II
If discussion of the role of punctuation and spelling and of physical
analysis in editing has been rather neglected in the theoretical writings
devoted to early texts, the problem of how to determine the relationships
among the surviving texts certainly has not been neglected. The great body
of literature on the theory of the textual criticism of ancient and medieval
writings has focused on what is after all at the heart of all critical editing:
the question how to choose among variant readings, which in turn involves
an assessment of the relationships among the witnesses and an evaluation
of when a departure from all the variants would bring one closer to the
author's intention. These matters have of course been debated at length by
editors of modern works also, and the same central issues link all these
discussions together. All of them in fact can be seen as variations on the
theme of objectivity versus subjectivity. Some urge the desirability of as
objective a system
as possible,
in which the role of the scholar's own judgment is minimized; others argue
for the superiority of taste and insight applied to individual cases over the
attempt to follow a predetermined rule. One's position along this spectrum
affects, directly or indirectly, how one will approach all other textual
questions—such as how much authority one assigns to a "copy-text"
or
a "best text" and how much freedom one perceives to be justified in altering
it (by drawing on other texts or on one's own conjectures). Fluctuations
from one direction to the other have characterized editorial thinking in all
fields; but the lack of interdisciplinary communication is reflected in the
fact that the various fields have not fluctuated in unison.
Fredson Bowers, writing on "Textual Criticism" in the 1958 edition
of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, illustrates this point by
suggesting how the editing of modern texts has benefited from earlier work
on the classics: "The acceptance of Housman's attitude and its extension,
about the middle of the 20th century, to editing from printed texts
constitutes one of the most interesting of modern developments in editorial
theory." Bowers here takes Housman as the exponent of a movement away
from the Lachmannian tradition of relying whenever possible on the
archetype as established through genealogical reasoning. Although many
have pointed out the fallacy of believing that a "best" text has the correct
readings at points where it is not obviously in need of emendation,
Housman's famous remark in the preface to his 1903 edition of the first
book of the Astronomicon of Manilius must be regarded as
the
classic statement of it:
To believe that wherever a best MS. gives possible readings it gives
true readings, and that only where it gives impossible readings does it give
false readings, is to believe that an incompetent editor is the darling of
Providence, which has given its angels charge over him lest at any time his
sloth and folly should produce their natural results and incur their
appropriate penalty. Chance and the common course of nature will not
bring it to pass that the readings of a MS. are right wherever they are
possible and impossible wherever they are wrong: that needs divine
intervention; . . . .
[30]
The reason that this fallacious approach (the "art of explaining corrupt
passages instead of correcting them" [p. 41]) gained currency, according to
Housman, is not only that "superstition" is more comfortable than truth but
also that it was a reaction against an earlier age in which "conjecture was
employed, and that by very eminent men, irrationally" (p. 43). Exactly the
same sequence—but delayed by several decades—can be
observed in the history of editorial approaches to printed texts. R. B.
McKerrow's edition of Thomas Nashe (1904), though it appeared at almost
the same time as Housman's Manilius, represented the kind of distrust of
eclecticism that Housman was attacking. McKerrow was one of a group of
scholars of English Renaissance drama whose work would revolutionize the
study of printed texts by showing the interdependence of physical and
textual evidence; the analytical techniques that resulted did at times enable
McKerrow and his colleagues to settle a textual point conclusively, as a
matter of demonstrable fact, and to that extent editing was legitimately put
on a more "scientific" basis. But in most cases there was still a large area
in which the facts were not conclusive, and here McKerrow took the
position that involved the least exercise of editorial judgment, the decision
to adhere to the text chosen as copy-text. In so doing he was reacting, at
least in part, against the undisciplined
eclecticism that had characterized the nineteenth-century editing in this
field.
[31] The event that Bowers refers
to, in the mid-twentieth century, representing a reinstatement of editorial
judgment—but, like Housman's, on a more responsible basis than
previously—was W. W. Greg's "The Rationale of Copy-Text." Greg
broke down the notion of a single authoritative text in two ways: the more
novel way, which he was the first to suggest, was that the primary authority
for accidentals might reside in a different text from that for substantives
(generally an early text for the accidentals, a later one for the substantives);
the less surprising way, in line with Housman's criticisms, was that an
editor could judge individual readings on their own terms and did not have
to accept all variants that were not manifestly impossible simply because
they came from a text that was known to contain some authorial
revisions.
[32] Both Greg
and Housman restore editorial judgment to a place of prominence; but that
judgment is firmly directed toward the determination of what the author
would have written, whereas the earlier proponents of eclecticism (against
whom the immediate predecessors of Greg and Housman were rebelling)
tended to be less scrupulous in distinguishing between what they themselves
preferred and what the authors being edited would have preferred.
The hope of having a single text to rely on dies hard, however, and
one mark of the wisdom of Greg's essay is that he recognized the danger
that he labeled "the tyranny of the copy-text."
