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III

The voluminous commentary engendered by Greg's essay has largely been concerned with the applicability of his approach beyond the field of Renaissance drama and with the appropriateness of concentrating on final authorial intention.[16] Most commentators have spent less time scrutinizing the general principles underlying Greg's recommendations than evaluating how useful those specific recommendations seem in different contexts, and thus there has been almost no questioning of the necessity for a concept of copy-text. The basic meaning of the term "copy-text" has remained stable from McKerrow's time onward—that is, the documentary text used as the basis for a scholarly edition. But the way in which a copy-text is selected and emended has undergone a remarkable shift during the twentieth century; and when the phrase "copy-text editing" is now used it signifies not what McKerrow would have understood by it but generally something close to what Greg meant by it. Being a critic of "copy-text editing" —and there have been many such critics in recent years—is likely to mean disapproving of the elevation of texts as completed by authors over texts as they emerged from publication or theatrical production, or objecting to the preference for the author's final intention rather than an earlier intention, or indeed decrying the practice of eclectic editing itself. But criticizing "copy-text editing" has not meant attacking the idea of copy-text. Whether or not editors of post-medieval writings have been successful in avoiding the "tyranny of the copy-text" as envisaged by Greg, they have not escaped the tyranny of the concept of copy-text.

Perhaps the most instructive example is Fredson Bowers, since he was the most prolific and influential editor of this century in the English-speaking scholarly world. He was also the person primarily responsible for the extension of Greg's ideas to the editing of post-Renaissance literature, and therefore one might think it unreasonable to expect that he would have been critical of "copy-text." Yet he was an ardent believer

in the importance of critical judgment in editing, and he did not hesitate to point out what he saw as limitations in Greg's rationale; thus his failure to question the need for a copy-text does show what Greg had called the mesmerizing power of the concept. As cases in point, one may turn to two of his essays from the 1970s, "Multiple Authority: New Problems and Concepts of Copy-Text" (1972) and "Greg's 'Rationale of Copy-Text' Revisited" (1978),[17] which are among the most trenchant analyses that Greg's ideas have received and constitute Bowers's principal reconsideration of his earlier, less measured, response to the "Rationale."

The first of these essays, after sketching Greg's contribution[18] and some of Bowers's own applications of Greg's rationale to later literature, takes up instances of thoroughgoing authorial revision, a subject not dealt with by Greg in much detail. In such cases, Bowers says, when "the two texts are parallel enough for a comparison of the accidentals to be pertinent," an editor "can make some essay at treating the accidentals of the revised edition on the same critical basis as its substantives" (p. 462). What the editor must not do, Bowers insists, is "to succumb to the tyranny of the copy-text." If all variants—accidentals as well as substantives—are treated critically, Bowers recognizes that "in an ideal state" the editor "would arrive at compatible results without regard for the choice of copy-text" (pp. 462-463):

A major element in this "practical convenience" turns out to be conciseness of the apparatus. Actually the choice of copy-text would not necessarily affect the length of the apparatus, though it could frequently do so if one were using the style of apparatus Bowers generally employed. But the main point is that if a shortening of apparatus is accomplished by presenting less information (as it is in Bowers's system), one is in the odd position of claiming that the purpose of selecting a copy-text is to withhold textual evidence from the reader.[19] In fact Bowers proceeds to point out, both in a footnote on this passage and in the following paragraph, that only in an ideal world would the choice of copy-text not affect the resulting edited text—but in that case the choice is not simply "motivated by practical convenience" after all, since the text is affected by it. Yet at the end of the paragraph, Bowers comes back to the matter of convenience, saying that a revised edition should be chosen as copy-text "only in cases of the sternest necessity when to select an earlier document would pile up lists of emendations of staggering proportions" (p. 464). Exactly what function a copy-text plays is finally unclear in this discussion, but the idea that there must be a copy-text of some sort seems never in doubt.

