University of Virginia Library

IV

Bowers's scholarship during the decades of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s was largely devoted to editorial projects. As a result, his career, in retrospect, displays a neat and logical pattern: in the first fifteen years following the war, he worked out basic principles and approaches for bibiographical and textual work and wrote major statements setting them forth; in the thirty years after that (exactly split by his formal retirement from Virginia), he applied those principles to the editing of a broad range of writers from the sixteenth century through the twentieth century. He did, of course, produce significant editions of Dekker and Whitman before 1960, but editorial work bulked far less in his activities of that period than did his writing of general discussions of rationale; after 1960 the proportions were dramatically reversed, for his important theoretical statements of these years—a few essays, not books—were overshadowed by the dozens of edited volumes that emerged from his study. This pattern reflects his temperamental preference for the empirical and critical over the theoretical; it also is a manifestation of his love of literature, of his desire to work closely with great pieces of writing—for critical editing (as he well knew and frequently proclaimed) entails the most minute familiarity with and comprehension of the nuances of the material to be edited.

This new phase of Bowers's career was inaugurated at the very beginning of the 1960s by his association with The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne. The origins of this edition (and of other editions of American authors soon to follow) can be traced back to a Committee on Definitive Editions set up in 1947-48 by the American Literature Group of the Modern Language Association of America (MLA); over the next fifteen years tentative plans for several editions of

major American authors were formulated (and initial research in some cases actually begun). With this stimulus, three American literature scholars at Ohio State University—William Charvat, Roy Harvey Pearce, and Claude M. Simpson—took on the responsibility for Hawthorne and invited Bowers to become the "Textual Editor" of the new edition. (A link between this group and Bowers was Matthew J. Bruccoli, who in 1961 had just completed his dissertation under Bowers's direction and taken a job in the English department at Ohio State and who then became Bowers's assistant on the Hawthorne project.) By agreeing to undertake the Hawthorne work, Bowers initiated a new era in the editing of writings of recent times, for his presence (and, in short order, his practice) announced to the scholarly world that the editing of nineteenth-century literature required the same rigorous bibliographical investigations as did the literature of the hand-press period.

In 1962, with remarkable promptness, the first volume of the Hawthorne edition appeared, containing The Scarlet Letter, and this volume soon became the same kind of landmark for the editing of modern literature that the first volume of the Dekker edition was for the editing of Renaissance literature. In its editorial rationale and its presentation of apparatus, it set a pattern that strongly influenced the work of a whole generation of editors. The approach was essentially the same as that of the Dekker edition, but Bowers made a full new presentation of the case in a nineteen-page essay, "A Preface to the Text" (designed to be supplemented, as the general textual essay in the Dekker was, by separate textual introductions to individual works). At the beginning he stated that the text of the edition was "a critical unmodernized reconstruction"—a phrase with momentous implications, for it indicated that, even for nineteenth-century literature, the retention of authorial forms of spelling and punctuation was an issue and the production of a reliable text necessitated the critical activity of emendation (drawing readings from various documentary texts and from the editor's own mind). That the aim of the "reconstruction" was an authorially intended text became clear in a later restatement of the "purpose" of the edition: "to establish the text in as close a form, in all details, to Hawthorne's final intentions as the preserved documents of each separate work permit"—by "synthesizing the evidence of all manuscripts and authoritative printed editions" (pp. xxxv-xxxvi).

According to this "Preface," after the documentary variants had been recorded and the relationship among the documents determined, the "editorial procedure"—in instances where a final manuscript does not survive—"follows the principles laid down by Sir Walter Greg"

(p. xxxiii). In some cases, however, Hawthorne's final manuscripts do survive, and the principal difference between applying Greg's "Rationale" to Dekker and using it for Hawthorne lies in determining how to treat those manuscripts, since Greg had addressed himself to situations in which the only authoritative texts were printed. Because Greg's choice of a first or early edition as copy-text was based on its proximity to a final manuscript and because one class of emendations to such a copy-text was meant to eliminate printing-house alterations of manuscript readings, Bowers reasoned that when a final manuscript survives it should be the copy-text. Although Hawthorne in some sense accepted (or expected) printers' or publishers' alterations, he did not, in Bowers's view, actively authorize them, and they sometimes had a "cumulative effect on Hawthorne's own modes of expression" that was "very serious indeed." Thus "the printing-house style imposed on the authoritative manuscript has been rejected" (p. xxxiv). This decision was a perfectly logical extension of Greg's line of reasoning, and it was accepted by many editors that followed. But it also became one of the most controversial decisions Bowers ever made, for not everyone agreed that Greg's line of reasoning was the most desirable one, and opposition to it gradually developed from two positions: that authors did "intend" the changes they authorized others to make (sometimes tacitly), and that uninfluenced authorial intention is less important than the combined intentions of all those responsible for bringing a work to the public. These positions deserve respect as alternative approaches, and they certainly merited more discussion than they had received at the time Bowers wrote, but they do not invalidate Bowers's reasoning: he was carrying to its logical conclusion an interest in literary works as the products of individual creative minds.

The other most influential aspect of the Hawthorne edition was its treatment of apparatus. Just as the Dekker edition set a new style in apparatus for Renaissance drama, so the Hawthorne edition provided a model (adapted from the Dekker) in a field that had no established tradition. The annotation, as in the Dekker, was limited to textual matters, but—unlike the Dekker—the pages of text were kept free of all annotation. At the back of the volume there were—in addition to discursive textual notes—four kinds of lists: variants within and between the first and second editions, editorial emendations to the copy-text, substantive variants in the collated editions ("historical collation"), and line-end word-division. The first of these was of course not always necessary (and when a manuscript existed, another list was needed to record revisions present in it); but the other three lists were standard

for succeeding volumes of the Hawthorne edition and (with minor variations in conception and form) for many later editions, edited both by Bowers and by others. The section on word-division was a notable innovation, addressing a textual problem that had apparently never been thought about before, given the lack of serious attention formerly paid to the editing of prose. Line-end hyphens in some words pose a problem for editors, who must decide whether to retain them, and readers of the new text in a scholarly edition similarly need to know whether to retain certain hyphens in making quotations; the word-division lists were Bowers's response to these previously unasked (but obviously logical) questions. Furthermore, his concern for recording editorial decisions about hyphens followed from a cardinal rule of his (expressed emphatically in the "Preface"): that, except for features of the layout and design of the copy-text document, all editorial departures from the copy-text must be reported, so that "the interested reader at any point can reconstruct the copy-text" (p. xxxviii).

In the same year as his edition of The Scarlet Letter, Bowers generalized on his experiences thus far in editing Hawthorne for a paper he delivered at the South Atlantic Modern Language Association meeting (22 November 1962). Entitled "Some Principles for Scholarly Editions of Nineteenth-Century American Authors," it made the same points as the Hawthorne preface, arguing the applicability of Greg's approach to a period in which books were routinely plated (and from which authors' manuscripts frequently survive) and advocating the kind of apparatus he was using in the Hawthorne edition, separating the listing of emendations from the historical record of variants. It was clearly a call to action, asking scholars of American literature to "bring to their task the careful effort that has been established as necessary for English Renaissance texts." Because of this paper, Bowers is properly to be regarded as the architect of the great coordinated effort to edit American literature that soon followed. But before this paper was published (in Studies in Bibliography in early 1964, causing the Times Literary Supplement on 14 May to recognize that Bowers's "conclusions apply equally to English authors"), another basic essay of his, one that was given far greater exposure, appeared. James Thorpe had asked Bowers to write an introductory exposition of textual criticism for a pamphlet commissioned by the MLA on The Aims and Methods of Scholarship in Modern Languages and Literatures; this pamphlet came out in 1963, and Bowers's essay thus became the most accessible and comprehensive statement of the applicability of Greg's "Rationale" to all periods of modern English, with examples drawn from Shakespeare, Dekker, Dryden,

Fielding, Sheridan, Shelley, Hawthorne, Whitman, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Sinclair Lewis, among others. By 1970 (when a revised edition of the pamphlet was published, including Bowers's expansion of his essay to incorporate examples from Stephen Crane), there were 30,000 copies of the pamphlet in print, and 15,000 more of the second edition were sold; Bowers's ideas on editing undoubtedly reached their largest audience through this essay. Two of its phrases, indeed, became bywords in the ensuing editorial debates: "inferential authorial fair copy," a compact way of stating what text, in Bowers's view, the critical editor was striving to reconstruct; and "all his [the editor's] textual cards on the table—face up" (the final words of the essay), an attempt to emphasize the importance of a comprehensive apparatus.

It was also in 1963 (following two Conferences on Editions of American Authors in June and October 1962) that the MLA set up the Center for Editions of American Authors (CEAA) as a standing committee (directed by William M. Gibson) to coordinate the various editorial projects then being formed; its functions were primarily to establish editorial standards for participating editions and (after 1966) to allocate National Endowment funds. Its editorial standards, as published in a Statement of Editorial Principles (1967), were the ones Bowers had already outlined; and this Statement, with the subtitle A Working Manual for Editing Nineteenth-Century American Texts, became another means by which Bowers's extension of Greg's ideas was given wide circulation. A great burgeoning of American editorial activity followed: by 1972, when a revision of the Statement appeared, fourteen editorial projects were involved and seventy-five volumes had been published (and over the ensuing two decades the number of projects doubled and the total number of volumes more than tripled). Bowers was never a member of the CEAA committee (or its successor, the Committee on Scholarly Editions), but his approach was the acknowledged foundation of the whole enterprise, and his advice played a role in the operation of the CEAA, especially during Matthew Bruccoli's directorship (1969-76).

