University of Virginia Library

II

Textual criticism, like all forms of scholarly investigation, is an activity
in which standing hypotheses are tested and revised or replaced, often by
the authors of the original hypotheses. Where the amount of evidence is
limited and fixed, difficult problems may over time be judged insoluble,
but only after an extended period of examination. Greg's scholarship is
in a sense a model of this process, as it is in part a record of corrective
second thoughts prompted by his own or others' further research. The
history of The Editorial Problem in Shakespeare offers exemplary testimony
to Greg's ever-growing views on the text of Shakespeare, most obviously
in the preface to the second edition (written in 1950), in which is of-
fered a catalogue of corrections of discussions appearing in the first edi-
tion, along with references to further and better scholarship on particular
points. The work had its origins in the series of Clark Lectures he deliv-

ered at Cambridge in 1939, but before the lectures could be published,
R. B. McKerrow's Prolegomena for the Oxford Shakespeare appeared. This
important book obviously demanded Greg's attention, especially since
he found himself in some disagreement with McKerrow's conservative
editorial principles. In preparing the lectures for publication in 1942, he
expressed a "more elaborate and less rigid" approach in a preface, and
in his own "Prolegomena" ("Prolegomena.—On Editing Shakespeare")
gave a detailed introduction which contested some of McKerrow's recom-
mendations, but also clarified many of his own. An appended essay, "Note
on Accidental Characteristics of the Text," is a snapshot of Greg's think-
ing on this subject at a point a few years in advance of "The Rationale of
Copy-Text," and can deepen understanding of its better-known successor.
Both the "Prolegomena" and the "Note" are helpful in demonstrating
why the problem of "accidentals" became for Greg a key to unlocking
the theoretical doors behind which the progress of critical editing had
stalled. In his "Note" Greg confesses "strong 'conservative' instincts,"
and an editorial disinclination "to violate" the "integrity" of particular
editions or manuscripts, but explains that these attitudes are reflections of
the "bibliographer's outlook … only a stepping stone, though an essential
one, towards the truly critical position."[23]

Through the development and application of methods of the physi-
cal analysis of documents, this "stepping stone"—which, of course, was
the New Bibliography—allowed for the possibility that judgment might
again play a serious role in the editing of English literature. Judgment
had been robbed of its privileges by foregoing editorial abuses, in which
choices among variants were made haphazardly or according to the aes-
thetic preferences of the editor. The conservatism of Greg and McKerrow
was a natural enough reaction to the undisciplined editorial past, though
they both strained under self-imposed restrictions. The strain was most
felt in encounters with works surviving in multiple authorities, whose in-
terrelationships could sometimes be revealed through a combination of
bibliographical analysis and critical insight. On occasion the presence
of authorial revision was suggested with more or less certainty, and so
emerged the editorial problem of multiple recoverable moments in the
life of literary works. The problem was new, for the most part. For most
surviving ancient and medieval works the possibility of identifying more

than one authorial version is excluded. Noteworthy exceptions are Ci-
cero's Academica, which survives in partial original (Priora) and revised
(Posteriora) versions, and the "Prologue" of the work by Chaucer tradi-
tionally known as "The Legend of Good Women," for which it is ac-
cepted that MS Gg contains the revised version of the earlier text (F)
preserved in several other manuscripts (see also note 33). When A. W.
Pollard and the others began developing methods to analyze printed
books, they could not help but draw lessons from the editorial experi-
ence of earlier literature, while taking note of differences. The differ-
ences seemed first of all to have to do with the amount and quality of the
textual evidence: while authors' manuscripts of works from the English
Renaissance are rare, the surviving early printed editions were, by and
large, made during or shortly after the authors' times. The apparently
better quality of the evidence suggested that methodical investigation of
mysteries of composition and tradition would be well rewarded; where
early expectations were not satisfied, it was not for want of trying.[24] Where
clarity was obtained, however, the nature of the new editorial problem
took shape. In this respect, historical importance attaches to McKerrow's
judgment that certain of Nashe's works survive in an earlier, uncorrected
edition, and a later edition which, while mainly derivative, also reflects
Nashe's corrections and, as with The Vnfortunate Traveller, revisions. This
may have been the first time that a scholarly editor, fully cognizant of the
survival of multiple moments in the history of the work he was editing,
was able to make a conscious choice to focus his critical text on one or
the other.

