University of Virginia Library

Editors of post-mediaeval English literature are not very often required, in the absence of an authorial holograph or authoritative edition, to reconstruct texts from a profusion of non-authorial copyings. When they do, as in the instances of Donne, Rochester and the authors of late seventeenth-century libertine verse and "state poems," they will naturally try to adapt the methods developed by classical and biblical scholars to deal with the problems that arise, but will not always find them as clarified or thought-through as would be desirable.[1] One reason for this may well be that editors of classical texts, dealing as a rule with thoroughly contaminated textual traditions which may, in any case, lead only to the conjectures of some Byzantine or Hellenistic editor or to an archetype that was already seriously deficient, have rightly placed their main emphasis on the reconstruction of the author's text through philological and historical means —reserving the genealogical method for situations where its conclusions would be more or less open and shut.[2] Biblical scholarship faces much

the same problem multiplied several hundredfold due to the enormous number of surviving sources and the complexity of their interrelationships, and, as a result, is reduced to dealing with broad groups or families of manuscripts without much fine tracing of individual lines of descent. In dealing with traditions such as that of Rochester, however, the editors have every right to feel that they should be able to make sense of the genealogical relationships—even when faced with groups of twenty or more manuscripts. Far from extending over centuries or millennia, the copying of the sources was probably concentrated within a decade or two. It was performed by scribes and compositors who spoke a common dialect of the English tongue, into which the editor can acquire more insight than would be the case with texts in a dead language.[3] There is a good deal of incidental information surviving about the circumstances of copying.[4] Finally, these were not sacred texts or high literature but topical poems written out currente calamo for immediate consumption, with the consequences that variation abounds and that the tradition is less likely to have been corrupted by the drawing of readings from more than one exemplar, though there may have been a fairly high incidence of memorial contamination.

Yet the problems clearly remain considerable. David Vieth, the first scholar to attempt to create a text of Rochester from the full range of the surviving sources (which he himself had been responsible for charting)[5], was, according to his own account, able to make only limited use of the genealogical method and relied in the establishment of his text on an adaptation of the "best manuscript" theory.[6] The present article

grew from a wish to discover whether, despite Vieth's scepticism, it might be possible to present plausible stemmata for Rochester's longer poems.[7] The innovations in method proposed have been developed solely with that end in view and will not necessarily apply in other areas of textual scholarship, though it is hoped they will be found to have some wider applicability.

The approach in general involves an insistence on the historicity of the act of transmission which has been unfashionable in recent years, and which departs, perhaps unwisely, from the principle argued for by Vinton Dearing that the concern of the editor should be with the text considered as a logical construct rather than with the manuscript as carrier of the readings.[8] The distinction in itself is an important one which may be grasped most easily if we consider a manuscript which is a copy of a source, A, being corrected from a manuscript descended from a source, B, belonging to a different branch of the textual tradition, so as to remove all the substantive readings which were characteristic of A. If we assume that the deleted readings are rendered illegible, it is fair to say that the text of that manuscript, in so far as this is defined by substantives alone,[9] now belongs to the branch of the tradition represented by B, although it remains a historical fact that the majority of the words inscribed on its pages—those in which it did not vary from either A or B—had descended by a physical act of copying from A. When editors construct a stemma, they will normally see their aim as that of producing a diagrammatic representation of the logical relationships of the groupings of variant readings that characterise the sources, not a family tree of copyings which would show the paths by which the majority of readings in each instance, whether variant or invariant, were actually transmitted from page to page. So, to return to the earlier

example, our manuscript would have to be included in a logical stemma as a descendant of B, even if the editor had firm external or non-substantive evidence for its having been initially copied from A.

There is, of course, no objection to this procedure as long as there is no confusion in the minds of editors or their readers over what is taking place. Indeed, it is often much more serviceable to the inquiry in hand than a strict family tree of sources would be. But dangers can nonetheless arise if editors allow themselves to lose sight completely of the nexus between the text and its carrier.[10] If the study of variation is, from one point of view, an exercise in the manipulation of symbols according to the principles of mathematical logic, it is equally the study of a certain kind of human behaviour—that of the scribe, professional or amateur, in the act of copying. The importance of habituating oneself to think in terms of the genealogies of manuscripts as well as of the class-relationships of texts is simply that the significance as evidence of a variant in any kind of textual inquiry must lie ultimately in the processes of thought (or non-thought) which have led to its coming into existence, its further transmission and possibly its disappearance. Modern English-language editorial practice admits the validity of such criteria, but insists that they should be reserved until the stage when the editor has established the primary pattern of relationships between his texts and begins the search for evidence of the direction of variation in order to locate the position of the ancestor.[11] My own contention is that the consideration of scribal motivation is relevant to every stage of textual reasoning and that to ignore it is to assent to the proposition that all cases of variation are of equal value as evidence for the relationship of texts—a proposition which may, indeed, be an unavoidable rule of

procedure in certain specialised studies of textual data, but which is in itself an absurdity.