c.f. Jerome McGann The Textual Condition.
Leah Marcus, in her article "Textual Indeterminacy and Ideological Difference: The Case of Dr. Faustus" (Renaissance Drama n.s. 20 (1989): 1-29), argues that both the A and B texts of Dr. Faustus can claim aesthetic integrity in their own right, and that neither comes any closer to "the absent authorial presence we call Marlowe" (284).
"post-structuralist theory has taught us [that] the idea of the original is not only misleading, but wholly illusory" (285).
Traditional textual critics typically attempt to link texts to an authorial agent as a way of authorizing their own interpretations of text, but while texts may be understood as the instruments of an authorial agent, they also bear traces of "nonagential" composition. Shakespearean texts are the product of collaborative intervention from agents of printshops, scriveners, and playhouses, and thus so-called "accidentals" form an essential part of a text (286).
"Texts -- like history -- exist in spite of us" (287).
The text of Antonio's letter to Bassanio is, in the folio text, clearly set off in italic text, and is otherwise unassigned: while Portia is given a speech prefix before and after the reading of the letter, no speech prefix is assigned to the letter itself (290). "[The letter] has no voice (that Portia or Bassanio voices the letter on stage is either purely conjectural or merely convenient)" (emphasis mine) (291). What a load of crap. It is conjectural in so far as a servant, or some other present person on stage may read the letter, but it is not "merely convenient," it is theatrically necessary. Stern has shown how letters were often separated from their surrounding texts, but if the letter was not meant to be read out loud, nothing at all would have been printed on it. There is an insignificant chance that anyone would have seen the text of the letter on the comparatively intimate Blackfriars stage, let alone at the Globe.
In his 1987 New Cambridge edition of Merchant, M. M. Mahood proposes that the distinction between Solanio, Salarino, and Salerio is one that can be resolved by a director in performance, which very likely was what would have happened in Shakespeare's company, but the three characters ought to be preserved in print because they were all present in the manuscript (295 - 296). This presumes that the manuscript can be reconstructed through print, and we should know better by now, but also "constitutes a performative version of the logocentrism described by Derrida: spoken language is imagined as prior to and more immediate than the written" (297). Ah.... I wasn't going to pull Derrida into this, but if someone else wants to, who am I to argue?
"It seems to me not much to matter how there came to be three characters with such names in the Hayes quarto, but simply that there came to be these three "letteral" configurations we have decided to call characters. The matter of the three Sallies is important here not because it stands as yet another site for our intervention in the attempt to solve a textual crux, but rather precisely because it marks the eruption -- inexplicable and yet undeniable -- of the accidental" (303).
"To clean up accidents in a text is to construct a narrativized world of total causality and accountability, a purely rational world in which everything is under control" (305 - 306). Such practice is untenable; it can only create texts within the historiographical framework of the editorial narrative. As Mahood demonstrates, there are no fewer than 16 "characters" (where each speech prefix and potential variant spelling represents its own unique character) in Merchant, and each are just as authorial as the other (306).
Citation
Marchitello, Howard. "(Dis)Embodied Letters and The Merchant of Venice: Writing, Editing, History." Shakespeare: The Critical Context. Stephen Orgel and Sean Keilen Ed. New York: Garland Publishing. 1999. p. 283 - 311. Print. Dual pagination is given for all works in this volume, but since the table of contents follows the pagination running at the bottom center of each page, this is the pagination that I have followed in my citations.
Showing posts with label Editors. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Editors. Show all posts
Tuesday, January 4, 2011
Monday, January 3, 2011
Notes on "What is an Editor?"
"Textual practice for the past twenty years has been increasingly faced with the necessity of abandoning the notion that was basic to the bibliography practiced by Greg and Bowers, that by comparing texts we can arrive at a single, authentic, original, a reconstruction of the author's final manuscript" (117).
Playtexts are built with a fluidity that enabled them to change as the conditions of performance change, and thus the printed text represents only a single stage of an ongoing process. Writers complaining that players have altered their scripts in performance helps demonstrate this point (117).
Uuncorrected sheets were bound into books with corrected ones, and there was nothing in print technology that required this: it is merely reflective of a Renaissance mindset that saw printed books as a fluid medium (117). I disagree with this, partially based on some of the other notes in this journal: hiring a proofreader was an added expense, and wouldn't always be done, and since time was money, when a proof reader was employed, even if only checking for typographical errors, it would mean idle press time to stop the press for the ten minutes Orgel says would have been necessary.
The fundamental assumption of most editors is that there is a "perfect" text that the editor should be true to in creating new editions of that text (118).
Producing a modernized text is not the best way to preserve the print archeology of the originals, but it is necessary to make Shakespeare accessible to the majority of modern readers, and thus the two key tasks of an editor are irreconcilable (119).
"Every facsimile is identical to every other one, and in this respect facsimiles falsify the essential nature of the Renaissance book" (121).
Summary
Orgel observes the material instability of the printed book, and the material instability of text itself ("proud" vs "provd" in Sonnet 129). He never says what an editor is, or proscribes a practice for editing, but instead illustrates that editors will often seek two contradictory goals in creating their editions. Editorial logic will, of necessity, be left to the individual judgment of the editor and the needs of the editor's audience.
Citation
Orgel, Stephen. "What is an Editor?" Shakespeare: The Critical Context. Stephen Orgel and Sean Keilen Ed. New York: Garland Publishing. 1999. p. 117 - 123. Print. Dual pagination is given for all works in this volume, but since the table of contents follows the pagination running at the bottom center of each page, this is the pagination that I have followed in my citations.
Playtexts are built with a fluidity that enabled them to change as the conditions of performance change, and thus the printed text represents only a single stage of an ongoing process. Writers complaining that players have altered their scripts in performance helps demonstrate this point (117).