As Bowers's work on successive volumes of the Hawthorne edition progressed, he gave increasing amounts of time to several other editorial projects that he had taken on. The most limited was a 1963 paperback edition of The Merry Wives of Windsor for Alfred Harbage's Pelican Shakespeare series (it was gathered six years later into the one-volume Penguin Complete Works). This was the only edition of Shakespeare Bowers ever published—though a decade later he made substantial progress on the texts of I Henry IV and All's Well That Ends Well

for a projected South Carolina edition (and at the end of his life he was in correspondence with Cambridge University Press about undertaking Othello for a series devoted to the Shakespeare quartos). The Pelican Merry Wives presented (by the dictates of the series) a modernized text and a three-page introductory essay not concerned with textual matters (which A. L. Rowse, in a letter to Bowers in August 1982, called "the best thing written about it"); but Bowers did include an appendix discussing the quarto and folio texts, with a list of his departures from the folio.

For Cambridge University Press he was serving as general editor of The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon, a series of volumes he had proposed in 1960, with individual plays assigned to separate editors—Bowers himself (he edited at least one play in every volume), L. A. Beaurline, and four of Bowers's former students who had written relevant dissertations in the 1950s, Irby B. Cauthen, Jr., Cyrus Hoy, Robert K. Turner, Jr., and George Walton Williams. (Later Hans Walter Gabler was added to the list of editors.) Each play was handled "according to editorial procedures set by the general editor and under his close supervision in matters of substance as well as of detail," in the words of the foreword to the first volume, which was completed at the beginning of 1965 and appeared in 1966. Bowers's sixteen-page general textual introduction held no novelties for anyone accustomed to his style of edition: it provided a clear statement of what editing in accord with Greg's "Rationale" meant and described an apparatus like the Dekker, with substantive emendations in footnotes and the rest of the textual record at the end. (A difference from the Dekker, however, was the silent modernization of the Elizabethan use of i, u, and v.) The assiduity of the search for press variants was suggested by Bowers's assertion that collation of quarto copy-texts included "all copies in the great libraries of Great Britain and the United States."

Whereas the Beaumont-Fletcher was an ongoing project, which in fact extended to the end of Bowers's life, another editorial undertaking of the mid-1960s, a two-volume selection of Dryden's plays edited in collaboration with L. A. Beaurline, was completed for 1967 publication. These volumes, John Dryden: Four Tragedies and John Dryden: Four Comedies, were published by the University of Chicago Press as part of the "Curtain Playwrights" series, established by Bowers and R. C. Bald to make available, in convenient format, selected works by English dramatists before 1700. Each volume contained a single-page explanation of textual policy, referring the reader to the Beaumont-Fletcher

edition for fuller discussion; the texts of this self-styled "reading edition" were established with the same thoroughness as those of Beaumont and Fletcher, but the simplicity of the textual histories (except for The Indian Emperour) led to the decision to limit the apparatus to emendations and stop-press variants. The editorial problem for The Indian Emperour was whether to choose the 1665 Trinity manuscript (not in Dryden's hand) or the first quarto of 1667 as the copy-text. Bowers chose the manuscript on the grounds that it preserved more of the archaic spellings present in the surviving early holograph letters of Dryden, features that were modernized by the compositors of the 1667 edition. The play had just appeared (1966) in the California edition of Dryden's works, where Vinton Dearing (who believed in the same editorial goals as Bowers) had chosen the quarto as copy-text; Phillip Harth, in a remarkable review in Modern Philology (1970), concluded (on the basis of his independent investigation of the evidence) that Bowers's choice was the proper one to retain as many of Dryden's own spellings as possible. Bowers was naturally pleased by Harth's conclusion, but he must also have taken satisfaction in Harth's notice of his long attention to Dryden, going back to a 1949 article on variants in the plays and the historic 1950 article on copy-text: Harth pointed out that "Bowers has become a unique authority on the textual aspects of Dryden's plays" and that the Chicago edition "offers a fitting climax to these studies."

Still another editorial project with which Bowers had become associated by the mid-1960s was The Wesleyan Edition of the Works of Henry Fielding under the executive editorship of W. B. Coley—a particularly pleasant undertaking for him because it allowed him to work with his Virginia colleague and good friend Martin C. Battestin. He agreed to serve as General Textual Editor, setting up the textual policy and writing textual introductions and bibliographical descriptions. (In this edition, there was to be only one textual essay in each volume, combining an exposition of the general textual principles with an account of the textual histories of the works in the volume.) The Fielding edition had individual volume editors, and Bowers accepted the additional task of editing the text for the Tom Jones volumes. The first volume of the series, Battestin's edition of Joseph Andrews, came out in 1967, and in 1972 Henry Knight Miller's edition of the first volume of Miscellanies was published, both with Bowers's textual introductions, representing his first detailed consideration of the editing of eighteenth-century texts. His own edition of Tom Jones (completed in 1971) appeared in 1974 in two volumes, with a historical introduction and commentary by Battestin;

Coley's edition of The Jacobite's Journal and Related Writings was also published in 1974, and Battestin's Amelia and Malvin R. Zirker's An Enquiry into the Late Increase of Robbers followed in 1983 and 1988, all three volumes again containing Bowers's textual essays.

In the Tom Jones volumes, Bowers's textual introduction provided a notable example of the place of bibliographical analysis in determining textual history. Whereas earlier editors had relied on the text of the third or fourth edition, Bowers showed that the striking variants in the third edition were limited to one bibliographical unit and that Fielding's revisions in the fourth edition were mixed with unauthoritative readings repeated from the third. In this situation, he said, "Greg's classic theory of copy-text must hold" (p. lxx), with the first edition carrying the authority for punctuation and spelling and the fourth providing many authoritative emendations of wording. Bowers firmly rejected the idea that, in marking up the third edition for the printer, Fielding sanctioned any third-edition readings not explicitly revised: "The day has long since passed when anyone could seriously argue that these had been 'approved' by Fielding since he failed to alter them back to the first-edition readings" (p. lxxi). (Although Bowers's position is entirely logical, given his concept of authorial intention, the day is by no means "passed" when the contrary argument may be heard.) Bowers's now famous handling of Fielding's revisions in the Man-of-the-Hill section (rejecting what were thought to be third-edition revisions not carried into the fourth) rested not only on bibliographical evidence but also on a large element of critical judgment—which Bowers, as always, was eager to acknowledge. Separating the authorial from the non-authorial readings of the fourth edition, he said, "is a critical process almost exclusively in which the editor shoulders his proper responsibility" (p. lxxi). Shortly after the publication of Bowers's edition, Hugh Amory disclosed evidence, found in a Harvard copy of the first edition of Tom Jones, leading to the conclusion that the Man-of-the-Hill story had been revised during the printing of the first edition and that the text of it in the third edition was actually the original (canceled) version (see Harvard Library Bulletin, 1977). Although this inference results in a textual history at variance with the one drawn by Bowers (who took Amory's findings into account in the 1977 paperback reprint of his edition and the 1985 Modern Library reprint), Amory acknowledged that Bowers "has settled the bulk of the edifice." Bowers's textual essay on Tom Jones remains a fascinating demonstration of his mastery in handling complicated textual situations.

While involved with work on all these editions, Bowers was generous of his time in encouraging and advising other editors. The most important instance of his direct role in an edition for which he did not edit any individual texts is his association with the John Dewey edition. In June 1965 Jo Ann Boydston, who was to become director of the Center for Dewey Studies at Southern Illinois University, asked Bowers for assistance in formulating an editorial rationale for a complete edition of Dewey's writings. Since 1961 she had been assembling the materials for editing and studying Dewey's life and works, and by 1965 she had decided that any serious editing of Dewey's texts should be conducted in conformity with the new textual approaches to American literature then receiving considerable publicity. ("I had had an almost mystical, not to say religious, experience upon first reading Bowers [in the MLA pamphlet]," she said in a 1984 article in Scholarly Publishing.) Bowers readily agreed to visit Carbondale (characteristically adding that there would be time for him to give a Shakespeare lecture, if one were desired), soon accepted the position of Consulting Textual Editor for the edition, and in April 1966 wrote a ten-page essay, "Textual Principles and Procedures," for inclusion in the published volumes. Bowers and Boydston worked well together, and their collaboration is important in editorial history in two ways: it marked the entry of Greg-Bowers editing into the field of twentieth-century writings, and it also resulted in the first application of this approach to the work of a philosopher (as Boydston noted in her preface to the 1967 volume, Psychology, which was designated Volume 2 of the series but was the first to appear).

What Bowers's consultative role entailed, after the initial planning, was described in a letter he wrote to the editor of the Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America in 1974: "Occasionally she may consult me about the import of the evidence for complex textual transmission and the effect of the transmission on the choice of copy-text and its treatment, and I am likely to read over her textual introductions and notes to see if I have any suggestions about the presentation of the problems treated there." (Boydston herself believes that Bowers understated his contribution here.) Bowers's textual essay for the Dewey edition was a cogent explanation of critical editing and its relevance to twentieth-century texts, and it was addressed (rightly) to an audience unfamiliar with bibliographical analysis, as this passage shows:

The preference for manuscripts over printed editions as copy-texts, argued in the Hawthorne edition, was set forth with particular emphasis here: By addressing the text of Dewey in the same way he had approached the texts of literary figures from earlier centuries, Bowers was publicizing an important point (one that Boydston obviously had in mind in seeking Bowers's help): that all verbal works, whether "literary" or not, require the same kind of textual investigation if readers are interested in having texts as intended by their authors. The association with Boydston afforded Bowers great satisfaction: as he wrote her on 29 March 1985, "It has always given me pleasure that we have had such a happy relationship, always with a meeting of minds."

By the end of the 1960s, with the Hawthorne and the Beaumont-Fletcher series still in progress, Bowers had embarked on a third multivolume edition, The University of Virginia Edition of the Works of Stephen Crane, two volumes of which reached publication in 1969. What constituted a "Bowers edition" was well known in textual circles by this time, and the nineteen-page essay on "The Text of the Virginia Edition" in the first volume (Bowery Tales) carried no real surprises (with many passages, indeed, repeated verbatim from the Hawthorne textual essay)—though a few more unreported alterations were allowed here. One point of considerable theoretical interest did emerge in the essay, but it was mentioned so unobtrusively that most readers probably did not recognize its importance. At the end of a paragraph, Bowers stated that "an editor may be bolder in experimental mixing of the accidentals in two substantive texts when they radiate from a lost archetype than when, as in a revised edition, one derives from another" (p. xvi). Then, near the end of a long footnote to this sentence, he observed, "Radiation is also found in various newspaper articles and sketches that would have been set by various compositors from proof copy furnished by Crane's syndicate employer."

