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II
Having established the necessity of critical editions, one can then consider what procedure should be followed in making the critical judgments they entail. Some kind of guideline is required if the operation is to be disciplined and historically oriented. Otherwise, textual decisions would simply reflect the editors' own preferences, and the results, which would not necessarily be without interest, would not be an attempt at historical reconstruction. Editorial taste is indeed essential, but an edited text should reflect, not the personal preferences of the editor, but the editor's judgments regarding the preferences of the author, or the author in conjunction with others, at a given moment. Simple as this distinction is, it has probably been the root of more textual disputes than any other single point. But since critical editing must rest on editorial judgment, a sufficient guideline would seem to be one that states the goal toward which that judgment is to be directed, perhaps indicating what ancillary information should be taken into account but without placing limits on the judgment itself: to say, for example, that an editor's literary sensitivity, informed by biographical, bibliographical, and more broadly
The fear that encouraging editorial judgment would amount to licensing personal preference, however, has repeatedly caused textual theorists to impose restrictions on the field within which editorial judgment is allowed to operate. The "best-text" theories are one result, and they have been curiously persistent, despite the ease with which their essential illogic can be exposed. In ruling that texts can be altered only where they are obviously incorrect, this approach seems to imply, incredibly, that texts are likely to be correct wherever they are not manifestly incorrect—a patent absurdity. A. E. Housman in 1903 pointed out this flaw most memorably, in the preface to the first volume of his edition of Manilius, and he wittily added, "assuredly there is no trade on earth, excepting textual criticism, in which the name of prudence would be given to that habit of mind which in ordinary human life is called credulity."[10] Perhaps the most basic way of stating the incoherence of the "best-text" approach is to observe that it begins with a belief that documentary texts can be improved through editorial intervention (otherwise there would be no reason to allow the correction of clearcut errors) but proceeds to cast doubt on the usefulness of such intervention (otherwise it would be allowed to operate more widely). If there were a chance that editorial judgment could correct a text at places not obviously incorrect, there would seem to be no reason not to sanction the effort; and one must therefore conclude, with Housman, that these places are assumed to be correct. Actually, however, there is no point looking for an explanation of this unreasoned approach other than a reflex reaction: the belief that a restriction of judgment was required to improve on the unscholarly eclecticism of the past.
McKerrow was undoubtedly caught up in this reaction when in 1904 he chose the second edition of Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller as his copy-text, to be altered only at obviously erroneous points, on the grounds that it contained some revisions by the author (2: 197). He was not happy with all the readings that this policy forced him to retain, but he felt that he had "no choice" in the matter; when he stated that an editor could not "pick and choose among the variant readings of his author's works those which he himself would prefer in writings of his own," McKerrow did not admit the possibility that choice among variants could be performed on any other basis.[11] Thirty-five years later, in
Greg's primary purpose in "The Rationale of Copy-Text" was to provide a sound argument for greater editorial freedom of choice.[13] "I am only concerned," he unambiguously proclaimed, "to uphold his [the editor's] liberty of judgment" (p. 386); at another point he called it "disastrous" to "curb the liberty of competent editors" (p. 388). He asked why, if judgment was to be admitted in distinguishing possible from impossible readings (as it was in the "best-text" approaches), "should the choice between possible readings be withdrawn from its competence?" (p. 381). The judgment of an editor, he answered, "is likely to bring us closer to what the author wrote than the enforcement of an arbitrary rule." Curiously, however, Greg's strong endorsement of editorial freedom in regard to substantive variants was not extended to what he called "accidentals" (spelling and punctuation), for it was the function of the copy-text, in his view, to provide the accidentals. He made a clear distinction between the nearly automatic acceptance of copy-text accidentals and the use of judgment in dealing with substantives: "the copy-text should govern (generally) in the matter of accidentals,
It seems evident, nevertheless, that Greg was not entirely comfortable with the idea of restricting the role of judgment in any aspect of the editorial procedure. He inserted the word "generally" in his directive that "the copy-text should govern (generally) in the matter of accidentals"; and he insisted that the copy-text should not be "sacrosanct, even apart from the question of substantive variation," enumerating instances in which it is "within the discretion of an editor" to alter copy-text accidentals. He even went so far as to say that, in regard to "graphic peculiarities" (by which he meant some practices of spelling and punctuation), "the copy-text is only one among others" (pp. 385-386). If, therefore, copy-text accidentals may be altered whenever one believes there is good reason to do so, just as copy-text substantives may certainly be, the role of the copy-text turns out to be that of supplying readings (of both substantives and accidentals) whenever there seems no other basis for deciding. Greg would never have insisted that any reading should be retained simply because it was present in the copy-text, if an editor's informed judgment pointed to a different choice; such "tyranny of the copy-text" (p. 382)[14] was what he was striving to eliminate from textual criticism. Thus if one is to fall back on the copy-text (for accidentals as well as substantives) only when there is no other way to choose, the key element in his copy-text procedure is determining when two readings are in fact "exactly balanced" (p. 386)—or, to use the more famous term that he also employs, "completely indifferent" (p. 387). If, in an editor's
Greg himself was, however, somewhat tyrannized by the idea of copy-text, for his essay includes this statement: "whenever there is more than one substantive text of comparable authority, then although it will still be necessary to choose one of them as copy-text, and to follow it in accidentals, this copy-text can be allowed no over-riding or even preponderant authority as far as substantive readings are concerned" (pp. 384-385). Thus at the very moment when he emphasizes the necessity for freedom of editorial judgment in regard to substantive variants from documents of equal "extrinsic" (that is, genealogical) authority, he places a mechanical, unreasoned restriction on judgment applied to the accidentals. When the surviving texts of a work form an ancestral series and a copy-text is chosen for its position in the series, there is a justification for falling back on the copy-text when the variants seem indifferent. But when the documents do not form such a series, and when two of them seem evenly balanced in authority, there is no reason to give more weight to the accidentals in one; the fact that there is often little basis for making decisions about accidentals does not in such an instance justify assigning authority to the accidentals that happen to be in a single document. Greg criticized editors for "abdicating" the "editorial function" if in the case of substantives "of equal extrinsic authority" they relied "on some arbitrary canon, such as the authority of the copy-text" (p. 384). But he was giving them contrary advice for the accidentals.
It was after this passage, however, that he sanctioned the alteration of copy-text accidentals—presumably in both kinds of situations, both where texts can be ranked on genealogical grounds and where two or more authoritative texts appear unrankable. Thus the overriding point is the necessity for editorial judgment, which must operate regardless of the relationships among the documents; and the idea of a copy-text (feasible for ancestral series but meaningless for texts of equal authority,
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