Uuncorrected sheets were bound into books with corrected ones, and there was nothing in print technology that required this: it is merely reflective of a Renaissance mindset that saw printed books as a fluid medium (117). I disagree with this, partially based on some of the other notes in this journal: hiring a proofreader was an added expense, and wouldn't always be done, and since time was money, when a proof reader was employed, even if only checking for typographical errors, it would mean idle press time to stop the press for the ten minutes Orgel says would have been necessary.
The fundamental assumption of most editors is that there is a "perfect" text that the editor should be true to in creating new editions of that text (118).
Producing a modernized text is not the best way to preserve the print archeology of the originals, but it is necessary to make Shakespeare accessible to the majority of modern readers, and thus the two key tasks of an editor are irreconcilable (119).
"Every facsimile is identical to every other one, and in this respect facsimiles falsify the essential nature of the Renaissance book" (121).
Summary
Orgel observes the material instability of the printed book, and the material instability of text itself ("proud" vs "provd" in Sonnet 129). He never says what an editor is, or proscribes a practice for editing, but instead illustrates that editors will often seek two contradictory goals in creating their editions. Editorial logic will, of necessity, be left to the individual judgment of the editor and the needs of the editor's audience.
Citation
Orgel, Stephen. "What is an Editor?" Shakespeare: The Critical Context. Stephen Orgel and Sean Keilen Ed. New York: Garland Publishing. 1999. p. 117 - 123. Print. Dual pagination is given for all works in this volume, but since the table of contents follows the pagination running at the bottom center of each page, this is the pagination that I have followed in my citations.
Sunday, August 15, 2010
Notes on Textual Instability and Editorial Idealism
As I continue my readings in bibliography, I've moved on to "Textual Instability and Editorial Idealism" by G. Thomas Tanselle, which sounds like it should be right up my alley given the conundrums I'm dealing with in the preparation of a final text. Merry Devil has textual instability aplenty, and right now if there's one thing I'm clearly lacking, it's enough experience as an editor to have a guiding ideology of how to best proceed with this project. Lets see what I can learn here....
Tanselle begins with the observations that the study of texts as social objects that are newly edited each time they are read has become popular in the last half century, but that this does not necessarily invalidate the Greg-Bowers tradition of establishing authorial intent. The vogue for "anti-foundationalist" literary theory leads to an anti-foundationalist textual theory, but neither can be more correct than the other (1-3).
Bowers preferred dealing with the problems presented by specific situations to discussions of theory (3).
The question of "multiple authorship" can only be answered based on how one define multiple authors. In Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius, Jack Stillinger defines multiple authorship so broadly that a single author must be someone who never incorporates anything outside of themselves into their work, and never revises it at a later time. Otherwise, any contribution made to a text is made by another "author." Tanselle finds this proposition ridiculous (3 - 5).
Stillinger's proposition is further undercut when he makes the distinction between changes that an editor makes to a text that are then authorized by the original writer, and changes that an editor makes to a text that are not; in this case calling them corruptions. These corruptions to the original authors text are, however, still authorized by the editor who makes them, and thus are "legitimate" for that particular new work (6). So, in a nutshell, if I make a change to a text by Shakespeare, I've corrupted Shakespeare's text at the same time that I've authorized by own, but my text has at least two authors (myself and Shakespeare). If an actor asks to change a word in the text and I let them, I am authorizing that change, and thus they become another author of text B, but if I don't and they do it anyway, they create a text C with three authors anyway. You can see how quickly this lies to madness, for if we follow this logic, by choosing to not make the change my actor suggests, they author a new edition because I have had to consider an alternative and choose not to use it, so they force me to re-evaluate my original choice, so in reality we create text C (actor changes word without me authorizing the change) and C prime (me not making the change after the actor has suggested it. This sounds like a Caucus Race.
Questioning the importance of authorial intention in textual studies is a worthwhile endeavor, but only if it can account for how the socialized, anti-foundationalist understanding of a text can fit together with the foundationalist approach. "Textual idealism" is not a synonym for "textual perfection," and constructing a text as it was conceived of by the author at a certain point in time does not undermine the notion of further editions of that text as products of social and historical change, nor does it invalidate those other texts (12).
It is further important to distinguish that bibliographers who attempt to discern authorial intention are not attempting to discover an original idea behind the work, but are attempting to reconstruct a material work that is not extant in physical form (12).
An author may have simply made a mistake in writing down their ideas, or they may have been limited by available materials or technology, but these limitations or accidents do not invalidate the text they intended to write. An intentionalist editor is therefore not trying to recover the idea of the text, they are simply intending to recover the text that was conceived of, but not necessarily written down properly by the author (12). Honestly, I'm a little shaky on this one. When it comes to typos &c, seeing through to authorial intention, that is the idea behind the text, is almost necessary. When an author calls a character by the wrong name (for example, omitting "Sir" in a speech prefix) and names another character that is clearly not present in the scene, I don't think it wrong to say that we can see the idea behind the text. Reconstructing the material textual object would mean reconstructing the error, but in this case it is more useful to reconstruct the idea behind the text and simply note the error. There's no need to muck this up with poetic notions of trying to see through to the genius or the muse behind the idea, for in this case we are seeing an idea clearly manifested in symbolic form that, for whatever reason, simply did not translate well into a material object. Maybe this is just splitting hair between the meaning of "idea" and "text as conceived."
It is important to remember that an intended text is in itself the product of a historical (and a social) process. Since no author writes in a vacuum, the texts they produce, whether intended or unintended, are distillations of a particular historical/cultural moment, and the texts intended by authors at the moment of conception should have their place in the history of the text (13-14). Thus, understanding of an author's intention means having to understand the author's particular historical/social/cultural context.