[33] Although his rationale for selecting
a
copy-text entailed choosing a text that could justifiably be accorded
presumptive authority in cases where the variants seemed completely equal
(particularly, in practice, in regard to accidentals), he understood that there
had always been a temptation to let the weight of copy-text authority extend
to readings that did not deserve such support. Greg's rationale does not
(though some of its critics seem to think it does) provide timid editors with
the opportunity to shirk, in the respectable name of conservatism, difficult
decisions. Of course, it can rightly be regarded as conservative, and
sensibly so, to retain a copy-text reading, even if one personally does not
prefer it, when one is not convinced that any of the alternatives are
authorial; Greg's point is simply that one should not be
deterred, by whatever authority attaches to the copy-text, from altering it
when one is convinced (through critical insight, in the light of all available
evidence) that another reading is, or comes nearer to, what the author
intended.
[34] Sometimes editors, both
of classical and of modern works, argue that the most they are justified in
doing is to attempt to purge the copy-text, or archetype, or paradosis, of
errors—not to try to restore what the author wrote. But this argument
cannot be praised for its respect of historical evidence; rather, it confuses
two kinds of edition, both legitimate, neither of which, when done properly,
disregards the evidence. If one is interested in a text as it appeared at a
particular time to a particular audience, a diplomatic or facsimile edition of
it serves the purpose best; correcting errors in it—editing it
critically—would be out of place, for the errors, though unintended,
were
part of what the contemporary
readers saw in the text in front of them. If, on the other hand, one wishes
to correct errors—to try to repair the damage done to the text in
transmission, however famous or influential its corrupt form may
be—then one is producing a text that differs from any now extant
(probably from any that ever existed), and
the aim of the alterations is obviously not the preservation of a documentary
from of the text but the construction of a text as close as possible (as close,
that is, as surviving evidence permits) to the one the author intended.
[35]
Some confusion on this point has been exhibited in the debate among
editors of modern works over whether to choose an author's final
manuscript as copy-text in preference to the first printed edition set from
it. Of course, any attempt to fix a general rule on this matter is misguided,
since situations vary greatly, and in some cases an author's revisions in
proof may have been so thorough as to make the printed edition the proper
choice. Some editors, however, prefer the first edition not for such reasons,
but because it is the product of a historical moment; even though some
aspects of its text may be the result of changes made in the publishing
office or pressures brought to bear on the author by the publisher or others,
the author accepted these conditions, they say, as part of the whole
publishing process, and the text of the first edition is the one that emerged
from a specific set of historical forces and the one that the public first read.
This argument, however, leads
only to the production of a facsimile edition; it has no relevance to a critical
edition, although it is sometimes offered as if it did have, through a failure
to think clearly about what the two approaches mean. Editors of earlier
material do not encounter the problem in quite this form, since they do not
deal with authorial manuscripts or authorially supervised printed texts, but
the general issues are familiar to them. One manifestation of the
exaggerated respect accorded to individual printed texts is the problem of
the textus receptus of ancient writings. The text of the New
Testament, or of other writings, that reached print was not, of course,
necessarily more authoritative than other texts; but the controversy that
sometimes surrounds editorial decisions to depart from the textus
receptus suggests the irrationality with which a favored text can be
defended. Clearly there are many differences between this situation and the
question, faced by editors of modern
works, whether to turn from printed book to manuscript for copy-text. But
there is an essential similarity as well: in both cases the scholar's
responsibility is to examine all the evidence in an effort to come as close
as possible to the text intended by the author,[36] however many or few steps
removed
such a text may be from the texts that survive. Deciding whether an
author's intention includes acquiescence to changes made by the publisher
is a problem of more immediate concern to editors of modern writings;
even so, such an editor's decision to follow a first edition may look just as
foolish as the hesitation to depart from the
textus receptus on
the part of an editor of earlier material.
Greg's rationale for selecting a copy-text was of course set forth in
the first instance for editors of printed texts that are not far removed from
authorial manuscripts; and near the beginning of his essay he distinguishes
his approach (growing out of McKerrow's) from that appropriate for the
classics. In the latter, he says, "it is the common practice, for fairly
obvious reasons, to normalize the spelling," whereas in the editing of
English texts "it is now usual to preserve the spelling of the earliest or it
may be some other selected text":
Thus it will be seen that the conception of "copy-text" does not
present itself to the classical and to the English editor in quite the same
way; indeed, if I am right in the view I am about to put forward, the
classical theory of the "best" or "most authoritative" manuscript, whether
it be held in a reasonable or in an obviously fallacious form, has really
nothing to do with the English theory of "copy-text" at all. (p. 375)
It is true that a concern for incorporating in an edition documentary
punctuation and spelling led to Greg's perception that the text with authority
for accidentals might not be the same as the one with authority for
substantives and to his statement that "the copy-text should govern
(generally) in the matter of accidentals" (p. 381). In fact, however, the
distinction between substantives and accidentals, though it has its uses, is
not crucial to the concept of copy-text that Greg calls "English," as the
word "generally" in his sentence suggests. Editors following Greg's general
line would in practice emend the copy-text with a later reading of any kind,
a substantive or an accidental, that could convincingly be argued to be
authorial; and in the cases where the variants seem evenly balanced, they
would fall back on the copy-text reading. Thus what underlies this
conception of copy-text is the idea of presumptive authority, a text to be
relied on when one finds no basis for
preferring one variant over another—an authority, it must be
emphasized,
that does not restrict one's freedom to choose variants from other texts
when there is reason to do so. It may be that editors of modern writings
will normally choose their copy-texts, as Greg was the first to point out
explicitly, to serve primarily as the authority for accidentals; but it does not
follow
that a different understanding of copy-text is required for editors of earlier
materials, even when they are not concerned with reproducing documentary
accidentals.