Bowers had to give further thought to this matter when he came to

concentrate on Crane's stories and reports that were syndicated in newspapers. He recognized that, in the absence of the master proof sent out by the syndicate office, no one of the newspaper appearances carried more authority than the others, since all of them "radiated" from the lost proof and stood in the same relation to it. The editor therefore could do nothing but conflate the radiating versions (generally adopting the variants that appear in the largest number of witnesses), in an attempt to reconstruct the text of the lost proof. Since in this procedure no one of the surviving texts would be serving as a "copy-text" in Greg's sense, Bowers's thinking on the matter offered a supplement to Greg's "Rationale," covering a situation that Greg did not deal with. Bowers explored the subject in a brief paper at the December 1971 MLA convention in Chicago and expanded his treatment greatly for publication in The Library the following June as "Multiple Authority: New Problems and Concepts of Copy-Text" (having in the meantime read a shortened version of the final paper before the Bibliographical Society in London on 18 April). This magisterial essay—which examined the concept of "copy-text" in detail and explained why "Greg's linear-derived rationale" was "inappropriate" for instances of "immediate and equidistant" radiation—is one of the half-dozen most important essays of Bowers's last thirty years. Although Bowers was the person responsible for the influence of Greg's "Rationale," he was not hesitant to expose areas that Greg had not considered.

In the 1970s Bowers added three more editions to the already burdensome roster of his projects (in addition to a 1973 two-volume facsimile edition—the first facsimile to receive a CEAA seal of approval—of the manuscript of The Red Badge of Courage, with a fifty-page analytical essay and extensive apparatus, for the Bruccoli Clark imprint of NCR/Microcard Editions). The first was The Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe in two volumes (1973) for Cambridge University Press (the publisher of the Dekker and the Beaumont-Fletcher as well). A four-page preface to the Marlowe (dated 15 July 1971) replaced the usual introductory essay on textual principles because the "editing of critical old-spelling Elizabethan texts seems to have been sufficiently codified as not to require here an extended description." It was "codified," of course, by Bowers himself, and the "concerned reader" was referred to the textual introduction in the Beaumont-Fletcher edition. Tackling Marlowe took Bowers into territory already explored by Greg, for one of Greg's major books was his parallel-text edition of Doctor Faustus (which Bowers, in a 1952 review in Modern Philology, called a "really

unique scholarly achievement," emerging from a task that "could have been undertaken so successfully by no other living scholar"). Bowers stated that the "one novelty" in his own edition was his investigation of the "notorious problem of Doctor Faustus." In an article (SB, 1973) published just before the edition came out, as well as in the edition itself, Bowers effectively questioned Greg's argument that the additional passages in the 1616 text (those not in the 1604) reflected Marlowe's original manuscript rather than the extra stage material paid for by Henslowe. Yet in the end Bowers accepted as a fact Greg's idea that the 1604 was a "memorial reconstruction," and he therefore, though with some reluctance, followed Greg in using the 1616 as copy-text—a decision now generally regarded as unwise. (At the end of the decade Bowers revised the Marlowe for 1981 publication, recollating all copy-texts, reconsidering all emendations and potential emendations, and augmenting the historical record, but not switching copy-texts.)

The second new edition Bowers embarked on in the 1970s was The Works of William James (on which his concentrated work began in January 1974). As the first unit in the American Council of Learned Societies' long-term plan to sponsor editions of major American philosophers, the edition was organized by Frederick H. Burkhardt, the general editor, for publication by Harvard University Press, with support for editorial costs from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Bowers had sole responsibility for establishing the texts of all James's writings (except the letters, for which he was "Consulting Textual Editor") and for seeing them through the press, an enormous task that eventually resulted in the publication of nineteen volumes (the largest of all Bowers's editions, with the most extensive textual apparatus, and the edition that he believed represented his best work). His general textual essay for the James, "A Note on Editorial Method," as it appeared in the first volume, Pragmatism (1975), was relatively brief (seven pages), but it contained two points of particular interest. The first was its discussion of copy-text. For those writings of James that appeared first in periodicals and were then collected in book form, James often allowed the magazine editors' styling of punctuation to stand for initial publication but was "more seriously concerned with the forms of certain of his accidentals" when marking magazine sheets and galleys for book publication. In such instances, Bowers suggested, the book texts contain the more authoritative punctuation and should be chosen as copy-texts, even though they are two steps removed from the manuscripts. The usual statement of preference for the text closest to a missing manuscript is here replaced with the explanation that the

choice of copy-text "will vary according to the circumstances of 'accidental' authority as superior either in the early or in the late and revised forms of the text" (p. 180). Despite what some people believe, this approach does not contradict Greg, who never claimed that a first edition should be selected as copy-text when there is evidence of an author's careful attention to the accidentals of a later edition; more important, Bowers's handling of the James texts showed his flexibility and openmindedness in meeting new situations and his readiness to modify a long-standing procedure under differing circumstances.

Another innovation in the James edition was the manner of recording manuscript alterations. Because James's numerous manuscripts generally contain extensive revisions, Bowers felt the need to construct a concise system for recording the intricacies of these revisions. In the textual essay he said only that "special provision" had been made "for the analysis and description of every variant between the initial inscription and the final revision within each manuscript"; but in the headnote to the list of manuscript alterations he outlined his system, and he explained it fully in one of his major late essays, a fifty-page article published in the 1976 Studies, "Transcription of Manuscripts: The Record of Variants." One may lament the substitution of the complexities of this system for the simple straightforward approach used in the Hawthorne edition; but Bowers's mind delighted in working out schemes for recording data (as in the Principles), and a number of editors have since found the system helpful. The wealth of material preserving James's revisions—which gave rise to the development of this system in the first place—was emphasized at the end of Bowers's essay. Of "equal ultimate importance" with the established text, he believed, were "the apparatuses and appendixes devoted to the facts about the progress of James's thought from its earliest known beginnings to final publication in journal and book, and continuing to annotation in his private copies"—"this living historical record of the development of James's philosophical ideas and their expression" (pp. 182-183). (This point was repeated emphatically in a lecture on "Editing a Philosopher: The Works of William James" given by Bowers at the University of South Carolina on 25 October 1978 and at Northern Illinois University on 19 March 1979 and then expanded into an article for Analytical & Enumerative Bibliography in 1980.) Bowers was struck by the copiousness of the genetic record, which he had not encountered in his work on other editions, and he knew that most readers (including professional scholars) were unaccustomed to extracting a "living" story from apparatuses.

The final multi-volume edition that Bowers undertook was of the

lectures of Vladimir Nabokov. This opportunity came his way through Matthew Bruccoli, who proposed the edition to Bowers in 1978 and planned to publish the lectures under the Bruccoli Clark imprint of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. With this project, Bowers was given a new editorial challenge: to fashion smooth reading texts out of lecture notes existing "in very different states of preparation and polish, and even of completed structure"—as he put it in the foreword to Lectures on Literature, published in 1980. Bowers felt that "it would be impractical to offer these manuscripts to the reading public in verbatim form," and his approach was to incorporate any disconnected comments (including those from the margins of the books Nabokov used as teaching copies) at appropriate places, creating bridging phrases where necessary but reproducing Nabokov's own wording "with fidelity." Although Bowers could exercise a creative freedom here that he would not have considered appropriate in his other editions, he no doubt saw the task as similar to the others in an important way: he was still in the position of judging how far to alter the documentary record in an attempt to produce a text that better reflected the writer's intentions. His respect for Nabokov was evident throughout his comments, and he was under no illusion that his text represented "what would have been Nabokov's language and syntax if he had himself worked them up in book form"; but it was, he could be sure, closer to what Nabokov said in class than a literal transcription of the notes. Two more volumes came out in quick succession (belying the difficulty of the task), Lectures on Russian Literature in 1981 and Lectures on Don Quixote in 1983. (The Nabokov editions have since been translated into French, Italian, Spanish, and German.)

During the rest of the 1980s Bowers took on no new editions (except, with his wife, an edition of the transcripts of their friend Leon Kroll's oral memoir, recorded in 1956-57 by the Columbia University Oral History Research Office), though he did assist Matthew J. Bruccoli in working out a detailed editorial plan for the Cambridge University Press edition of F. Scott Fitzgerald (and was named as "Textual Consultant" on the title page when the first volume, The Great Gatsby, appeared in 1991). What he concentrated on in the late 1980s was finishing the James and Beaumont-Fletcher editions. The James, indeed, had been his primary ongoing project since the mid-1970s, for he had published the last of his ten Hawthorne volumes in 1974 (he was not involved in the notebooks and letters) and the last of the ten Crane volumes in 1976. Once the James was completed, the Beaumont-Fletcher was his only unfinished editorial project; he had seen two volumes through the press in 1985 and 1989, and in his final years he completed

most of his work for the three remaining volumes (the first of which appeared a year after his death).