Editors attempting to create a text that reflects an author's intention by making emendations do so by attempting to fix the text as intended at a specific time by the author. This can mean incorporating later emendations into an earlier text on the premise that those emendations more accurately reflect the intended earlier text, or vice versa. Still, the editor is also fixing the edited text in a certain moment in time, and as with any historical research, will be required to fill in the gaps with their own critical judgment (17).
In the anthology Editing in Australia, Peter Shillingsburg's "The Autonomous Author, the Sociology of Texts and Polemics of Textual Criticism" advocates an approach to reading, and thus editing, based on context. A text needs to be read in light of all possible contextual factors. This position is not a new one, but Shillingsburg sets it forth very well, and this essay is therefore worth following up with (23).
James McLaverty suggests the two important questions when considering a text are what versions are, and which text editors should present to readers. He goes on to argue that any distinctive "utterance" of a text somehow connected to other utterances constitutes a new version. The text editors should present to readers encapsulates one or more of the author's intended utterances, and also includes the structural apparatus for connecting these utterances, and for connecting this particular utterance with other utterances (25 - 26).
Joseph Grigley builds on McLaverty's work with the observation that individual utterances cannot be repeated because each utterance is its own event. Even if the precise words of an utterance can be repeated, its context cannot. Grigley's conception of the timely nature of utterances may not offer anything new to editors, who have known for generations that they can never recapture the complete context of a work, but it may help clarify what editors have done and will continue to do going forward: capture the interpretation of a textual moment (26).
The binary between "modernist editors" who seek to create a stable and definitive text and "post-modernist editors" who highlight the instability of texts and the value of interpretation is, as most binaries tend to be, too neat to be practical (30).
Morris Eave's entry in Cultural Artifacts and the Production of Meaning: The Page, the Image, and the Body offers a view of editing that delights in the instability of texts. He argues that all editorial decisions are legitimate, and links the decisions of the editor to the same decisions the artist makes as part of "the process of history." Intentionalist editing is one more form of interpretation and creation, and should not be dismissed (32 - 33). A-men I say to that. The fact is that it's very difficult to present Renaissance or earlier, or even early 20th century or earlier plays in their entirety to a modern audience. The theatrical conventions of the time will dictate an audiences expectation and basic level of tolerance for how long they're willing to sit still. Like it or not, in the early 21st century, that means the 10 or 15 minute span of a YouTube video.
Tanselle's got my back on this last point. I'll quote him here: "Thus when Eaves says that 'whatever is may be . . . on its way to becoming right,' he recognizes that change may be necessary to produce rightness for a given audience" (33).
Ann R. Meyers, in "Shakespeare's Art and the Texts of King Lear" notes that even attempts at documentary editing still require a degree of selection and interpretation. In presenting the two versions of King Lear in their Oxford Edition, Wells and Taylor have made emendations to the quarto Lear where Qa has "crulentious," Qb "tempestuous," and F "contentious," Wells and Taylor have used the Folio reading in their quarto version of the text based on paleographic evidence that demonstrates the Folio provides the correct reading to the compositor error of the Quartos. Despite similar paleographic evidence for reading for the correctness of Folio's "Come unbutton" (as opposed to Qa's "Come on be true" or Qb's "Come on") Wells and Taylor have left the reading of "come on be true" because it makes to them "local and contextual sense" (34 - 35). Wells and Taylor are the ones that determine the sense of their inclusion or rejection of certain readings, and thus they still are creating a text that is a conflation; an edition of their own interpretation.
In "Text as Matter, Concept, and Action," Peter L. Shillingsburg offers an ambitious argument for the existence of non-material texts, in which he demonstrates how non-material texts are linked to their material counterparts. He conceives of works as entities that are manifested in material and linguistic form, but that the conceptual version of a text should not be confused with the Platonic ideal of "text" (37). This is definitely one I'll have to read. Where does one draw the line between ideas, texts as conceived but not written, and the text that appears on the page. I can only imagine some future textual scholar trying to make sense of the stew of tracked changes that Google Docs keeps of "Battleground State." Precisely how much weight should we give to the text as conceived when the author might decide that the text as conceived sucks, and needs extensive re-conception before it's fit to be put in front of people?
Texts can only be understood through observation, but every observer has the right to choose how they wish to observe a text (or anything else for that matter). Any theory of textuality must encompass every process by which a text may be observed, which includes a range of methods and tastes as diverse as the number of observers (39-40). Observing a text through an historical scope requires a different apparatus than observing that text with a final performance in mind, and observing a text as a work of art fit to be hung on a wall requires a still different apparatus. Before presenting an edition of Merry Devil, I must determine who that edition is for.
Paul Eggert, in "Document and Text: The 'Life' of the Literary Work and the Capacities of Editing," also argues that all editions of a work should be considered and studied as authentic iterations of the work and should be studied as authentic (41).
Tanselle says this of Grigely's "Textual Criticism and the Arts: The Problem of Textual Space," but I think it bears quoting, as it has general application, and should, I think serve as a framework for understanding any essay arguing for any theory of a text: "Practically everyone understands that the experience of a text, like all other experiences, is colored by one's entire previous life and that it will continue to reverberate in one's mind, affecting all experiences afterward. An essay that says something like this does not mark any advance in thinking" (45).
If modern approaches to editing emphasize the plurality of texts rather than the intentions of a single author, than it is curious that modern textual scholars have a low regard for the work of the intentionalist editors of previous generations. The texts they produced are, after all, a further contribution to the plural text that modern textual scholars celebrate (49 - 50).
