University of Virginia Library

I

The critical editorial approach to Anglophone literary works which
arose alongside the "New Bibliography" had detractors before the ar-
rival of the postmodern wave, the adherents of which, furthermore,
were not even the first to describe it as a Platonic pursuit. As far back
as 1959, Shakespeare scholar Leo Kirschbaum criticized the editorial vi-
sion of Fredson Bowers for, among other things, its supposed "Platonic
idea of an Elizabethan dramatic text—an absolute, unchangeable, holy
thing.…"[6] Much of the editorial discussion that shaped Bowers's ap-
proach was centered on works of the English Renaissance, and so past
and present opponents of critical editing have sometimes attempted to

support their criticisms by referring to the declining fortunes of certain
hypotheses of tradition advanced by McKerrow and his colleagues and
successors, especially those involving the origins of Shakespeare's plays.
Paul Werstine, an active latter-day critic of the concept of authorial in-
tention, has in several essays sought to discredit W. W. Greg's editorial
recommendations by undermining his investigations into the problems
of Shakespearean transmission. Dissecting Greg's discussions about the
manuscript origins of a few of the early printed texts, Werstine attempts
to show in "Post-Theory Problems in Shakespeare Editing" that they con-
stitute, in Werstine's oft-repeated Lyotardian phrase, a "grand narrative,"
whose supposed purpose is "the conservation of the Romantic view that
the greatest art we have was produced by the individual genius working
in splendid isolation from the rest of his culture."[7] For the tolerant reader
there are some limited lessons to be learned in Werstine's overall skepti-
cism of the discoveries of the New Bibliography, and even in his criti-
cisms of Greg's individual hypotheses about whether certain printed texts
were based on actors' memorial reconstructions or Shakespeare's "foul
papers." What good there is, however, must be carefully strained from
an environment of distorted representations of Greg's motives and even
aspersions on his character (as well as sprinklings of some rapidly aging
postmodern jargon). For readers unfamiliar with the original discussions,
the danger is high that Werstine's misrepresentations will be absorbed
along with his sometimes insightful analyses and reassessments of the evi-
dence. Particularly damaging in this respect is Werstine's unprincipled
amalgam of some speculations of Greg's contemporary J. Dover Wilson
with Greg's well-known contribution to editorial practice. In a later es-
say, Werstine goes so far as to say that "Greg's theory of copy-text rests
to a large extent on his confidence in Wilson's work on Hamlet."[8] In fact,
Wilson's work on Hamlet is not mentioned in "The Rationale of Copy-
Text," Greg's influential statement of editorial principles; nor even do the
plays of Shakespeare figure largely among the examples he uses in that
essay to demonstrate his main insight—that a revised edition of a work,
containing the author's last preferred wording, may not be as faithful to
his or her preferred formal details ("accidentals") as the earlier edition,
if the later typesetting was based on it. Readers of Greg's The Editorial
Problem in Shakespeare, furthermore, will be surprised to find Werstine,
working from a few fleeting and circumspect remarks he has found there,
fashioning a wholesale endorsement of Dover Wilson's views on Hamlet [9]
The masking of Greg's reservations about Wilson's views may mislead
new scholars, who will have to seek elsewhere, at any rate, for an appre-
ciation of the many important and enduring advances in the investigation
of play origins owed to Greg's scholarship.

Readers of Stephen Orgel's The Authentic Shakespeare, a collection of
essays warmly received by Professor Werstine, will find themselves con-
fronted with an even less accurate picture of the editorial views and pur-
poses of Greg and the tradition he represents (though Orgel criticizes
Greg's ideas without using his name). At the center of this distorted rep-
resentation, contained mainly in two brief opening essays, "What Is a
Text?" and "What Is an Editor?", is the familiar assertion that critical ed-
iting in the main involves the pursuit of a Platonic ideal text.[10] The asser-
tion is meant to serve as a foil for Orgel's often convincing demonstrations
of the instability of texts, which would fail to achieve the insightful effect
Orgel seeks for them if they were cast against a more balanced assessment
of Greg's views. Orgel also discounts—or rather, attempts to abnegate—
the traditional editorial connotation of the word authority, meaning writ-
ing which came from the author. His objections to this connotation are
representative of a range of similarly strong reactions recorded by other
scholars seeking to diminish the importance of the author in the literary
process. In their discussions the critics typically ignore the restricted but
indispensable traditional editorial meaning, and Orgel is no exception.
To those familiar and comfortable with that meaning, the objections to
it seem, again, to be the result of a misunderstanding—whether willful
or not—rather than of a genuine disagreement. Orgel wants the word to
mean social power or control, to the exclusion of all other meanings. He