His phenomenal production of editions resulted in a total of sixty volumes between 1960 and his death (not counting revised reprints or the two 1987 anthologies he edited—on Elizabethan and Jacobean-Caroline drama—for the Dictionary of Literary Biography), with at least one volume appearing every year from 1961 through 1989:

• 1961 Dekker 4 [i.e., volume 4]
• 1962 Hawthorne 1
• 1963 Pelican Merry Wives of Windsor
• 1964 Hawthorne 3
• 1965 Hawthorne 2
• 1966 Beaumont-Fletcher 1
• 1967 Dryden (2 vols.)
• 1968 Hawthorne 4
• 1969 Crane 1, 7
• 1970 Beaumont-Fletcher 2; Crane 5, 6; Hawthorne 5
• 1971 Crane 4, 9
• 1972 Hawthorne 6, 7
• 1973 Crane 8; Crane facsimile (2 vols.); Marlowe (2 vols.)
• 1974 Fielding, Tom Jones (2 vols.); Hawthorne 9, 10, 11
• 1975 Crane 2, 10; James [1], [2]
• 1976 Beaumont-Fletcher 3; Crane 3; James [3]
• 1977 James [4]
• 1978 James [5]
• 1979 Beaumont-Fletcher 4; James [6], [7]
• 1980 Nabokov [1]
• 1981 James [8] (3 vols.); Nabokov [2]
• 1982 Beaumont-Fletcher 5; James [9]
• 1983 James [10], [11]; Kroll; Nabokov [3]
• 1984 James [12]
• 1985 Beaumont-Fletcher 6; James [13]
• 1986 James [14]
• 1987 James [15]
• 1988 James [16], [17]
• 1989 Beaumont-Fletcher 7

Anyone who understands how time-consuming the procedures of scholarly editing are will find this record amazing—and all the more so in view of the other activities in which Bowers was simultaneously engaged, especially in the 1960s. His energy and intelligence repeatedly produced path-breaking editions, illustrating the imaginative handling of a great variety of textual situations and leaving their mark on the future study of authors from five centuries.

The story of the reception of Bowers's editions is a fascinating index of the shifting issues that confronted editors—and, indeed, all literary scholars—in the last thirty years of Bowers's life. His voluminous and steady output of editions during this time meant that he was always being reviewed, both in popular and in scholarly journals. Furthermore, other scholars in greater numbers were producing editions as well: it was an age of editing, shaped in many ways by Bowers's own activities. Because his presence was so strongly felt, any review of any edition might well refer to "the Bowers school" or "the Bowers type of edition" even if it did not engage in some discussion of the merits or demerits of Bowers's approach. Practically everything that has been written since 1960 about the scholarly editing of writings in English (and more recently about writings in other modern languages) has commented in one way or another on Bowers's work. Whether or not he is explicitly mentioned, his principles or the results of his influence are inevitably a significant part of the subject.

Bowers's editions and the position they represent have been accorded a great deal of praise, and a great deal of criticism as well. They have been controversial, at first because they were innovative and later because—such was the growth of his stature—they seemed traditional. Some of the praise his editions have received has in fact been meaningless, for many reviewers of editions—even in academic journals—do not know how to evaluate editorial scholarship; and after commenting on the literary work that has been edited, they may add a sentence or two of perfunctory praise for the labor involved in what they regard, all too often, as a mechanical task. (Bowers wrote to David Vander Meulen on 12 November 1985, "When I was young I used to feel outrage myself at reviews that were praising but ignorant and missed the point of what I was trying to do.") Similarly, some of the criticisms of Bowers's approach cannot be taken seriously, for they spring from personal biases rather than from an open-minded engagement with the issues. The most famous instance is probably Edmund Wilson's article "The Fruits of the MLA," published in the New York Review of Books on 26 September and 10 October 1968 and then as a pamphlet. In the course of this incoherent attack on the whole CEAA enterprise, he focused briefly on Bowers:

Although nothing could be farther from the truth than the claim that Bowers did not have a love of literature, the main points to be made about Wilson's discussion are, first, that it gave no evidence of serious thought about the central issues of scholarly editing and, second, that it was clearly motivated by anger—over the decision of the National Endowment for the Humanities to favor the MLA editorial project rather than his own scheme for a series of American classics similar to the French Pléiade volumes.

It is perhaps not surprising that Bowers's emphatic manner, coupled with the official sanction his position had received from the MLA, would automatically trigger some resistance. The very idea of an institutional committee (the CEAA) that inspected scholars' work and decided whether to award it an emblem of approval was anathema to some people, who as a result could not evaluate objectively the standards involved. They were likely to say that no one standard could be appropriate for all situations—without having examined Greg's rationale carefully enough to see that it was not a restrictive "standard" but a framework useful for thinking about textual problems. His rationale did assume that the goal of editing was the establishment of an authorially intended text; but for those who agreed with that goal, it did not place restrictions on individual judgment. A considerable number of reviews and articles, however, did raise serious issues (one of which was indeed whether authorial intention was an appropriate goal). They were not always coherently argued, but taken together they constituted an unprecedented outpouring of debate on the textual criticism of post-medieval literature. And Bowers's editing was always at the center of the discussion.

On 29 December 1959 at the MLA convention in Chicago, Leo Kirschbaum issued an attack on "the Bowers school" that foreshadowed some prominent strands in the debates of the following decades. One of his charges was that Bowers and his followers treated plays as literature for reading, with "no sense of the theatre": "One would think that there had never existed a theatre in Virginia, that no one in Charlottesville had ever seen a play," and so on. A playwright's final manuscript, which Bowers aspired to reconstruct, did not, in Kirschbaum's view, represent

a final intention, since the play had not at that point undergone the process of staging. "It is incumbent on a modern editor," he said, "to present a text in terms of the Elizabethan playhouse." (When Samuel Schoenbaum printed Kirschbaum's paper in the fifth number [1959-60] of Opportunities for Research in Renaissance Drama, Bowers wrote to him in protest, particularly of Kirschbaum's tone; but when Schoenbaum replied that his policy was to print the papers that had in fact been read at the MLA Renaissance Drama Conference Group meeting, Bowers immediately conceded the justice of Schoenbaum's position.) This particular point of Kirschbaum's was actually a questioning of the supremacy of uninfluenced authorial intention; in pointing out that what a playwright wrote "could not have been sacrosanct under the pressure of actual theatrical demands," he was saying that drama is unavoidably a collaborative effort and that the collaborative result is what we should be interested in. Although the intentions of authors as individuals had been the focus of textual criticism since antiquity, a growing doubt about the emphasis on individuals has been a mark of recent decades.

Drama obviously raises the issue in acute form, but it has been raised in connection with all kinds of writing. Morse Peckham, for instance, in a 1971 essay in Proof entitled "Reflections on the Foundations of Modern Textual Editing," argued that it is "pure hagiolatry" to focus on authorial intention rather than on the passage of a text through an endless series of encounters with individuals. (Peckham appended a note to his essay, declaring that "Nothing in this paper should be construed as an attack on Professor Bowers. As a hagiolator myself, I have a tendency to canonize great scholars. . . . As a man of achievement and as a human being built on the grand scale, he is necessarily the object of the free-floating resentment which seems to be more prevalent in the academic world than elsewhere.") James Thorpe (Principles of Textual Criticism, 1972) and Philip Gaskell (From Writer to Reader, 1978), among others, tended to believe that authorially intended punctuation was in fact likely to be honored by choosing first editions (containing changes expected by authors) rather than manuscripts as copy-texts. By the 1980s a "social" approach to textual criticism, emphasizing the collaborative nature of the publication process and the influence of book design on readers, had become a prominent alternative to what was perceived as the Greg-Bowers orthodoxy of authorial intention. The leading statements of this position were Jerome J. McGann's A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (1983) and D. F. McKenzie's Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (1986), both of which—to use McGann's

phrasing—conceived of "the process of literary production" as "far more socialized" than Bowers did. The specific application to drama—in a much more thoughtful way than Kirschbaum's—came in T. H. Howard-Hill's "Modern Textual Theories and the Editing of Plays" (The Library, 1989); but his argument, like the others', suggested that a concern with uninfluenced authorial intention was wrong, rather than recognizing that it and the social approach were two alternative routes to the past that must always be with us.

Another complaint of Kirschbaum's 1959 paper was what he perceived as Bowers's "Platonic bias," the view that "some place, somewhere, a substantive text has existed, exists, or will exist." This criticism was an attempt to deal with the fact that authors revise their works and that there may be distinct versions of their works embodying different "final" intentions. Greg and Bowers both understood that some acts of revision produce what are in effect new works, demanding separate treatment; but Bowers did not find, in the authors he edited, any instances of revision that precluded his focusing on a single final intention. The eclecticism involved in his constructing single intended texts from multiple documentary witnesses was criticized—often indirectly—from more than one point of view. The most basic was the belief that versions of works (including early drafts) deserved to be studied in their own right and that the proper emphasis for textual study was on development rather than stasis. A genetic school of textual criticism became prominent in France and Germany and was increasingly recognized in English-speaking countries through Bowers's openness to diverse points of view in his own journal, Studies in Bibliography (which published Hans Zeller in 1975 and Louis Hay, Klaus Hurlebusch, Gerhard Neumann, and Siegfried Scheibe in 1988). A related movement in English literary study was most prominently represented by a group of scholars who advocated the printing of discrete versions of certain Shakespearean plays (as in the 1983 anthology The Division of the Kingdoms, edited by Gary Taylor and Michael Warren). Although these various studies did not usually make Bowers a specific target, their general tendency was to cast doubt on approaches that elevated final authorial intention over the multiple intentions reflected in successive revisions.

