrow, Greg, and 'Substantive Edition,'" forthcoming in The Library. The problem in the "Rationale" resulted from Greg's abandonment of his position about mixed texts as held in the Editorial Problem and his return to McKerrow's narrow definition. However, two particular remarks in the "Rationale" can be interpreted only in terms of his original acceptance of mixed texts as substantive and so suggest either incompletely digested revision of his essay or else an inadvertent anachronism in his thinking. It may be remarked that in 1942 Greg believed that the Folio Hamlet and Othello were printed from independent manuscripts, not from annotated quartos (Editorial Problem, pp. 64, 108). In his Preface to the second edition in 1951 he acknowledged the scholarship that had shown Othello and confirmed Troilus as set from quartos but he allowed his earlier statements about Hamlet to stand.
The shift might be confusing to a reader intent on following every point in the argument. In practical terms whether an edition is substantive or not, in McKerrow's sense, is of some editorial importance. If two editions are printed from different manuscripts, concurrence of readings is generally good evidence for their authority (barring common error transmitted from some antecedent document), whereas if two editions are bibliographically linked this concurrence might mean only a printing error in the first passed on to the second by scribal oversight, as is usually supposed to have happened with good kissing carrion and pious bonds (or bands) in Hamlet Q2 and F1.
At this time, especially, printers much preferred even heavily annotated printed copy to manuscripts as setting copy. In my own view, not all of the annotated copy was necessarily furnished Jaggard by the Folio editors: it is just as possible in cases when the company had provided some manuscript other than the prompt-book (not allowed from their possession) that Jaggard himself had an available quarto annotated by reference to the manuscript for the convenience of his compositors. If a prompt-book had been the only manuscript, the theatrical company would necessarily have been responsible for the marked-up printer's copy that had been conflated with it.
The only question (which Greg does not mention) might be the practicability of retaining a bad quarto's accidentals as more representative of an Elizabethan author's period than, say, a good text printed much later which modernized the formal features of some now lost early document. But the chances for such occurrences are so limited as to be ignored. In the Cambridge edition of Marlowe, it seemed pedantic to attempt to restore the bad quarto's first-edition accidentals in the text of Doctor Faustus for those portions of the later good quarto based on the annotated third edition of the bad. In order to avoid a top-heavy apparatus of emendation, convenience suggested the propriety (since in neither case was there evidence for accidental authority) of using the later good edition as copy-text. Interestingly, on page 111 of Prolegomena McKerrow discusses the possibility of using the accidentals of the bad Q1 Richard III and decides that it was mainly convenience that dictated his choice of the derived Folio as copy-text instead.
Actually convenience cannot be ignored when the choice seems relatively indifferent because of one's ignorance. In both Beggars Bush and The Woman's Prize the manuscript behind the 1647 Folio seems to be closer in text to the authors' working papers but the printing was about fifteen to twenty years later than the inscription of the preserved manuscript. Nevertheless, the punctuation of the manuscripts would have called for an extensive apparatus of emendation had they been selected as copy-text. The difference in formal features did not seem sufficient to justify the considerable reworking of the accidentals that would have been necessary in a critical edition, especially since it was possible that the system of the Folio, being set from an older manuscript than the scribal transcripts, might still be closer to the authors. When nothing is known of an author's accidentals, a practising editor (as distinguished from a textual theorist) is likely to have some sympathy with Greg's remarks about expediency.
In his general account (IX, 72) Simpson also remarks on the fact that the press-corrections are heavier in the older works and drop off markedly in the newer, which he takes to be an indication that Jonson was bringing these older plays up to date. One may comment that if Jonson had indeed read pre-printing proofs, this disparity need not have existed since then his in-press alterations should have shown light polishing and second thoughts plus the correction of compositorial failure to follow copy. Instead, the evidence suggests the serious correction and revision at the press that is to be expected if these were the only proofs he saw. The disparity in press-correction between the older and newer plays also has another implication in that it automatically reduces assumptions about the amount of compositorial transmissional error corrected in press and increases the amount of Jonson's independent revision to be found in the press-variants in the older plays. In turn this suggests that the original marking of setting copy may have been less extensive than usually thought in respect to the kind of details represented by his press-corrections since these would mainly be new changes.
