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The main purpose of this paper is to ask questions about what an editor owes to the "social contract" when preparing a scholarly edition. A survey of specific issues in editorial debate preceding these questions can be found in Textual Criticism since Greg, A Chronicle, 1950-1985 by G. Thomas Tanselle.[1] In what follows I assume readers to some extent familiar with the history of that debate through the early 1980's as it applies to editing modern works. A historical background is important because various spokespersons for new social theories of textual criticism claim to be proponents of a "new historicism" replacing the principles of New Criticism underlying much textual criticism of the 1960s and 70s.[2] But many spokespersons for traditional historical criticism claim never to have lost track of history and think the new historicism is valid primarily because it returns to old principles, rejecting in the process some of the "aberrations" of recent critical theories, deconstruction particularly, in which history, including the author, seems to have disappeared.
In dealing with the history of textual criticism and the newer ideas, I mention theorists by name occasionally, but I am not trying to survey any particular person's ideas; rather I am attempting to sort out different possible ways of looking at and using evidence in textual criticism—particularly along lines that might be regarded as a social theory of texts. Only God does not need to learn from experience (though my wife points out Eve was made second), and many writers to whom I refer, especially those exploring ideas of social influence, have changed their minds or modified their theories. I daresay they will again. As Morse Peckham has recently observed, "we have after all learned a great deal about something that has turned out to be a more difficult and confusing problem than was originally thought."[3]
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