Textual evolution was approached in a different way by Hershel Parker, who had the notion that an examination of the creative process enabled one to locate authorial intention as it emerged from the heat of composition and to disqualify some chronologically "final" authorial revisions as being incoherent tamperings that postdated this period of organic revision. To his mind, the Greg-Bowers tradition neglected the

creative process, and he believed that Bowers was guilty of many additional faults as well, enumerated in his book Flawed Texts and Verbal Icons (1984), which documented his persistent campaign, from 1974 on, to expose what he saw as the deficiencies of Bowers's editorial practice. (A measure of the strong feelings that Bowers aroused is offered by Morse Peckham's 1987 review of this book in Analytical & Enumerative Bibliography: although Peckham dismissed Parker's main argument, he nevertheless was "vastly" entertained "to watch Hershel Parker blow that grand panjandrum, that imperial bow-wow, Fredson Bowers, right out of the water." Bowers used the occasion of this review to deny—in a letter published the next year—the implication that he "blackballed" Parker from the Committee on Scholarly Editions.) Parker's most detailed criticisms of Bowers were directed at the Crane edition. He considered the textual essay in the volume containing Maggie (Bowery Tales) "to be argued with bewilderingly specious pedantry," and he "found the editorial apparatus so badly conceived and error-ridden as to be quite unusable" (p. 148); he had even demanded (unsuccessfully) that the CEAA rescind the seal of approval awarded to the volume. His 1976 review (most of which he reprinted in his book) of the volume containing The Red Badge of Courage accused Bowers of a "misleading account of Crane's revisions," the "related decisions to emend the novel excessively," and "failures to consider the full range of textual and critical evidence" (pp. 153-154). (The evidence, in his view, led to the conclusion that Crane was forced by the publisher to alter the novel, and thus that Bowers should not have accepted so many of the first-edition readings.) Parker's student Henry Binder wrote an article entitled "The Red Badge of Courage Nobody Knows" for a special Crane issue (edited by Parker) of Studies in the Novel (1978) and produced a text, retaining manuscript readings whenever possible, for the first edition of The Norton Anthology of American Literature (1979), of which Parker was one of the editors; when Norton was about to bring out the Binder text as a separate edition three years later, Herbert Mitgang wrote a front-page article for the New York Times entitled " 'Red Badge' Is Due Out as Crane Wrote It" (2 April 1982).

Despite this fanfare, the determination of Crane's "intention" remains a matter of critical judgment (and Binder's edition, in its turn, came in for criticism). Parker's comments were like those of many other reviewers of editions in seeming to regard errors of fact and errors of judgment as equally certain. David J. Nordloh, for example, in what is probably the harshest criticism that any of Bowers's editions has received (in the Crane number of Studies in the Novel), first discussed

inaccuracies in the Crane volumes and then tried to explain, as an equally definite matter, why the new texts were "muddles of editorial synthesis and intervention," combining "an insensitivity to what Crane was doing with an unwillingness to leave Crane as he was" (pp. 103-104). For Nordloh, the "introduction of imagination where evidence fails" (p. 115) was a fault; but of course critical editing, like other attempts to reconstruct the past, inevitably relies on informed creativity. The difficulty that many people have in coming to terms with this point is epitomized in Leon Howard's review of two of the Crane volumes in Nineteenth-Century Fiction (1970): he recognized that "aesthetic judgments" can be "desirable in editorial work," but he concluded (since to him Bowers's approach resulted in "a grossly 'eclectic' edition") that Bowers's text of Maggie "cannot be recommended for the use of serious students and critics." Donald Pizer was similarly unprepared to accept even "the best possible coalescing of the 1893 and 1896 editions" of Maggie as anything other than "a bibliographical curiosity" (Modern Philology, 1970). Thomas L. McHaney took a more reasoned position (in American Literary Realism, 1971) when he explained why he personally would have preferred a "more conservative," less emended, text of Maggie but could still say that "one must lean in Bowers' direction even there, so persuasive are his arguments."

Although the Crane edition, particularly Bowers's handling of Maggie and The Red Badge of Courage, stirred up more debate than any of Bowers's other editions, the Hawthorne edition came in for considerable criticism. As the first scholarly edition of its kind in American literature, it was frequently met with bewilderment and misunderstanding. For some people, Bowers's tone was an additional obstacle to a fair examination of the scholarship involved. Richard Harter Fogle devoted nearly half of his chapter on Hawthorne in American Literary Scholarship for 1965 to an explanation of his preference for Hyatt H. Waggoner's Riverside edition (1964) of The House of the Seven Gables over Bowers's Centenary edition—the faults of the latter including Bowers's apparent dismissal of the Waggoner edition in a footnote and his use of his "undoubted talents largely in praise of his own vocation of bibliography" (p. 26). And Roy R. Male, three years later in the same publication, objected to Bowers's The Marble Faun for "making Hawthorne merely an interesting case study for textual bibliographers"; he regarded the whole Centenary Edition as a monument that "pays tribute to Fredson Bowers, not to Hawthorne" (p. 21). But some serious and detailed discussions of real textual questions did appear, and the issue they repeatedly touched on was the regularization of spelling. Thomas

L. McHaney felt that "the editors of Hawthorne's work have sought more consistency than is necessary" (Studies in the Literary Imagination, 1969); John Freehafter concluded that Bowers's text of The Marble Faun contained "too many textual emendations" as a result of excessive normalization and "inattention to linguistic evidence" (Studies in the Novel, 1970); and O M Brack, Jr., questioned Bowers's assumption, as a basis for emending Fanshawe, that the lost manuscript was "relatively consistent within itself" (Proof, 1971). There is, indeed, good reason to question Bowers's judgment on this matter; but, since judgment is involved, it is hard to see how one can claim, as Freehafter does, that Bowers's own emendations in The Marble Faun are "usually incorrect."

Commentary on the other editions was less agitated and even at times indifferent. The Beaumont-Fletcher, not unexpectedly, prompted reviewers to lament, as they had with the Dekker, the lack of explanatory annotation. Kenneth Muir, in Shakespeare Studies (1967), spoke for many when he said that "the same editors should provide the annotation, since no text can be established on bibliographical principles alone"—and he continued to wonder, in reviewing the next volume in 1974, whether one can edit a text "without being able to explain every line of it." Comments such as these, naïvely implying that Bowers and his co-editors did not take "meaning" into account, show how little scholarly editing is understood, even by some persons who have engaged in it. Clifford Leech was wiser, in his more thoughtful review (University of Toronto Quarterly, 1967), to say simply, "We need a commentary." The Dryden edition, praised by Phillip Harth in the important review mentioned earlier, was questioned by O M Brack, Jr., in Philological Quarterly (1968) not only for what he surprisingly considered an "unusual procedure" in handling The Indian Emperour (taking accidentals from the 1665 manuscript and some of the substantives from an edition of 1670) but also for its preservation of "minutiae" in a readers' edition with simplified apparatus. Several distinguished reviewers of the Marlowe edition—Kenneth Muir in Journal of English and Germanic Philology (1974), Roma Gill in Review of English Studies (1974), and Mark Eccles in Modern Philology (1975)—noted numerous errors in it (as did correspondents to the Times Literary Supplement in April, May, and June 1974), but Muir and Eccles also found much to praise. Gill (whose 1965 edition of Faustus had anticipated Bowers's critical view of the 1616 text and whose 1989 edition was to use the 1604 as copytext) felt constrained to conclude, "Those of us who in the past have admired Mr. Bowers's work, in both the theory and the practice of textual criticism, can only be saddened by the present production." As

for the Tom Jones edition, both Don L. Cook (Review, 1979) and Peter Miles (The Library, 1979), in sensible and balanced reviews, expressed admiration for Bowers's achievement but also pointed out a disconcerting number of errors in the apparatus.

In contrast, the textual accomplishment of the James edition was rarely recognized by reviewers, because philosophers were not accustomed to textual study and often in fact were contemptuous of it. John Passmore, reviewing three volumes of the edition in the Times Literary Supplement (24 June 1977), claimed to see the value of lists of variants for literary study but did not regard them as important in "an edition for philosophers"—since philosophers "go to James because they are interested in, let us say, truth or meaning or experience" (which, one can only conclude, are unrelated in philosophers' minds to nuances of expression). Similarly Jeffrey Barnouw believed that the "overwhelming textual apparatus" might serve a purpose for "some few readers" (Review of Metaphysics, 1981); and Carl P. Duncan, after noting the "massive amount of bibliographic detail and textual analysis," added (with a significant "but"), "But there are some things of interest to historians of psychology" (American Journal of Psychology, 1982). One has to turn to The Library—where Peter H. Nidditch, editor of Locke, reviewed the first volume of the James—to find the textual work taken seriously. The Nabokov volumes, as one might expect, were reviewed widely, but (like the James) in journals where the editing was scarcely noticed. (As Bowers wrote to his oldest son on 20 November 1980, about a month after the first Nabokov volume had appeared, "The midwife gets no credit for the baby.")

Of the hundreds of reviews Bowers's editions received, those dealing with the Hawthorne and Crane editions produced the liveliest controversy and engaged the most interesting issues. Their most incontestable, if unfortunate, contribution was the demonstration that these editions contained a substantial number of errors. But the reviewers revealed their own limitations when, after theoretically accepting the value of critical judgment in editing, they attacked as flawed those editions that embodied critical judgments not in accord with their own. Bowers was charged both with violating Greg's principles and with carrying them out too rigidly (Parker, for instance, made both charges [pp. 62, 66]); it was not easy for some reviewers to accept the multiplicity of results that Greg's emphasis on editorial judgment could lead to. Nevertheless, even some of Bowers's most severe critics could acknowledge the uniqueness of his attainment. Nordloh, before enumerating the "excruciating details" of his criticism, summarized the difficulties inherent in the

editing of Crane and called Bowers "the only person with the skill, the powers of mind, the patience above all, to have attempted it alone" (p. 107). Many of the reviewers were not deferential to Bowers, nor would he have wished them to be; but the debates that swirled around his editions, even in instances when they revealed unquestionable flaws, were testimony to the comprehensive strength, imaginative daring, and critical intelligence of his editorial vision.

During the last three decades of his life, Bowers produced, in addition to those sixty volumes of editions, nearly a hundred essays, lectures, and reviews. A dozen or so of the articles were of the utmost importance, ranking with the most significant of his earlier writings, and six or seven of the reviews will stand as classic examples of what long, detailed scholarly reviews can accomplish. All these essay-length pieces constitute a body of work that a scholar who had done nothing else could be proud of; when one considers his prodigious output of editions during the same years (to say nothing of his other activities), the record seems astounding. His concentration on bibliographical and textual investigations did not prevent him from writing essays of literary criticism on Renaissance drama and poetry, and some dozen and a half pieces—on Herbert, Vaughan, Milton, and particularly Shakespeare—appeared in these years. The bibliographical studies were frequently offshoots of his editorial work, some of them dealing with specific problems (in Crane's The O'Ruddy, Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, and Beaumont and Fletcher's Beggars Bush, for example), but most of them treating general issues, sometimes recapitulating for different audiences what he had said before and in a few instances offering important new observations.