[37] The fact that editors
dealing with different periods may have to take somewhat different positions
regarding accidentals is a superficial matter that does not alter the
fundamental questions they all have to face. The real issue that should be
raised about the "English" conception of copy-text is whether the idea of a
text of presumptive authority is appropriate to all patterns of textual
descent—an issue relevant to modern as well as earlier texts. If we
are
not distracted by the problem, undeniably troublesome, of how to treat
spelling and punctuation, we can see that Greg's essay takes its place in the
larger tradition of textual theory: like the seminal pieces on the editing of
classical, biblical, and medieval works, its dual theme is textual authority
and editorial freedom. To
state a rationale of copy-text is inevitably to take a position on how much
weight should be given to the editor's critical judgment in establishing a
text—that is to say, how much alteration should be permitted in any
given
documentary form of the text, on the basis of the editor's assessment of its
status, of the variants in other texts, and of further conjectures. The
principal approaches to this question that have been advanced over the years
are well known, and have often been surveyed.
[38] I propose to do no more here than
specify
some
main lines, so that Greg's rationale can be seen in relation to them. They
have not usually been taken up in this context, but doing so shows, I think,
that editorial discussion might be sharpened by greater awareness of the
entire tradition.
[39]
For this purpose it is not necessary to go back beyond the approach
usually associated with Karl Lachmann. Although scholars have shown that
Lachmann's own contributions to the development of the "genealogical"
approach have been greatly exaggerated,[40] his editions of the New Testament
(1831)
and of Lucretius (1850) stand as monuments linking his name with this
method. Historically the importance of this movement is that it represented
a reaction against the unprincipled eclecticism that had prevailed in the
previous century (of which Richard Bentley was the most important, and
most notorious, exemplar) and marked a recognition of what a scholarly
approach must entail, at a time when ancient documents were beginning to
be more accessible. There can be no question that the general drift of the
genealogical approach is correct: that scholars must examine all the extant
documents, learn as much about them as possible, and attempt to establish
the
relationships among the texts they contain. This much we would now take
for granted as part of what it means to be scholarly. The difficulty comes
in choosing a means for working out those relationships and in deciding
what use to make of the data thus postulated; and when people refer to "the
genealogical method" they normally mean the particular recommendations
on these matters associated with Lachmann and his followers. Taken in this
sense, the genealogical method can certainly be criticized, and its defects
have by now been enumerated many times.[41] The essence of the method is to
classify
texts into families by
examining "common errors," on the assumption that texts showing common
errors have a common ancestor.
[42]
Despite the obvious fallacies of such an approach, it had an influential life
of more than a century and is regarded as the classic method of textual
criticism. Two landmarks in its history added to its stature but at the same
time can be seen to have made its weaknesses evident. One is B. F.
Westcott and F. J. A. Hort's great
Introduction to their
edition
of the New Testament (1881), which brilliantly stated the rationale for the
approach and improved it methodologically (e.g., by focusing on
agreements in correct or possibly correct readings rather than agreements
in errors); they conclusively showed the illogic of relying on the
textus receptus. However, as Ernest Colwell has carefully
explained, Westcott and Hort in practice did not strictly adhere to the
method, recognizing that editorial judgment in assessing the general
credibility of individual manuscripts and the intrinsic merits of individual
readings must remain central, even in an approach that emphasizes
objectivity.
[43] The second classic
statement of the genealogical method is Paul Maas's famous essay,
"Textkritik" (1927), best known to English readers in Barbara Flower's
translation (not published until 1958).
[44] It is a highly abstract distillation
of the
basic principles, showing their logic and soundness under certain
conditions; but unfortunately those stated conditions (p. 3)—that each
scribe copied from a single exemplar, not "contaminating" the tradition by
drawing readings from two or more exemplars, and that each scribe also
made distinctive departures, consciously or unconsciously, from that
exemplar—are unlikely to have obtained in real situations.
[45]
The force of these weaknesses is obvious, as is their relevance to the
textual analysis of later material. Another of the often-discussed limitations
of the method deserves to be underscored here: the fact that it does not
make allowance for authorial revisions, for the possibility that variant
readings result from the author's second thoughts as well as from scribes'
errors and alterations. This oversight is not unique to the genealogical
method but in fact exists, in greater or less degree, in all the approaches to
textual criticism, regardless of the date of the works being considered. It
springs from wishful thinking, for however difficult it is to choose among
variants, it is easier to proceed on the basis that one is right and the others
wrong than to recognize that several may be "right" or at least represent the
author's preference at different times. Even among editors of modern
works, where many authorial revisions can be documented, there is a
reluctance to conceive
of a text as containing multiple possibilities; and though an editor's goal is
indeed to "establish" a text, editors—of works from all
periods—should
not forget that a "work" comprehends all the authorial readings within its
several texts.