In the second essay, six years later, Bowers gives Greg's "Rationale" a more critical reading, examines its applicability to authorially revised editions of later periods (in the light of his own further experience), and finds that he has a "serious quarrel" with Greg's belief in "the lesser authority of a revised edition in cases of doubt" (p. 123). Although he is convinced that Greg's idea of choosing a copy-text for its accidentals is "still (and no doubt invariably) sound . . . for any period" (p. 147), he concludes that the greater accuracy of compositors in periods after the Renaissance means that indifferent substantive variants in revised editions of the last three centuries may generally be regarded as more likely to be authorial than compositorial (p. 155). There is an irony here in Bowers's partial return to McKerrow's belief in the whole body of substantive variants of a revised edition. Bowers's position is more flexible, but there is considerable similarity between McKerrow's idea of adopting all the variants when some are certainly authorial and Bowers's newly formed conviction of the likelihood "that an indifferent variant in the revised text is authorial" (p. 155). Bowers even admits the possibility that this view may apply to accidentals as well as substantives (depending on one's judgment of compositorial fidelity) and thus that the revised text could become the copy-text (p. 160). But given his recognition that

copy-text accidentals as well as substantives can be altered by the editor (e.g., pp. 128-129, 148-149), along with his willingness to make distinctions even among what he labels "indifferent" variants (rendering them in fact no longer indifferent),[20] one begins to wonder what is left of the concept of a copy-text as a fall-back position. That this concept is the ostensible focus of the essay reveals its tyrannizing powers, for the real subject is—as it must be in an approach that stresses judgment—the process of active decision-making. Bowers was willing—as he put it at the end of the essay—to "reverse Greg's principle for any period after the Renaissance"; but he was apparently not ready to demote the idea of denominating one text as the copy-text in every instance.

This reluctance is most dramatically revealed in his treatment of so-called "radiating texts"—texts that do not form an ancestral linear series but instead represent independent lines of descent from a common source. This kind of textual history is frequently encountered in the study of the manuscript traditions of ancient texts, but Bowers's attention was drawn to it by his editing of Stephen Crane, whose syndicated newspaper pieces provide a classically pure example of the problem: the various original newspaper texts of a piece are independently derived from (and equidistant from) the master copy supplied by the syndicate office to the subscribing newspapers. In the absence of such master copy, the syndicated appearances—"radiating" from the lost original—constitute the only evidence for reconstructing what the syndicate office sent out (which is, in turn, at least one step removed from Crane's lost manuscripts). In the fifth and sixth volumes of his Crane edition (Tales of Adventure and Tales of War, both 1970), Bowers first dealt with this situation extensively.[21]

His procedure, at points of variation in punctuation among the radiating texts, was generally to adopt the reading present in the largest number of them (though he recognized that not every instance could be handled on a quantitative basis); and then he selected as a copy-text the single newspaper text that contained the largest number of the readings that he had decided to adopt. As he says in discussing "The Pace of Youth," the first of the pieces in Tales of Adventure, the Dayton Daily Journal text "has been selected as copy-text for its general concurrence with majority opinion" (p. cxlii). This use of "copy-text" of course shifts the meaning of the term from what Greg (and Bowers in earlier discussions)

had meant by it—for here it does not designate a text that can be accorded presumptive authority by virtue of its genealogical position, since all the radiating texts are equidistant from the copy furnished by the author. Instead of a copy-text that helps one to resolve cruxes, it is now one that is selected after the cruxes have been resolved. The problem emerges even more clearly in Bowers's account of the next piece, "One Dash—Horses," where he designates the syndicate master proof as the copy-text (even though it does not survive), because it is "the earliest recoverable archetype," and he is then driven to use the term "physical copy-text itself" for the one newspaper text that is "perhaps the closest in its accidentals to the lost master proof" (p. cxlvii). Tales of War also includes instances in which Bowers, after pointing out that several newspaper texts are "technically" of equal authority, chooses one as copy-text for its "convenience"—the convenience stemming from the fact that the text chosen (to quote his statement in one case) "is generally less in need of accidentals emendation" (p. cxi).[22]