The closest parallels I can think of concern the relation between a preserved early draft manuscript or typescript like Stephen Crane's "A Detail" or "The Octopush" and the completely rewritten revision that was subsequently published from a now lost quite different copy. Even the William James manuscripts that must yield as copy-texts to his greatly worked-over book publications are not this distant from the revised form: the choice of James's books as copy-texts is made for other reasons than those that affect Every Man in his Humour.
This is a confusing footnote at best since it seems to use Greg's discarded expansion and not McKerrow's strict bibliographical definition of 'substantive edition.' Technically, the Shakespearean bad quartos that represent two substantive editions in the bad and good texts according to McKerrow's standard would be like The Merry Wives of Windsor where the bad quarto was not utilized as copy for the good Folio text. (Q1 and Q2 Hamlet, in my opinion, would also be substantive in this sense.) Plays like Richard III offer a paradox. Technically according to the "Rationale" the bad quarto (Q1) is the substantive edition since it alone was printed without reference to any other edition, and the Folio is a derived edition since its printer's copy was contrived by annotating a copy of the Quarto (Q3) with readings from a good manuscript. But to be technical in this matter is to be ridiculous textually, and other terms must be sought. It would have been helpful if Greg had not blurred the distinction between the two kinds of bad quartos, for this distinction powerfully affects his definition of the corresponding good texts.
Among other important differences, the accidentals of the earlier edition have no authority and the bad quarto would not be an acceptable copy-text even if it were practicable to introduce into its accidental texture the good substantive readings (and their accompanying accidentals) from the Folio. Moreover, when as is inevitable the Folio of Richard III is taken as copy-text, no one but a variorum editor would dream of recording the Bad Quarto's variant accidentals as Simpson felt obliged to do for the Quarto (and later editions) when he selected the 1616 Folio as copy-text for Sejanus.
The only question (which Greg does not mention) might be the practicability of retaining the bad quarto's accidentals as more representative of an Elizabethan author's period than, say, a good text printed in the eighteenth century with the texture of that period. But the chances of such occurrences are so limited as to be ignored. The First Folio's accidentals, although 'modernized' from copy, are not so vitally different from those of earlier quartos as to be anachronistic to a serious degree.
When in the manuscript of The Marble Faun Hawthorne was endeavoring to spell in the English manner for the English publishers of the first edition, he nevertheless retained neighbor as an -or spelling. William James is an -or speller but he invariably writes colour and usually honour. Hawthorne's attempts to style his manuscript in the British manner led him to adopt some -our spellings that were not acceptable by English standards of the day. Having chosen the manuscript as copy-text in the Centenary Edition of this romance, I felt that to alter Hawthorne's uncharacteristic but self-imposed -our to the American -or he used in other works (or even to the current British standards) would have been essentially to modernize the text. This is a different matter from my editorial position that British forms in William James's articles printed in English journals should be Americanized to his standard manuscript practice, observable in those preserved manuscripts underlying the British prints. Naturally, when James revised such articles for American book collection, he or the compositors gave them the normal American spellings in the editions that have been chosen as copy-texts. Thus the two principles are quite different and do not apply to each other even when James's British periodical articles might become the copy-text in default of other more authoritative documents.
This is less open-ended than it sounds because in this period (with authors like Jonson something of an exception) one can usually never satisfy oneself that such spellings are not authorial: ordinarily Elizabethan works are edited with no authorial manuscripts preserved to indicate what the author's accidentals were like. Moreover, given the variation in spelling the same word customary in most authors (and many scribes), to decide whether or not some word is authoritatively spelled requires more confidence in normality than most Elizabethan editors would wish to assume. The practical upshot is that the more eccentric the spelling, the more likely an editor is to impute it to the author.