New theoretical insights into the nature of editing have the danger of creating a sense of the futility of the editing process. If all versions of a text ought to be considered in their own right, it is impossible to present a modern reader with an accurate distillation. It is likewise impossible to create an edition that encompasses the needs of all possible readers of a text. Through this, it is important to remember that editing a text is a creative activity, akin to writing an essay or giving a performance (50 - 51). So it is more than helpful, it is essential to determine the ultimate goal of a text before it is produced. Is the goal for the text to be read in a classroom or to be performed on a stage. What kind of classroom? What kind of stage? Determining the ideal audience for a work will provide the context in which the work is to be created. The way you advertise your show for a Philly Fringe audience will of necessity be different from the way you advertise your show for a largely academic audience in rural Virginia.
While some more modern philosophies of editing have heaped criticism on previous generations of editors for preferring a "single text" edition of a work, the form of the codex lends itself to this style of presentation. Critical editors of the past might very well have wanted to present multiple text editions of their work, but this option was unavailable given the physical and economic limitations they faced (52-53).
Here's something worth quoting: "The acts of constructing texts and works are social events, as many textual theorists have been telling us; but we are not going as far as we can toward understanding those events if we limit ourselves to surviving objects and exclude from our deliberations the mental events that are a fundamental part of the textual process" (58).
Quoting Virginia Wolfe: "I believe that the main thing in beginning a novel is to feel, not that you can write it, but that it exists on the far side of a gulf, which words can't cross: that its to be pulled through only in a breathless anguish. . . . But a novel, as I say, to be good should seem, before one writes it, something unwriteable but only visible; so that for nine months one lives in despair, and only when
one has forgotten what one meant, does the book seem tolerable. I assure you, all my novels were first rate before they were written" (58-59).
Summary: Texts that are conceived are inherently different from texts that are written, and if we are truly to explore textual objects as cultural artifacts, this requires seeing beyond the words printed or written on them. The form of the printed book has as much as any guiding philosophy led to the development of single text editions, but single text editions will always be a requirement of publishing. Someone with the proper knowledge and training will always be necessary to distill information that a less well informed reader does not have, or does not have access to. In the complete social history of a text, a single text edition of that text is another version of the text.
Wow. This was a thick survey of the development of theories of editorial instability and editorial theory. It's left me with a lot to think about, and some other things to explore.
Tanselle begins with the observations that the study of texts as social objects that are newly edited each time they are read has become popular in the last half century, but that this does not necessarily invalidate the Greg-Bowers tradition of establishing authorial intent. The vogue for "anti-foundationalist" literary theory leads to an anti-foundationalist textual theory, but neither can be more correct than the other (1-3).
Bowers preferred dealing with the problems presented by specific situations to discussions of theory (3).
The question of "multiple authorship" can only be answered based on how one define multiple authors. In Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius, Jack Stillinger defines multiple authorship so broadly that a single author must be someone who never incorporates anything outside of themselves into their work, and never revises it at a later time. Otherwise, any contribution made to a text is made by another "author." Tanselle finds this proposition ridiculous (3 - 5).
Stillinger's proposition is further undercut when he makes the distinction between changes that an editor makes to a text that are then authorized by the original writer, and changes that an editor makes to a text that are not; in this case calling them corruptions. These corruptions to the original authors text are, however, still authorized by the editor who makes them, and thus are "legitimate" for that particular new work (6). So, in a nutshell, if I make a change to a text by Shakespeare, I've corrupted Shakespeare's text at the same time that I've authorized by own, but my text has at least two authors (myself and Shakespeare). If an actor asks to change a word in the text and I let them, I am authorizing that change, and thus they become another author of text B, but if I don't and they do it anyway, they create a text C with three authors anyway. You can see how quickly this lies to madness, for if we follow this logic, by choosing to not make the change my actor suggests, they author a new edition because I have had to consider an alternative and choose not to use it, so they force me to re-evaluate my original choice, so in reality we create text C (actor changes word without me authorizing the change) and C prime (me not making the change after the actor has suggested it. This sounds like a Caucus Race.
Questioning the importance of authorial intention in textual studies is a worthwhile endeavor, but only if it can account for how the socialized, anti-foundationalist understanding of a text can fit together with the foundationalist approach. "Textual idealism" is not a synonym for "textual perfection," and constructing a text as it was conceived of by the author at a certain point in time does not undermine the notion of further editions of that text as products of social and historical change, nor does it invalidate those other texts (12).
It is further important to distinguish that bibliographers who attempt to discern authorial intention are not attempting to discover an original idea behind the work, but are attempting to reconstruct a material work that is not extant in physical form (12).
An author may have simply made a mistake in writing down their ideas, or they may have been limited by available materials or technology, but these limitations or accidents do not invalidate the text they intended to write. An intentionalist editor is therefore not trying to recover the idea of the text, they are simply intending to recover the text that was conceived of, but not necessarily written down properly by the author (12). Honestly, I'm a little shaky on this one. When it comes to typos &c, seeing through to authorial intention, that is the idea behind the text, is almost necessary. When an author calls a character by the wrong name (for example, omitting "Sir" in a speech prefix) and names another character that is clearly not present in the scene, I don't think it wrong to say that we can see the idea behind the text. Reconstructing the material textual object would mean reconstructing the error, but in this case it is more useful to reconstruct the idea behind the text and simply note the error. There's no need to muck this up with poetic notions of trying to see through to the genius or the muse behind the idea, for in this case we are seeing an idea clearly manifested in symbolic form that, for whatever reason, simply did not translate well into a material object. Maybe this is just splitting hair between the meaning of "idea" and "text as conceived."
It is important to remember that an intended text is in itself the product of a historical (and a social) process. Since no author writes in a vacuum, the texts they produce, whether intended or unintended, are distillations of a particular historical/cultural moment, and the texts intended by authors at the moment of conception should have their place in the history of the text (13-14). Thus, understanding of an author's intention means having to understand the author's particular historical/social/cultural context.
