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Subject: File: "MATERIAL TEXT"

Valuing the Material Text: A Plea for a Change in Policy

Concerning Selection of Reference Texts for Future New Variorum

Shakespeare Editions, with Examples from the 1609 Quarto of

SHAKE-SPEARES SONNETS

Hardy M. Cook

In 1871, Horace Howard Furness initiated one of the greatest scholarly

undertakings of modern times: The New Variorum Shakespeare — an

undertaking so vast in scope that it has not been completed to this day — an

undertaking so vast that it can never truly be completed — an undertaking

that of its very nature must like the Phoenix repeatedly consume itself in

flames and be reborn of its own ashes. In the first of these editions, A

New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare: ROMEO AND JULIET, Furness explains

his purpose and plan: faced with having the valuable notes of editors like

"Knight, Singer, Collier, Ulrici, Delius, Dyce, Hudson, Staunton, White,

Clarke, Keightley, and Halliwell" only available in different volumes, he

proposed to save time and effort by "collecting these comments after the

manner of a Variorum and presenting them, on the same page, in a condensed

form, in connection with the difficulties which they explain" (vi). After

originally deciding "to adopt the text of some one edition from which all the

variations of the Quartos and Folios and other editions should be noted," he,

"in consequence of unforeseen obstacles," chose instead to adopt "the reading

of a majority of the ablest editors," producing a composite text to be used as

the reference text for his edition (vii-viii). Composite texts were also used

as reference texts for next three volumes: Macbeth (1873),

Hamlet (1877), and King Lear (1880).

In 1886, The New Variorum Shakespeare underwent the first of its

many transformations. Evidently preparing the first four volumes caused

Furness to reflect more deeply on the nature of Shakespearean texts:

But when we study Shakespeare [as opposed to simply reading him],

then our mood changes; no longer are we "sitting at a play," the

passive recipients of impressions through the eye and ear, but we

weigh every word, analyse every expression, shift every phrase,

that no grain of art or beauty which we can assimilate shall

escape. To do this to our best advantage we must have

Shakespeare's own words before us. No other words will avail,

even though they be those of the wisest and most inspired of our

day and generation. We must have Shakespeare's own text; or,

failing this, the nearest possible approach to it. We shall be

duly grateful to the wise and learned, who, where phrases are

obscure, give us the words which they believe to have been

Shakespeare's; but, as students, we must have under our eyes the

original text, which, however stubborn it may seem at times, may

yet open its treasures to our importunity, and reveal charms

before undreamed of. (Variorum Othello v)

The "original text" Furness found in the 1623 First Folio. In a plea worthy

of Michael Warren1, Furness eloquently offers his reasons for adopting the F1

text of Othello as his reference text:

Can any good reason be urged why, in this present play at least,

we should not, in hours devoted to study, be it remembered, have

the text of the First Folio as our guide? Is there not every

reason why we should? If misspellings occur here and there,

surely our common-school education is not so uncommon that we

cannot silently correct them. If the punctuation be deficient,

surely it can be supplied without an exorbitant demand upon our

intelligence. And in lines incurably maimed by the printers, of

what avail is the voice of a solitary editor amid the Babel that

vociferates around, each voice proclaiming the virtues of its own

specific? Who am I that should thrust myself in between the

student and the text, as though in me resided the power to restore

Shakespeare's own words? Even if a remedy be proposed which is by

all acknowledged to be efficacious, it is not enough for the

student that he should know the remedy; he must see the ailment.

Let the ailment, therefore, appear in all its severity in the

text, and let the remedies be exhibited in the notes; by this

means we may make a text for ourselves, and thus made, it will

become a part of ourselves, and speak to us with more power than

were it made for us by the wisest editor of them all — it may be

"an ill-favoured thing, sir" but — it will be "our own."

