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Notes
I am assuming the separation of emendation entries either by placement as textual footnotes at the bottom of the text-page, as preferably for substantives, or else in a different section of the apparatus from the historical collation. A few editors (ill-advisedly in my opinion) combine emendations and the historical collation in one list, either as footnote entries or as an appendix. The function of these two parts of the apparatus is so different as to make it an anomaly—and a distracting one—to consider the record of an editor's emendations of the copy-text a part of the historical collation, which (although it may repeat the emendations-entry information in its own different form) is chiefly concerned with recording rejected, not accepted, readings that are variant from the edited text.
An example, although not perhaps an exact one, occurs in the Beaumont and Fletcher Second Folio of 1679 where its editor was able to compare the 1647 Folio text of some plays with a manuscript, probably the promptbook; hence a few plays contain additions and variant readings stemming from fresh authority albeit these may be imbedded in a texture of unauthoritative changes.
This principle of the clear stage, so essential for the Elizabethan theater to observe, was also violated in the Folio All's Well That Ends Well and in Measure for Measure, both seemingly derived from Shakespeare's working papers, although in Measure for Measure through the medium of a Ralph Crane transcript.
This is the conclusion of A. R. Humphreys, the New Arden editor, who examines the evidence with care. However, one must be cautious in making blanket statements about almost any Folio play deriving from a Quarto. The same lack of authority has usually been attributed to F Romeo and Juliet; but for a persuasively argued view that the F editor did indeed consult a manuscript, see S. W. Reid, "The Editing of Folio Romeo and Juliet," in this volume. Even when consultation of a manuscript cannot be inferred, the deliberate variants of an actor-editor may reflect some attenuated authority.
For instance, the example of Dr. Reid's study of Romeo and Juliet might encourage some future scholar to have still another look at 1 Henry IV for the possibility that the F editing was occasionally buttressed by some reference to a manuscript.
The abuses to which ill-informed readers may put the evidence of historical collations by preferring sophisticated, smoother, or easier readings that they discover although their training has not enabled them to evaluate authority is, of course, no proper concern of the editor. In this matter we cannot be our brothers' keepers.
It is a bit lordly to insist that such a critic should be prepared to perform the essential collations himself if he is to investigate the matter. If the apparatus of an old-spelling edition is not sufficient to serve as a basic reference for textual scholarship, it has lost an important reason for its existence.
That Blount as a publisher, or Jaggard as a printer, would at leisure annotate a Bad Quarto from the manuscript furnished by the Folio editor, this annotation presumably as an aid to faster typesetting, is an hypothesis sometimes advanced but quite without evidence, and it is one that had better not be given any credence until some better evidence is offered. (The normal reference manuscript at this date would ordinarily be a promptbook, which would not be allowed to leave the theater.) Some years ago, to explain certain signs of Q1 influence on Q2 Hamlet (annotation scarcely being in question), I suggested the possibility that as a convenience for dealing with a difficult manuscript the compositor of Q2 Act I might have had a copy of Q1 pinned up over his cases as a guide ("The Textual Relation of Q2 to Q1 Hamlet," Studies in Bibliography, 8 [1956], 39-66). But no Quarto-Folio play seems to have had anything like this arrangement.
Whether any examples actually exist of good texts in the Folio which have no derivative relation from a good Quarto is still moot. Cases like 2 Henry IV are still argued, and F Hamlet is not entirely demonstrable by bibliographical evidence as set from annotated printed copy. Some plays generally accepted in F as deriving from annotated good quartos. like Othello, are being subjected to second thoughts as a result of compositorial studies. Even generally accepted annotated Bad Quartos for F copy like King Lear find some scholars who argue for setting in F from an independent manuscript.
The term 'authoritative readings' is to be taken in two senses. In the simplest, one document offers the right reading for a corruption in the other. But in some cases when authorial revision has been involved, as seems to have happened with Troilus and Cressida, both readings will have authority in the sense that they represent what one presumes Shakespeare actually wrote, but one document contains a revision and hence, in this special sense, is more 'authoritative' than the other in representing the author's final intentions.
A play could be revised by someone other than the author, as, say, for purposes of production or, later, on revival. For an example of production revision, see my note "Establishing Shakespeare's Text: Poins and Peto in 1 Henry IV," SB, 34 (1981), 189-198. As another example of mixed authority one may cite the various readings that critics have singled out in annotated Bad Quartos where the annotator seems to have made a mistake in annotation or else himself entered a reading not found in the manuscript he was working from.
