University of Virginia Library

Determining Final Authorial Intention in Revised Satires: The Case of Edward Young
by
James E. May

In editing a text with multiple authorities in linear descent, an editor ordinarily takes for his copy-text the first edition (or, in some cases, a thoroughly revised reprint or an author's holograph). This text he emends with the author's revisions, after separating them from compositorial errors. He normally gives preference to the last revision should several overlap since his goal is to reproduce the author's final intentions. Yet an author's last revisions are not accepted as "final" unless they are, as G. Thomas Tanselle has written, "an attempt to improve the work in terms of its original conception."[1] Tanselle concludes that, when an editor "chooses an authorial reading previous to the author's last one . . . his justification is that the reading is 'final' in terms of his view of the work as an organic whole and that the later reading either creates a new work or is an isolated alteration at odds with the spirit of the work" (p. 353). As examples of last revisions without final authority, Tanselle cites certain of Melville's changes in Typee which "alter the tone of the book and are not in keeping with the spirit of the original version" (p. 335). He would distinguish those revisions Melville made that alter the work's original conception from those that do not and then accept only the latter: "known authorial revisions must be divided into categories for editorial decision according to the motives and conceptions they reflect" (p. 336). As kinds of revision that might alter the original conception and require extraordinary treatment, besides those altering tone, Tanselle suggests those

adapting the text to a younger audience (p. 334) and those removing discussions of issues that date the work (p. 336).

Tanselle does not apply his editorial principles to any pre-Romantic satires or public poems, which often are loosely-coherent collections of diverse materials within a mixed form, and revisions to which cannot usually be judged by any principle of organic form. However, Tanselle's willingness to give special treatment to changes both to accommodate a different audience and to alter historical features suggests the usefulness of rhetorical and historical considerations in determining final authority in revised satires. Since satires and other forms of public poetry in their origin were usually intended to refer to historical situations and to achieve certain effects on a particular audience, the editor, in assessing final intention, should consider whether later revisions presuppose an audience and state of affairs different from those for which the work was originally intended. This editorial policy, appropriate to revised satires incorporating historical references within a persuasive appeal to a distinct audience, is examined in the following discussion of Edward Young's revisions to his satirical poetry. Most of Young's later revisions to Love of Fame (1725-28) were prompted by changes in the objects satirized or praised or in his or the public's attitudes. Some of these revisions that cause updating, even if not intended to do so, violate the work's original conception, and, so, should be denied final authority. The prerogative to deny final authority here depends upon Young's having conceived the work rhetorically, that is, following the advice of classical rhetoric, his having primarily chosen his theme, topical materials, ethos, and manner in order to achieve certain effects on a contemporary audience. But not all his revisions, even those that result in updating, violate his rhetorical interlocking of speaker, subject, and audience. This essay sketches a methodology and poses necessary historical questions for discriminating between those revisions to satires conceived like Young's that do not violate the rhetorical conception from those that do and, so, should be denied final authority. Many partly satirical poems are not primarily rhetorical in conception, nor do their conceptions require much historical reference. Yet when these poems, like Young's Two Epistles to Mr. Pope (1730), were revised after the passage of many years, they may lose much of their historical integrity. But, as we will see in the case of Two Epistles, the scholarly editor, if so inclined, still has several options for preserving the historicity of the earlier version.

The revisions primarily discussed here occur in Love of Fame and Two Epistles when they were reprinted in the authorized Works of 1757 by the poet's friend Samuel Richardson.[2] The Love of Fame satires, after first being published in a series of seven folios (1725-28), were revised for a collected edition in 1728, when Young added a Preface and 12 lines, removed 24 and

moved 4 lines, changed about 30 words or phrases, and overhauled emphatic capitals and italics.[3] But then, 29 years later, for Works 1757, Young removed a sentence from the Preface and 42 lines from a text of over 2500, although making no additions and introducing no more than three changes in phrasing.[4] Charles Frank's observation about the 1757 revision of Love of Fame, that "It was essentially an old man's way of revising and correcting,"[5] can be applied with greater accuracy to the revision of Two Epistles. In 1757, the epistles, not previously revised, lost 70 of their 628 lines, but no phrasing changes or additions were introduced, not even to accommodate the omission of Epistle I's concluding lines.[6] Other early poems were similarly revised for this collected works: lines were deleted but none were added, and little phrasing was altered.[7] Thus, one cannot argue by analogy that Young carefully revised Love of Fame and Two Epistles for Works 1757. Since Young's 1757 revisions of those two poems almost exclusively involved deleting lines, and since he could have introduced those changes about 30 years after the first editions, the editor must scrutinize the revisions to determine if, to quote Tanselle, they aim "at altering the purpose, direction, or character" of the original works (p. 335). Young seems to have removed lines for three major reasons: to eliminate redundant and awkwardly-expressed passages, to increase structural coherence, and to remove dated opinions and public or personal references. Only the deletions designed to accommodate the poems to a new audience and state of affairs seem to require special treatment. The creation of this separate case is especially required for Love of Fame since it was conceived rhetorically for a particular situation.