Editors attempting to create a text that reflects an author's intention by making emendations do so by attempting to fix the text as intended at a specific time by the author. This can mean incorporating later emendations into an earlier text on the premise that those emendations more accurately reflect the intended earlier text, or vice versa. Still, the editor is also fixing the edited text in a certain moment in time, and as with any historical research, will be required to fill in the gaps with their own critical judgment (17).
In the anthology Editing in Australia, Peter Shillingsburg's "The Autonomous Author, the Sociology of Texts and Polemics of Textual Criticism" advocates an approach to reading, and thus editing, based on context. A text needs to be read in light of all possible contextual factors. This position is not a new one, but Shillingsburg sets it forth very well, and this essay is therefore worth following up with (23).
James McLaverty suggests the two important questions when considering a text are what versions are, and which text editors should present to readers. He goes on to argue that any distinctive "utterance" of a text somehow connected to other utterances constitutes a new version. The text editors should present to readers encapsulates one or more of the author's intended utterances, and also includes the structural apparatus for connecting these utterances, and for connecting this particular utterance with other utterances (25 - 26).
Joseph Grigley builds on McLaverty's work with the observation that individual utterances cannot be repeated because each utterance is its own event. Even if the precise words of an utterance can be repeated, its context cannot. Grigley's conception of the timely nature of utterances may not offer anything new to editors, who have known for generations that they can never recapture the complete context of a work, but it may help clarify what editors have done and will continue to do going forward: capture the interpretation of a textual moment (26).
The binary between "modernist editors" who seek to create a stable and definitive text and "post-modernist editors" who highlight the instability of texts and the value of interpretation is, as most binaries tend to be, too neat to be practical (30).
Morris Eave's entry in Cultural Artifacts and the Production of Meaning: The Page, the Image, and the Body offers a view of editing that delights in the instability of texts. He argues that all editorial decisions are legitimate, and links the decisions of the editor to the same decisions the artist makes as part of "the process of history." Intentionalist editing is one more form of interpretation and creation, and should not be dismissed (32 - 33). A-men I say to that. The fact is that it's very difficult to present Renaissance or earlier, or even early 20th century or earlier plays in their entirety to a modern audience. The theatrical conventions of the time will dictate an audiences expectation and basic level of tolerance for how long they're willing to sit still. Like it or not, in the early 21st century, that means the 10 or 15 minute span of a YouTube video.
Tanselle's got my back on this last point. I'll quote him here: "Thus when Eaves says that 'whatever is may be . . . on its way to becoming right,' he recognizes that change may be necessary to produce rightness for a given audience" (33).
Ann R. Meyers, in "Shakespeare's Art and the Texts of King Lear" notes that even attempts at documentary editing still require a degree of selection and interpretation. In presenting the two versions of King Lear in their Oxford Edition, Wells and Taylor have made emendations to the quarto Lear where Qa has "crulentious," Qb "tempestuous," and F "contentious," Wells and Taylor have used the Folio reading in their quarto version of the text based on paleographic evidence that demonstrates the Folio provides the correct reading to the compositor error of the Quartos. Despite similar paleographic evidence for reading for the correctness of Folio's "Come unbutton" (as opposed to Qa's "Come on be true" or Qb's "Come on") Wells and Taylor have left the reading of "come on be true" because it makes to them "local and contextual sense" (34 - 35). Wells and Taylor are the ones that determine the sense of their inclusion or rejection of certain readings, and thus they still are creating a text that is a conflation; an edition of their own interpretation.
In "Text as Matter, Concept, and Action," Peter L. Shillingsburg offers an ambitious argument for the existence of non-material texts, in which he demonstrates how non-material texts are linked to their material counterparts. He conceives of works as entities that are manifested in material and linguistic form, but that the conceptual version of a text should not be confused with the Platonic ideal of "text" (37). This is definitely one I'll have to read. Where does one draw the line between ideas, texts as conceived but not written, and the text that appears on the page. I can only imagine some future textual scholar trying to make sense of the stew of tracked changes that Google Docs keeps of "Battleground State." Precisely how much weight should we give to the text as conceived when the author might decide that the text as conceived sucks, and needs extensive re-conception before it's fit to be put in front of people?
Texts can only be understood through observation, but every observer has the right to choose how they wish to observe a text (or anything else for that matter). Any theory of textuality must encompass every process by which a text may be observed, which includes a range of methods and tastes as diverse as the number of observers (39-40). Observing a text through an historical scope requires a different apparatus than observing that text with a final performance in mind, and observing a text as a work of art fit to be hung on a wall requires a still different apparatus. Before presenting an edition of Merry Devil, I must determine who that edition is for.
Paul Eggert, in "Document and Text: The 'Life' of the Literary Work and the Capacities of Editing," also argues that all editions of a work should be considered and studied as authentic iterations of the work and should be studied as authentic (41).
Tanselle says this of Grigely's "Textual Criticism and the Arts: The Problem of Textual Space," but I think it bears quoting, as it has general application, and should, I think serve as a framework for understanding any essay arguing for any theory of a text: "Practically everyone understands that the experience of a text, like all other experiences, is colored by one's entire previous life and that it will continue to reverberate in one's mind, affecting all experiences afterward. An essay that says something like this does not mark any advance in thinking" (45).
If modern approaches to editing emphasize the plurality of texts rather than the intentions of a single author, than it is curious that modern textual scholars have a low regard for the work of the intentionalist editors of previous generations. The texts they produced are, after all, a further contribution to the plural text that modern textual scholars celebrate (49 - 50).
