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Textus XIX (2006), pp. 305-322.

Carlo M. Bajetta

The Authority of Editing: Thoughts on the Function(s) of TextualCriticism

Editing is everywhere: the overwhelming majority of the texts weencounter in our daily experience have been in some way preparedfor publication. The passage from Cicero we read at school, the ex-cerpt from the Bible we were made to learn by heart, the most re-cent novel by Dan Brown and even the latest Hollywood film havebeen critically established or proof-read, seen through the press and/or emended, adapted or cut by someone whose activity can be seenas collaboration, or whose authority de facto overrules that of theauthor or scriptwriter. The ubiquity of editing is such that most ofus accept it almost unconsciously. It is remarkable that looking up asynonym of “editing” in the standard thesaurus provided withMicrosoft Word™ 2000, one finds the following entries: “restric-tion”, “suppression”, “control”, “cutting”, “expurgation” and even“bowdlerization”. The antonym given is “freedom”. On consultingthe Oxford English Dictionary one may be relieved to find that thefirst entry for “edit” is “to publish, give to the world (a literary workby an earlier author, previously existing in MS)”, followed by “toprepare an edition” (OED, “edit”, v., 2a; the example given is “toedit Horace, Shakespeare etc.”). One may be less comforted to dis-cover that the first entry is marked as obsolete, and probably muchless reassured when later encountering (at “edit”, 2b) a rather disqui-eting sub-meaning: “to garble, ‘cook’ (e.g., a war-correspondent’s

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dispatch)”. In addition to this, “editing”, as seen above, is known tobe roughly synonymous with “cutting” – but do we think about thisin terms of “eliminating unwanted material” (ibid.: 2d)? History hastaught, and is, unfortunately, still teaching us, that war-correspond-ent’s dispatches are usually “garbled” or “cooked” for political rea-sons by people who have the power to do so. Similarly, and sadly,the physical elimination of “unwanted material” does not happenonly in Hollywood.

Modern language use tells us that there is a strong connectionbetween editing and authority; in everyday life our awareness of this,however, seems dimmed. Even when narrowing the meaning of “ed-iting” to the textual criticism of works by deceased authors, as thefollowing pages do, one discovers how little this connection is keptin mind by appreciators of literature and literary critics alike. Wecannot deny that frequently we consider an edition of a given work“authoritative” on the basis of how prestigious the publisher or thescholar who has edited that text is. The figure of the textual editor(better if backed by a well-known international University Press) hasfrequently been seen as the guarantee of the genuineness of the text,and consequently of its value (in both literary and monetary senses).This paper will explore how this has happened and still happens.

1. The Power of Publication

In book history, authority is frequently associated with politicalinfluence, control, permission to publish, licensing or censorship(see, for example, Myers and Harris (eds) 1992; Rozzo (ed.) 1997;Infelise 1999; Boyer 2002, McKitterick 2004: 151-165). Less atten-tion seems to have been devoted to issues of power in connectionwith the posthumous publication of the great “classics” from Homerto Eliot; this relation, however, has been in existence since the dawnof textual criticism.

In the beginning, as usual, there was politics: Cicero recounts,even if in a somewhat chronologically confused fashion, that the firstarrangement of the books of Homer was effected by the tyrant

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Peisistratus (De Oratore, 3.137; but cf. Dilts 1995: 75). Anotherinteresting event for historians of editing can be found towards thesecond half of the fourth century BC, when Lycurgus of Athens hadan official copy of the texts of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripidesmade, and ordered that any performance should conform to thisversion (Pseudo-Plutarch, Vita Decem Oratorum 7.841; Centanni2003: lxxiv). While the latter may possibly have been a way to pre-vent corruption resulting from inexact oral transmission or extem-pore additions, these acts were, however, of momentous conse-quence: political authority had created the canonical author.

Ever since then, “going down in literary history” has necessarilyimplied being published, and edited, in some way. Most writershave achieved canonical status through some sort of “official” edi-tion of their works; these very editions, however, have always had toface the dangers of textual corruption. The scholars who were atwork on the text of the Homeric poems in the library of Alexandriain the second century BC were clearly aware even then of the factthat errors introduced by people other than the author could ob-scure the original state of a text. The works written by the epitomeof the Greek poet were understood to be potentially distant fromthe mind of their creator, and needing to be restored to their pris-tine perfection. Searching for an ideal “perfect” text was deemedunnecessary by another trend of critical thinking, that which wouldbecome dominant in Pergamum almost a century later. These otherearly editors noticed that each and every manuscript of a given workshowed evident traces of corruption; their practice, then, was to electthe best possible – that is, least corrupt – witness as a model to befollowed (cf. Pfeiffer 1968: i.2, 210-250). Those edited, it should benoted, were texts preserving an aura of auctoritas. In an superblyironic and extended polyptoton, this very auctoritas was edited on thecommand of some authority, thus engendering an “authorized” edi-tion which (as the Pergamum scholars had already understood) mayhave failed to integrally reproduce the author’s intention.1

