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Notes
Social Values and Poetic Acts: The Historical Judgment of Literary Work (1988), p. 177. By "post-Greg," I assume McGann acknowledges that this formulation is "different from" that of Greg. See the more extensive discussion in A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (1983), "The Theory of Copy-Text," pp. 24-36. A similar definition is given by Philip Gaskell, From Writer to Reader: Studies in Editorial Method (1978), pp. 4ff.
N. F. Blake, "On Editing the Canterbury Tales," in P. L. Heyworth, ed., Medieval Studies for J. A. W. Bennett (1981), p. 112. See also, N. F. Blake, The Textual Tradition of the Canterbury Tales (1985), p. 168.
W. W. Greg, "The Rationale of Copy-Text," SB, 3 (1950-51), 19-36; rpt. Collected Papers, ed. J. C. Maxwell (1966), pp. 374-391 (my citations are to the reprint). The later attempts to map this distinction onto one between final and original intentions are generally inapplicable to medieval editions; see, however, D. C. Greetham, "Normalisation of Accidentals in Middle English Texts: The Paradox of Thomas Hoccleve, "SB, 28 (1985), 121-150, esp. p. 127 n. 10. Greg's acknowledged point of departure for his discussion is McKerrow's 1904 edition of Nashe and his 1939 Prolegomena for the Oxford Shakespeare (see pp. 378-381).
See, in particular, the review of Gabler's Ulysses by Antony Hammond, The Library, 6th ser., 8 (1986), 382-390, and McGann, Social Values, p. 265, n. 8. The distinction between the abstract copy-text (a text) and the physical printer's copy (a material object) is made by G. Thomas Tanselle, "The Meaning of Copy-Text: A Further Note," SB, 23 (1970), 191-196; see also, "Greg's Theory of Copy-Text and the Editing of American Literature," SB, 28 (1975), 202.
Greg denies that the "English" theory of copy-text (i.e., his own) has any relation to the classical editor's "best text" ("Rationale," p. 375).
See esp. Fredson Bowers, "Greg's 'Rationale of Copy-Text' Revisited," SB, 31 (1978), 90-161, esp. pp. 94-97, outlining some of the different concerns of Greg and editors of modern texts. See further, p. 125: "what impels an editor of later works to concern himself with copy-text is the conviction that the accidentals are an inseparable whole with the substantives in transmitting the author's total meaning." (The Middle English Ormulum is one of few likely exceptions.)
On the term "best," see George Kane, "'Good' and 'Bad' Manuscripts: Texts and Critics," (1986), rpt. Chaucer and Langland: Historical and Textual Approaches (1986), 206-213. The difficulties involved in invoking the word "best" can be seen, e.g., in Skeat, 2: lxvii on the Troilus MS Cl. "This is a beautifully written MS., and one of the best; but it is disappointing to find that it might easily have been much better. The scribe had a still better copy before him, which he has frequently treated with supreme carelessness." Extant MSS are thus by definition worse than imagined ones. See further, 4:xvii: "Of all the MSS., E. is the best in nearly every respect. It not only gives good lines and good sense, but is also (usually) grammatically accurate and thoroughly well spelt." Walter W. Skeat, The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, 7 vols. (1894-1900).
W. W. Greg, The Play of Antichrist from the Chester Cycle (1935), Introduction. Cf. the situation of authorial revision discussed in "Rationale," pp. 389-391. In these cases, a later edition could have presumptive authority on substantives while the copy-text would maintain both chronological and genealogical priority; for Jonson's Sejanus, "it would obviously be possible to take the [earlier] quarto as the copy-text and introduce into it whatever authoritative alterations the [revised] folio may supply" (390).
Exceptions could theoretically exist. If I wished to edit one Canterbury Tales MS (say El) showing particularly how it differed from another (say Hg), I might do a "'single-text" or "best-text" edition of El using Hg as copy-text (for spelling, line references, etc.).