Always granting that in early authors they usually cannot be distinguished from compositorial or scribal spellings and that the preservation of authorial characteristics in early literature is likely to be less than in later, much depending, however, on the care with which a later writer marks copy and reads proof.
In a far cry from the attitude of the editor of modern literature toward the importance of copy-text to the presentation of an author, Greg writes (p. 384), "The thesis I am arguing is that the historical circumstances of the English language make it necessary to adopt in formal matters [i.e. accidentals] the guidance of some early text."
Although Greg would not necessarily have wished to confine this statement to substantives, the context makes it clear that he is thinking only of substantives when he writes 'original reading' and that his chief concern in this passage is to defend the rights of an editor to choose substantive variants from authoritative editions other than the copy-text. How much he would have defended the same rights as applied to accidentals is problematic. In the "Rationale," at least, he does not remark on the anomaly that Herford-Simpson in Sejanus (F being the copy-text) add certain cases of apostrophus from Q which F had dropped but do not emend, according to the same principles, when F normalizes the Q classicizing spellings with one hand while adding a few with the other. Nor does he comment on the tyranny of the copy-text that persuaded the editors to retain what appear to be F corruptions of Q's use of apostrophus, as in He's for Q He'is. Rightly or wrongly, the general impression one is likely to receive from the "Rationale" is a concentration on editorial freedom to deal with variant substantives but little recognition of the comparable opportunities that exist with accidentals.
Especially when a reprint is line for line with its copy, considerable mechanical advantage accrues in hand setting to follow the accidentals of the original in order to speed justification of the line. I am no historian of publishing practices and have no idea when the modern custom of a publisher styling the manuscript, to be followed exactly by the printer, revolutionized the older system. What I know from observation is that Hawthorne's manuscripts in the 185os were not at all marked by Tichnor and Fields but were heavily styled at the Riverside Press, several thousand accidental variants from the manuscript press copy appearing in each first edition. (There is also some question whether Tichnor and Fields ever assisted Hawthorne in reading proof for these romances.) The Marble Faun manuscript was not marked, either, by Smith, Elder, its British publisher. In the first decade of the twentieth century Longmans, Green never attempted to style William James's manuscripts or typescripts: James dealt directly with the Riverside Press for each step of the books' production. Whether it was the passage of fifty years or the difference between a fiction writer and a philosopher, in contrast to Hawthorne the Riverside Press set James's copy with considerable fidelity. A test case is his posthumous Some Problems in Philosophy in which his customary heavy proof-correction is not present to interfere with the evidence. The Riverside Press departed from the typescript copy furnished it by Horace Kallen in only about one accidental for every five or so printed pages. In PBSA, 71 (1977), 59 (see fn. 9 above), Bush detects a movement from the mid-eighteenth century toward the substitution of copyreading for the proofreader's correction of authorial accidentals; but he remarks "How widespread this reader's function was is impossible to say," and the references he cites are few and rather vague.
Here the evidence of Some Problems of Philosophy is very useful, indeed, in giving us an insight into the fidelity of setting his works customary at the Riverside Press. In James's Psychology (1890) the Holt printer's fidelity in close to verbatim setting from printed copy suggests that when more numerous variants from copy are elsewhere found the creator of these variants (both accidental and substantive) was James himself.
After the editor had made a futile attempt with Pragmatism, the initial volume, to apply the more common Greg rationale and insert substantive book revision in the journals used as copy-texts.