1 One may want to mention in passing that most of the earliest texts of the Biblewere assembled and put into writing during the Hebrew Monarchy (which began about1000 BC; cf. Andersen 1995: 34). It is also noteworthy that, at least officially, no edi-

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This brief survey of the early days of textual criticism shows thatsince its inception, editing was a negotiation of authority. Whileconditions have changed, this is still the crucial issue for philologists.As David Greetham suggests, the different attitudes of the Alexan-dria and Pergamum linguists and grammarians stemmed respectivelyfrom Platonic and Stoic convictions; in a way, these principles arestill perceptibly operative in modern editorial theory. On the oneside we have the Lachmann method (and its developments), that is,the quest for an ideal archetype, the nearest possible reconstructionof the work as it came from the pen of the author. On the otherside, the acceptance of a supposed “best text” inaugurated by JosephBédier, an idea which has various followers – and almost countlessvariations (Kristeller 1984; Greetham 1999: 50-51; Timpanaro2003). Royal command may have lost some of its importance in thegeneration of critically edited texts (one should note, however, thatmany nations, including Italy, still have “national editions” of ca-nonical authors), yet authorial issues still play an important role inthe publication of ancient and modern classics. The dynamics ofauthority have been radically modified, and literary theory may havebeen an involuntary protagonist of this transformation.

2. The Death of the Author and the Birth of the Editor

Classical and Biblical philology have been the workshop of edito-rial thinking for centuries. Scholars in these fields, however, wereand are typically confronted with texts which have a long line ofdescent, and are therefore frequently interspersed with corruptedreadings.2 Until the first systematizations of textual criticism, most

torial problem exists for the Koran or Qur’an, given that an “authorized” text (said tohave “descended” on Mohammed; cf. for example, Sura 97 and Sura 85, exp. 21, 22)has been in existence since the seventh century. After the official edition established inEgypt in 1923, all modern editions are meant to be identical (that is, casual printingerrors excepted; cf. also Carter 1995: 552-553).

2 Incidentally, the problem of serious corruption of texts has not affected Arabicliterature. Scribal copying in medieval Arabia seems to have been subject to a system oflicensing of copies known as ija-za (“permission”): no one could transcribe a literary or

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notably Karl Lachmann’s edition of Lucretius (1850), this distancebetween a given work and its creator allowed scholars to feel theycould intervene drastically on the texts they where meant to restore.Editors, in other words, perceived themselves as “authorized” to in-tervene on the text at will – thus possibly replacing the author’s willwith their own. This way of dealing with ancient works was fre-quently extended also to the printed editions of the modern classics.Shakespeare’s First Folio (1623) was perceived by eighteenth-cen-tury readers as having little authority per se, being the work of un-skilled labourers who could not do justice to the eloquence of theBard. Samuel Johnson stated this in one of his memorable para-graphs:

No books could be left in hands so likely to injure them as plays fre-quently acted, yet continued in manuscript: no other transcriberswere likely to be so little qualified for their task as those who copiedfor the stage, at a time when the lower ranks of the people were uni-versally illiterate: no other editions were made from fragments sominutely broken and so fortuitously reunited; and in no other agewas the art of printing in such unskilful hands. (Murphy 2003: 81)

Like Alexander Pope before him, Johnson presented a bleak pic-ture of Renaissance copyists and of Elizabethan printing-houses. Hetried, however (unlike Pope, who, he observed, had “rejected what-ever he disliked, and thought more of amputation than of cure”), toresist the allurements of emendation. In fact, in his Proposal for anew edition of Shakespeare (1745), Johnson remarked:

As I practised conjecture more I learned to trust it less; and after Ihad printed a few plays, resolved to insert none of my own readingsin the text. Upon this caution I now congratulate myself, for everyday encreases my doubt of my emendations. (Ibid.: 82)

Johnson – while not necessarily always following these principlesin his edition – was an important voice which was raised in favour

scholarly work without the personal authorization of another licensed transmitter (inter-estingly, as M.G. Carter has noted, this may have a link with the potestatem legendi andthe licentia legendi et disputandi which controlled lecturing and debating in westernuniversities; Carter 1995: 554). Authority here may seem to be keeping old texts fromcorruption – or perhaps keeping the young from the corruption of old texts.

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of what nowadays is termed “authorial orientation” and of the aban-donment of a purely aesthetic and subjective stance to editing.