accordingly presumes that only those with legitimate or financial power
can have authority, and concludes that authors are without authority
since in his view they are often paid servants mechanically satisfying the
demands of their powerful employers. In the English Renaissance, Orgel
explains, the "authority of the published text was … that of the pub-
lisher: he owned it; the author's rights in the work ended with his sale of
the manuscript. The publisher was fully entitled to alter the manuscript if
he saw fit—the manuscript was his."[11] Here it is easy to see that Orgel's
use of the term authority is simply incongruous with how the term has
been used in scholarly editing. That a misconception is operating is made
plainer by Orgel's attempt to clarify his views with an analogy about
painting. "Once the painting has been sold," Orgel explains, referring
to painting in general, "we do not believe that the artist has any further
rights in it." The owner, according to Orgel, has the authority to mutilate
or even destroy it, as was the fate meted out by Clementine Churchill
to Graham Sutherland's portrait of her husband Winston: "to believ-
ers in the autonomy of the artist, the painting was a Sutherland; but to
Churchill, the painting was a version of himself, and he didn't like it. The
authority in this case belonged to the subject/patron.…"[12] Here a basic
misconception (the confusion of the two meanings of the same word) and
a subordinate misconception (the reference to those who understand the
editorial meaning of authority as believers in something called "the au-
tonomy of the artist") are compounded together with the false equation of
two incongruous artistic genres. A painting is a particular material object;
the destruction of the object is the same as the destruction of the work
of art. A literary work, however, is not a material object, but sequences
of words; the destruction of a particular material object that records the
words does not necessarily destroy the work itself—unless the object is the
only record and no one has committed the text to memory. It must further
be pointed out that for those who understand the editorial meaning of
authority, as a measure of that which came from the author, the authority
of the painting Mrs. Churchill destroyed was unique to that object and
could not be transmitted to another object—even by Sutherland, who in
attempting to do so would only create another Sutherland painting, with
an authority all its own. Whatever aesthetic judgments might be made
of them, hand-painted "copies" of paintings are not copies from an edi-
torial point of view, but unique objects possessing the authority of their
creators—and none of the authority of the "copied" work. The same does
not hold true of texts, where the authority present in the text of one docu-
ment may be transferred in the making of another. Since a literary work
consists of the ordered thoughts of the author (or authors)—conveyed to
the mind of the reader or audience by means of a particular sequence of
inscribed symbols or vocalized sounds—it may be truly represented by
any number of "copies," whether symbolic or spoken, as long as they are
linguistically accurate.[13] If, to respect Orgel's set of parameters, an author
creates a work according to a publisher's general design, it would still
have to be conceded that the design is fulfilled according to that author's
unique artistic inclinations. Literary creations, no less than fashions of
dress or laws, outwardly define a society, but also inwardly reflect its de-
mands. In literature the demands, or influences, may be directly related
to the work at hand, such as a publisher's command or a friend's advice;
or they may be less apparently related to the work but no less formative of
the author's intentions, such as the author's memories of the past, or reac-
tions to contemporary public or private events. That influences play upon
and shape the mind and taste of the author is, however, of keen interest
to the author-centered editor. Furthermore, the author at last must create
the work, and what happens to it after he or she relinquishes it—whether
it is deliberately or accidentally altered by others, for example, or even
altered by the author, under the pressure of an undeniable demand by
some powerful person—does not erase the historical fact of the text as it
was before the alterations were made. How much of the unaltered text
may be recovered is a matter which depends on the totality of the avail-
able evidence, but the recovery of this text has been the purpose of textual
criticism since its earliest known existence.

Other examples of Orgel's use of the word authority might be sum-
moned as further proof of his belief that publishers, producers, patrons,
owners—but not authors—have power and influence in society as a
whole and in its artistic dimensions.[14] Most editors would not argue with
the essentials of this belief (while perhaps feeling that it is stated too cat-
egorically), but neither would they concede that the editorial connotation
of the term authority, as a measure of textual proximity to that which the