Among his most influential essays of this period (many of them originating as lectures) are several that have already been mentioned—his basic introduction to textual criticism for the MLA pamphlet (1963), his statement of the application of Greg's "Rationale" to the editing of American literature (1964), his essential supplement to Greg in the treatment of "Multiple Authority" (1972), and his exposition of a new system for recording manuscript alterations (1976). Of his other major general pieces, the three most remarkable ones are probably "Bibliography Revisited" (an address to the Bibliographical Society in London on 17 October 1967 as part of its seventy-fifth anniversary celebration, and published in The Library in 1969), which is Bowers's most significant supplement to his Principles of Bibliographical Description, concentrating on the issue of "degressive bibliography" (the practice of reducing the quantity of detail for certain entries); "Remarks on Eclectic

Texts" (a paper read in abridged form at the Villa Serbelloni in September 1973, and published in Proof in 1975), which must be regarded as the classic explanation of the value of producing texts that bring together readings from different documentary witnesses; and "Greg's 'Rationale of Copy-Text' Revisited" (SB, 1978), which is the most trenchant examination of Greg that has been written. The latter piece was a distinguished meditation on Greg's applicability to later periods, meaningfully (in view of Bowers's position as Greg's champion) expressing caution in making such application (Bowers himself called this essay, in a letter of 4 January 1984, "one of the most important articles I have tried to write about textual criticism").

Five other notable statements can perhaps be singled out. In 1966 his Zeitlin-VerBrugge and Howell Lecture at the University of California (both Los Angeles and Berkeley), "Bibliography and Modern Librarianship" (published as a pamphlet the same year), dealt with the implications of bibliographical scholarship for the practices (wittily criticized) of librarians. His Ohio State lecture, "Practical Texts and Definitive Editions," on 16 February 1968 (published in a pamphlet the next year with a lecture of Hinman's), celebrating the publication of The Marble Faun in the Centenary Edition, responded to critics of the Hawthorne edition and coined the term "practical edition" (for editions that rest on "information that may be procurable through normal scholarly channels and thus without more special research than is economically feasible"). A summation of his approach, "Scholarship and Editing," was delivered before the Bibliographical Society of America on 23 January 1976 (and published in the Society's Papers the same year). And a thorough reconsideration of historical records of variants ("The Historical Collation in an Old-Spelling Shakespeare Edition") and of the practice of regularization ("Regularization and Normalization in Modern Critical Texts") appeared in Studies in Bibliography in 1982 and 1989.

Bowers wrote considerably fewer reviews in the thirty years after 1960 than he did in the fifteen years from the end of the war through 1960 (twelve as opposed to twenty-one—even the latter figure not being particularly large). He was not drawn to reviewing, even though he recognized (in both of his obituaries of Greg) that Greg's reviews had played an important role in the history of bibliographical scholarship. His attitude toward reviewing was stated unequivocally in a letter to David Vander Meulen on 12 November 1985:

His reviews, therefore, when he chose to write them, were special occasions; and at least six or seven of his dozen post-1960 reviews will not be "forgotten," for they are extended investigations of major works. They are, indeed, performances of the kind that practically no one else would have been capable of—and certainly no other single person could have written all of them, so great is their range of subjects. The earliest is one of his best-known writings, his unfavorable review (Modern Philology, 1964) of the second volume of the Yale Johnson edition, which cogently objected to its policy of "partial modernization." (Five years earlier he had severely reviewed the first volume in the Journal of English and Germanic Philology, complaining about misleading transcription and silent alteration: "'We have supplied punctuation silently,' remark the editors and thereupon fall silent themselves. This is not at all a satisfactory statement of procedure.") He went on to deal at length with Kathleen Tillotson's edition of Oliver Twist (fourteen pages in Nineteenth-Century Fiction [1968], taking a critical look at her choice of copy-text and her policy of emendation); Arthur Golden's edition of Walt Whitman's Blue Book (five pages in the Journal of English and Germanic Philology [1969], constituting an important evaluation of the methods for recording manuscript alterations, looking forward to his long 1976 article); Philip Gaskell's A New Introduction to Bibliography (sixteen largely unfavorable pages in Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America [1973], lamenting in particular Gaskell's distrust of analytical bibliography and criticizing his generalizations about Elizabethan printing); Peter Nidditch's edition of Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (eleven pages in The Library [1976], praising Nidditch for "true intellectual effort" in dealing with a situation in which there is "evidence for authorial control of the accidentals in a series of revised editions"); Philip Edwards and Colin Gibson's five-volume edition of Massinger (sixteen pages in the Yearbook of English Studies [1979], admiring the edition in general but regretting in it a "trend towards modernization of Elizabethan conventions with only doubtful benefit to modern clarity"); and Harold Jenkins's edition of Hamlet (fifteen pages in The Library [1983], examining in detail the bases for and the implications of Jenkins's elevation of the second quarto text).

If reviews, except in unusual instances, seemed to him a waste of energy, he did not feel the same way about lectures. Besides his major

essays that were delivered as addresses, he presented many other proficient pieces, always with flair, at a wide variety of locations, and most of them were later printed. His role as Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar in the 1962-63 academic year took him to Marietta College and Vanderbilt University, among other places, where one of his topics was Shakespeare; and he gave fourteen lectures during 1963-64 to commemorate the four-hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare's birth—participating in related events as well, such as a White House reception in June 1964 to honor the National Shakespeare Anniversary Committee. (The Vanderbilt lecture, "What Shakespeare Wrote"—published in the 1962 Shakespeare Jahrbuch—was praised by James G. McManaway in the 1965 Shakespeare Survey as "a fine introductory statement, one that will bear frequent reading.") The 1960s, indeed, were the period of his greatest activity as a lecturer, despite the heavy load of duties imposed by his departmental chairmanship. In early 1962, for example, he gave the Phi Beta Kappa Convocation address at Washington and Lee University (12 April, on Hamlet's fifth soliloquy); later that year, he spoke in the Sesquicentennial Series at Rice University (16 November, on point of view in Shakespeare), then at the South Atlantic Modern Language Association meeting (22 November, on editing American literature), and then at the MLA convention in Washington (28 December, on Hamlet). Among the places he lectured (with different lectures) in the years that followed were Wayne State University (10 March 1964 in the President's Lecture Series, on Shakespeare's texts), the University of South Carolina (on 2 April 1965 at the Southeastern Renaissance Conference, on Henry IV), the Clark Library (7 May 1966, sharing the platform with Lyle H. Wright at a Clark Library Seminar on "Bibliography and Restoration Drama," the papers from which were then published as a pamphlet), the University of Toronto (4 November 1966, in the second of its Conferences on Editorial Problems, on the textual implications of machine printing), and the University of Mississippi (27 November 1967, the Christopher Longest Lecture, on Paradise Lost). In the 1970s his lecturing tapered off, especially after his retirement from Virginia in 1975 (although two prominent 1971 occasions he participated in were the World Shakespeare Congress in Vancouver in August and the Colloquium on Nineteenth-Century Canadian Bibliography in Toronto in November); but he was still enthusiastic about lecturing in the last years of his life, as his performances at the biennial conferences of the Society for Textual Scholarship show (in 1981, 1985, 1987, and 1989).

Some of his lectures and publications dealt with professional matters

(a tradition with him going back at least to his Randolph-Macon address of 1954 on scholarship and undergraduate teaching). One of his Phi Beta Kappa talks was entitled "The Academic Jungle" and was full of frank and practical advice to undergraduates on the realities of the world of graduate study. In the course of it, he touched on a subject that was a favorite of his in the 1960s, the inappropriateness of the Ph.D. program for training teachers. Here he called the Ph.D. system "a singularly foolish one," and in other pieces on this topic he became a staunch and outspoken advocate of a Doctor of Arts degree for those who intended to be primarily teachers, not publishing scholars. He outlined the rationale for this degree in College English (November 1965), asserting that the concept of the Ph.D. as a "union card" had caused training in research to be "inflicted as a whole on the thousands for whom it was not designed." (He made clear in the process, however, that he did not lament the passing of "the old philological days" and welcomed the recent substitution of "critical learning for the older historical method.") Such further titles as "The Business of Teaching" (The Graduate Journal, 1961) and "On a Future for Graduate Studies" (American Association of University Professors Bulletin, 1970) showed his continuing concern for the training of teachers in graduate school. (The latter piece, delivered at the Brown University Graduate School Convocation on 1 June 1970, received further circulation when it was excerpted in PMLA in October under the title "The Dilemma of Graduate Education.")

His interest in the welfare of his profession was manifested in many other ways as well. For four years (1956-59) he was a Regional Chairman of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation; he served on the Executive Council of the MLA (1963-66), on the MLA's Committee on Research Activities (1955-60), New Variorum Shakespeare Committee (1955-82), Committee on Resolutions (1962), and English Program Advisory Committee (1966-68), and as the MLA delegate to the American Council of Learned Societies (1967-70); he was a member of the advisory boards of the Virginia Quarterly Review (1961-75)—the journal founded by his mentor James Southall Wilson—and the Shakespeare Quarterly (1954-72) and of the University Press of Virginia (1970-74); his term on the Executive Committee of the South Atlantic Modern Language Association (1967-71) included one year as vice president (1968) and one as president (1969); and he also held the presidencies of the Southeastern Renaissance Conference (1960) and the Society for Textual Scholarship (1985-87). The way such commitments made his schedule hectic is suggested by a letter he wrote to Gordon Ray on 30 November 1962:

These varied activities and writings, along with his brilliantly attentive chairmanship of his department at Virginia, were enough to demonstrate not simply his good citizenship in the academic world but his deep sense of professional responsibility.