One may at this stage appreciate what an achievement the Lach-mann method was. It inaugurated a series of principles meant tohelp avoid arbitrariness in the emendation of a text, and, thanks toits revisions in the early twentieth century, provided a reliable basisfor the analysis of textual traditions (cf. Maas 1958; Tanselle 1983;Kristeller 1984; Orlandi 1995; Pasquali 2003). It was these princi-ples that the Anglo-American school of textual criticism of WalterWilson Greg and Fredson Bowers set out to revise in the light of thedifferent textual conditions they were faced with. Working on textsof both the Renaissance and the modern period, where authorialmaterials are frequently available, Greg and Bowers developed thetheories of “copy-text” and “final authorial intention”. In their view,to edit a given work one should select a copy of it which can beproved to be the nearest to the author; this should then be emendedby including the latest corrections and additions which reflect the“final” text, the work we believe its creator wanted – even if thisnever materialized (Greg 1966: 347-391; Bowers 1964: 197-199;McGann 1992: 1-8). Clearly, in this perspective, the author’s origi-nal manuscript is the perfect “base” or “copy-text”; still, we mayhave various authorial manuscript versions of, say, a poem byWordsworth, Hardy or Yeats (all compulsive reviewers of theirworks). These versions, moreover, may diverge substantially fromsubsequent printed editions. We can have revisions which do notsimply affect single words or phrases: on the insistence of Bulwer-Lytton, Charles Dickens changed the original grim ending of GreatExpectations into the more cheerful and acceptable finale that mostreaders of the time were thought to desire. According to the Greg-Bowers school (even if Greg was much less dogmatic than hisAmerican colleague; see McGann 1992: 28), one should in theoryfollow Dickens’ manuscript for accidentals (spelling, punctuation),but emend its ending according to the final printed version. In somecases, though, to follow this logic means to reconstruct an ideal “fi-nal” work which incorporates very different states of the text, and topresent a work which never existed as a single document, but only

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(perhaps) in the mind of its creator. In the Lachmann-Bowers lineof thought (defended by scholars such as G. Thomas Tanselle andmany others) the author is then, as Jerome McGann has observed,“the ultimate locus of a text’s authority, and literary works are con-sequently viewed in the most personal and individual way” (ibid.:81). The choice of the early manuscript witness implies, in fact, thisview of the authorial figure: the nearer the document is to its origi-nator, the closer it is to his genius.

The Idealistic-Romantic ideology implicit in this was recognizedand exposed as early as 1983 by McGann and many textual theoristsafter him (see David Greetham’s introduction in ibid.: ix-xix; Pettit2000: 1-29). This recognition, however, could never have takenplace without the influence of post-structuralism and of the theoriesof Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. On theone hand, the actual decease of authors and the problems of textualtransmission of their works prompted the need for editing; on theother hand, the theoretical “death of the author” andDeconstruction have engendered a revision of the very idea of textsand of textual criticism. The conceptual substitution of the – nomatter how idealized – person of the writer with an “authorial fig-ure” and of the text with something which “is said” (à la Foucault)or is by definition indeterminate has, in fact, meant a radical devalu-ation of the concept of authorial intentions (see Tanselle 1976;Stillinger 1991: 4-24; Greetham 1999: 157-205; Shillingsburg1999; Mathijesen 2002; Bennett 2005a and 2005b; Bajetta 2006).Whether as a consequence of such a devaluation or not, in the latetwentieth century most controversies about editing seem to havecentred on problems of authority. The keynote element in recenteditorial discussions, far from being merely a variation on the themeof the Lachmann-Bédier controversy, is the recognition of the socialnature of texts: the fact that, as James Thorpe and Philip Gaskellhad already argued in the mid-late seventies, almost everyone in-volved in the production of a text may help in some sense to shapethat text – or at least to contribute to “the effect that a literary workwill have on a reader” (Thorpe 1972: 26; cf. also Gaskell 1978;McKenzie 1986). The author is seen, therefore, not as an isolated

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literary monad, but as one of the components of the production ofthe work of art – an object which is understood to be fundamentally“social rather than personal” (McGann 1992: 8). The 1990s and thepresent decade have seen copious production of scholarly articlesand monographs which attack traditional views of editing, oftencontrasting “authorial” editions with “multi-version” editions, “proc-ess” with textual “stability”, genealogical absolutism with hyper-textual freedom (see, for example, Stillinger 1991, 1994; Bornstein1993; Shillingsburg 1997, 1999, 2006; Greetham 1999; Mathijesen2002; Tanselle 2005).