G. Thomas Tanselle, "Classical, Biblical, and Medieval Textual Criticism and Modern Editing," SB, 26 (1983), 50: "Thus what underlies [Greg's] conception of copy-text is the idea of presumptive authority. . . ." On p. 64, Tanselle notes that "the idea of copy-text as presumptive authority" is a "natural extension of Greg's position." Gaskell, From Writer to Reader, p. 5, seems to attribute this position to Greg himself: "[Greg's "Rationale"] argued essentially that the earliest in an ancestral series of printed editions should be chosen as copy-text, and should be followed both in words (which Greg called 'Substantives') and in non-verbal details (. . . 'accidentals'), unless the editor believed that verbal variants from another source had greater authority."
That a copy-text must be a version of the text to be edited seems obvious enough, but there could be situations where this might not be the case, e.g., where a "version" of a text is regarded not as a "variant" but as a different text. The Folio King Lear could easily be edited with the Quarto functioning as copy-text, even by an editor who regards them as representing different plays; see Gary Taylor and Michael Warren, The Division of the Kingdoms: Shakespeare's Two Versions of King Lear (1983). See the distinction by Fredson Bowers, "Regularization and Normalization in Modern Critical Texts," SB, 42 (1989), 79-102, where the two methods of standardizing accidentals are distinguished on the basis of whether the system is taken from a version of the text to be edited (regularization) or from an external system (normalization); only "regularization" would involve the use of a copy-text.
John M. Manly and Edith Rickert, ed., The Text of the Canterbury Tales, 8 vols. (1940). The volumes from the Oklahoma Variorum Edition cited below include Paul G. Ruggiers, ed., Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales: A Facsimile and Transcription of the Hengwrt Manuscript, with Variants from the Ellesmere Manuscript (1979) [hereafter, Hg Facsimile]; Thomas W. Ross, ed., The Miller's Tale (1983); Derek Pearsall, ed., The Nun's Priest's Tale (1984); Donald C. Baker, ed., The Manciple's Tale (1984); Helen Storm Corsa, ed., The Physician's Tale (1987); Beverly Boyd, ed., The Prioress's Tale (1987). Other editions are by N. F. Blake, ed., The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer, Edited from the Hengwrt Manuscript (1980); E. T. Donaldson, ed., Chaucer's Poetry: An Anthology for the Modern Reader (1958); Robert A. Pratt, ed., Geoffrey Chaucer: The Tales of Canterbury (Complete) (1966).
George Kane, "John M. Manly (1865-1940) and Edith Rickert (1871-1938)," in Paul G. Ruggiers, ed., Editing Chaucer: The Great Tradition (1984), pp. 207-229.
For the failure to distinguish different editorial procedures, see, e.g., Ross, "All modern editions have returned to a single manuscript as base-text" (p. 111). This is the lead sentence in a section entitled "Modern Editions" and listing Skeat, Robinson, Manly-Rickert, and Pratt. The different procedures (eclectic, recension, and single-text) are here regarded as the same. (In fairness to the Variorum Editors, only Ross's version of the introduction contains this statement.)
Editor's Preface, Hg Facsimile, p. xii; Donald C. Baker, "Introduction: The Relation of the Hengwrt Manuscript to the Variorum Chaucer Text" flatly calls the Ellesmere MS "the second-best manuscript" (Hg Facsimile, p. xvii).
See further Joseph A. Dane, "The Reception of Chaucer's Eighteenth-Century Editors," Text, 4 (1988), 217-236, on the equally uncritical and often amusing editorial rhetoric regarding the "worst" Chaucer edition.
Florence H. Ridley, rev. Boyd, Speculum, 64 (1989), 684; cf. the more judicious review by A. S. G. Edwards in SAC, 11 (1989), 189-191. See also Baker, "Introduction," Hg Facsimile: "What we are attempting is the difficult task of providing at one time the text which is as near as it is possible to get to what Chaucer must have written (and we believe that for most of the Canterbury Tales it is that of the Hengwrt manuscript—as slightly emended—to a greater extent than that of the Manly-Rickert text)" (p. xviii).