Love of Fame was contrived for a broad, contemporary audience, with an anonymous but persuasively-conceived speaker attempting to reform the behavior and attitudes of a particular society. Like most eighteenth-century satires, the poem lacks organic unity, containing parts that primarily fulfill formal and expressive intentions.[8] Young's formal intentions included the desire to write an Horatian satire with Juvenalian touches, which would rival Boileau's example and become a paradigm for English poets of what satire ought to be.[9] And he desired to expound his analysis of human pride, as in Satire The Last where he exposes the causes and effects of the love of fame (VII.117-158). But his rhetorical conception is paramount, and to its reformative purpose he subordinated design, ethos, thought, and style. He chose the Horatian kind with occasional Juvenalian severity on therapeutic grounds, as he did the thesis that the love of fame is a universal passion.[10] Similarly, Young deliberately addressed the current follies of English Society and historical persons who symbolized those evils. For example, he attacked current vogues for gambling and for deistical free-thinking, alluding to Mrs. Kemp's salon and to Anthony Collins' writings, and, for various vices, he singled out masquerade producer John Heidegger, Secretary of the Treasury John Scrope, and critic Charles Gildon.[11] Although many of his victims have Latin names, a key published by Edmund Curll in 1741 and

marginalia in early editions, especially those in Horace Walpole's copy of 1728, show that contemporary readers thought the satires were full of historical references.[12] From such allusions to the contemporary milieu, Young made a deliberate appeal for authority. The same ethical strategy lies behind the panegyrics, which, although they function as ethical norms, also indicate the speaker's worldliness. The speaker demonstrates his familiarity with fashionable noblemen in the epistolary addresses to peers and statesmen, like the Duke of Dorset and Sir Spencer Compton, Speaker of the House, in panegyrical apostrophes within the text, like that to Queen Caroline, and in anecdotal references, like those to Lord Stanhope at the World Club or to the poet himself writing Satire V at Dodington's Eastbury estate.[13] This association with society's leading lights anchored the satire to historical reality and lent the speaker a social status that in a class society translated into taste and discernment.

I stress the rhetorical conception of Love of Fame because the case for giving special treatment to revisions that alter a work's historicity is strengthened when the work, like most satires, is rhetorically conceived for a particular historical moment. (The extent to which different satires exploit the contemporary scene varies greatly; Pope's satires, for example, contain many more topical allusions than do Young's.) Love of Fame was more determined by its historical moment, by the fashions and ills of its age, than was Two Epistles. The second epistle was didactically conceived to express universal precepts about what has been, is, and will be the poet's true craft. Even the satirical first epistle, although it has some historical references, as to the Mint, to Elkenah Settle, and to gambling at White's Coffeehouse,[14] draws heavily on commonplaces from Horace and Young's immediate predecessors in literary satire, like John Oldham, and avoids attacks on particulars. Consequently, when Two Epistles was brought forth revised twenty-seven years after its first publication, few deletions occurred that can be attributed to Young's accommodating it to new rhetorical circumstances. But the new rhetorical situation attending Love of Fame's 1757 republication dictated many deletions. The passage of time had called for certain adjustments of ethos, removed the relevance of several attacks, lent disruptive irony to one panegyric, and necessitated a few other changes for the fulfillment of the satire's reformative purpose. Although these changes cannot be said to have altered the "purpose" of the work, they did alter its "conception," provided what I am defining as "rhetorical conception" is compatible with Tanselle's use of the word. A satire like Love of Fame is sufficiently anchored to history that any attempt to remove materials because they later become ineffective conflicts with the historical integrity and, thus, the "spirit" of the work.