New theoretical insights into the nature of editing have the danger of creating a sense of the futility of the editing process. If all versions of a text ought to be considered in their own right, it is impossible to present a modern reader with an accurate distillation. It is likewise impossible to create an edition that encompasses the needs of all possible readers of a text. Through this, it is important to remember that editing a text is a creative activity, akin to writing an essay or giving a performance (50 - 51). So it is more than helpful, it is essential to determine the ultimate goal of a text before it is produced. Is the goal for the text to be read in a classroom or to be performed on a stage. What kind of classroom? What kind of stage? Determining the ideal audience for a work will provide the context in which the work is to be created. The way you advertise your show for a Philly Fringe audience will of necessity be different from the way you advertise your show for a largely academic audience in rural Virginia.
While some more modern philosophies of editing have heaped criticism on previous generations of editors for preferring a "single text" edition of a work, the form of the codex lends itself to this style of presentation. Critical editors of the past might very well have wanted to present multiple text editions of their work, but this option was unavailable given the physical and economic limitations they faced (52-53).
Here's something worth quoting: "The acts of constructing texts and works are social events, as many textual theorists have been telling us; but we are not going as far as we can toward understanding those events if we limit ourselves to surviving objects and exclude from our deliberations the mental events that are a fundamental part of the textual process" (58).
Quoting Virginia Wolfe: "I believe that the main thing in beginning a novel is to feel, not that you can write it, but that it exists on the far side of a gulf, which words can't cross: that its to be pulled through only in a breathless anguish. . . . But a novel, as I say, to be good should seem, before one writes it, something unwriteable but only visible; so that for nine months one lives in despair, and only when
one has forgotten what one meant, does the book seem tolerable. I assure you, all my novels were first rate before they were written" (58-59).
Summary: Texts that are conceived are inherently different from texts that are written, and if we are truly to explore textual objects as cultural artifacts, this requires seeing beyond the words printed or written on them. The form of the printed book has as much as any guiding philosophy led to the development of single text editions, but single text editions will always be a requirement of publishing. Someone with the proper knowledge and training will always be necessary to distill information that a less well informed reader does not have, or does not have access to. In the complete social history of a text, a single text edition of that text is another version of the text.
Wow. This was a thick survey of the development of theories of editorial instability and editorial theory. It's left me with a lot to think about, and some other things to explore.
Saturday, July 24, 2010
Making Shakespeare Notes: Chapter Seven
Rules of punctuation and spelling were highly variable in early modern printed texts. In the "Shakespeare" portions of the Thomas Moore manuscript, the author has punctuated, capitalized, and spelled words, sometimes within the same line, seemingly at random (138).
It was common practice for scribes and printers to add punctuation (and perhaps capitalization) according to their own tastes. It is unlikely that punctuation that has come down to us is original, and there are examples where the words may remain the same, but the sense of a line is altered by the punctuation (139).
From the evidence of the Thomas Moore manuscript, it seems as if Shakespeare in some cases wrote lines first, and then parceled them out to characters later. This might account for the confusion of the name of Pistol's wife in Henry V, and of the names of the Nurse's and Romeo's serving men in Romeo and Juliet (141-142).
It may be possible to discern the source of a printed copy by looking at descriptions of entrances. An authorial stage direction is more likely to provide an entrance for the character and scene, such as "enter gentleman on the walls of Rome," whereas a prompter will be more likely to write in terms of practical stage direction/architecture: "enter above." Texts that come from prompters also tends toward specificity in numbers; whereas an author may specify "lords and attendants," a prompter, who like any good stage manager would know who is available when, would be more likely to specify how many lords and attendants can enter at the given moment (144).
Prompters were responsible for editing play texts as required by the Master of Revels, such as removing swearing from the play, and then submitting those changes for official approval (144-145).
"Any Shakespeare text that can be traced to a prompter's book has already been repeatedly mediated by other hands" (145). Meditate on this: If the extant Merry Devil text has come from a copy that was cut for touring, it very likely comes to us from a copy of the touring prompter's book.
Since revenues from touring plays when the London theatres were closed were less than home performances, non-sharer members would not tour, and the plays would be altered to accommodate a smaller cast. Lines might be dropped, or characters might be amalgamated into one. Also, country audiences were not as sophisticated as city audiences, and thus the plays were cut to a shorter running time than they would have enjoyed in the London playhouse (145-146).
Since playwrights incorporated timely events and jokes into their plays, a very popular play, which might run for over a year, would need regular revising in order to keep the material fresh (146).
It is likely that many of the texts do not come to us in the form in which they had enjoyed life in performance at the time they were printed. Foul paper, one off, or otherwise deprecated versions of texts, would not have been discarded due to the cost of paper, but would have been kept in the company's reserves in case something had happened to the book then in use. The company could afford to send these archived copies, no longer necessary for the performance of the play, to the printer for publication where they may have been more reticent to part with a more practically useful text for that purpose (146-147).
Since print is easier to read than manuscript, a printed text, even if it was outdated, might find its way back into use by the company. A printed quarto could be augmented with manuscript emendations to reflect the play as it then existed in the company's repertory. This is what appears to have happened in the case of Romeo and Juliet, as the Folio text tends to closely follow the spelling and punctuation of the good quarto, but presents several changes over that text (147).
The realities of printing house practices also affect the plays that come down to us. Just as even good typists will make typos, even a good compositor will occasionally choose the wrong letter. Since compositors had to work quickly, like their modern touch-typist counter parts, they had to rely on their sense of touch and their knowledge of where certain letters were to lay them out quickly. Letters that felt similar and which were arranged in close proximity in the type case, could easily be confused (150 - 152).
It is also possible that decisions about spelling and punctuation would have been made to reflect the quantities of type available vs. those used heavily in the text. The speech prefix of "Bastard" for "Edmund" in King Lear may be a function of the heavy use of magiscule italic Es in the text, and thus the decision to refer to the character as "Bastard" may be nothing more than the printer's way of preserving E for other uses (Enter, Exit, and Edgar) (153).