McKerrow decided on the later versions, and his decision to use them
as his copy-texts was most famously recalled and criticized by Greg forty-

odd years later, in "The Rationale of Copy-Text." This essay (appearing
in the third volume of Studies in Bibliography) opened a new vista in edi-
torial thought, one in which greater responsibility would be referred to
the judgment of the editor—the "truly critical position" of Greg's earlier
"Note on Accidental Characteristics of the Text." "The Rationale" was
one of the many important products of Greg's maturity, appearing in his
seventy-fifth year, more than fifty of which had been given over to the
study of Renaissance literature. In his youth he had been a pioneer of
bibliographical analysis, and in the extremity of age he tirelessly advo-
cated for an editorial approach fitted to its advantages and limitations.[25]
To the point when McKerrow and Greg began to consider the problem
typified by The Vnfortunate Traveller and present in certain other Renais-
sance works, the widely accepted goal of editing—the movement of the
received text closer to that which the author wrote—was of necessity
minimally defined. Though multiple levels of authorial intention are not
generally discernable in Renaissance works, Greg's recommendation in
"The Rationale of Copy-Text" for the construction of a critical text of
a revised work was ideally suited to the few, like The Vnfortunate Traveller,
which evidently survive in sequential series of documents. While many
Renaissance plays have two or more independent, often widely varying
witnesses, their relationships cannot often be established, with the result
that Greg's special copy-text recommendation can rarely be applied as
prescribed.[26] It was, however, in the editing of works of later periods,
which are generally witnessed by a more ample documentary record, that
the implications of Greg's discussion could unfold. The editorial experi-
ence of American literature proved that Greg was in the right frame of
mind, in emphasizing both textual genealogy and editorial judgment, in
the approach to works for which ample evidence had survived. As the
level of evidence rises, however, so does the complexity of the problem
of authorial intention; for much of the literature of the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, the boundaries of discussion established in "The Ra-
tionale of Copy-Text" are too narrow.

Without expecting to approach it too nearly, McKerrow and Greg
proposed as their editorial goal a text reflecting the moment when the
author submitted a finally revised and corrected manuscript for publi-
cation (or performance)—the "finally intended" text.[27] When editors of
American literature adopted Greg's recommendations they also adopted
this goal, which for them was more nearly realizable—the literature of
the last two or three centuries being represented not only by published
forms, but often by prepublication documents, from authors' drafts to
corrected proof sheets, and sometimes illuminating collateral material
such as authors' notes and publishers' correspondence. The history of
some works is therefore attested to well enough for editors to recognize a
creative process and be able to reconstruct several stages in its life. The
American editorial experience, with Greg's essay providing the theoreti-
cal point of departure, was shaped in many practical engagements with
the copious evidence, and accompanied by many more discussions and
controversies. One of its great fortunes has been to have as its chronicler
G. Thomas Tanselle, who was an important participant in both the prac-
tical engagements (as an editor of the Melville edition), and the discus-
sions and controversies, to which he made many of the most learned and