Another common criticism of the genealogical method—that
one
must revert to one's own judgment when the choice is, to quote Maas,
"between different traditions of equal 'stemmatical' value" (p.
1)—calls
attention to what may be a more serious problem: the tendency to think that
the method generally minimizes the role of subjective judgment. The
Lachmannian system is responsible for the standard division of editorial
activity into recension and emendation and is therefore conducive to an
attitude, as I suggested earlier, that takes the first of these procedures to be
more objective than it is (or can be). There is superficially an
appropriateness in distinguishing readings thought of by the
editor from those present in at least one of the surviving documents; indeed,
from the point of view of documentary evidence, one is bound to regard
any proposed reading not in the documents as falling into a distinctly
separate category. But from the point of view of what are likely to be the
authorial readings, this distinction is of no significance, for an editorial
"conjecture" may be more certainly what the author wrote than any of the
alternative readings at a point of variation. The very term "conjecture," or
"conjectural emendation," prejudices the case; readings in the manuscripts
are less conjectural only in the sense that they actually appear in documents,
but they are not necessarily for that reason more certain. One is
conjecturing in deciding that one of them is more likely to be authorial than
another, just as one conjectures in rejecting all the variants at a given point
in favor of still another reading. The process of conjecture begins as soon
as one combines
readings from two documents,
[46] and
every decision about what is an "error" in a document rests on the editor's
judgment. Unquestionably the attempt to establish first a transmitted text is
a more responsible procedure than to engage at once in speculation, before
surveying the range of documentary evidence; but one must then resist the
temptation to regard that text as an objective fact. Colwell states this point
well in a comment on Hort:
His prudent rejection of almost all readings which have no manuscript
support has given the words "conjectural emendation" a meaning too
narrow to be realistic. In the last generation we have depreciated external
evidence of documents and have appreciated the internal evidence of
readings; but we have blithely assumed that we were rejecting "conjectural
emendation" if our conjectures were supported by some manuscripts. We
need to recognize that the editing of an eclectic text rests upon conjectures.
(p. 107)
This problem is equally of concern to editors of modern works. Although
their tendency to use "emendation" to mean any editorial change in the
copy-text, including readings drawn from other documents, is more
realistic, they are inclined to think that they are being cautious if they
choose a documentary reading over one newly proposed by an editor. Such
is not necessarily true, of course: the quality of the reading is everything,
finally, and the editorial tact necessary to recognize that quality is at the
heart of the whole process. The system associated with Lachmann's name
cannot be held entirely responsible for editors' misunderstanding of this
point, but it does seem to make the point harder to see by imputing to
certain kinds of editorial decisions a greater objectivity than can usually
exist.
Some of the people who have criticized the "Lachmann method" have
set forth alternative approaches that have themselves become the subject of
considerable discussion. One such person is Joseph Bédier, whose
work,
particularly influential in the medieval field, can serve to represent another
general approach to editing. The introduction to his second edition (1913)
of Jean Renart's Le Lai de l'Ombre, which has become the
point of departure for the twentieth-century criticism of Lachmann,[47] concentrates on the two-branched
stemma
as evidence of the weakness of the genealogical method. The fact that most
stemmata turn out to be dichotomous is regarded suspiciously as indicating
more about the operation of the system than about the actual relationships
among the manuscripts. What Bédier recommends instead is to
choose
a single good manuscript and to reprint it exactly except for any alterations
that the editor finds imperative. This
approach has been called "a return to the method of the humanists of the
Renaissance";[48] certainly it is a move
in the opposite direction from Housman's criticism of Lachmann at nearly
the same time. When Giorgio Pasquali, ridiculing this best-manuscript
approach, linked the English Shakespeare scholars with the medievalists in
following it,[49] he was essentially
correct in regard to the period before Greg's "Rationale." There is no
question that, in spite of Housman's incontrovertible logic, the best-text
theory —whether or not directly influenced by Bédier in
every
case—held sway over a great deal of editing in the first half of the
twentieth century. An instructive paradox of the commentary on
Bédier
is that his position has been regarded both as extremely conservative,
restricting the role of editorial judgment, and as extremely subjective,
emphasizing the editor's own critical decisions. The strict
adherence to a single text does suggest an attempt to minimize subjectivity;
but the leeway then allowed the editor in deciding what readings are not
possible and must be replaced sets very few restrictions on subjectivity. The
point in the editorial
procedure where subjectivity enters may seem to have been shifted, but its
extent has not been reduced. And in fact it is present from the beginning in
both approaches—both in the selection of a "best" text and in the
decisions involved in
recensio.