Accidentals would be too complex and in most cases too critically meaningless to attempt a record of variation on an historical basis except as part of the accidentals emendation list where the readings of both primary texts would be provided when the accidentals emendation was drawn from the non-copy-text authority, but not otherwise.
For instance, except for portions of Act I, Q1 and Q2 Hamlet are uncollatable on a consistent basis. Yet for specific debated readings like Q1 dead vast and middle of the night versus Q2-F dead waste, an editor choosing waste might well feel required to analyze his choice in a textual note. It would also be proper, and indeed required, for the Q1 reading to appear in the historical collation as the source for the record of modern editors' choice of vast, but not otherwise.
C. J. K. Hinman's machine collation of multiple copies of the First Folio has effectively removed all possible suggestion that a Second Folio variant could derive from an unrecorded authoritative press-correction in the First, although it has not entirely removed the possibility that a Second-Folio variant could derive from a presently unknown uncorrected state of the First, the authority of which reading could be argued.
This is not the place to enter upon a disquisition as to the meaning of the term semi-substantive. (I do not especially favor the alternative term 'quasi-substantive.') I take it to refer narrowly to the kind of textual reading that in its form would normally be excluded as an accidental were it not that, say, ambiguous spelling as in travail-travel has given rise to substantive variation among early editions (and their successors) according as different meanings were selected; or ambiguous punctuation has substantively affected meaning such as occurs in Hamlet's What a piece of work is [a] man speech, for example.
Such full information is usually available only in the Variorum volumes that have been published. However, the Variorum is still greatly incomplete and proceeding very slowly; hence one may hope that some brave publishing house will agree to issue an authoritative old-spelling edition before the Variorum is completed, although the present prospects are not bright. Moreover, since the Variorum is an essentially unedited reprint of whatever copy-text has been selected (the older ones with variable standards of collation), many scholars (one assumes) will wish to own for their private use a critically edited old-spelling edition to be used simultaneously for the most informed general reading as well as for reference, this last the sole usefulness of the Variorum volumes. That there is something so forbidding about the old-spelling concept as to remove it from use as a general reading text is a fallacy. By simple typographical adjustments, and by some attention to occasional emendation of the punctuation for clarity according to its own standards (not modernizations), it is possible to construct old-spelling texts that even undergraduates can manage without difficulty, as illustrated by the Marlowe and the Beaumont and Fletcher editions, I trust. George Walton Williams reports ready undergraduate acceptance of his old-spelling Romeo and Juliet text (Duke University Press, 1964).
I take it that a reader has a more immediate interest in knowing, as he reads, what changes the editor has made in the copy-text wording than in the minor cleaning-up process of alterations in the accidentals, where meaning has not been singularly affected. Thus the rationale for the separation of the two parts, at least in early texts where the amount of substantive emendation called for may be considerable by ordinary standards of nineteenth- or twentieth-century texts, but where the much larger amount of accidentals emendation may have a tendency to obscure this much more important record of substantive alteration when intermixed. Moreover, I like to serve the convenience of the reader by placing substantive emendations at the foot of the text-page in all editions where policy does not call for a clear-text page. The list of accidentals alterations is then segregated in an appendix along with the textual notes, this historical collation, and any other sections of the apparatus that conditions may require. Among the substantive emendations footnotes I automatically subsume without distinction the semi-substantives, according to my own notions of their effect on meaning in a truly substantive (not in an imagined) manner.
In order to preserve the immediate texture from anomalies introduced by the form of the emendation, an editor may need to adjust not only the accidentals of a substantive change, but also the system of the alteration of an accidental itself (as in the choice of either a colon or a semicolon or a comma for the punctuation of the original), by careful adjustment to the ascertained characteristics of the compositor who set the Quarto page or the Folio column.
Since accidentals vary so much more widely between different editions than do substantives, and since in all cases of simple reprints any later reading can have no authority, the fact that an early edition happens to have printed a reading which the old-spelling editor prefers to that of the copy-text is of interest only historically, as remarked earlier. Hence the simple identification of the immediate source is sufficient. It is also of some account that, unlike the substantives, the accidentals of early editions had, in general, little or no effect in establishing the accidentals of the modernizing post-1700 editorial tradition. It follows that an historical survey of accidentals variation would be practically meaningless, even if it were no more than to continue the history beyond the immediate source to the last collated edition.