satisfying contributions. His recent collection Textual Criticism since Greg
(2005) is an indispensable guide to these discussions, which are carefully
recounted, dissected, and clarified in six thick survey-essays written at
intervals during thirty years.[28] The volume contains nearly six hundred
footnotes with references to perhaps two thousand editions of authors and
books and articles on editing. The titles of three successive essays are sug-
gestive of the problems that distinguish the editing of modern literature:
"Historicism and Critical Editing" (covering discussions from the period
1979–1985), "Textual Criticism and Literary Sociology" (1985–1990),
and "Textual Instability and Editorial Idealism" (1990–1995). The titles,
that is, call attention to the problems of authors' changing intentions and
the nonauthorial alteration of texts. Authors of earlier literature changed
their intentions too, of course, and their contemporaries and near-
contemporaries also influenced and altered their works, but this kind of
history only becomes generally visible—and therefore of central editorial
concern—for scholars of recent literature. Many of the most important
pages of Tanselle's surveys beginning with the "Historicism" essay are
therefore devoted to elaborating the conception of authorial intention to
address this history, and discussing the emerging editorial alternative of
social textual theory.[29] Together, the three essays constitute an extended,
many-sided exploration of what becomes visible to the editor of modern
literature: the complexities of the artistic process and the dynamic inter-
action of author and society. Tanselle's handling of several decades' worth
of often rancorous editorial disputes has been exceedingly judicious and
impartial, always seeking to clear away thoughtless or counterproductive
verbiage so that the most useful insights might be better appreciated. The
advantage to any discipline of having its scattered discussions brought
together in the careful analyses of an eminent scholar need hardly be em-
phasized; that much of the rancor which the author defused was directed
at his own views—or at what detractors mistook for them—only in-
creases the overall achievement. Tanselle's many original essays on edito-
rial and bibliographical subjects had become essential reading for editors
of American literature, and so those who began to question the "Greg-
Bowers tradition" naturally saw the author as its inheritor and principal
exponent. This identification was not inappropriate in itself, though the
picture of the tradition painted by many of its critics might have been less
distorted had more practicing editors engaged themselves in the discus-
sions. The Greg-Bowers editorial model has been repeatedly criticized by
a few editorial polemicists for its supposed interest in establishing a single,
exclusively valid constructed text, reflecting only the author's last inten-
tions, while denying the social, collaborative dimension of the creative
process. To sustain this criticism, early, abstract, and simplified formula-
tions of editorial theory were used as points of departure, while practical
developments in the editions themselves were little accounted for.

The effect of these misconceptions was heightened by an initial lack
of clarity on the part of some author-focused editors about the need to
deepen the definition of their editorial goal; later on, as the best editions
began to present critical texts reflecting complex histories of composition
and tradition, much of the insight within their covers went unnoticed
and unpublicized. Apart from those of Bowers and Tanselle, that is, few
contributions to the scholarly journals were made by practicing author-
focused editors, while the journals published little in the way of mean-
ingful assessments of the editions. These factors probably contributed to
the emergence of social textual theory, since it was conceived partly as
an alternative to a perceived narrowness in the authorial focus. In fair-
ness to those who were moved by the arguments of Jerome McGann,
social textual theory's chief progenitor, it should be noted that author-
focused critical texts were sometimes viewed as necessary outcomes of
an objective process, a fallacy that has caused confusion in more than
one generation of scholarly editors. Tanselle began the process of clear-
ing away some of the confusion and rectifying the theoretical disjuncture
between the goal McKerrow and Greg had conceptualized and the edi-
torial realities of more recent literature in his 1976 essay, "The Editorial
Problem of Final Authorial Intention."[30] In characteristically systematic
fashion, the author drew upon practical lessons, most obviously from his
own engagement with Melville's works, as well as pertinent philosophical
and editorial discussions, to sharpen the concept of artistic intention and
demonstrate its connection to scholarly editing. From the practical side
it had already become apparent that many modern works survived in a

series of variant documents, some of which seemed to suggest a progres-
sion, whether of a steady or irregular character, toward a single final state,
while others revealed complex forms of development, in which multiple
"final" states could be identified as possible objects for attempted critical
reconstructions. Not surprisingly, the evidence frequently revealed the
involvement, welcome and not, of persons other than the author in the
creative process. Tanselle discussed the expurgation of Melville's Typee
and Stephen Crane's Maggie, calling attention to a large class of modern
works whose themes and realistic language were more or less censored by
or at the behest of publishers or their agents. A whole range of uncoerced,
genuinely collaborative interactions between authors and others was also
being discovered at this time.

Of the discussions Tanselle examined in this early article, perhaps
the most provocative and helpful in its way was "A New Approach to
the Critical Constitution of Literary Texts" by Hans Zeller.[31] Zeller pro-
ceeded from an understanding that modern works present editors with
rich and visible histories; he endorsed the concept of authorial intention
as the proper focus for a critical edition, but rejected what he under-
stood as the automatic preference of the Anglo-American approach for
the author's last intentions. He furthermore disavowed editorial eclec-
ticism, believing that each variant document, even if distinguished by
but a single authoritative alteration, corresponded to a particular set of
authorial intentions, and was therefore a discrete version of the work in
question. In supplying a brief informative historical sketch of German
editorial practices, especially in the determining field of Goethe criticism,
Zeller found cause to examine the edition of Goethe's works prepared by
the Deutsche Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin (DDR), from 1949.
The coincidence of this date with the appearance of "The Rationale of
Copy-Text" enhances Zeller's comparison of Greg's recommendations
with the practices of the edition's first editor, the learned German Jewish
philologist Ernst Grumach (1902–67).[32] Zeller found much in common
in the approaches of the two contemporaries, though followers of Greg
might find more correspondence between Grumach's views and those