In "Principles and Methods in the Collected Edition of John Stuart Mill (Editing Nineteenth Century Texts [1967], p. 117) J. M. Robson remarks that "An electronic eye may find otherwise, but to the human eye there is (in general) a uniformity in accidentals between the substantively revised and unrevised portions of the later editions, a uniformity which does not exist between later revisions and earlier revised passages." The sense of this is not wholly clear to me, but if it attempts to distinguish the uniformity throughout the latest revised edition, for which Dr. Robson is arguing as copy-text, from the lack of uniformity in earlier revised texts, the evidence is not necessarily an indication of Mill's extensive accidental revision in the uniform text but could be the styling applied alike to revised and unrevised sections by the printer of the final edition. Dr. Robson may well be right in his choice of copy-texts, but his evidence is suspect.
A complicating factor can be the publisher's revisions also introduced into a revised text, as happened with F. Scott Fitzgerald: see M. J. Bruccoli, Apparatus for F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1974).
Naturally, no one would argue that in the transmission of meaning accidentals are as important as substantives, although there is always the example of the letter in Ralph Roister Doister as well as the two versions of Hamlet's what a piece of work is a man speech to show the contrary. I am talking about editorial principle, insofar as it can be implemented, and not expediency in any individual case. Since accidentals in modern times have lost the philological significance that Greg thought worth preserving, if they have not gained correspondingly in importance as a part of the total complex of authorial meaning, then all later texts might be modernized and discussions of copy-text are idle.
However, one must always consider the role of authorial oversight; even the scrupulous William James sometimes inadvertently overlooked in one passage anomalies he had set right in another.
Few writers are likely to quarrel with normal printer's (or publisher's) styling when the sense is acceptable even though it may differ from their own accidental characteristics, which alone should concern an editor and which, incidentally, are likely to remain constant in later documents. For instance, Stephen Crane seldom put commas between adjectives in series although the printer almost invariably 'corrected' him. He made no effort to remove these commas when he read proof, but neither did he accept the lesson and insert such commas in his subsequent manuscripts. William James usually (although not invariably) omitted the comma in the British fashion before the and or or of a coordinate series of three or more, which American printers usually inserted. He would sometimes in proof remove this inserted comma but perhaps more usually not, although his own practice was never affected in his manuscripts. The question that goes unanswered is whether a writer's indifference, his oversight, or an unwillingness to demand resetting of such departures constitute 'approval' of uncharacteristic accidentals in a revised edition, especially when the setting copy itself exhibited certain categories of these accidentals in the writer's characteristic form.
In the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library is preserved a memorandum written by Hitchcock addressed to but not demonstrably seen by Crane which was sent by Hitchcock to the printer in order to correct nine readings in subsequent impressions of the Red Badge. The following semi-query was addressed to Crane but no answer is preserved in case he ever saw it: "I don't understand just what local dialect you give your men, but suppose it to be western New York—I thought 'derned' and 'yeh' did not begin till farther west, but it is doubtless all right." The corrections (some of which are sophistications) are not in themselves evidence of Hitchcock's intervention in the preparation of the typescript for the printer, before or after Crane had himself finally revised it in New Orleans. In fact, it could be suggested that the readings (and the dialect) are matters he would have taken up in any careful publisher's reading of the typescript setting copy. It may be noted that the one major substantive alteration Hitchcock ordered (Moreover for Too) caught only one of the four occurrences in the first edition (and manuscript) of this typical Crane locution and is a manifest sophistication.
One need not be too casual about these losses, of course: preservation of the proof would help to identify any publisher's alterations, and preservation of the typescript would establish the extent of the publisher's editing of the printer's copy as against Crane's New Orleans revisions. However, if the manuscript is taken as copy-text, the loss is not so great as if the first edition had been selected (or the manuscript not preserved), for the authorial markings in these two documents would not have been extensive (especially in the proofs) and most substantive authorial changes may be identified by comparison of the manuscript with the first edition.
Since I have extensively analyzed problems of copy-text, with illustrations, in "Multiple Authority: New Problems and Concepts of Copy-Text," Essays, pp. 447-487, with further discussion in "Remarks on Eclectic Texts," pp. 488-528, the account here is correspondingly brief.
