Chapter 7
Editing Texts
This paragraph deals with
the critical debate initiated with a single essay by W. W. Greg, ‘The Rationale
of Copy-Text’, Studies in
Bibliography, vol. 3 (1950-51), pp.
19-36, reprinted in his Collected
Essays (1966), pp. 374-391, and in other
anthologies of textual criticism; see Bibliography and Textual Criticism.
English and American Literature, 1700 to the Present, edited by O.M. Brack,
jr., and Warner Barnes (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1969), pp. 41-58;
Art and Error: Modern Textual Editing, essays compiled and edited by
Ronald Gottesman and Scott Bennett (London, Methuen, 1970), pp. 17-36. An
Italian translation appears in Filologia
dei testi a stampa, a cura di Pasquale
Stoppelli (Bologna, Il Mulino, 1987), pp. 33-51. Again a word of warning is
required, since for people not expert in the criticism of English Renaissance
texts some of what Greg is saying can seem obscure, and the central message of
the essay has to be extrapolated with care. Rivers of ink have been spent in
debate relating to Greg’s rationale, many litres of which in complete
misunderstanding of what it really suggests, so that anyone wishing to react
against the brief summary furnished here would do well to read further before
jumping to conclusions. As the title of the article inequivocably states, what
Greg suggests is not a theory, nor a rule, nor a law, but a rationale which
prevails only in a certain type of interaction between an author and a printing
shop.
As has been remarked
several times in the course of this piece, the defining characteristic of the
McKerrow-Greg-Bowers school is a concern for finding ways in which bibliography
betters our understanding of textual transmission and thus, as a final outcome,
improves textual scholarship. It is perhaps inevitable therefore to discover
that it has produced its own, perhaps idiosyncratic, but ingenious and
effective theory of critical editing, containing elements of novelty for
scholars experienced in other traditions, especially those raised on a diet of
Lachmann and Bédier. Again the pragmatic approach exhibited initially by
McKerrow, coined into a ‘rationale’ by Greg, and further elaborated by Bowers,
derives from an intense familiarity with the problems of editing Elizabethan
and Jacobean texts written in a very fluid state of the English language. With
respect to other editing traditions, built on the acquaintance with classical
and medieval texts, it needs to be pointed out that critical scholarship of
Renaissance English texts habitually distinguishes between ‘old-spelling’ and
‘modern-spelling’ editions: in the first the words are printed and spelt as in
the copy-text, in the second, though the copy-text is still followed, spelling,
punctuation and other features are modernised. The peculiarities of late
Sixteenth and early Seventeenth-Century works in English often mean that
unusual and idiosyncratic spellings derive from the author in person, and
therefore deserve attention from the editor. With respect to other languages,
problems of form include not only spelling and punctuation, but also
word-division, insertion of hyphens, upper or lower case, and the use of italic
to highlight key terms in the text (for instance in the first edition of
Milton’s Paradise Lost in 1667).
The copy-text – the term
was first coined by McKerrow in 1904 - is the manuscript or printed version
chosen by the editor to furnish the basis of the critical edition and scholars
previous to Greg, such as Paul Maas, had already commented on how the “tyranny
of copy-text” interfered with an freedom of choice, since any departure from
the base could lead to an editor being accused of taking unjustified liberties.
Building on a hint furnished by McKerrow in his Prolegomena for the Oxford Shakespeare (1939), Greg distinguishes between the “substantive readings” and what
he terms the form or the ‘accidentals’ of the text. In his definition the
substantives are the words themselves and their meanings: if we change horse to house, only one letter is modified but the whole sense has changed; the
accidentals are the shape of the text, “such in general as spelling,
punctuation, word-division, and the like” (p. 376), that influence our
perception of the text but do not alter the substance of the “author’s meaning
or the essence of his expression” (ibid.): if, instead of horse, we write ‘horse’ or Horse or hoss or ’orse, the surface of the text is changed but not the reference to an
equine. When Greg produced this brief essay, textual editing, despite the
grumbles of a minority, generally required both the accidentals and the
substantives to follow the copy-text, except where manifestly incorrect. Greg
states instead that this principle is valid only for the accidentals, whereas,
as far as the substantives are concerned, an editor must be free to trust his
own judgement.