of R. B. McKerrow, at least in the matter of copy-text choice, since, in
Zeller's description, Grumach used revised editions as copy-texts for the
two works he edited (the epics Reinecke Fuchs and Hermann und Dorothea).
Zeller's main reason for pairing Greg and Grumach, however, seems to
have arisen from the willingness of both editors to draw readings from
different authoritative documents to serve their goal of an authorially in-
tended critical text. Zeller's theory of insular documentary-based versions
prevented him from endorsing their approaches, which he equated with
"contamination"—the term used in the editing of ancient texts to indicate
the classic problem of a single document carrying variants from alternate
traditions and so resistant to stemmatic classification.

Despite his rejection of the logic of Greg's rationale, Zeller did state
the editorial problems of modern literature with admirable clarity, and
was especially helpful in stressing that modern works could survive in
multiple versions. A weakness for exaggeration sometimes misdirected
attention when an issue of importance was being discussed: it is unhelp-
ful, for example, to consider the "editorial principle of final authorial
intention" in light of Zeller's suggestion that its "logical conclusion" would
be the "annihilation" of works such as The Aeneid, whose authors willed
that they be destroyed.[33] The belief that "final intention" must mean the
author's last expressed wishes for his or her work has proved to be a
persistent one. Certainly when J. P. Postgate spoke in 1911 of the "ul-
timate intention" of Marlowe with respect to the variants of the widely
divergent 1604 and 1616 versions of Doctor Faustus, something like last
(known) wishes was meant (see note 27); instructions to destroy works,
however, are rarely of use to the editor of a critical text. Zeller's view
that each variant document (and even each layer of alteration on each
document), constitutes a discrete version, was in part a reaction to his
mistaken belief that the Greg-Bowers approach held either a "morpho-
logical" or "teleological" view of literary works.[34] These notions—which
seem suggestive of a work of art perfecting itself (or maturing), in a ba-
sically involuntary natural or philosophical movement—are of course
foreign to modern scholarly editing. Yet few would deny, as Zeller seems

to do categorically, the existence of an artistic process, in which artists
develop works, with one or another degree of deliberation, toward points
of completion. It is a process that most would agree can be revived, in
pursuit of a revised end. Whether all the development within this process
is constructive, or should be described as progress, are not strictly edito-
rial questions, though they will likely demand the attention of the editor
of a modern work, at least when it comes to deciding which point of the
process should be the object of the attempted reconstruction. For Zeller,
however, authors' interest in perfecting their works, or their response to
others' suggestions or demands, are, in the distinction he draws, matters
for literary rather than textual analysis. The editor's job as he sees it is
limited to recounting the history of the work in its versions and selecting
the version to be presented as the critical text, which is defined as the
text of a particular document, cleared by the editor of simple errors. He
criticizes attempted reconstructions that purport to go beyond particular
documents, to reflect the author's uncompromised intentions. His reasons
are clearly stated: referring to Fredson Bowers's relatively straightforward
restorations in The Blithedale Romance of manuscript deletions of a few ref-
erences to liquor and sex, Zeller writes, "I find the idea perplexing, that
the editor should feel obliged not only to make inferences about the final
intentions of an author, but also about the causes behind these intentions.
I cannot regard the psyche of an author and its analysis as a substantial
foundation for editing."[35] This remark is more consistent with Zeller's
practical recommendations than is his earlier avowal of the goal of an
authorially intended text. The creative human mind does not always re-
spect documentary boundaries. The original documentary record, never
having been complete, is liable to have eroded by the time a work comes
in for scholarly attention. Editors of modern works commonly seek to
reconstruct texts of lost documents—fair-copy manuscripts, typescripts,
proof sheets—from descendents and ancestors. Only by drawing readings
from both an early printed edition and a draft manuscript, for example,
can an editor reconstruct the text of the intervening lost authoritative
document. In other words, for some historical purposes, only an eclectic
text will answer. There are limits of course.