(Variorum Othello v-vi)

For this and the next eleven volumes under his editorship, which included a

second edition of Macbeth, Dr. Furness, instead of using a modernized

text, employed a type facsimile of the plays reprinted from his own copy of

the First Folio as the reference text2 -- a practice he probably would have

continued with the remainder of the plays and second editions of the first

versions he had already produced, as this comment from the second edition of

Macbeth suggests: "the Text of the first four plays is composite; the

Text of the remaining eight is that of the First Folio. Although each play is

a volume apart and independent of the rest, yet a uniformity of Text is, to

some extent, desirable" (xiii). Furness evidently took great care in

reproducing each of these facsimiles: "reprinting it from [his] own copy with

all the exactitude in [his] power, scanning it letter by letter" (Variorum

Othello vi). As a result, many bibliographical features are reproduced:

block letters, approximate fonts, italics, spacing, ligatures, and even italic

question marks; however, because of the layout, having textual and critical

notes on the same page as the text they refer to, there is no attempt to

indicate pagination or columns, and thus there are no signatures or

catchwords.

After his father's death, Horace Furness, Jr., edited two more editions,

both of which use F1 as the reference text, The Life and Death of King

John (1919) and The Tragedy of Coriolanus (1928). After Horace

Furness, Jr.'s death, the series came in 1933 under the sponsorship of the

Modern Language Association. The first volume to be published under the MLA's

auspices, Henry the Fourth, Part I, was edited by Samuel Burdett

Hemingway, who had been selected by Furness, Jr. This volume marks yet

another departure for The New Variorum Shakespeare: it is the first

edition to use a quarto as the reference text. In all previous volumes in

which a quarto text is an earlier text than that of F1, Furness, Sr., had two

arguments. In cases like those of Ado and LLL, Furness argues

that even though the quarto text was earlier that "there is in reality but one

text, inasmuch as it is from this Quarto that the Folio itself was printed"

(Variorum Ado v). In the case of MND in which the quarto has

claim to being the better text, Furness argues that "To enter into any minute

examination of the three texts is needless in an edition like the present"

(Variorum Dream x) — all variants would be recorded in the textual

notes anyway. Hemingway changed all that by selecting Q1 and by making "a

more thorough collation of the various copies of each quarto than has been

deemed necessary in the earlier volumes in the series" (v). Of the volumes

that followed in this — what I call — the first cycle under MLA sponsorship,

the 1938 Poems and the 1944 Sonnets were obviously based on

quarto texts, while the plays — Henry the Fourth, Part II (1940),

Troilus and Cressida (1953), and Richard II (1955) — all

use the F1 text as the reference text. However, these type facsimiles to my

eyes appear to be less scrupulous about spacing than the volumes prepared

under the Furnesses, conveying less bibliographical information (graphic

codes),3 yet these seeming changes are nothing compared to those resulting

from the policy of the second cycle of Variorum editions under the MLA's

auspices.

Richard Knowles announced the next major transformation of the

principles governing The New Variorum Shakespeare in his "Plan of the

Work" for the 1977 A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare: AS YOU LIKE

IT:

This edition differs somewhat from earlier volumes of the New

Variorum Shakespeare. The text is not a type facsimile, but a

modified diplomatic reprint of the First Folio text which

ignores its significant typographical irregularities, corrects

its obvious typographical errors, but retains its lineation.

All significant departures from F1 are duly recorded. [Emphasis

added] (ix)

Under this editorial policy, which was followed by Mark Eccles in his 1980

MM and Marvin Spevack in his 1990 Ant., many typographical

features of the original text are ignored or silently regularized:

The reprint does not reproduce typographical features such as the

long s, ligatures, display and swash letters, and ornaments;

abbreviations printed as one letter above another are reproduced

as two consecutive letters, the second one superscript. Minor

typographical blemishes such as irregular spacing, printing space-

types, and wrong font, damaged, turned transposed, misprinted, or

clearly erroneous or missing letters or punctuation marks have

been corrected, usually silently. If, however, the anomaly is

likely to have any bibliographical significance, its correction is

recorded in the appendix. Where the error is not clearly

typographical, or where the correction is not an obvious one, the

text has been left unaltered and various emendations have been

recorded in the textual notes. . . . In general, the attempt has

been made to omit and ignore all insignificant typographical

peculiarities, but to retain or at least record any accidental

details of possible textual significance. (Knowles, Variorum

AYL xi-xii)

My work in preparing the first volume of The Public-Domain, Old-Spelling,

Electronic Shakespeare, SHAKE-SPEARES SONNETS and A LOVER'S

COMPLAINT (forthcoming from the Centre for Computing in the Humanities,

University of Toronto), and my reading of the work of Jerome J. McGann and

Randall McLeod have convinced me that the Variorum Shakespeare's new policy

concerning the old-spelling reference texts for Variorum editions is a

mistake.

Fredson Bowers, in his "President's Address: Unfinished Business"

presented before the Society for Textual Scholarship, represents to views of

many when he contends that "The aim of textual criticism is to make the fewest

mistakes possible in presenting the authentic words of an author" (1). A

textual critic, according to Bowers, achieves this end by "the reconstruction,

usually from imperfect or partial evidence, of authorial intention" (2). With

Elizabethan editing (as with much of current textual methodology), the key to

this reconstruction is "Greg's theory of the copy-text with its

differentiation of two authorities, each of which in some circumstances should

be differently treated" (5). On the literary side, however, the issue of the

recoverability of an author's intentions has been questioned at least since

the New Critics. In addition, recently, several literary critics4 have

interrogated the term "authentic" when applied to Shakespeare. On the textual

side, no one in the past dozen years has advocated more persistently a

reexamination of current textual practices than Jerome McGann, calling for "a

socialized concept of authorship and textual authority" (Critique 8).

In 1981, in response to the establishment of TEXT: The Transactions

for Society for Textual Scholarship, McGann tried to overcome the

polarization in literary studies between the interests of textual scholars5

and literary critics by claiming that "Because criticism must articulate a

system of differentials, then, a special demand is placed upon it to elucidate

literary works at their point of origin, where the initial and determining

sets of differentials are permanently established" ("Shall" 36-37). He

explores this interest in the "point of origin" of literary works in his A

Critique of Modern Textual Criticism, offering his early thoughts on what

has become known as his Social Theory of Editing.

McGann opens A Critique by summarizing the aims of modern

textual criticism:

All current textual critics . . . agree that to produce a critical

edition entails an assessment of the history of the text's

transmission with the purpose of exposing and eliminating errors.

Ultimately, the object in view is the same in each case: to

establish a text which, in the now universally accepted

formulation, most nearly represents the author's original (or

final) intentions. (15)

This current understanding proceeds from two hundred years of scholarship.

Methodologies applied to classical and biblical texts were eventually adapted

to Shakespearean and other early modern and modern texts, giving rise to 1)

the theory of the critical edition, 2) the theory of the copy-text, 3) the

problem (or theory) of final authorial intentions, and 4) the theory of the

nonspecialist or modernized edition (23). A large part of the problem with

textual criticism that followed, according to McGann, arises because Bowers

appropriated Greg's theory of the copy-text to formulate a theory of authorial

intentions, a theory underpinned by "the concept of the autonomy of the

creative artist" (40). McGann, on the other hand, contends that "an

autonomous author, and an ideal (‘finally intended') text" are "two related

phenomena which do not and cannot exit" (56). He sees the production of texts

as more dynamic and socialized:

The rule of final authorial intentions, as well as the guideline

determining choice of copy-text, all rest on an assumption about

the location (and the locatability) of literary authority. As the

very term authority suggests, the author is taken to be — for

editorial and critical purposes — the ultimate locus of a text's

authority, and literary works are consequently viewed in the most

personal and individual way. . . . The result is that the dynamic

social relations which always exist in literary production — the

dialectic between the historically located individual author and

the historically developing institutions of literary production —

tends to become obscured in criticism. (81)