Followers of Bédier and of Lachmann have been adept at
suppressing recognition of the role of critical judgment at certain stages of
the processes they favor, and they have failed to see that their apparently
quite different approaches have much in common. The narrowness and
confusion exhibited by such partisans can be illustrated in the work of a
distinguished medievalist, Eugène Vinaver.[50] Admiring Bédier's
criticism of
Lachmann, he makes sweeping claims for the newer system:
Recent studies in textual criticism mark the end of an age-long
tradition. The ingenious technique of editing evolved by the great masters
of the nineteenth century has become as obsolete as Newton's physics, and
the work of generations of critics has lost a good deal of its value. It is no
longer possible to classify manuscripts on the basis of "common errors";
genealogical "stemmata" have fallen into discredit, and with them has
vanished our faith in composite critical texts. (p. 351)
The real issue of course is whether objective rules or individual judgment
will bring us closer to the author's text, and this fact is nowhere better
shown than in the conclusion Vinaver draws from these observations (that
"composite critical texts" are discredited) or in the statement he proceeds
to make: "nothing has done more to raise textual criticism to the position
of a science than the realisation of the inadequacy of the old methods of
editing." Housman, for instance, would have agreed in general with most
of Vinaver's paragraph but would have come to the opposite conclusion:
that we must put more faith in critical texts and not aim to place editing in
"the position of a science."
[51] Vinaver
realizes that Bédier's position, which he essentially approves, does
not
eliminate subjectivity, and his own effort toward injecting more objectivity
into it is to explain six kinds of errors that arise from scribal
transcription.
[52]
Knowledge of them, he believes, will "widen the scope of 'mechanical'
emendation" and "narrow the limits of 'rational' editing" (p 365).
[53] Vinaver is one of those editors
who, in
their eagerness to find objective criteria for editorial decisions, exaggerate
the distinction between correcting an error and making a conjectural
emendation. Vinaver's attention to scribal error stems from his belief that
an editor should aim at "lessening the damage done by the copyists," not
at reconstructing the original. To do the latter, he thinks, would be to
"indulge in a disguised collaboration with the author" (p. 368). He does not
seem to see that attempting to restore what the author wrote is different
from altering the text to what, in one's own opinion, the author should have
written. Like Bédier and other advocates of the best-text approach,
he
is not willing to say that the former is important enough to be worth risking
along the way a few instances of
the latter. Yet in defining the editor's role as that of "a referee in the
strictly mechanical conflict between the author and the scribe" (p. 368), he
does not eliminate the problem; he is not, after all, ruling out every
editorial departure from the chosen text, and he leaves unsolved the
question how one can satisfactorily distinguish safe and unsafe categories
of critical activity. His effort to assist Bédier proves no assistance
in the
end, for he overestimates, along with Bédier, the difference between
their approach and Lachmann's. It is interesting to learn that the
predominance of the dichotomous stemma is mathematically not such an
oddity as Bédier thought;
[54]
but
that fact does not make Lachmann right and Bédier wrong. The
approaches associated with both their names are in fact subject to the same
criticisms, for they both cover up much of the uncertainty and subjectivity
in the detection of error and therefore entail a
misunderstanding of the nature and scope of conjectural emendation.
It was inevitable that the desire for objectivity in textual analysis
would lead to the use of quasi-mathematical or quasi-statistical approaches.
Nine years after Bédier's famous introduction, Henri Quentin, in his
Mémoire sur l'etablissement du texte de la Vulgate
(1922),
announced a system that proved to be the first of a long line of
twentieth-century attempts to make textual analysis something akin to formal
logis.
[55] The heart of Quentin's
system is the rule that, in any group of three manuscripts, the intermediary
between the other two will sometimes agree with one or both of them, but
they will never agree against it. Quentin's system is thus to build a stemma
by taking up manuscripts (and their families) in groups of three, following
this rule. In the process of comparison no attempt is made to recognize
"errors"; variants are simply variants, without a direction of descent
implied. The concept of the intermediary therefore encompasses three
possibilities: the intermediary could be (a) the archetype from which the
other two manuscripts are independently descended, (b) the
descendant of one of them and the ancestor of the other, or (c) the
descendant, through conflation, of both of them. In order to determine
which of these possibilities is actually true, Quentin resorts to so-called
"internal" evidence—that is, to subjective judgments about the nature
of
the variants. He envisions his system as an attempt to reconstruct the
archetype—the latest ancestor of all the surviving texts—rather
than the
author's original; in Lachmannian terms, he is concerned only with
recensio. And certain central difficulties in Lachmann are
present in Quentin also: the definiteness Quentin imputes to his method does
not seem fully to recognize the amount of subjectivity that is finally relied
upon; nor does the suggestion that there is something more objective in
attempting to reconstruct the archetype than in trying to approach the
author's original acknowledge adequately how indistinct the line is between
the two, at least from the point of view of the
nature and certainty of the conjectures involved.
[56] Although the same cannot be said
of W.