author created or intended to create, is much affected by discussions of
other meanings of the word. The exclusive definition proposed by Orgel
might at first seem to be justified by his view of the author—as little
more than an employee carrying out the instructions of the powerful.
Yet even an author (or authors) who creates a play according to someone
else's instructions about plot and characters produces an "authoritative"
manuscript in the traditional meaning of the term. An editor interested
in recreating the author's text would, in addition to repairing it of scribal
or compositorial errors, seek also, evidence permitting, to separate it from
later non-authorial alterations, such as modifications made by others for
performance. For an author-centered critical text, neither the errors nor
the acting changes have authority; an editor pursuing a collaborative so-
cial text would extend the conception of authority to comprehend the
acting changes.[15] Unlike Orgel's conception, however, the conception of
authority modified to guide the social textual editor bears a distinct rela-
tion to the original author-centered one. Authority in the sense of social
power is a self-evidently important concept affecting artistic creations
as much as any other aspect of organized human life. To claim that this
concept negates the editorial meaning of the word, however, is as illogical
as would be a claim that the concept of powerlessness negates the editorial
designation of codex descriptus. Authoritative and derived texts are useful
editorial concepts that cannot be disposed of by value judgments relegat-
ing the author to the margins of the creative process.

Orgel's conclusion about traditional editing, that it is a striving for a
Platonic ideal, emerges from the following set of assertions:

It can be acknowledged, in respect to Orgel's remark about the assump-
tion of the transparency of the printing process, that the discovery and
development of methods of bibliographical analysis in the first half of
the twentieth century tended to foster an overconfident mood concern-
ing possible results. Given early successes some confidence was to be
expected; overconfidence showed itself when bibliography was set upon
problems (especially in Shakespeare) that could not be decisively resolved
within the limits of the existing evidence. One temptation was to see me-
chanical causes in textual variation that all literary sense would suggest
was the result of purposeful alteration, authorial or otherwise. To react as
Orgel does, however, to the early ambitions of analytical bibliography by
positing the simple identification of a work of literature with a "material
embodiment" suggests a kind of idealism in itself, in which documents
necessarily appear, but authorless and without tradition, with the contin-
gent gaps in the historical record transformed into an essential mystery.
Orgel's blanket statement (at the beginning of "What Is a Text?"), that "at
the heart of our texts lies a hard core of uncertainty," seems, however, not
so much an idealist credo about cognitive limits as a casually exaggerated
conclusion about the expectations and results of analytical bibliography.[17]
Whether or not A. W. Pollard, McKerrow, or Greg sometimes expected
too much is a matter of small importance relative to their accomplish-
ments, prominent among which were the establishment of methods of
bibliographic analysis, and the permanent connection of these to the edit-
ing of Anglophone literature. Orgel's awareness of these achievements is
demonstrated in some of his other essays (notably "Acting Scripts, Per-
forming Texts")—even as he attempts to press his main point about the
unimportance of authors.

Orgel's mention of "accidentals" is of course a reference to W. W.
Greg's essay "The Rationale of Copy-Text," in which the authority of
the accidentals (spelling, punctuation, word division, and emphasis) of a
work, was, for certain editorial situations, treated separately from that of
its "substantives" (wording). Anyone familiar with Greg's argument will
at once recognize that it has not so much been misinterpreted as per-
fectly inverted—an unfortunate effect, perhaps, of the disregard of the
editorial meaning of the word authority. Greg conceived of the division
out of his concern that authorial spelling and punctuation be preserved
as far as possible. The concern was connected to the editorial problem

engendered when a revised edition of a work was typeset from an earlier
edition. As Greg observed, the later edition is derivative where it does not
incorporate the author's changes; since accidental variants so often resist
reasonable selection, those of the earlier edition should be preferred in
instances of doubt, as more likely to be authentic. Though the term has
sometimes seemed to invite misinterpretation, accidentals was coined by
Greg in an attempt to indicate greater instability in the transmission pro-
cess, not intrinsic insignificance. Those involved in transmitting the text
seemed either to treat spelling and punctuation with less care than they
did the words, or felt freer to alter them deliberately. Revising authors,
furthermore, were rarely able or willing to halt or reverse the deterio-
rating trend. Finally, since a scholarly editor is a better judge of verbal
variants than accidental variants, Greg recommended that questionable
accidental variants from the revised text be regarded as without author-
ity. A critical edition of the revised text, he furthermore concluded, would
better rely upon the accidentals of the earlier edition in cases of doubt.
The idea, again, was to preserve the most authoritative level of spelling
and punctuation, by "generally" adopting the accidentals of the earliest
surviving document in a series. As for the variant wording, that, said
Greg, "belongs to the general theory of textual criticism and lies alto-
gether beyond the narrow principle of the copy-text."[18]