What I call "preliminary lemmata can be based on any text; for the opening of the Canterbury Tales, "When that April with its showers sweet" might be a more economical basis of collation than "When April with its sweet showers"; the preliminary lemmata would differ but the textual-critical results would probably be the same. The lemmata printed in the final edition would differ only if the final line attributed to Chaucer differed. Kane, "Manly and Rickert," pp. 208-209, also criticizes Manly-Rickert's use of Skeat's Student's Edition. Kane's point, however, is that Manly-Rickert do not explain in detail the editorial procedures by which they postulate manuscript groupings, and that Skeat (which contains both original and unoriginal readings) cannot be used as a touchstone to identify "unoriginal" ones.
Cf. Baker, Manciple's Tale, p. 72: "all subsequent editions collated except MR have used El as their copy-text (and usually base-text as well)." Baker then states that Manly-Rickert's "copy-text" is SK (the argument that Manly-Rickert "draw" away from El is of course irrelevant unless SK with its readings from El is Manly-Rickert's "base text"). That Manly-Rickert have no base text is also recognized by Corso, p. 85: "MR is not based on any particular manuscript or manuscripts." The abbreviation SK is misleading; Manly-Rickert chose the Student Skeat (a conveniently packaged, cheap physical object) as a means of collation, not the Oxford Skeat (a cumbersome, expensive scholarly edition).
The section on dialect and spelling is dealing primarily with the value of formal matters in determining MSS groups, as are the three pages dealing with spelling (Dialect and Spelling, 1:545-560; spelling is discussed directly only in pp. 557-560). Manly-Rickert show no great concern with spelling as authorial, a motive force behind Greg's notion of copy-text: "in close groups of MSS there is nothing to show that the spelling system of the lost original was preserved" (1:560).
See the section "The Present Edition" in the various CT volumes of the Variorum. See also, Donaldson, p. v: "I have followed the lead of Manly and Rickert by using Hengwrt as my base." I assume Donaldson means only that he has chosen his base text because of his interpretation of Manly-Rickert's results (not that Manly-Rickert also use such a base text). Since Donaldson normalizes spelling, there is no reason to distinguish a copy-text apart from his base text, Hg.
Blake omits the Canon Yeoman's Tale, not in Hg, an option not reasonably open to the Variorum editors, given the nature of their edition as a base for commentary.
See Blake, Textual Tradition, chap. 3, pp. 44ff.; Blake occasionally misrepresents Manly-Rickert's grouping of MSS (El is assigned to group a, p. 50).
Hg is the ideal witness for this copy, since the Hg scribe "copied only what was in front of him and took no liberties with the text and did not seek to edit the contents" (Textual Tradition, p. 95).
Textual Tradition, pp. 165ff. ("A Matter of Copytexts"): "the hypothesis of a copy-text, which itself was being modified, as the basis of many early manuscripts, appears to be a more satisfactory solution [than Manly-Rickert's groups] to the textual problems of the poem. . . . We may assume, therefore, that there was the basic copytext, which formed the Chaucerian draft copy. . . ." To this copytext were added various glosses and "alternative readings" (p. 168). Blake identifies this text used by various early scribes as "the author's draft" (p. 169).
John H. Fisher, ed., The Complete Poetry and Prose of Geoffrey Chaucer (1977), pp. 966-967 (the section on the text is unchanged in later editions). Fisher's opinion has since changed; see "The Text of Chaucer," Speculum, 63 (1988), 779-793, noting "the excellence of the text of the Hengwrt manuscript in comparison with that of the Ellesmere," its "correctness" and "elegance of its expression" (p. 787). Fisher attributes the modern favoring of Hg over El to "the deconstructive temper of modern criticism" (p. 791). A better explanation might be his own (p. 787) and numerous other Chaucerians' involvement with the Variorum.