In some cases a satire might be so extensively reshaped to suit new rhetorical circumstances at odds with the original as to prevent the confluence of the two authorities in an eclectic text. Changes and additions can so alter the style, materials, sentiments, and sensibility of the original poem as to create a distinctly new work or hodgepodge of the old and implicit new. Then an editor may be forced to edit two separate versions or to focus on one, while relegating the other to an appendix.[15] When deletions alone disfigure the integrity of the original, brackets, like those I will later propose for Two Epistles, may be useful. However, an eclectic text is possible for Love of Fame. The revised text of 1757 is not so much a new version adapted for a 1757 audience as it is one less adapted for a 1720's audience: it has merely become less anchored to any time or place, more universal, which, according to some definitions of satire, makes it less of a satire, more of a moral poem. The revised edition is not timeless or fully accommodated to 1757 but still contains most of the dated references in the first editions or introduced in the revisions of 1728. Its value to literary historians of the 1750's is almost nil, but the first editions, as well as the revised second, have considerable value to historians. Scholars approach the poem as the first formal verse satire of the century, as a prototype of Pope's work in the kind. They value it not only for historical insight into the 1720's but as an expression of the period, which shaped it and called it forth.

So given the importance of historical circumstances to Young's original intentions, and to a lesser extent, the value of the satire's historical features to scholars, an editor should incorporate only those revisions of Love of Fame not intended to alter its original interlocking of a specific speaker, audience, and society. In editing Love of Fame this policy is compatible with the choice of first-edition copy-texts, required by the nature and number of the revisions.[16] The editor of revised satires ought to especially guard copy-text readings whenever publishers can be suspected of encouraging or performing the revisions. In the case of Young's satirical poetry, the nagging possibility that the printer Richardson collaborated with Young on the revisions or introduced them himself may influence the editor's attitude toward accepting the 1757 revisions.[17] But apart from his efforts to exclude non-authorial

changes, the editor, by focusing on 1725-1728 copy-texts for Love of Fame, will be less inclined to admit revisions performed thirty years later which disrupt the copy-text's historical setting and thrust. Even if the revision occurred but a few years afterwards, the historical features of first-edition copy-texts ought to have some weight in editing satires. An editor is, of course, more likely to discern updating in revisions introduced after a decade or more, but, as I shall argue concerning one revision in the 1728 octavo of Love of Fame, it is possible to identify revisions forced by historical change even after a few years have elapsed.

Assuming the theoretical validity of denying final authority to certain 1757 revisions of Love of Fame, the editor preparing an edition based on the 1725-1728 copy-texts now faces the difficult task of separating the revisions compatible with the satire's original rhetorical conception from those detracting from it and, so, lacking final authority. Since he would preserve not the full historicity of the first editions, but only those historical features integral to the work's rhetorical conception, the editor will find it helpful to divide the revisions into three classes: 1) those due to a change in the referents, such as a person's ceasing to deserve praise or censure, 2) those due to a change in the public's attitude toward the referent or the author, and 3), without regard to these changes in the world or in public opinion, those due to a change in the poet's opinion or beliefs. Only revisions that fall into classes one and two tamper with the work's original rhetorical conception and, so, should receive special treatment as revisions without final authority (unless one's edition is limited to the final version).

The editor must allow Young the freedom to change his mind, to remove old opinions or even to introduce new ideas, provided these changes were not intended as responses to new rhetorical circumstances, even though in a strict sense they affect the historicity of the poem. For example, in the revised octavo of 1728, Young introduced four lines into Satire The Last's general exposition of the causes and effects of the love of fame. They added a providential purpose for this universal passion not noted in the first edition: our desire for fame "Confirms society; since what we prize / As our chief blessing, must from others rise" (VII.155-158). These lines, without internal flaws, were removed in 1757, probably because they interrupt the coherent development of ideas before and after them. In 1728 Young wanted to say his say, but in 1757 he was less concerned with developing his thesis than with removing

artistic flaws, which is suggested by his never adding, only removing, lines. Since Young's original conception of Love of Fame seems to entail the subordination of thematic materials to a reformative and satiric intent, the editor is forced to honor as final his deletion of these lines. Nor can he argue that the omission detracts from the historical anchoring of the poem so important to its rhetorical conception.