McGann concedes that "The author's wishes and intentions are obviously matters

of importance, but they must be adverted to and assessed by the textual critic

in a more generous social context" (90). By insisting "that literary

interpretation is grounded in the historical study of material texts (whether

or not the scholars are aware of this grounding, and whether or not their

criticism makes self-conscious use of it)" (xxi), McGann is insisting on the

importance of not only the linguistic codes of a text but also its

bibliographical ones. This connection constitutes the principal focus of his

essay "What Is Critical Editing?": "My study of texts . . . has made me aware

how literary works are coded bibliographically as well as linguistically, and

that in the case of the bibliographical codes ‘author's intentions' rarely

govern the state or the transmission of the text. In this sense literary

texts, and their meanings, are collaborative events" (23). From McGann's

perspective, textual criticism has located meaning in the linguistic text at

the expense of the bibliographical one. Although the linguistic text may be

the chief, it is not the sole authority, for "‘meaning' in a literary work

results from the interactive agency of these two semiotic mechanisms operating

together" ("What" 28).

McGann's Theory of Social Editing has not gained wide acceptance among

textual scholars. Bowers, labeling it "an editorial attitude" because it is

"it is not specific enough as yet to be called a theory" (6), is "suspicious

of any overall theory that denigrates an author's intentions by sharing them

with social milieu as a central fact" (10). He continues to "place authorial

intention above any other consideration, while recognizing that an initial

intention can be modified from early to late, for better or worse, by the

criticism of friends or of publishers' editors" (10-11). T. H. Howard-Hill is

similarly critical:

. . . it may be said that the inability of A Critique's

arguments to convince many editors (to whom in some measure it was

directed) is an almost unavoidable function of the book's position

within a program directed to extra-bibliographical (in the

broadest sense) ends. (31)

Despite these criticisms from highly respected textual scholars, I cannot

dismiss as casually the issues McGann raises, especially regarding early

modern Shakespearean texts, texts produced in the printing house with no

ostensible assistance by the author himself (the two narrative poems

apparently being the only exceptions). I believe McGann is correct in

asserting that textual criticism has focused too narrowly on the linguistic

text at the expense of the bibliographical one. I believe the early quartos

and First Folios that are the principal repositories of the texts we call

Shakespeare's plays and poems are material objects and must be engaged on

those terms. I also believe there is a middle ground between the attitude

toward texts that McGann criticizes and the extreme relativist position that

De Grazia and Stallybrass set forth in their "The Materiality of the

Shakespearean Text."6

I am concerned in this paper with the New Variorum Shakespeare

Committee's decision regarding the nature of the reference text for volumes

since 1977, the decision to use modified diplomatic reprints that do not

reproduce the very bibliographical features that McGann maintains are

important. No one has done more in the past fifteen years to call attention

to the significance of these bibliographical features than Randall McLeod.

McGann, commenting on orthographic variations in the 1609 quarto of SHAKE-

SPEARES SONNETS, points out that "As our scholarly knowledge increases,

however, we often discover that texts which had previously seemed corrupt are

not so at all; that it is we (or our ignorance) who are at fault" (99).

McLeod, who has argued that some previously thought to be corrupt readings are

probably not so, has actively been dispelling that ignorance and educating

many of us to appreciate the wealth of information inherent in bibliographical

detail.

McLeod is interested in "the iconicity of the text" ("Unediting" 38).

He maintains that "the old typographic medium was simultaneously communicating

various messages — as text and about text. To consider the

literary context alone is to turn a blind eye to this interconnectedness of

medium and message" (Clod, "Information" 256-257). Gleaning from McLeod's

stunning work, I intend to make a case for the New Variorum Shakespeare

Committee's changing its policy regarding reference texts.