By the time Bowers retired from his position at Virginia in the spring of 1975, having spent thirty-seven of his seventy years at the University, he had been—not surprisingly—the recipient of numerous honors and awards. His own university had recognized his achievements with two endowed chairs, first the Alumni Professorship of English (1957-68) and then the Linden Kent Memorial Professorship (1968-75), and with its highest honor, the Thomas Jefferson Award (1971). The citation for that award, calling him a "Jeffersonian gentleman," mentioned his knowledge of dogs, music, stamps, and wine as well as of literary scholarship, and it affirmed, "Mr. Jefferson, the extraordinarily versatile man in whose honor this award is made, would appreciate the versatility of Professor Bowers. Like Mr. Jefferson, Mr. Bowers masters thoroughly whatever interests him." Bowers's undergraduate university, Brown, had honored him with its Bicentennial Medal in 1964 and then with an honorary degree (Doctor of Letters) in 1970—the same year in which he also received a Doctor of Letters degree from Clark University. (He later —on 12 December 1983—wrote to his oldest son, "I have felt a peculiar obligation to Brown ever since I went there. . . . if Brown had not given me a scholarship . . . I'm not sure I could have gone to college.") His Gold Medal from the Bibliographical Society in London—the most important award in his field, which had been presented to only three Americans before—had come the previous spring (1969), and one more honorary degree, the Doctor of Humane Letters from the University of Chicago, was presented to him in 1973. Among his research fellowships had been three national ones, a Fulbright in 1952-53 and two Guggenheim Fellowships, in 1958-59 and in 1970 (postponed to 1972); he had also been made a Research Scholar at the Rockefeller Foundation's Villa Serbelloni Research Center (1970, 1972), a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford (1972, 1974), and a Fellow Commoner at Churchill College, Cambridge (1975). He had been elected to the American Antiquarian Society and the British Academy (as a Corresponding Fellow)

in 1968 and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1972. The bookish clubs he had been admitted to were the Grolier, the Codrington (All Souls), the Elizabethan (Yale), and the Tudor and Stuart (Johns Hopkins).

His many admirers naturally regarded his retirement as an appropriate occasion for another honor, in the form of a banquet or a conference. But he made clear that he wished no such thing, though he indicated that he would enjoy small dinners in friends' houses (and those friends responded, sometimes with formal dinners, remembering the many black-tie evenings at Woodburn). One of the most touching occasions for Bowers occurred early in his final year at the university. On 26 October 1974 his former Virginia and Chicago students who had written their dissertations under his direction (or co-direction) gave a dinner in his honor. The menu-keepsake, printed at the university library "by C.S. & K.S. for I.C." (Clinton Sisson and Kendon Stubbs for Irby Cauthen, on a Chandler & Price treadle press given to the library by the Bibliographical Society), listed all the names, twenty-eight from Virginia and two from Chicago. At the time of this dinner there was an exhibition of Bowers memorabilia in the Rare Book Department of Alderman Library (on display for the month of October), and A Keepsake to Honor Fredson Bowers was published to accompany the exhibition. George Walton Williams's elegant introduction to it spoke on behalf of all of Bowers's students:

The booklet contained ten photographs and two reproductions of title pages: the photographs were of Bowers in 1906, 1910, ca. 1924, ca. 1940, 1971, and 1973, along with one of him judging a dog show (correctly dated 1954 but labeled "Long Island Kennel Club" instead of Irish Wolfhound Club of America Specialty Show at Amory L. Haskell's Woodland Farm, Red Bank, N.J.), one of him and his wife at Bread Loaf in 1960, one reproducing a drawing of Nancy Hale (ca. 1940) by her mother, and one showing her mother's 1946 oil portrait of Bowers in his naval uniform (a portrait that hung for several years in the living room at Woodburn, before it was given to Bowers's oldest son); the title pages were of The Dog Owner's Handbook and Principles of Bibliographical Description (the latter most unfortunately reproduced from the Russell & Russell reprint of 1962).

At this dinner the official announcement was made that the Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia would be bringing out a collection of Bowers's essays. Late in 1975 a 550-page volume, containing twenty-six essays chosen by Bowers, was published, with an introduction by Irby B. Cauthen, Jr., expressing gratitude for Bowers's "service to the world of bibliography, a world that has felt—and will continue to feel—his creating and forming hand." Entitled Essays in Bibliography, Text, and Editing, the volume is one of the landmark books in the history of bibliography, bringing together many (but not all) of Bowers's most significant essays from 1941 through 1973, arranged in four sections, the first called "The Bibliographical Way" (six items) and the others dealing with descriptive bibliography (three items), analytical bibliography (six items), and textual criticism and editing (eleven items). Bowers did not revise the essays (a wise decision, since they were all historic documents that had been widely read and acted upon in their originally published form), but he did add a few comments in brackets and about two dozen new footnotes (some of considerable biographical interest). At the end of the volume were a check-list of Bowers's writings and a chronology of his career (based on his own records), which have been useful despite their occasional inconsistencies and inaccuracies. In reviewing this volume for Library Quarterly, G. Blakemore Evans stated, "No more fitting tribute than this volume could have been conceived for Bowers." Peter Davison, in Modern Language Review (1978), noted that Bowers's stature was such that reviewers took "glee" in pointing out errors in his work; but, Davison concluded, "picking holes in mountains does tend to leave them looking very much like mountains."

Bowers's life in retirement continued for a while to be much the same as it had been before, except that he had more time for his research and writing (and more time for long trips, such as the one he and his wife took to Egypt in the spring of 1978, when she was working on a book about her great-uncle, who had been a diplomat there). Shortly before his retirement, when he sent Gordon Ray a report (23 September 1972) on his remarkably active second Guggenheim Fellowship, he had said, "I feel I am entering a period of real productivity, now that the dam has broken, and I am grateful to the Foundation for the opportunity to let loose a great deal of activity that had been penned up for lack of time." Five years later—two years into retirement—he wrote Ray again:

His editions and essays kept appearing apace, and he attended conferences and gave lectures.

After returning from the September 1978 conference at the University of Kansas that brought editors of literary and historical material together, he wrote me (on 31 October) as follows:

The following spring (1979) the Bowerses were in Venice and London in April, with a few days at Oxford in May before returning on the 7th. "Although I'm glad to get away," he wrote on 3 April, "I shall miss the Virginia spring, which is just beginning, with cherry trees out, our orchard full of daffodils, and, unfortunately, the grass beginning to grow." (He always mowed the five-acre clearing around the house himself, using a Gravely twelve-horsepower, fifty-inch rotary mower that he had to walk behind.) A letter from London on 25 April closed with a paragraph that started in a characteristically lively fashion and ended on a touching note: His description (after he was back home, on 27 May) of some of his doings in London and Oxford can stand as an indication of what his trips had always been like, with attention paid to friends, music, theater, and food: And a letter a few months later (27 September) suggested that the pace of his life had not slackened: he was "pushing ahead full steam" on the Nabokov, "since the publisher would like it six months ahead of the original schedule," and he was to lecture at Kent in October and at Yale in December.

The next spring (1980) everything changed, when his wife had a stroke. By late May she was thought to be recovering satisfactorily, but in early June she had a setback, followed by two operations to clear her carotid arteries. After more visits to the hospital, daily physical therapy, and constant attention from him, she regained considerable use of the left side of her body and was well enough by June 1982 for them to go to Folly Cove for the summer and to plan a trip abroad for the next spring. Bowers hoped to spend two months at Oxford, working through the Bodleian's newly acquired Harding Collection in order to amass further data for his Restoration drama bibliography—which, as he said in a letter of 16 March 1983, "has gathered dust for about twenty years but which I now want to revive and finish before I die." They did make the trip, living in Iffley Turn, Oxford, from 7 April to 7 June, during which time Bowers completed his work at the Bodleian and addressed both the Bibliographical Society (in London on 19 April) and the Oxford Bibliographical Society (in May). From then on, the Restoration bibliography was one of his primary concerns, vying with the Beaumont-Fletcher and James editions and with Studies for his time:

The process of looking at major collections that he had thus far not adequately examined meant that he needed to spend time at the Huntington Library. He was made a Research Fellow there for the month of May 1985, an arrangement that was repeated in the following two years. Thus the Bowerses added a new element to their annual routine, spending a month in California in May before going to Folly Cove.

Along with his devoted care of his wife, Bowers continued to have

an intense work schedule during these years, though he faithfully took a brief rest every afternoon (except at the Huntington, where—as he wrote on 14 May 1987—he worked "a seven-hour day without a mid-day nap"). Something of his old hectic pace is suggested by the events of late April 1985. On 20-23 April a conference was held in Charlottesville to celebrate Bowers's eightieth birthday; three days later (the day after his actual birthday) he flew to New York to deliver the Presidential Address ("Unfinished Business") at the conference of the Society for Textual Scholarship and to read another paper the next morning ("Mixed Texts and Multiple Authority"), returning home immediately after it in order not to be away from his wife longer than necessary; and on 1 May they flew together to Los Angeles for his work at the Huntington. The Charlottesville conference, which Bowers had agreed to only reluctantly, was organized by Hans Walter Gabler and David J. Nordloh and brought together twenty invited scholars for a series of discussions based on fifteen previously circulated papers. (At the opening session in the Rotunda, attended by both the Bowerses, I had the pleasure of conveying official greetings from the Bibliographical Society of America and of reading a paper attempting to characterize Bowers's achievement.) Bowers participated in all the discussions and was pleased, if exhausted, at the end. As he wrote me just afterward (24 April), "Usually I can snooze during meetings, but not those—too conspicuous, and in fact too interesting. . . . it was stimulating to me and being again in the midst of the clash of ideas which meant something was a very welcome change from the routine of my rather solitary existence." The appearance of some of the papers in SB reflects his continuing vigilance on behalf of the journal; but the papers most directly celebrating his accomplishments (David Vander Meulen's on the Principles and my opening statement) became the basis for a special commemorative number of the Bibliographical Society of America's Papers (Second Quarter 1985), published also as a separate pamphlet. (After this issue came out, Bowers wrote me —on 22 October 1985—that his "greatest pleasure" in it was "the vividness it has brought me of the positive need for me to put even greater effort into finishing the Restoration play bibliography while I am still able to poke a typewriter.")