If this record of the readings of collated editions is not to be provided in the historical collation, it must appear in the emendations entry. Moreover, further complications ensue if the adopted emendation is not followed by some of the collated editions after its point of origin. This situation is readily handled in the historical collation but less so in the emendations listing.
An ideal, but one very likely unreachable with accuracy except at extravagant cost of time, would be to record within parentheses the earliest editor who originated the rejected emendation being listed as the reading in one or more modern editions recorded in the historical collation.
Twentieth-century editions vary widely in merit, of course, but not all warrant Dr. Werstine's general dismissal as popularized texts, which presumably have sacrificed textual integrity to modernization for a student audience. The care that a respectable number of editors have bestowed in their treatment of the texts compares favorably with what they would have done as old-spelling editors. (This independent research is especially true of the new modernized edition currently under preparation for Oxford by Messrs. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor.) Of course, various commercial texts have been ground out to order, with royalties of more concern to the producer than a fresh shaping of the text. The ultimate consumers are in part to blame for indifference to textual matters in modernized editions, especially those for school use. I have been told, and it could easily be true, that once when a well-known scholar was hired to produce a new one-volume edition, the publisher polled the country's educational establishment and came up with the request that the familiar Globe text be reprinted as the basis for the eagerly anticipated new annotations. It is not really remarkable that textbook editions sell more on their illustrations and their notes than on any textual innovation.
That is, the reading would be represented by the record of its adoption by some one or more of the collated editions from the Globe to the Clarendon, although the old-spelling editor had decided to reject the emendation. As remarked above, it would be an asset, and one of some interest to the reader even though laborious for the editor, if provision were made in the historical collation entries of rejected readings for the identification of the earliest edition which had made the rejected emendation, as ought to be done in the emendation entries for accepted ones.
For instance, it is no concern of the architect of an historical collation whether the New Arden editor of The Comedy of Errors, as Dr. Werstine wonders (p. 98), printed at V.i.370 "And are you not my husband?," as a designed emendation of F are not you, though not accompanied by the usual note recording the Folio variant, or whether, as likely, it was a slip owing to his having annotated some earlier edition with the transmitted error (which goes back to the 1773 Variorum) as setting copy, the departure from the Folio not observed. He continues with the case of editors who chose the Folio Hamlet as copy-text instead of Q2, and inquires, "How is a contemporary old-spelling editor to determine when previous editors adopted Folio readings because they took the Folio text as copy-text and when they adopted Folio readings on the intrinsic merit of the readings?" (pp. 98-99). I suggest that if an historical collation is to represent a record of the twentieth-century textual tradition, the causes for the variation in readings among the collated editions is of no concern to the editor himself (once he has considered his own choices and rejected the variant), or indeed to his readers unless some one scholar alerted by curious variation in a modernized edition wishes to make a private albeit speculative study of its rationale, usually buried with the editor. Even the Variorum seldom comments on the problems that unnecessarily trouble Dr. Werstine.
I suggest, however, that when any such modernization appears in a pre-1700 edition it should be recorded as of philological interest. In such cases, but in such cases only, the sigla for the appropriate modern editors can be added to the entry for the sake of consistency in following each listed variant up to the final collated edition.
Some illustrations of procedure may be found in the historical collations of the ongoing New Cambridge Beaumont and Fletcher edition or the revised Cambridge Marlowe.
However true for the modernizing of forms just discussed above, it is not true for real substantives. For example, it is difficult to conceive of a presentday editor substituting a modern equivalent as a different word for an obsolete word in the copy-text, etc.
These requirements are drawn from Greg, but even the most conservative editors honor them little in the observance, for if literally followed they would choke off many important and doubtless correct emendations. In fact, they exhibit a far too simplistic optimism in an editor's ability to identify the source, especially in cases of complex textual transmission. Even after an editor has come to some conclusions about the nature of the printer's copy, whether holograph or scribal, to judge between paleographical misreading and scribal or compositorial memorial error, or a plain inexplicable foul-up, may well prove impossible. For example, when surveying Sisson's often plausible but just as often misguided emendations based on supposed misreadings, one should recall Greg's wry comment that the chief use of paleography in emendation is to confirm a conclusion already arrived at by other means. Many famous emendations fail to meet Greg's idealistic but impracticable criteria, including "'a babbl'd of green fields": talk'd has been suggested as paleographically the easier source if table is actually a misreading.
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