In 1979, in his "A Technique for Headline Analysis, with Application to

Shakespeares Sonnets, 1609," McLeod provides concrete examples of the

information that can be determined from the title page and running titles of

the 1609 quarto of the Sonnets. Using evidence gathered from

transparent photocopies of the title pages of Aspley and Wright imprints,

McLeod speculates that the Wright was the later imprint:

The order of these changes [the transposing of a reglet and

the interchanging of the first and third E's in the name], which

coincide with the unlocking and adjustment of the page to alter

the imprint, is not to be determined by strict bibliographical

evidence. It is possible that in the unlocking of the page the

first and perhaps the second line of type "SHAKE-SPEARES |

SONNETS." pied and was reassembled, in the process the two E's

being interchanged and the reglet rearranged. However, since the

position of the narrower-bodied E in "SHAKE-" in the Wright state

of the title produces a more pleasing typographical effect than

when it is the penultimate letter in "SPEARES" in the Aspley

state, it is also possible that the change was deliberate, in

which case the Wright was the later imprint. (202-203)

From a similar analysis of the running titles, he conjectures about the

imposition of the formes and offers a probable reconstruction of the events,

which calls into doubt MacD. P. Jackson's assertion that a new skeleton was

constructed for Sheet K.7 The point of both examples is that valuable

information is contained in what otherwise might be thought irrelevant

bibliographical details. Without getting into my proposal at this point, I

will nevertheless contend that the changes in the running titles in Q1609 from

"A LOVERS" (K3v, K4v, L1v) to "THE LOVERS" (L2v) and the various "SHAKE-

SPEARES," (B1r, C2v), "SHAKE-SPEARES." (D1v, D2v, D3v, D4v, G1v, G2v, G3v,

G4v), and "SHAKE-SPEARES" (B1v, B2r, B3v, B4v, C1v, C3v, C4v, E1v, E2v, E3v,

E4v, F1v, F2v, F3v, F4v, H1v, H2v, H3v, H4v, I1v, I2v, I3v, I4v), all convey

information that could be the staring point for further investigation.

Just as running headlines "function on high to unify the text beneath

them" (McLeod, "Information" 241), so do catchwords function on low to unify

text between pages. In "Information on Information," McLeod explains how the

mismatched catchword, "Ladies" for "Faire," in a copy of Harington's second

edition of Orlando Furioso "is one example of a large body of evidence

which shows that copy for the second edition must have been an annotated

exemplar of the first" (268). This information characterizes the materiality

of this text. Yet the significance of the information does not stop

here: "A collation of copies of the second edition reveals that some of them

do in fact have the normally-to-be-expected concord, ‘Faire' for ‘Faire'.

These copies offer a later state, brought about by stop-press alteration"

(270). If catchwords were included in the Variorum editions and if such a

catchword crux were to appear, it would most likely, under current guidelines,

be "corrected silently" as a clear error. However, McLeod forces us to

reconsider such a decision:

I grant that the earlier state of the second-edition catchword,

"Ladies", is wrong — wrong functionally: but more

importantly, it is also true — true to copy, true as a

witness. It opens to view a larger, transformissional,8

identity than does the smooth, reductive redundancy of the merely

correct text. (But not to dismiss this merely correct text; for

in the company of the variant state, it points to an even more

expansive textual identity: the correct text is not simply correct

— it is corrected.) (270)

In "UNEditing Shak-speare," McLeod offers a similar argument for retaining the

punctuation of an original text:

Editors argue that the printer's punctuation was a compositorial

discretion (or indiscretion), and does not necessarily or

accurately represent Shakespeare's pointing to the degree, for

example, that the printer's diction represents the author's. This

is likely an accurate assessment; but it does not follow that the

punctuation is not part of the evidence, that it may not be partly

Shakespearean, or that it lacks interest as intelligent

contemporary reading in itself. (42-43)

In both these cases, McLeod forces us to consider the materiality of the text

and the significance that the system of graphic codes in the material text can

convey.