Students familiar with
other critical traditions will not find anything disturbing today in the
principle of selection between different substantive readings, independent from
the choice of copy-text, since the procedure reflects the practice followed in
numerous editions of classical and medieval texts. But, having defined the
principle of a divided authority and therefore of the editor’s right to produce
an eclectic text, Greg applies the method to cases of printed texts which in
successive imprints have been revised, either by the author or by reference to
a manuscript. His essential point is that, unlike manuscripts in which the
relationship between the witnesses is difficult to define, in printed texts the
transmission is linear and the various stages are known. It is important to
understand that compositors always preferred to set from a previous printed
text, if available, and therefore, even when the version was improved by
reference to a manuscript, it was common practice to write the corrections into
a copy of an earlier edition and send it to the printing shop. In such
circumstances the new edition is bettered in terms of the substantives, but
worsened in the accidentals, since the compositor introduces the new substance
but imposes his own preferences on the styling of the text. Greg’s solution has
the logic of sweet reason. Where it can be reasonably supposed that the
accidentals of the first edition are closer to the author’s original manuscript
and that those of the reprint have no additional authority, a critical text can
be constructed which unites the form of the earliest edition with the
substantives of the later ones. The rationale has been frequently applied in
editions of Shakespeare’s dramas: for instance, Othello was first
published in quarto form in 1622 (Q1), while the text produced in the First
Folio benefited from extensive revision taken from a manuscript, whose
different and improved reading were copied into one of the quarto reprints
(probably Q4). Since the form of this last is without authority, editors have
generally conjoined the form of Q1 and the substance of the Folio.
Greg’s rationale was taken
up, at times over-enthusiastically, by Bowers and his disciples who applied it
on an extensive scale to critical editions of the British and American
novelists (the latter under the auspices of the Centre for American Authors
(CEAA)). The phenomenon has occasioned much debate, most of it partisan, and
various attacks have been launched against these reconstructions of texts
according to authorial intention. For the benefit of Continental readers, who
are not necessarily familiar with the nuances of the history of English as a
spoken and written language, I here wish to clarify some unspoken assumptions behind
these operations. Again it is necessary to understand how writers worked in the
period concerned, as well as the economic and social enterprise marked by the
novel. For writers such as Scott and Dickens, a successful career as an author
gave the possibility of immense gains, but also placed them under constant
pressure to produce their material in a short space of time. Both were prolific
in their output, so that their collected editions occupy over a metre of
shelf-space, and both worked in close collaboration with their respective
printing shops. As natives of other tongues have learnt to their cost and
displeasure, in the English language there is little correlation between
spelling and pronunciation, while matters such as capitalisation, punctuation and
so on seem equally haphazard. The British have never had the equivalent of an
Academie Française with the authority to decide right and wrong in matters of
language, while usage has always been dictated by the streets of London, with
an infinite number of variables. These same problems were felt by the writers,
who duly created the text, but left the ‘styling’ (i.e. the accidentals) to the
experts in the printing shop. When both Scott and Dickens, towards the end of
their careers, came to revise the texts of their novels for their respective
collected editions, they both made alterations to the substance of the text,
but showed no interest in the form, since, to put it bluntly, they did not
consider it their business.
What Bowers insists on and
is often ignored in the debate around Greg’s rationale is the fact that a copy
annotated in this manner represents the last intention of the author of which
we have knowledge and therefore ought to be the focus of our critical
attention: for instance, in his introduction to the Dramatic Works of
Thomas Dekker in 1953, he states: “In all cases the first editions – the only
ones set from manuscript – provide my copy-text. Later editions have no
authority except for two plays... which show revisions and corrections deriving
from the author. For these two plays I use the methods of recent textual
theorists [i.e. Greg]. I retain the ‘accidentals’ – the general texture of
spelling, punctuation, and capitalization – of the first edition, the only one
which has a direct relationship to the ‘accidentals’ in the manuscript that
served as printer’s copy. Into this texture I introduce those revisions
(chiefly ‘substantive’) for which, in my opinion, neither the compositor nor
the printing-house editor but the author was responsible. For these two plays
the critical text thus comes as nearly as possible to reproducing the copy of
the first edition marked by the author for the printer of the second edition”
(Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, I, p. ix); cfr. Idem, ‘Current theories
of copy-text, with an illustration from Dryden’, Modern philology, vol. 48 (1950), pp. 12-20, rist. in Essays cit, pp. 277-288: 280). Of course
it does not always happens that an author revises a copy of the first edition
in order to prepare a revised version. Sometimes a later reprint is chosen, but
in such a case, having accepted that what we reconstruct is the annotated
exemplar, theoretically it is acceptable to move this layer of manuscript
corrections backwards in time into a virtual copy of the princeps, as Bowers explains in his introduction to Henry Fielding,
A history of Tom Jones : “By this
procedure an editor of Tom Jones does
not substantially reproduce the exact marked copy that was given to the press
for the fourth edition, for this was the third edition which is at one step
removed from the authority of the first-edition accidentals. Instead, by
choosing the first edition as copy-text and then substituting for its
substantives those revisions in the fourth edition that are considered to be
authorial, not compositorial, an editor attempts to reproduce what would have
been the characteristics of the marked copy if Fielding had annotated the first
instead of the the third edition. That this procedure reconstructs a purely
hypothetical printer’s copy for the fourth edition is of no consequence in
comparison to the virtues that are achieved in wedding the authority of the
first-edition accidentals with the general authority of the revised
fourth-edition substantives” (Oxford, at the Clarendon Press, 1974, I, pp.