For several of Young's deletions it is difficult to say whether some change in the rhetorical situation, either in the referent or the public's attitude toward it, had wrought a change in the poet's opinion. For instance, the editor must consider whether Young deleted from Satire III six lines attacking opera (III.209-214) because opera or public attitudes toward it had changed by 1757, or because, without regard to historical circumstances, he merely wished to alter his expressed opinion. If the passage had been originally part of an expressive pattern conceived apart from the rhetorical inter-locking of speaker, subject, and audience, and Young had simply changed his mind, then an editor would honor the deletion. However, in Love of Fame there is no such pattern of self-expression, and the attack occurs in a series on topical luxuries; so, the lines probably should remain, the omission ignored as a rhetorical adaptation to historical change in opera and its reputation, provided such change can be verified.

In the 1757 revision of Two Epistles, a more complicated problem involves the removal of the satirical portrait of Lico (Ep. I.133-140), a foppish poet whose vainly worn "scarlet" stockings are set incongruously against his poverty: "He stands erect on silken, scarlet legs, / His Figure bullies, tho' his Fortune begs." Excluding for the purpose of discussion the possibility that it was struck for redundancy or dullness, the character could have been removed owing to any of the three historical changes outlined above. In 1757 the satiric attack may have become obsolete if scarlet stocking were no longer worn by Grubbian hacks or fops, or if they were then worn by people of fashion. On the other hand, perhaps the rhetorical circumstances had not changed, but the elder Young now found distasteful the extended attack on poets more for their poverty than their poetry. The editor's difficulties here are complicated further since the public may have come to understand Lico as referring to Ambrose Philips, whom Pope had satirized for wearing "red Stockings" in his "Macer, a Character."[18] If Young had originally intended Lico to be a satiric glance at Philips, and if he removed the portrait because he now thought better of Philips or simply thought the manner of attack disreputable,

then the editor would accept the change as an altered opinion. Conversely, if Young deleted the portrait in response to the public's misreading the generalized Lico as Philips, then the editor would ignore the deletion as an accommodation for a new audience. The same set of questions must be asked concerning the couplet deleted from the satirical portrait of the speaker's "friend" Hilario, whom some have identified with Jonathan Swift.[19]

Similar considerations apply to panegyrical materials removed in 1757, like the couplet praising Simon Harcourt. This is a problematic deletion since the context, a discussion of the true patron, invited Young's actual testament to his supportive readers. Yet this self-expression is a rhetorical device for authority and occurs in a formal imitation of Horace.[20] Young wrote that for some authors there are "large-minded" patrons who appreciate and guide their efforts:

Young cut the couplet on Harcourt, although he let stand those that follow praising other patrons. It may be as difficult for the editor to ascertain the poet's intention for revising the passage as it is to establish a hierarchy of his several original intentions. But, after making that critical judgment, the editor will accept the deletion as final if the original praise was expressive in intent and if its removal was prompted by Young's change of heart. And, if the praise of Harcourt was removed as weakening a bid for authority, due, say, to his ill-repute in 1757, then its removal may not deserve final authority. In another satire with a different rhetorical conception, a poet might with final authority remove lines praising a person who had become disqualified as a norm, but, since Young avowedly anchors his persuasive appeal to historical material, we must refuse final authority to adjustments not only of speaker and audience but of victims and norms when they were prompted by historical change.

Although in the previous cases the editor will labor with a complicated

knot of possibilities to determine whether changes in the society or in only the poet probably caused the revision, there are deletions in Love of Fame that were clearly forced upon Young by new rhetorical situations and by new historical circumstances. In one 1757 alteration, Young responded not to any physical change in what he had referred to nor to any change of heart but to a change in the speaker-audience relation. In this instance, Young deleted the following couplet from a sketch of a femme fatale: "Thrice happy they! who think I boldly feign, / And startle at a Mistress of my brain" (VI.63-64). This emphatic gesture was appropriate to the anonymous vir bonus, but the work's 1757 audience, inclined to biographical fallacies, knew that the pious rector of Welwyn was the author. Thus, the reader's inability to separate speaker from poet probably required the removal of the speaker's self-conscious exclamation.