Compositors were expected to edit the texts they were given to make them legible to their readers, but in the process of so doing may have altered the sense of the lines by mis-interpreting the playhouse text (154).
It is also possible that disfigured or poorly inked (or over inked) pieces of type have altered the sense of the texts. A damaged f resembles a long s, and this is why Ferdinand exults at having "So rare a wondred Father, and a wise" instead of "So rare a wondred Father, and a wife" (154-155).
SUMMARY:
The plays from early modern London that come down to us are many times removed from the hands of the men who wrote them. While it may be possible to spot some trends behind "the veil of print," the hand of the author is not one of them. Who wrote Shakespeare? is an irrelevant question. Who edited him is much more useful for the purposes of determining how the play may have been performed, and how the texts that we have might best be presented.
It was common practice for scribes and printers to add punctuation (and perhaps capitalization) according to their own tastes. It is unlikely that punctuation that has come down to us is original, and there are examples where the words may remain the same, but the sense of a line is altered by the punctuation (139).
From the evidence of the Thomas Moore manuscript, it seems as if Shakespeare in some cases wrote lines first, and then parceled them out to characters later. This might account for the confusion of the name of Pistol's wife in Henry V, and of the names of the Nurse's and Romeo's serving men in Romeo and Juliet (141-142).
It may be possible to discern the source of a printed copy by looking at descriptions of entrances. An authorial stage direction is more likely to provide an entrance for the character and scene, such as "enter gentleman on the walls of Rome," whereas a prompter will be more likely to write in terms of practical stage direction/architecture: "enter above." Texts that come from prompters also tends toward specificity in numbers; whereas an author may specify "lords and attendants," a prompter, who like any good stage manager would know who is available when, would be more likely to specify how many lords and attendants can enter at the given moment (144).
Prompters were responsible for editing play texts as required by the Master of Revels, such as removing swearing from the play, and then submitting those changes for official approval (144-145).
"Any Shakespeare text that can be traced to a prompter's book has already been repeatedly mediated by other hands" (145). Meditate on this: If the extant Merry Devil text has come from a copy that was cut for touring, it very likely comes to us from a copy of the touring prompter's book.
Since revenues from touring plays when the London theatres were closed were less than home performances, non-sharer members would not tour, and the plays would be altered to accommodate a smaller cast. Lines might be dropped, or characters might be amalgamated into one. Also, country audiences were not as sophisticated as city audiences, and thus the plays were cut to a shorter running time than they would have enjoyed in the London playhouse (145-146).
Since playwrights incorporated timely events and jokes into their plays, a very popular play, which might run for over a year, would need regular revising in order to keep the material fresh (146).
It is likely that many of the texts do not come to us in the form in which they had enjoyed life in performance at the time they were printed. Foul paper, one off, or otherwise deprecated versions of texts, would not have been discarded due to the cost of paper, but would have been kept in the company's reserves in case something had happened to the book then in use. The company could afford to send these archived copies, no longer necessary for the performance of the play, to the printer for publication where they may have been more reticent to part with a more practically useful text for that purpose (146-147).
Since print is easier to read than manuscript, a printed text, even if it was outdated, might find its way back into use by the company. A printed quarto could be augmented with manuscript emendations to reflect the play as it then existed in the company's repertory. This is what appears to have happened in the case of Romeo and Juliet, as the Folio text tends to closely follow the spelling and punctuation of the good quarto, but presents several changes over that text (147).
The realities of printing house practices also affect the plays that come down to us. Just as even good typists will make typos, even a good compositor will occasionally choose the wrong letter. Since compositors had to work quickly, like their modern touch-typist counter parts, they had to rely on their sense of touch and their knowledge of where certain letters were to lay them out quickly. Letters that felt similar and which were arranged in close proximity in the type case, could easily be confused (150 - 152).
 | |
| Photo of type case layout from Tiffany Stern's Making Shakespeare. The website she has credited is no longer in service. |
Compositors were expected to edit the texts they were given to make them legible to their readers, but in the process of so doing may have altered the sense of the lines by mis-interpreting the playhouse text (154).
It is also possible that disfigured or poorly inked (or over inked) pieces of type have altered the sense of the texts. A damaged f resembles a long s, and this is why Ferdinand exults at having "So rare a wondred Father, and a wise" instead of "So rare a wondred Father, and a wife" (154-155).
SUMMARY:
The plays from early modern London that come down to us are many times removed from the hands of the men who wrote them. While it may be possible to spot some trends behind "the veil of print," the hand of the author is not one of them. Who wrote Shakespeare? is an irrelevant question. Who edited him is much more useful for the purposes of determining how the play may have been performed, and how the texts that we have might best be presented.
Friday, February 12, 2010
What Greg said
I've mentioned W.W. Greg's name before, but perhaps not as central to my inquiry into the text of Merry Devil as I should have. When it comes to bibliographical studies in the first half of the twentieth century, Greg was, as the kids say, "the man." I'm sure someone out there would disagree with me, but he was one of those most responsible for the newness of the "New Bibliography" movement, and so it just makes sense to consult him whilst developing my own edition of the work. So let's see what he has to say.... hmmm......
"It would be difficult to find a play that presents a greater variety of difficulties to an editor."
That's hard. In "The Merry Devil of Edmonton," from The Library: Transactions of the Bibliographical Society (1944, pages 122-139) Greg does a decent job of eviscerating William Amos Abrams' 1942 "definitive edition" of The Merry Devil. Certainly, this has given me much to think about. Maybe too much.
Authority, for Greg, means something strictly from the author's hand; that's impossible (and he knows as much). In so far as the old New Bibliographers were interested in bibliography as a tool to see through "the veil of print" (borrowing that term from Dr. Menzer), no one is really sure whose hand to look for in Merry Devil.