If Jonson did revise some of the accidentals as well as the substantives in the working papers before sending them to the printer, such accidentals would be impossible for an editor to distinguish from those originally present in the working papers but inadvertently not copied faithfully in the fair authorial transcript. Of this nature perhaps are the characteristic parentheses that Simpson notices as appearing in the Quarto Masque of Queens in some places where they are wanting in the preserved fair copy. Of course, from the point of view of a critically edited text, the origin is of no practical account so long as such variants are established (a) as authorial, and (b) as not representing a revision in writing out the fair copy although permitted to stand in the working papers and thence transferred to print.
Greg adds that the editor should also record "the alteration whenever the sense is appreciably affected." This selective permissiveness would prevent a reader from reconstructing the original from the apparatus and hence he would never know in any given case whether he was reading the original or the editor's silent substitution. Greg's remarks on the treatment of accidentals in an apparatus are not to be taken seriously as prescripts.
If the ideal state prevailed that an editor would produce the same critical text regardless of the choice of copy-text, then the whole matter would be academic and the choice would rest purely on the convenience of the apparatus. But except for multiple-authority texts like newspapers set from a common syndicate proof and preserved in sufficient numbers for statistics to operate, this state is quite theoretical, for few cases permit an editor to be certain about the exact authority of each individual variant accidental. Thus the choice of copy-text will exercise an important influence on the neutral accidentals printed in the critical edition: all those in the copy-text not subject to treatment like substantives must be taken on faith as in general representing more authority than those in the other document(s).
The textual commentary in the Centenary Edition (1974), IX, 536-547, may be consulted for the details. More evidence is present, with more variety, in Mosses from an Old Manse (1974), X, 537-556. The transmissional problems of The Snow-Image (1974), XI, 411-422, do not differ in kind except for one or two tales. In all these stories the collected book editions were taken to be of lesser accidental authority than the earlier printings and hence were rejected as copy-texts since Hawthorne had made only a minimum of alteration either in copy or in proof. In short, many more accidental variants appear in the books than those that might be imputed to Hawthorne. Under these circumstances, authority is best preserved, on the odds, by altering the originals in the few cases when the book accidentals give evidence of authorial change than by accepting the book's accidentals en bloc and restoring the forms of the originals only as corrections of the errors in the book.
For example, three accidental press-corrections were made in the punctuation of the four pages of the inner forme of sheet B in the revised 1668 edition, but in this same forme two variant spellings from the first edition, two variant word-divisions, three variant capitalizations, and three punctuational differences were not touched although presumably compositorial. If the revised 1668 edition had been chosen as copy-text over the 1667 first, ten unauthoritative accidentals would have been reprinted in order to secure three authorial (not identifiable if they had not been determined by press-correction). However, the third edition of 1670 was also revised. In the same four pages this text makes four substantive alterations. If Dryden had also touched up the accidentals at the same time, on the evidence of the 1668 copy whatever he had altered would be lost among the three changes from 1668 in word-division, twenty-three in capitalization, and eight in punctuation. The revised 1670 edition, therefore, would depart from 1667 in a total of forty-four accidentals, of which only three by a fortunate chance can be identified as authoritative. The major part of the remainder are presumably compositorial, including those categories not press-corrected by Dryden in 1668.
This would include radiating texts in which a choice of copy-text rests on the convenience of the reader according to the ease with which he can refer to the apparatus. That is, it is most convenient, usually, to select that radiating text that needs the least correction from the others and thus one that has the fewest unassigned accidentals. When enough witnesses have been preserved so that the statistical tables of the accidental variants can be utilized as the basis for choice, there should be little if any need for an editor to rely on any accidental in the copy-text simply because it occurs in the copy-text, although he may of course take that fact into account when the copy-text document seems on the whole to be relatively faithful and all other evidence is indifferent, as by only partial corroboration from other witnesses. On the other hand, if an editor chooses to adopt G. T. Tanselle's ingenious suggestions for a new kind of apparatus for radiating texts, the need for an arbitrary copy-text vanishes: see his "Editorial Apparatus for Radiating Texts," The Library, 5th ser., 29 (1974), 330-337.