Various references in his letters show that his "solitary" life had many interruptions—visits to the Houghton Library from Folly Cove, to the University of Maryland to deliver a lecture that resulted in what he believed was his first standing ovation (late spring 1984), to McMaster University to advise the Bertrand Russell editors (October 1984), and so on. Two more honors came to him at this time: on 24 January

1986 the Bibliographical Society of America made him an Honorary Member, and on 26 September of that year the Association for Documentary Editing (meeting in Charlottesville) held a session on his influence and awarded him its triennial Julian P. Boyd Award. The continuous appearance of his editions during these years (two or three volumes in a year not being uncommon) is of course the best testimony to the efficiency of his rigorous schedule at home. Hints of that schedule surfaced in his letters: on 24 July 1984, for example, he wrote, "So far this summer I've been working on Beaumont and Fletcher for the vol after next, but today a mess of proof for the next vol. arrived that must have priority. Poor Wm James is being left in the lurch"; and on 8 February 1986, "I am as eager as I can be to get cracking again on that bibliography, but there has been no chance all winter. Just now I have assembled what I need to write the intro to my text of Henry VIII for the next B & F vol., and then (except for some extra collation needed for Two Noble Kinsmen in the same vol.), I shall be free to try to tie up the next James volume on his mss." He was never without a heavy load; as he had written to his oldest son on 9 February 1982, "I have . . . taken on more than I should, but . . . I have a horror of not having enough to do." When Gordon Ray retired from the Guggenheim Foundation in 1985, Bowers said in a congratulatory note to him, "I'm sure you will stay as busy as I have. As W. W. Greg once remarked to me—'What else is there to do?'" Nothing better captures Bowers's energetic drive than this statement, especially since it implies his private measuring of himself against Greg.

Nancy Hale's health declined further in 1987, partly because her physical therapy was interrupted for a cataract operation. In April 1988 she had another small stroke, which prevented their going to California in May but not to Folly Cove in late June (when she flew with a friend and he drove as usual). About two weeks after their return to Charlottesville, on 24 September 1988, she died, at the age of eighty, and Bowers's life was never the same again. His depression over losing her after forty-six and a half years was scarcely to be relieved in work, which he had previously been able to immerse himself in, regardless of other problems that were on his mind. Besides, his own health was cause for further depression. He had felt ill during the winter of 1987-88, and in June 1988 he had a benign polyp removed from his colon and was diagnosed as having a duodenal ulcer. Although the treatment for it was successful at first, he developed a more serious problem, inflammation of the pancreas, that summer at Folly Cove. By 28 November, however, he could report that the doctors had given him "a clean bill of

health"; but ominously he added that he still felt "precarious and often somewhat ill." He was henceforth never to be without this feeling, in greater or lesser degree, and his last years can be summed up in his sentence, "I am partly ill, active, and unhappy" (16 January 1989).

He nevertheless delivered a paper ("Elizabethan Dramatic Texts: Problems in Semi-Substantives") at the April 1989 Society for Textual Scholarship conference in New York, went to the Huntington Library in May (this time on Mellon Foundation support), and spent the summer at Folly Cove. From the Huntington in early June he made a characteristic report: "I'm getting quantities of work done here, and helping a couple students in off hours when rare book room closed." And back in Charlottesville on 21 June, before leaving for Folly Cove: "I am busting the traditional gut to get my introduction off to England for the next Beaumont and Fletcher volume." What was uncharacteristic in these reports was his emphasis on his exhaustion. He did obtain satisfaction, however, from the work he was still able to do, and from his family and his friendships—he had himself always been the most loyal and considerate of friends. He continued to welcome family gatherings at Folly Cove; and on his last drives there, he was delighted to visit with his wife's granddaughter in Connecticut, having finally given in to the family's request that he make the trip in two days rather than one. (As late as 16 September 1987 he had referred to "a grueling 14-hour drive down from Folly Cove, two hours behind schedule with massive traffic jams.") In Charlottesville, he enjoyed seeing old English department friends, like Martin and Ruthe Battestin, Irby and Betty Cauthen, Don and Polly Hirsch, Robert and Francesca Langbaum, Barbara Nolan, and Tony and Viola Winner, as well as new friends like David and Doris Vander Meulen, who had moved there in the summer of 1984. David Vander Meulen's bibliographical work (stemming from a landmark Wisconsin dissertation of 1981, "A Descriptive Bibliography of Alexander Pope's Dunciad, 1728-1751") was beginning to be widely noticed; and, at Bowers's urging, he joined the Virginia English department that fall, with the understanding that he would assist Bowers in editing SB. Once they got to know each other, Bowers recognized that Vander Meulen was indeed the person he had hoped for as his successor to look after the future of SB and the Virginia bibliographical tradition.

Another satisfaction of his last years was the publication in late 1989 of Hamlet as Minister and Scourge and Other Studies in Shakespeare and Milton, a 239-page volume bringing together thirteen of his critical essays (one of which was also bibliographical, the one on "sullied"/"solid"), preceded by a biographically interesting preface. The dedication

to Nancy Hale repeated the dedication in his volume of Lyell Lectures twenty-five years earlier, but he could not conceive of dedicating it to anyone else. The essays were drawn from a period of almost three decades: the title essay, his most famous piece of critical writing, was the earliest one (1955), and the latest dated from 1982. After four essays on large themes (tragic reconciliation, dramatic structure, point of view, and "dramatic vagueness" in Shakespeare), the volume concentrated on Hamlet, with six pieces, followed by one on Lear and one on Henry IV; it closed with the only non-Shakespearean essay in the volume, his 1978 study of Samson Agonistes. David Bevington is quoted on the jacket as saying that the essays taken together "show the cohesion and growth of an impressive critical mind"; and the volume itself has more cohesion than one often finds in a collection of essays, because Bowers kept returning to certain subjects, notably structure and reconciliation—not unrelated in his mind, for he always dealt with the ethical implications of structure (as he had done from the time of his study of revenge tragedy half a century earlier). His critical essays gave permanent form to the kind of criticism that he engaged in so effectively in the classroom: explication thoroughly grounded in historical knowledge. Reviewers naturally compared and contrasted these essays with Bowers's bibliographical and textual work. Robert Y. Turner (in Shakespeare Quarterly, 1991), acknowledging the great influence of Bowers's approach to Hamlet, found the decisiveness and certainty of Bowers's "confident criticism," with its "tightly controlled postulates and definitions," to be related to the rigorous tone of his bibliographical writing. R. S. White (in Shakespeare Survey, 1991), on the other hand, said, "Fredson Bowers was known to my generation as the one who cast a long shadow on textual studies," but this volume "shows him in a more benign light as teacherly guide and critical inspiration."

When in early 1990 the next conference of the Society for Textual Scholarship was being planned (for the following year), Bowers agreed immediately to provide a paper, but in the autumn he began to wonder whether he would feel like attending and reading the paper himself. Both his perpetual stomach pains, still unsatisfactorily diagnosed, and his anti-depression medication robbed him of energy and concentration; "it is especially annoying," he said, "that I cannot forget my woes in work since my concentration is so bad that the tension rises if I put in much more than half an hour checking my play bibliography entries. And some days I can't quite manage that." By the time of this letter (15 March 1991), he had decided definitely that he could not attempt traveling to the conference (though he had not given up hope of going

to Folly Cove in the summer). It was agreed that I would read his paper for him; but the paper apparently went astray in the mail, and on 8 April, three days before the conference, I telephoned him to ask for another copy. He found one, which he thought was not identical to the one previously sent, and Vander Meulen faxed it to me. On the morning of Thursday, 11 April 1991, at the opening session of the conference, I read his paper "Why Apparatus?" as part of a program that also included a paper by his good friend Jo Ann Boydston. When I returned to my office that afternoon, there was a message to telephone Vander Meulen; he informed me that Bowers had died in his sleep early that morning and had been found by the housekeeper at about the time his paper was being read to the assembled textual scholars in New York. In two weeks he would have been eighty-six.

The news was learned by most of the conference participants during the course of the afternoon, and at the banquet the following evening David Greetham, founder and executive secretary of the Society for Textual Scholarship, read a memorial resolution, in which Bowers was described as "the most respected textual critic of this century." After the banquet Jo Ann Boydston and I, over drinks at the Algonquin, exchanged memories of Bowers—conscious of the fact that the three of us had regularly gathered there after these biennial occasions and had last dined together just before the 1989 conference. By having that conversation, we were acting in the spirit of Bowers's wishes for a memorial, because he had left these instructions, dated 25 June 1989:

On 21 April the Langbaums invited some forty-four of Bowers's friends "for drinks in Fredson's memory"; the only formal reminiscences on that occasion were moving statements by Fredson T. Bowers, Jr., Robert Langbaum, and David Levin (whose letter was read in his absence by J. C. Levenson). Two days later E. D. Hirsch delivered before the university faculty meeting a perceptive memorial resolution. By this time obituaries had appeared in newspapers in New York and London, as well as in papers closer to home; and the more extended process of reflection in scholarly journals was about to begin.

Two moments from Bowers's last months, representing breaks in his suffering, offer appropriate tableaux to remember him by. One shows him and the Vander Meulen daughters on a fine March morning, twelve days before his death, picking daffodils in the Woodburn orchard. The other was described by Bowers's oldest son at the Langbaums' gathering:

The body of Fredson Bowers was cremated, and the ashes were buried on 29 June 1991 in the Hale family plot at Forest Hills Cemetery, Jamaica Plain, Boston, next to the grave of Nancy Hale.