Greg dismisses the work as being a collaboration, but he admits that the comparatively short line count indicates this is an abridgment. Greg cites Abrams' opinion that the extant version is possibly cut for touring purposes (129), but he goes on to say that
Greg approves of Abrams' selection of the first quarto as the copy-text, which is also the one I picked, so w00t, and goes on to praise Abrams for his investigative work into the connection between the play The Merry Devil of Edmonton and the chapbook The Life and Death of the Merry Devil of Edmonton, with the Pleasant Pranks of Smug the Smith, Sir John, and mine Host of the George, about the Stealing of Venison. Those early-moderners did love their long titles.
Anyway, Greg points out that while the chapbook is clearly inspired by the play, there are references in the play that are informed by the chapbook. The theory being that the chapbook is based on an unaltered version of the play text, and the references still in The Merry Devil that don't necessarily make sense at a glance, but are informed by the chapbook, are the result of uneven cuts. Think of the chapbook as an original novelization of a film, which is then cut before being released by the studio. The novel is based on the uncut script, and still has things in it that the studio release leaves off. Even so, Greg remarks that "the chapbook contains no hint of the main plot of the play" (134-135), so how much can really be lost?
Sarcastic yet true answer: for a 1500 line play, maybe about 1000 lines or so.
Of course, while The Life and Death of the Merry Devil may inform the action in The Merry Devil, there really isn't any way of constructing the original text based on that. If Greg and Abrams are right, the original, uncut play must be considered lost. Of course, that doesn't mean that the extant text isn't funny, and quite honestly, maybe being shorter makes it funnier. It was cut for a reason, after all. Maybe it's better that someone cut them back in the early 1600s: I won't have to worry about cutting them for my production in Philly.
Greg goes on to say that all an editor can "legitimately aim at is to repair corruption that has arisen in the course of printing and remove minor contradictions." As much as the editorial job is difficult, it is difficult beyond the ability of anyone to achieve definitively, and that actually makes my job as an editor easier. Of course, that makes my job as a director that much harder, but I'm a better director anyway.
Works Cited
Greg, W. W. "The Merry Devil of Edmonton." The Library: Transactions of the Bibliographical Society. 1944. London. Oxford UP. vol. s4-XXV 3-4 p. 122-139.
"It would be difficult to find a play that presents a greater variety of difficulties to an editor."
That's hard. In "The Merry Devil of Edmonton," from The Library: Transactions of the Bibliographical Society (1944, pages 122-139) Greg does a decent job of eviscerating William Amos Abrams' 1942 "definitive edition" of The Merry Devil. Certainly, this has given me much to think about. Maybe too much.
Authority, for Greg, means something strictly from the author's hand; that's impossible (and he knows as much). In so far as the old New Bibliographers were interested in bibliography as a tool to see through "the veil of print" (borrowing that term from Dr. Menzer), no one is really sure whose hand to look for in Merry Devil.
Greg dismisses the work as being a collaboration, but he admits that the comparatively short line count indicates this is an abridgment. Greg cites Abrams' opinion that the extant version is possibly cut for touring purposes (129), but he goes on to say that
if a rough author's draft (after having served for the production of a regular prompt book) had been severely cut with a view to preparing an abridged version of the play, and had then come into the printers hands, the resulting edition might have been something like what we find in the extant text (130).Of course, what Greg refers to as "corruption" I might be inclined to call "collaboration." Have you ever seen the directors cut of a film when the director wasn't very good? It makes you wish you had watched the studio cut. In a modern theatrical environment, directors, actors, designers, and even stage managers and hands all bring something to the table that influence the performance, and sometimes that means cutting an over indulgent text. Who really wants to sit through a four hour Hamlet anyway?
Greg approves of Abrams' selection of the first quarto as the copy-text, which is also the one I picked, so w00t, and goes on to praise Abrams for his investigative work into the connection between the play The Merry Devil of Edmonton and the chapbook The Life and Death of the Merry Devil of Edmonton, with the Pleasant Pranks of Smug the Smith, Sir John, and mine Host of the George, about the Stealing of Venison. Those early-moderners did love their long titles.
Anyway, Greg points out that while the chapbook is clearly inspired by the play, there are references in the play that are informed by the chapbook. The theory being that the chapbook is based on an unaltered version of the play text, and the references still in The Merry Devil that don't necessarily make sense at a glance, but are informed by the chapbook, are the result of uneven cuts. Think of the chapbook as an original novelization of a film, which is then cut before being released by the studio. The novel is based on the uncut script, and still has things in it that the studio release leaves off. Even so, Greg remarks that "the chapbook contains no hint of the main plot of the play" (134-135), so how much can really be lost?
Sarcastic yet true answer: for a 1500 line play, maybe about 1000 lines or so.
Of course, while The Life and Death of the Merry Devil may inform the action in The Merry Devil, there really isn't any way of constructing the original text based on that. If Greg and Abrams are right, the original, uncut play must be considered lost. Of course, that doesn't mean that the extant text isn't funny, and quite honestly, maybe being shorter makes it funnier. It was cut for a reason, after all. Maybe it's better that someone cut them back in the early 1600s: I won't have to worry about cutting them for my production in Philly.
Greg goes on to say that all an editor can "legitimately aim at is to repair corruption that has arisen in the course of printing and remove minor contradictions." As much as the editorial job is difficult, it is difficult beyond the ability of anyone to achieve definitively, and that actually makes my job as an editor easier. Of course, that makes my job as a director that much harder, but I'm a better director anyway.
Works Cited
Greg, W. W. "The Merry Devil of Edmonton." The Library: Transactions of the Bibliographical Society. 1944. London. Oxford UP. vol. s4-XXV 3-4 p. 122-139.
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