The necessary changes according to the textual results of this new discovery are incorporated in the text of the 1977 paperback edition published by the Wesleyan University Press, with page-line references to enable holders of the two-volume Wesleyan-Clarendon edition (1975) to correct their copies pending a second printing of the larger form.
Some useful surveys of two of the Shakespeare Folio's compositors' errors in setting against copy may be found in Alice Walker, Textual Problems of the First Folio (1953), especially pp. 31-35, 86-93, 119-120, 130-134, 143-149. Another such list can be found in John S. O'Connor, "A Qualitative Analysis of Compositors C and D in the Shakespeare First Folio," Studies in Bibliography, 30 (1977), 69-74.
One may add, as a contributing factor, the possibility with careless authors that an indifferent variant in the revised edition may also be the publisher's editor, as happens in Crane's revised Maggie, and, as mentioned, in F. Scott Fitzgerald's plate revisions. This publisher's intervention can come in a different line of revision, as between an author's manuscript and the copy finally given to the printer, as assumed in Crane's novels published by Appleton although the extent of Ripley Hitchcock's ministrations is still far from certain as compared with those of the printer.
If, as seems likely, Fielding's lost manuscript actually contained laid hold on and anywise it might not be enough to show that these locutions could be found elsewhere in his works. Unfortunately, even their appearance at a date later than the 1743 third edition might not provide positive evidence one way or another, for it is clear that some of the readings of the 1749 first edition of Tom Jones (revised about a year later in the fourth edition) repeated the same sort of original readings that had been revised out of Joseph Andrews in 1743 and 1748. What would be needed would be evidence that Fielding used both, whether indiscriminately or chronologically. In that case the third-edition reading could be taken with more confidence as an authorial revision. If the third-edition form never appeared elsewhere in Fielding, it would suffer under the presumption of error, of course.
This is an argument to be used with discretion, of course, when the compositorial stints are unidentifiable. In Tom Jones, for instance, I am not troubled by the revised fourth edition's normalization of a country landlady's 'Here's a great young Squire, and a many other great Gentlefolks of Quality' (537.6-8) to and many other, for it is a natural sophistication or eyeskip; and when at 834.30 the same change is made in a reported speech by Squire Western an editor may merely note to himself that the earlier occurrence now seems more probable as sophistication. It seems difficult to believe that Fielding would remove such an idiom from two dialect speaking characters: a literal minded compositor, or even a pair, seems the better explanation.
On this evidence it is probable that in Joseph Andrews two examples of the reverse movement, both in the fourth edition of 1748-49, are not revisions but compositorial changes to be ignored in favor of the copy-text: broke for 1-3 broken (151.10) and tore for torn (331.40).
Estimate of error outside of positive typographical misprints or quite contrary sense, which do not count as evidence, is partly subjective, of course. Nevertheless, in Tom Jones if one sets aside the cases when the fourth edition followed a variant in its corrupt third-edition copy, there appear to be no certain compositorial substantive errors departing from copy in Book I, only one in Book II, two in Book III, six in Book IV, nine in Book V, seven in Book VI, and so on. Given the quantity of text, this represents greater faithfulness than would be expected in an Elizabethan printing-house. These presumptive errors contrast with seemingly authorial substantive revisions as follows: twenty-three in Book I, eighteen in Book II, eighteen in Book III, thirty-nine in Book IV, forty-three in Book V, and twenty in Book VI.
One must repeat that all rules are off when dealing with variant pre-publication scribal transmission of authority as with Shakespeare's two-text plays, or Fletcher's plays with preserved scribal manuscripts in a different line. Usually in such plays the chances for tracing the origin of error in any bibliographical sense are minimal, at least with results likely to win a consensus.
| ||