We can also be nearly certain that earlier, in 1728, Young dropped the concluding lines of Satire The Last to adjust the poem to new historical circumstances, specifically to the recent death of George I. Young had originally closed the satire, published in January 1726, with a clever hyperbole referring to George I's stormy and delayed voyage back to England in December 1725 after negotiating the Treaty of Hanover. In the first edition, lines 211-224 depict the King in danger at sea, lines 225-234 praise the concerned Prime Minister for not sleeping at England's Helm, and lines 235-246 depict England's joy upon the King's return:

When the poem was reprinted in March 1728, Young dropped lines 235-46, for, with the King's having died less than a year earlier, the celebration of the "smile of Fate" and George's symbolic triumph over the seas of chance would have seemed ironic or even ludicrous. Today, with George I and II long dead, these lines are no longer inappropriate or ironic, and an editor will reintroduce them since the poem's original conception entails an English audience in 1726. Most panegyrics allude to contemporary figures and are designed for particular audiences and occasions, but, when the work as a whole does not share that rhetorical conception, the author can delete or alter those panegyrics without bringing different intentions to the work. For instance, Young has several laudatory digressions on contemporaries in his narrative poem on Lady Jane Gray, The Force of Religion (1714);[22] his removal of these passages in 1757 only complemented his narrative design and must be considered a final revision. However, in Love of Fame the panegyrics are integral to both structure and strategy, and in Satire The Last Young made a deliberate bid for authority by putting to poetic use the headlines of the preceding month.

For several revisions previously discussed, the public, by misreading the poem, may have functioned as a disapproving editor, forcing Young to alter his original readings. An interesting parallel to those adjustments to a new audience—where the historicity of the first editions may be disrupted by anterior readings—involves the poet's removing names and dedications from Satires II and V, presumably to satisfy the persons praised. Young intended to publish all seven satires with dedications, as he indicated to Thomas Tickell in November 1724: "I propose publishing one after another directed to people of Fashion" (Pettit, p. 36). Besides gaining financial favors from the patrons, the dedications served the structural function of balancing censure with virtuous example and the rhetorical function of rooting the satire in contemporary life. There is evidence that Satires II and V, without public dedications, were originally, and remained silently, dedicated to Richard Lumley, the second Earl of Scarborough, and Henrietta Howard, mistress of George II and later Countess of Suffolk. Satire II has a dedication in the body of the poem (ll. 95-100) and two panegyrical passages to someone whose name had been elided (ll. 201-204 and, in the folio only, ll. 291-294). Later, in the Tonson sixth edition, 1763, the separate title for Satire II carries a dedication to "the Earl of Scarborough," who had died in 1740, and the two-syllable blanks in lines 95 and 291 and the three-syllable blanks in lines 92 and 201 are filled with "Lumley" and "Scarborough."[23] Since this edition introduced 38 entirely new lines from a manuscript antedating folio publication, these names probably reflect Young's original intentions, which were overruled by Scarborough. Similarly, we know from Horace Walpole's annotated copy of Love of Fame 1728 that he supposed his neighbor Mrs. Howard's name belonged in the blank before the panegyrical set-piece in Satire V.[24] If her two-syllable surname also belongs at line 11, and if the claim there genuinely speaks of her modest refusal of open praise, then, as the praise of "Henrietta" at IV.210 also argues, Young did not elide her name to avoid difficulties with Princess Caroline or to avoid a disreputable norm. When an author introduced changes at the request of a patron, who, like a publisher, prevented the fulfillment of a rhetorical plan, the editor may decide to reintroduce the earlier readings. However, there would have to be strong evidence for the authority of the hypothesized readings, stronger than that

offered above for Mrs. Howard's name. Also, the poet's original conception must define the primary audience to be the general public, and not the inner audience of the epistolary frame or the apostrophes. In admitting these anterior readings, the editor would be denying final authority to certain copy-text readings and interfering with the historicity of the copy-text.

The editor of Love of Fame can construct a text preserving the author's final intentions while also conserving the historical spirit of the original. This is possible because the historical details of the first editions are so important to the work's primarily rhetorical conception. That solution is not accessible in editing some poems, including Two Epistles. Although Two Epistles was addressed to Pope and treats much the same topics as poems contributing to the Dunciad controversy,[25] even the satirical first epistle was not contrived to participate in the current quarrels within the literary scene and is remarkably free of particularized attacks. Moreover, the second epistle, as W. L. Mac-Donald noted, "may bear the interpretation of advice to any writer," without regard to time or place.[26] In short, the editor predisposed to protect the historicity of and all the critical observations in the first edition of Two Epistles cannot do so by claiming that later revisions violate the work's conception for a particular historical occasion. He cannot claim that any revision aside from the omitted Lico portrait was intended to update the poem or adapt it to a new audience. Yet, as is surely often true of revised poetry, the poet's removal of 70 lines lessens the value of the work to literary scholars by detracting from its historical integrity. For instance, in 1757 Young struck eight lines from an extended comparison of hacks to serpents (Ep. I.269-276). The resulting image is now free of the over-extension for which Young was attacked later in the century, but the original reflects the baroque excess of the age of The Dunciad. Other 1757 deletions remove topics characteristic of the earlier period, as the attention to wit and the reliance on the court as a standard in the advice "Courts know no such Creature as a Wit" (Ep. II.100), or the admonishment not to import thoughts from France and to avoid "easy writing" (Ep. II. 225-232). For all these changes one can posit literary motives quite compatible with Young's original design and intention. Also, an editor cannot argue that the changes represent new, or updated, critical positions since, over four decades, Young's criticism is remarkably homogeneous.