Given his view of literary history as cut-and-dried matter, Zeller un-
surprisingly found Bowers's treatment of Stephen Crane's Maggie espe-
cially untenable. Maggie is uncharacteristic of Bowers's work in that it

comes dangerously close to breaching the historical limits that give criti-
cal editing its essential meaning. From a single round of revisions Crane
made in the text of the privately printed 1893 version of his story for
publication by D. Appleton in 1896, Bowers sought to preserve only what
he regarded as "stylistic changes as well as literary improvements," while
rejecting bowdlerizing changes the publisher had demanded.[36] For his
critical reconstruction of The Blithedale Romance, Bowers believed he could
reasonably restore three references to liquor and sex that were deleted
in manuscript, on the grounds that, unlike the bulk of the alterations,
these three did not reflect Hawthorne's own inclinations. They seem to
have been made out of deference to polite taste (possibly as represented
in the person of Sophia Peabody, Hawthorne's wife). A simple case like
The Blithedale Romance, in which a few revisions seem clearly out of step
with the rest, allow us to conceive of an author separately serving his or
her own intentions and someone else's while engaged in a single round of
revisions of a work. Bowers argued that two sets of intentions were also
served in Crane's revision of Maggie, but the editor was unable to identify
the two types of changes convincingly, as he had done for the Hawthorne
work. The basis of his critical reconstruction was questioned, politely by
Tanselle in "The Editorial Problem of Final Authorial Intention," and
more forcefully elsewhere.[37] His acceptance of the bowdlerized version
of the ending of chapter 17 attracted particular unfavorable notice. One
would have to assume that the evidence for alterations serving the pub-
lisher's rather than Crane's intentions was in the toning down or removal
of highly realistic language or subject matter—curse words, primarily,
and, in chapter 17, Maggie's encounters with prospective customers. By
restoring only some of these deletions in the critical text, Bowers seemed
to negate the controls he had established for his reconstruction.

Bowers called his critical text the "'ideal' text of Maggie as a literary
fact, not a limited 'ideal' text either of the 1893 or of the 1896 edition."[38]
This statement is not worded very clearly, nor was its meaning clarified
elsewhere in Bowery Tales, the volume containing the story, but it seems
to indicate a belief that the critical text was an ideal reconstruction of
the work as a whole, as opposed to a rendering of one or the other ver-
sion. If this surmise about Bowers's meaning is accurate, then he was

either basically confused on this occasion, or momentarily at odds with
the general direction of the editorial tradition he was otherwise involved
in upholding. Within the author-focused model, a critical text can be
said to represent the work as a whole only when the evidence indicates a
creative process defined by a single culminating point or when there is not
enough evidence to do anything else. Otherwise, a critical text can only
represent a particular moment in the history of the work. Bowers's Maggie
was more truly an attempted reconstruction of a presumed, intermediary
third version of the story, which, in the editor's view, existed once in the
author's mind, but only there. It might, however, be recovered in the
comparison of the text of the first edition with that of the revised one. The
authorially intended text is often partly defined by the rejection of altera-
tions made by or at the behest of publishers or their agents—especially
those with the suspected purpose of censoring coarse language or sensitive
subjects. Yet a scholarly editor must construct a critical text according to a
viable historical hypothesis, whereby it is argued that the author intended
for the work to take the chosen form at one time or another—though the
factor of time cannot be defined too narrowly, since a particular version
may have taken shape over an extended period. Bowers's claim for the
critical text of Maggie indicates that he came to believe that Crane had
corrected and improved the text according to his own tastes, quite apart
from simultaneously fulfilling the bowdlerizing demands of his publisher
(possibly with the assistance of Ripley Hitchcock, Appleton's editor). Had
he neatly separated the bowdlerizations and the improvements, and ad-
opted only the latter, his text might have attracted less criticism. Even
better would have been a clear, convincing demonstration, if such were
possible, that Crane had conceived of such a text. As it was, the edition
of Maggie must be counted among those few early occasions when Bowers
did seem to misrepresent the critically reconstructed text in metaphysical
terms, as the definitive synthesis of a literary work's constituent histori-
cal moments. Opponents of the "Greg-Bowers" editorial approach have
tended to fix their arguments to these early missteps, allowing themselves
thereby to miss a world of subsequent experience, in which editorial un-
derstanding developed and matured.