The conceptual imprecision in this shifting use of "copy-text" probably had little effect on Bowers's final text, since his copy-texts in these instances were chosen not for their authority but for the extent of their agreement with what he had already decided the text should contain. Nevertheless, the fuzziness surrounding "copy-text" here does have practical consequences for the reader, through its effect on the apparatus. Because the list of emendations provides a record of editorial alterations made in the designated copy-texts, and because the "historical collation" records only substantive variants, the variants in accidentals among the radiating texts are not fully reported. Bowers does say, in his headnote to the emendations list in both of these Crane volumes, "when as in syndicated newspaper versions a number of texts have equal claim to authority, all are noted in the Emendations listing" (5:211; 6:335). What this statement means is that a full record of variants in accidentals is normally[23] provided for each place where the designated copy-text is

emended; but any variants in accidentals at places where the copy-text is not emended remain unreported. Yet the documentary authority of those variants is the same as that of the reported ones, given the genealogical equality of all the radiating texts. Thus the reader is deprived of some of the evidence from the texts that collectively form the primary authority in these cases. That Bowers himself sometimes thought of a group of radiating texts as a kind of collective copy-text is suggested by an instance in "One Dash-Horses" where he retains the designated copy-text's capitalization of "North" but says that it "may most properly be regarded as an emendation" (p. 199)—and then includes it (with "stet") in his list of emendations (p. 213). In short, the importation of a concept of copy-text into these situations is more productive of confusion than of clarity.

Bowers's primary theoretical discussion of radiating texts occurs not in the Crane edition but in the latter half of his essay on "Multiple Authority," where it constitutes his principal supplement to Greg—since it, unlike most of his other treatments of copy-text, focuses on a situation that Greg did not attempt to cover. But his discussion, pioneering as it is in many ways, is weakened by his retention of the idea of a copy-text, especially after having in effect shown why it is irrelevant. He emphasizes, quite properly, the role of critical judgment, pointing out that for radiating texts it must be applied as fully to accidentals as to substantives.[24] A statistical approach, he rightly asserts, is not sufficient, for an unconventional authorial reading might be normalized by many compositors and "preserved only by the dogged or indifferent few"; "the minority reading may sometimes need to be adopted on critical grounds" (p. 468). This cogent reasoning implies the importance of recording all the variant readings in radiating texts; and it is therefore revealing of his divided mind that he proceeds to advocate choosing a copy-text "requiring the least amount of apparatus" (p. 471).[25]

He recognizes the reasons for dispensing with the concept of copy-text altogether in such situations: if there are eight radiating texts, he says, the copy-text is "only one of eight equal witnesses, of no greater presumptive authority than the other seven" (p. 470); the choice of copy-text, then, is "theoretically indifferent" and "largely a question of convenience"; it is made only after the critical text has already been constructed (p. 471), and it is "not integral to the editing" (p. 485). He is therefore receptive to the possibility of having no copy-text; yet he maintains that a copy-text be chosen "to serve as the physical basis" (p. 471) for a critically reconstructed text, without making clear why the "physical basis" must be equated with a single document, when in fact it is a group of documents. The idea that there must be a copy-text was so firmly rooted in his mind that the only alternative he saw to selecting a single radiating text was to have a "non-extant copy-text" (p. 471), in Crane's case the lost syndicate master proofs as reconstructed from the radiating texts. To cling to a concept of "copy-text" even if it comes to mean the same thing as the scholar's reconstructed text is surely the ultimate in being tyrannized by the idea of having something called "copy-text." At the end of the essay Bowers says that to try applying Greg's rationale to radiating-text situations "would establish a real tyranny of the copy-text"; but Bowers (like Greg before him) was not able, even while warning others about this tyranny, to shake himself entirely free from its bonds.