Nevertheless, even though Young's 1757 revisions to Two Epistles were not intended to update the work or to alter its original purpose or conception, some or all of the revisions still might perhaps be denied final authority for violating in fact whatever conception the original had. Thus, one might argue that Young's original intention in Epistle II of expressing a body of coherent criticism outweighs certain 1757 deletions designed to remove passages with redundancy and obscurity. In particular, two passages, apparently struck for excessive refinement, state truths central to Young's critical theory yet not

expressed elsewhere in the epistle: the first is on the value of sincerity in composing (Ep. II.59-70), and the second advises satirists to copy the art but not the subjects of Greek and Roman writers (Ep. II.201-206). If the editor can argue that these deletions weaken the thesis that the original poem was called forth to express, he could perhaps convincingly argue that the poet's 1757 intentions, either in specific revisions or within the revisions as a whole, must be considered different, and not final, intentions since they contradict the purpose and thrust of the original. This argument makes the theoretical assumption that stylistic and structural revision, not intended to alter the original purpose and design, can indirectly and unwittingly disrupt the poet's original conception, which might occur were the poet sufficiently uninvolved with the work as to throw out the beans with the weeds.[27]

In general, if an editor cannot argue that a poet's revisions bring different intentions violating his original ones, but if he values the first edition's historical integrity more than the poet's final intentions, then he might choose to produce a text without final authority. After removing press variants and errors from the copy-text, to preserve the historicity of the first edition, he can relegate to textual footnotes or an appendix either all later revisions or—if he chooses—only those that disrupt the historical integrity of the original. The editor of Young's Two Epistles, in order to reproduce for literary historians more bibliographical evidence and a more informative text, might best adopt the former of these editorial methods and abandon the orthodox goal of reproducing the final authorial readings. Since the only revision in 1757 was the deletion of 70 lines, he might reprint a corrected 1730 copy-text with the deleted lines placed in the text within brackets. He can justify his neglecting the poet's later revisions by arguing the importance of the lines deleted in 1757 to historical scholars, who primarily approach the work as an historical document rather than an aesthetic object, as a compilation of remarks rather than as an artistic whole. Since in 1757 Young seems to have intended not to alter his critical opinions, but only to improve the poem's artistic merit, his revisions do not have much if any importance to the history of criticism. In consequence of using the line numbers of the longer original, the editor can list in his historical collation the variant substantives in editions between 1730 and 1757, variants that would otherwise not ordinarily have been listed yet are important in establishing the transmission of the text. An edition like that described here, which—with or without brackets—reprinted readings later omitted by the author, would not produce a text with final authority, but the edition would be "critical" in so far as its notes and apparatus would indicate the author's varying intentions, and its textual introduction and notes would hypothesize which intentions have final authority.

In this essay, I have tried to apply the editorial principles of final authorial intention to revisions of satirical and quasi-satirical writing that is rhetorically conceived for a historical moment or that has a largely historical value to scholars. Although this application has solely concerned deletions, nearly all introduced decades after the work's original publication, these have been treated in the same manner that other kinds of revisions would be handled, as, for instance, additions made shortly after publication. As with all revisions, the editor will use his historical and critical skills to construct a hierarchy of the poet's intentions while composing and revising in order to determine which revisions are compatible with the work's original conception. However, rhetorical and historical circumstances and features are more often central to the conceptions of satires, like Love of Fame, than to those of other kinds of literature. The satirist usually derives his poetic impulse from his participation within the contemporary scene, conceives his work for an audience specific to time and place, and fleshes out its design with topical references. Thus, after intensive historical scholarship, the editor of a satire may well find that later revisions, like certain deletions in Love of Fame and Two Epistles, were responses to historical changes and to new rhetorical circumstances and, so, probably should be denied final authority.

Notes