W. Greg's effort five years later (
The Calculus of Variants,
1927)—for Greg more openly admits the limitations of his
"calculus"—the problems with his work are essentially the same. The
details of his procedure are of course different (in a quasi-algebraic
operation, he factors his formulaic representations of complex variants so
that he can focus on two variants at a time), but it reaches an impasse, as
Quentin's does, beyond which one cannot proceed without the introduction
of subjective judgments regarding genetic
relationships. As a mental exercise (and as a demonstration of the keenness
of Greg's analytic mind), the
Calculus is a fascinating work;
but
as a contribution to editorial theory it does not have the significance of his
"The Rationale of Copy-Text" a generation later.
[57] Not long after the publication of
Quentin's
and Greg's proposals, William P. Shepard performed the interesting
experiment of applying both to a number of medieval works, some of which
had previously been studied by other textual scholars. Invariably the two
methods produced different stemmata, both from each other and from those
proposed by earlier editors. Shepard's experiments, as he stressed, are not
conclusive, but they lend weight to his doubt whether the human activity of
copying can be given a "mechanistic explanation."
[58]
He recognized, however, that "we are bound to seek such an
explanation if we can"; and the dream that "some day a law or a formula
will be discovered which we can apply to the reconstruction of a text as
easily and as safely as the chemists now apply laws of analysis or synthesis"
(p. 141) continues to intrigue us, as evidenced by the scholars—such
as
Archibald Hill, Antonín Hrubý, and Vinton A. Dearing—who
have followed in the tradition of Quentin and Greg.[59] Hill, Hrubý, and Dearing all
attempt
to work out problems left unsettled by Greg, and all recognize the
importance, first seen clearly by Quentin, of examining distributional before
genealogical evidence (i.e., studying the record of
variant readings for evidence of relationships before attempting to assess
which descended from which). Hill proposes a principle of "simplicity" as
a mechanical means for choosing among alternative stemmata: one scores
two points for each line connecting a hypothetical intermediary and one
point for the other lines and then selects the diagram yielding the smallest
total. Hrubý tries to use probability calculus applied to individual
readings in texts in order to solve what Greg called "the ambiguity of three
texts"—to distinguish, in other words, between states of a text
resulting
from independent descent and those resulting from successive descent.
Dearing's work is an extension of Greg, taking into account and adapting
Quentin's idea of intermediaries and Hill's of simplicity; like Greg, he
offers a "calculus" that involves the rewriting of variations, and he sets
forth in detail the formal logic that underlies it. Because a primary
deficiency of earlier approaches was
their inability to deal with situations in which a scribe conflated the texts of
two or more manuscripts,
[60] Dearing's
handling of this problem is of particular interest. For him, a logical
consequence of his distinction between bibliographical and textual analysis
is that in the latter conflation simply does not exist. A scribe using two
manuscripts, he says, would not think of himself as conflating them but as
attempting to produce a more accurate text (a text nearer the archetype)
than either of them; to say that he had "manufacturered one state of the
message out of two others" would be "to confuse means and ends" (p. 17).
The bibliographer, who is concerned with the physical means of textual
transmission, can say that a record has been produced out of two others;
but the textual analyst will see it simply as a message that may at times
have affinities with other texts. Although this observation is presented as a
remarkable revelation ("The
light of truth blinded Saint Paul. New insights are not always easy to
understand, much less to accept when understood"), one may wonder
whether it is not in fact commonly understood and taken for granted.
Clarity of thought does demand that some such distinction be recognized,
and one cannot quarrel with Dearing for attempting to make it explicit; but
whether it materially affects one's dealing with "conflation" is another
matter. If, from the textual point of view, there can be no "conflation," one
has eliminated the word as an appropriate way of describing the situation;
but one has not eliminated the situation itself or the problem it poses for
textual analysis. Dearing speaks instead of "rings" in genealogical trees and
devotes considerable space to techniques
for rewriting trees so as to eliminate rings, either by inferring states or by
breaking the weakest connection in a ring. One breaks the weakest, rather
than some other, link in deference to the "principle of parsimony": "The
fewest possible readings are treated as something different from what they
really are" (p. 88). As with the other systems, the nature of the concessions
required to make the system work causes one to question the validity of the
results.
[61] Dearing's effort to
encompass conflation within his system is laudable, but his confidence that
his book "for the first time formulates the axioms of textual analysis and
demonstrates their inevitability" (p. x) would seem to be excessive.
[62] In the half century since Shepard
discussed Quentin and Greg a great deal of effort has been expended on
statistical approaches to textual analysis, but there seems little reason for a
more optimistic verdict than his.
Different as these various methods—from Lachmann to
Dearing—are, they all have the same problem: the questions of
conflation
and the direction of descent prove to be the stumbling block for systems
that attempt to achieve objectivity, and those systems either rely on
subjective decisions, covertly or openly, or else set up conditions that limit
their relevance to actual situations. This is not to say that one or another of
the procedures developed in these systems will not be helpful to
editors—of modern as well as earlier material—on certain
occasions,[63] and editors can profit
from the discussion of theoretical issues that the exposition of these systems
has produced. But the impulse to minimize the role of human judgment (the
view, in Dearing's words, that "textual analysis, having absolute rules, is
not an art" [p. 83]) has not led to any satisfactory comprehensive system.