Larry D. Benson, ed., The Riverside Chaucer (1987); F. N. Robinson, ed., The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer (2nd ed. 1957).
See the criticism heaped on Robinson by Roy Vance Ramsey, "F. N. Robinson's Editing of the Canterbury Tales," SB, 42 (1989), 134-152. Ramsey's attack on Robinson is by implication criticism of the Riverside, an edition that competes with the Variorum with which Ramsey himself is heavily involved. Ramsey argues that Robinson based his text not as he claims on El but on the previous editions of Skeat and Manly. Ramsey is surely justified in criticizing the celebratory essay by George F. Reinecke, "F. N. Robinson (1872- 1967)," in Editing Chaucer, pp. 231-251. But that an eclectic edition should rely heavily on previous editions should come as no surprise; that Robinson agrees with Skeat (the most respected editor of Chaucer at the time) in cases where their texts diverge from El is to be expected. Ramsey's supporting statistics are difficult to evaluate, and there are occasional errors in his descriptions of them (e.g., p. 141; if the figures in Ramsey's chart are correct, for "129 of 255 cases" read "140 of 255 cases"; the figure 129 is from a different column).
The statement on the next page is slightly different, but the first difference between Robinson and Barney I find is a comma in line 57: "I have been slightly more conservative of Cp's forms than Robinson, but I have generally treated the spelling of the text as he did, altering some odd . . . or misleading . . . spellings of Cp and suppressing (and occasionally adding) final -e in accordance with Chaucer's usage, especially when its pronunciation would affect the meter" (p. 1162).
See Robinson, pp. xxxix-xliv: "throughout all Chaucer's works . . . the spellings of the manuscripts have been corrected for grammatical accuracy and for adjustment of rimes" (p. xxxix); "Skeat's general policy was to normalize both the spelling and the grammar of his text . . ." (p. xli); "in a library edition, like the present one, there seems to be no purpose in preserving two inconsistent systems of orthography. . . . The editor has consequently gone farther than any of his predecessors in removing such scribal, or ungrammatical, -e's" (p. xlii); "the orthography of the Legend and a number of the minor poems has accordingly been freely normalized" (p. xliii). See also the textual notes to LGW by A. S. G. Edwards and M. C. E. Shaner (p. 1179); Prologue F is "normalized," apparently according to Robinson.
B. A. Windeatt, ed., Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus & Criseyde: A New Edition of 'The Book of Troilus' (1984).
See "The Scribal Medium," pp. 25-35; B. A. Windeatt, "The Scribes as Chaucer's Early Critics," SAC, 1 (1979), 119-141; and McGann's notion of a literary work as a social product (Critique, pp. 51-63). Cf. Kane's harsh criticism of Windeatt's evaluation of scribes: "'Good' and 'Bad' Manuscripts," p. 208.
George Kane, ed., Piers Plowman: The A Version (1960, 1988); George Kane and E. Talbot Donaldson, ed., Piers Plowman: The B Version (1975).
Those who emphasize the authority of Kane's procedures seriously misrepresent his methods. Kane establishes principles by which scribes err, and error, by its nature, is not subject to infallibility. Patterson, in his review, however, seems to think it is: "As a system, this edition validates each individual reading in terms of every other reading, which means that if some of the readings are correct, then—unless the editorial principles have in an individual instance been misapplied—they must all be correct"; Lee Patterson, "The Logic of Textual Criticism and the Way of Genius: The Kane-Donaldson Piers Plowman in Historical Perspective," in Jerome J. McGann, ed., Textual Criticism and Literary Interpretation (1985), p. 69. Even disregarding the grim political implications of such reasoning, its logical and scientific invalidity should be noted. I could well apply a rule that every word in Piers was "In" and do so consistently; I would be right in some cases. Cf. Greg's critique of McKerrow that leads off his "Rationale": alterations of a particular exemplar must be "of a piece before we can be called upon to accept them all" (p. 381). But we cannot determine that without testing them individually.
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