This particular charge of "Platonism," at least, falls on one of its at-
tempted justifications—an accusation of carelessness about accidentals.
While utterly misplaced in a discussion of Greg's editorial practices, the
accusation, not surprisingly, becomes undisputed fact when its direction is
reversed. As he intimates in The Authentic Shakespeare (p. 17), and demon-
strates in the Pelican Shakespeare, which he co-edited, Orgel is a "mod-
ernizing" editor, preferring to alter Elizabethan spelling and punctuation
according to a necessarily personal notion of what modern readers will
find "accessible."[19] The modernized Shakespeare, a fixture in university

classrooms for generations, was called into question in the first half of the
last century by Greg and his colleagues, who began to pay deserved atten-
tion to period spelling and punctuation. Following them, Fredson Bowers
made old-spelling the practical norm for scholarly editions, and in his edi-
tions always adopted what he believed were the author's accidentals (or
the nearest recoverable semblance thereof).[20] This ought not be forgot-
ten, though Orgel's mistaken statement about accidentals may have been
partly triggered by Bowers's perverse habit of declaring, in contravention
of his practical attitude, that accidentals lacked basic significance. Never-
theless, when editors with social concerns favor modernization—and in
this Orgel joins Jerome McGann—they would seem not only to forswear
all logical criticism of the reasoned eclecticism of author-focused editing
(not to mention criticism of the seriousness with which that orientation
has treated accidentals), but also to create the very dichotomy between
literary and textual criticism that they profess to oppose.[21] The authori-
ally intended critical text is eclectic insofar as it is a reconstruction of a
particular moment in the history of a work of literature to which no one
document bears adequate witness. The editor therefore needs the free-
dom to bring together variants from as many sources as necessary (includ-
ing his or her own mind), but the process of selecting and arranging them
takes place within a strict historical framework. The process is focused on
recovering the author's preferences; one could criticize it for sacrificing
the preferences of society (as represented by scribes, actors, publishers,
proofreaders, printers, etc.), but in a well-constructed critical edition these
are not far to seek, since rejected variants are recorded in the apparatus.
It should not need saying, but by removing the historical limits, mod-
ernizing editors deny readers not only the authorially intended text, but
also the social text. Social textual theory, as articulated by McGann and
endorsed in one or another form by Orgel and many others of like mind,
holds that literary and dramatic works are collaborative products, created
as much by commissioning patrons, acting companies, and publishing
companies as by authors; it should follow from this that the text presented
in a scholarly edition ought to reflect the concept of collaboration. The
implications of the approach remain unexplored, however, since practical
demonstrations in the form of social textual editions are slow in appear-
ing. The expressed preference for modernization suggests, however, that
some social textual theorists would rather not fully extend theory into
practice. Reticence to provide editorial demonstrations of the social text
may arise from a realization that, in discounting the importance of the
author's preferences with respect to accidentals (and substantives), and el-
evating those of society in their place, the new focus leads practically to a
text with the linguistic attributes of the same period as those of the author-
centered text. For Renaissance works, these attributes include early and
irregular forms of spelling and punctuation, unfamiliar to modern eyes at
first glance. Experience has shown, however, that with less patience than
might at first be expected, modern readers can gain adequate facility in
reading typographically faithful renderings of English-language Renais-
sance texts. Nevertheless, some scholars halt after that first glance and de-
cide that the forms of words (and certain words themselves) are obstacles
to understanding and should be removed and replaced with forms the
scholar finds more familiar. This line of reasoning proceeds from some
glaring prejudices: that modern readers will not understand older forms
of the written language, that these forms constitute a discrete rather than
integral part of the language of the original, and that they are inessential
to the meaning and can be exchanged for modern equivalents which will
make the meaning clearer. Whether or not modernization has advantages
in certain circumstances, its blanket application at the university level
obviously impedes literary study. It pulls textual and literary criticism
apart, and then casts the former discipline aside, not recognizing that its
most basic function is textual interpretation; as for the latter discipline,
it is left to beg original meanings of linguistic anachronisms, texts whose
origins have been partly effaced according to elusive notions of what will
be familiar to modern readers. In The Editorial Problem in Shakespeare Greg
discussed the essential importance of accidentals, and of the need to pre-
serve their original forms—even if these reflect only the intrusions of the
author's contemporaries. Of the spelling he had this to say:
Of the need to preserve original punctuation, Greg simply observed, "Just
as the language of an Elizabethan author is better represented by his
own spelling than by ours, so the flow of his thought is often more easily
indicated by the loosely rhetorical punctuation of his own day than by
our more logical system." It is this line of reasoning that has been twice
missed: first when Greg is falsely criticized for believing that accidentals
may be altered without altering meaning, and then when the misinformed
critics circle back and favor or practice modernization.