McLeod's work evinces a concern with the early modern typographical

medium — its "subtle texture of accidentals" ("Spellbound" 81) and its

"complex, ambiguous, contradictory, unhomogeneous" face (Clod, "Information"

246). The starting point for any bibliographical conjecture must be the

material text itself because; as McLeod notes, "The relationship of printed

image to typeface and to type is concrete, and our inferences about

composition are necessarily tied to an actual historic event" ("Spellbound"

81). There are often explicit reasons for the "Minor typographical blemishes

such as irregular spacing, printing space-types, and wrong font, damaged,

turned, transposed, misprinted, or clearly erroneous or missing letters"

(Knowles, Variorum AYL xi) that the present Variorum Shakespeare

guidelines deny us. For example, McLeod offers an explanation for the

presence of the variety of mixed font "w's" and the use of "vv" or "VV" in a

text like the 1609 quarto of SHAKE-SPEARES SONNETS: "English printers

often acquired their types from more advanced publishing cultures, among whom

the Italians and French had little use for the letter w. As a consequence,

the w's in English Renaissance books often mix founts" (Clod, "Information"

246). Under the current guidelines, "vv" and "VV" would be reproduced

("Spellbound" 90) but mixed font "w's" apparently would be silently corrected

or regularized and with this change information would be lost.

In addition, under the current guidelines, the u (round-u) and v (sharp-

u) allotypes would be distinguished in the Variorum's old-spelling reference

texts, but the |s (long-s) and s (round-s) would not. This to me is a

significant loss. In early modern typesetting, theses two allotypes were used

in these ways: v (sharp-u) was used initially, while u (round-u) was used

medially or finally; |s (long-s) was used initially and medially, while s

(round-s) was used finally and as a capital (Clod, "Information" 249, 254).

Thus, both allotypes function "to differentiate the ends of words from the

middle" and their leveling "obscures the kind of information we see in the

originals themselves" ("Spellbound" 87). Further, McLeod explains that "the

old medium did not distinguish as many sounds, but it was more self-

referential, and enhanced the detection of transmissional error" (Clod,

"Information" 251). Besides enabling us to determine more easily

transmissional errors, the presence of the |s (long-s) and s (round-s)

distinction helps us to see predictable exceptions, such as in this rhyme from

Sonnet 16:

To giue away your |selfe,keeps your |selfe {|st}ill,

And you mu{|st} liue drawne by your owne |sweet skill,

( Sonnet 16.13-14)9

McLeod explains the presence in the last line of the exception, the five-type

"skill" rather than the expected ligatured, four-type "{sk}ill": "If a long-s

type had been used instead, the kerning right edge of its typeface,

which corresponds to a vulnerable projection of metal off the edge of the

typebody, would have broken against the ascender of the k, which is

rooted on its typebody" (Clod, "Information" 254). Concerning this crux,

McLeod writes, "The leveling of the distinctions of s in modern typesetting

decreases redundancy, making our setting of this crux less dense a

communication than that of the seventeenth century" (Clod, "Information" 254-

255).

In "Spellbound," McLeod examines issues surrounding typefaces that

involve the difficulties of distinguishing an etymological spelling, a

phonetic spelling, and a type-exigent setting/spelling in that typesetting

problems often "undermine the validity of the spelling concept" (83). For

example, as we saw above, a kerned piece of type is a vulnerable piece of

type. That italic type has "more kerned sorts than black-letter or roman

founts" (83) make more problematic the determination of why a particular word

in italic type is spelled the way it is. There are, of course, practical

lessons with applications, for example, to studies of compositor's stints:

McLeod maintains that each of the compositors who set type for Troilus and

Cressida10 "sets t

Posted by Hello! on April 11, 1997 at 08:43:14
In Reply to "Macbeth" posted by Steven on April 09, 1997 at 13:13:30

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