lxx-lxxi).
The outcome of these
various operations a text which in ‘historical’ terms has not circulated
previously, and from this particular point have derived most of the challenges
to the acceptability of the rationale. Again it is possible that part of the
reaction is due to the prescriptive tone in some articles by Bowers, though not
a few of the arguments involve a theoretical whirlygig, vitiated by concepts
such as reception theory and the historical instability of texts, which fails
to address the practical problem of an editor who has to produce a text other
people will read. To take the most common objection, is the editor duty-bound
to respect the form of the text that originally appeared and were read at the
time? A positive reply does not take account of the extent to which such texts
are compromised (at times by the author), or corrupt, or sometimes just
inferior. Do we really want to read the 1850 text of Wordsworth’s Prelude in preference to the 1805 version recovered from the manuscripts in
1971? Textual editors have always recuperated and made available versions of
texts that do not have the support of a historical tradition, but which are
better than previous versions put into circulation. Obviously a scholar
interested in the influence of Wordsworth’s Prelude on writers of the late
Victorian period will work with the 1850 text, but modern readers will choose
the 1805 (or the two-part 1798-99) version as the truest expression of
Wordsworth the poet. The construction of an eclectic text, which nevertheless
remains truer to what the author actually wrote than any alternative, is
therefore a perfectly logical, successive step.
Plenty of cases inevitably
spring to mind, for example English or American authors such as Richardson (who
was also a professional printer) or Henry James, and Italian writers such as
Ariosto and Manzoni, who thoroughly revised both the substance and the form of
their works and for whom Greg’s rationale is inappropriate, but the long list
of exceptions serves only to define what is not even a rule but a solution in
given circumstances. In the definition of Gianfranco Contini, any critical text
is never more than a ‘working hypothesis’ that speaks to its own time and to no
other. Future generations will produce their own critical texts according to
their own criteria, resources and technologies, and this is their concern, not
ours. Above all historical truth is not obtained by placing a higher value on
the safety of the editors in their own critical community than on what the
author actually wrote.
For further bibliography
and above all for the development by Bowers of Greg’s initial proposition, see
Fredson Bowers, ‘McKerrow, Greg and “Substantive Edition”’, The Library, s. 5, vol. 33 (1978), pp. 83-107, and Idem, ‘Greg’s “Rationale of
Copy-Text” Revisited’, Studies in
Bibliography, vol. 31 (1978), pp.
90-161. The rationale has also been the object of three articles by G. Thomas
Tanselle, brought together and published in monograph form as Textual Criticism since Greg: A Chronicle,
1950-1985 (Charlottesville,
University Press of Virgina, 1987). The same scholar offers his own view of
what textual editing should be, along Greg-Bowers lines, in the 1987 Rosenbach
lectures, issued as A
Rationale of Textual Criticism (Philadelphia,
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989). The debate has remained a lively one
and Tanselle offers a wide-ranging round up more recent developments in
‘Editing without a Copy-Text’, Studies in
Bibliography, vol. 47 (1994), pp. 1-22;
‘Textual Instability and Editorial Idealism’, Studies in Bibliography, vol. 49 (1996),
pp. 1-60; and most recently in ‘Textual criticism at the millenium’, Studies in bibliography, vol. 54 (2001), pp. 1-80.
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