In this context, it is useful to look again at the approach
suggested by Greg in "The Rationale of Copy-Text," for it places no
restrictions on individual judgment—that is, informed judgment,
taking
all relevant evidence into account and directed toward the scholarly goal of
establishing the text as the author wished it. The idea that all alterations
made by an editor in the selected copy-text are
emendations—whether
they come from other documentary texts or from the editor's (or some
editor's) inspiration—gives rise to a fundamentally different outlook
from
that which often has prevailed in the
textual criticism of earlier material. It leads to a franker acceptance of the
centrality of critical judgment because it calls attention to the similarity,
rather than the difference, between adopting a reading from another text and
adopting a reading that is one's own conjecture. Both result in a form of the
text unlike that in any known document and therefore represent editorial
judgment in departing from documentary evidence. Some documentary
readings are—or seem—obviously wrong, but obviousness is
itself
subjective, and correcting even the most obvious error is an act of
judgment; and attempting to work out the relationships among variant
documentary readings involves judgment, or at least, as we have seen,
evaluation of the varying results of different systems for establishing those
relationships. This approach recognizes that what is transmitted is a series
of texts and that to think of a single text, made up of readings from the
documentary texts, as "what is
transmitted" is to confuse a product of judgment based on the documentary
evidence with the documentary evidence itself. But the choice of one of the
extant texts as a copy-text in the sense that emerges from Greg's rationale
is not at all the same as taking a "best-text" approach (whether
Bédier's
or some other variety), for one has no obligation to favor the copy-text
whenever one has reason to believe that another reading is nearer to what
the author intended. Indeed, if one has a rational basis for selecting one
reading over another at all points of variation, there is no need for one text
to be designated as "copy-text" at all. In this conception, therefore,
copy-text is a text more likely than any other—insofar as one can
judge
from all available evidence—to contain authorial readings at points
where
one has no other basis for deciding. The usual deterioration of a text as it
is recopied suggests that normally the text nearest the author's manuscript
is the
best choice for copy-text—except, of course, when the circumstances
of
a particular case point to a different text as the more appropriate
choice.
All available evidence should be considered by the editor in making
these decisions—evidence from the physical analysis of the
documents
and from the textual analysis of their contents as well as from the editor's
own judgment as to what, under the circumstances, the author is likely to
have written. Although Greg's proposal is specific, dealing with the printed
dramas of the English Renaissance, the spirit of his rationale can, I think,
be legitimately extended in this way, providing a comprehensive approach
that encompasses other more limited approaches. It allows one to go
wherever one's judgment leads, armed with the knowledge of what evidence
is available and what systems of analysis have been proposed; and it
provides one with a mechanical means of deciding among variants only
when all else fails, a means that is still rationally
based. One must postulate a relationship among the texts, of course, before
one can select and emend a copy-text, and Greg does not suggest in his
essay on copy-text how to work out that relationship. His emphasis is
different from that of most of the writers on the textual criticism of earlier
materials, and in this sense his work is not directly comparable to theirs.
But many of them have also talked about the construction of a critical text
and have revealed in the process that the two activities cannot always be
kept entirely separate. Since the analysis of textual relationships involves
judgment at some point, the examination of variants for that purpose is
intimately linked with the consideration of variants for emendation. It is not
arguing in a circle to decide (having used subjective judgment to some
extent) on a particular tree as representing the relationship among the texts,
and then to cite that relationship as one factor in the choice among variant
readings; the
latter is simply a concomitant of the former, for the process of evaluation
employed in working out the relationship between the two readings overlaps
that used in making a choice between them. Ideally the relationship among
the texts should be a matter of fact, which can then be taken as a given in
the critical process of deciding what the author wrote. But historical "facts"
vary in their degree of certainty; and the more judgment is involved in
establishing the "fact" of textual relationship the more such a process will
coincide with that of evaluating readings to produce a critical text. The
traditional division between recension and emendation is an illustration of
this point, though it often has served as a way of concealing it. The open
reliance on critical judgment in Greg's rationale and the lack of dogmatism
manifested there can appropriately be extended to the prior task of dealing
with genealogical relationships. It would seem reasonable to maintain an
openness to
all approaches that might be of assistance both in evaluating variants and in
pointing to relationships. A statistical analysis might prove suggestive, for
example, but should be used in conjunction with other data, such as
physical evidence. Bibliographical and textual evidence, though undeniably
distinct, must be weighed together, since physical details sometimes explain
textual variants.
Because Greg spoke specifically of copy-texts that were chosen for
the relative authority of their accidentals, editors of earlier works—of
which the preserved documents are not likely to contain authoritative
accidentals—have concluded that his approach is relevant only for
works
preserved in authorial manuscripts or in printed editions based on them.
Such a view does not take into account the natural extension of Greg's
position that I have mentioned: the idea of copy-text as presumptive
authority, which one accepts (for both accidentals and substantives)
whenever there is no other basis for choosing among the variants. This
concept of copy-text is relevant for materials of any period, for it is not tied
to the retention of accidentals: any feature of the copy-text that one has
good reason for emending can be emended without affecting the status of
the copy-text as the text one falls back on at points where no such reason
exists to dictate the choice among variants. Dearing takes too narrow a view
of the matter, therefore, when he says that one chooses a particular text as
copy-text if one concludes that the scribes "tended to follow copy even in
accidentals" (p. 154). Furthermore, the point is not whether they followed
copy; it is simply that the text located at the smallest number of steps from
the original is likely to be the best choice to use where the variants are
otherwise indifferent, because that text can be presumed, in the absence of
contrary evidence, to have deteriorated least, even if the scribes were not
careful in
following copy.
[64] When there are
two or more lines of descent, an editor may conclude in a given case that
a text in one line, though it is probably more steps removed from the
original than a text in another line, is nevertheless more careful and more
representative of the original; one would then select it as copy-text, for the
point of this approach is that one turns to the text nearest the original only
when there is no other evidence for deciding.
This procedure, derived from Greg, would seem to be appropriate for
all instances in which—if the choice of copy-text is not clear on other
grounds—one can decide that a particular text is fewer steps removed
from the original than any other known text. It is not helpful, however, in
those instances in which two or more texts are an equal, or possibly equal,
number of steps from the original. These situations are taken up by Fredson
Bowers in an important essay on "Multiple Authority,"[65] which is the logical complement
to Greg's
"Rationale." What is particularly
interesting about Bowers's essay is that, although it deals with a problem
especially relevant to earlier material, it is occasioned by work on modern
literature, specifically Stephen Crane's stories that were published through
a newspaper syndicate.
[66] In the
absence of any of the presumably duplicate copies of the text sent out by
the syndicate office, what the editor has are the appearances of the text in
the various newspapers that belonged to the syndicate. These are all
apparently removed from the syndicate's master proof, and from the
author's original, to exactly the same extent; and unless one has other
evidence to suggest that one of the newspapers is likely to be more accurate
than the others, there is no way to choose one of these texts as carrying
presumptive authority. In such cases, therefore, Bowers recognizes that
"critical tests (guided by bibliographical probabilities) must be substituted
for the test of genealogical relationship"
(p. 467). Statistical analysis is important, but, as Bowers says, "quantitative
evidence is not always enough" and "qualitative evidence, the real nature
of the variant, needs to be considered" (p. 468). What Bowers implies, but
does not quite say, is that in such cases there is no copy-text at all, since
no text can be elevated over the others and assigned presumptive authority;
the critical text is constructed by choosing among readings, at all points of
variation, on critical and bibliographical grounds.
[67] If one finds two readings evenly
matched,
there is no copy-text authority to fall back on, and one must settle the
dilemma some other way (such as by a statistical analysis to determine
which text has apparently been correct most often). This approach to
radiating texts, taken in conjunction with the idea of a copy-text of
presumptive authority, when the situation warrants, provides a
comprehensive plan for dealing with variants. The point that
should be stressed is that neither part of this plan is limited to material of
a certain type or period.
[68]
My comments in the preceding pages aim to be nothing more than a
series of reflections arising from an effort to think about what connections
there are between the textual criticism of ancient writings and the editorial
scholarship devoted to modern works. I do not claim to have proposed a
new "method"; but I do hope that I have exhibited a coherent line of
thinking applicable to all editorial scholarship. The issues will always be
debated, and there will always be champions of various approaches. But no
approach can survive in the long run that does not recognize the basic role
of human judgment, accept it as something positive, and build on it.
Welcoming critical judgment is not incompatible with insisting on the use
of all possible means for establishing demonstrable facts. Scholarly editors
are, after all, historians as well as literary critics, and they must understand
the subjective element in the reconstruction of any event from the past.
Establishing texts from specific
times in the past, including the texts intended by their authors, is a crucial
part of this large enterprise of historical reconstruction and cultural
understanding. It seems obvious that textual scholars dealing with modern
works can benefit from examining the ways in which editors of earlier
materials have dealt with complicated problems of transmission and from
studying the theories underlying those treatments; I think it equally clear
that editors of earlier writings will find relevant what students of later texts
have said about authors' revisions and the choice and treatment of a
copy-text. One of the textual scholars who have emphasized the importance
of cooperation among specialists in different areas is Bruce Metzger. He
has urged New Testament scholars, through his own impressive example,
to explore textual work in the Septuagint and the Homeric and Indian epics
and to "break through the provincialism . . . of restricting one's attention
only or chiefly to what has been
published in German, French, and English." As he says, "An ever present
danger besets the specialist in any field; it is the temptation to neglect
taking into account trends of research in other fields. Confining one's
attention to a limited area of investigation may result in the impoverishment
rather than the enrichment of scholarship."[69] It is to be hoped that many more
textual
scholars will pursue their work with this same breadth of vision and will
welcome the "cross-fertilization of ideas and
methods" that results. Editing ancient texts and editing modern ones are not
simply related fields; they are essentially the same field. The differences
between them are in details; the similarities are in fundamentals.