The new theoretical wave has given life to a new generation ofscholarly editions, based on “text” rather than on the often un-recoverable “authority” of the writer’s intention. These books fre-quently deploy a wide array of different versions of a given work andallow one to choose between “reading texts” and/or various stages ofthe possible revisions of, say, a poem or novel, sometimes even in-cluding photographic facsimile reproductions (as is the case with theCornell Wordsworth or The Tennyson Archive). One may think thatthe death of the author (both actual and theoretical) has created amore democratic text for the use of the reader. The problem is thatthe latter is frequently dealing with another power, that of the edi-tor, who becomes the chief “presiding authority” and almost the soleorganizing principle of the text (cf. Tanselle 1986: 31-32; Greetham1999: 199-200). Even in multiple version editions one needs, infact, to select some stages of the revision process if one does notchance to have a very patient publisher with countless stocks of in-expensive paper at his disposal (see, for example, the interesting caseof the Garland facsimiles in Reiman 2003) and even in multimediaor Internet editions such as The Blake Archive one may fail to getpermission rights to reproduce all the witnesses and images onewould like to present to the public. Electronic editions such as theRossetti Archive, for all their desire to give the reader the “biblio-graphic experience” of the originals, frequently present a single copyor a choice of copies from a given edition, and have always to medi-ate the physical embodiment of the text (for example, paper, format,binding) through a computer screen. Editorial choice, in other

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words, always overrules in some way both the authority of the writerand the desires of the reader, no matter how candid, impersonal orapparently neutral this choice may seem.

3. Editorial Authority and Authorial Intentions

The fact is that both those authors who mildly pass away andwish their text to go and those who, alive and kicking, send theirtext to the printer, are perfectly aware that something will happen toit, but have conflicting feelings about it. Authors are perfectly awareof the fact that their texts have “a structure of survival” of their own(Derrida 1985: 183), and realize quite clearly that to publish is torenounce part of their authority over their texts. At the same timethey frequently show a Lear-like desire to retain their image ofpower; they may sigh their vade, liber with some sort of ill-concealedresignation – especially in an age of cheap photocopies and opticalscanners – while still trying to retain control. Those with more con-fidence in their powers, while accepting to leave their work to pos-terity, provide information on what they consider the “final” state ofat least some of their writings (for example, Hardy, Yeats; see Hynes1982: i-xx; Gould 1989), or leave statements concerning some spe-cial poems they wish their future editors to place first or last in acollection (Tennyson’s “Crossing the Bar” being a classic example;see Ricks (ed.) 1987: III, 253-254).

The verb “to edit” is strictly linked with the Latin e-dere (“to giveout”, “to put forth”); the past participle form of e-dere is editus,which means “published”.3 To be published, then, is inevitably tobe edited. From the Renaissance to the present day, authors haveunderstood that their texts are inevitably “sent to the world”through the agency of someone else. One should not wonder, then,at the fact that some writers, from John Donne to William Blake,were all in all happier with a limited circulation than with mass pro-duction of their works (cf. Marotti 1986; Lewis 1995 [introd.]: 274-

3 Both the OED and Webster’s Dictionary agree that this is a back formation from“editor”, from e- + dere, variant form of “dare”.

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276; Mason (ed.) 1998: vii-xii). It is, however, worthy of note thateven in a period such as the late sixteenth and early seventeenth cen-tury, when typography was still regarded with some suspicion, anumber of authors, both on the continent and in England, did in-tend their work for the press. One has just to think of Spenser’sFaerie Queene, Pierre de Ronsard’s Oeuvres (1584) or Ben Jonson’sauthorized Works (1616), published during the lifetimes of, andquite probably personally overseen by, these writers (cf. May 1981;Speed Hill 1995: 212-123). Even a later idiosyncratic writer such asBlake, at one stage, appears to have been attracted by the prospectsof a wider diffusion of his works: in 1803 he stated that “the Profitsarising from Publications are immense” and declared himself “sorrythat I did not know the methods of publishing years ago” (Keynes(ed.) 1966: 207; McGann 1991: 45).

The modern common acceptance of the print medium, though,does not necessarily imply the disappearance of a certain uneasinesson the writer’s part: the concern frequently regards the details or“accidentals” of one’s texts. “House styles”, proof-readers, both poorand too astute copy-editing all influence the aspect of one’s work onthe page. Should one resist this or not? Do these changes enhancethe presentation of one’s text or do they, even partially, deface it?Literary history may furnish many examples of wavering positionson the part of several writers in this respect. Recent scholarship hasdemonstrated, for example, that Faulkner, who claimed that punc-tuation and similar features were “the stuff that don’t matter” and isgenerally credited with leaving matters of punctuation to his typog-raphers, in fact did so intermittingly (Polk 2000). The same appliesto Walter Scott, who, while generally allowing his frequent dashes tobe transformed into commas and colons, occasionally corrected vir-gules and full-stops, and freely altered proofs in order to reviseIvanhoe (1820; see Tulloch (ed.) 1998: 418-454, in particular 426-429). Conversely, and contrary to what has been maintained so far,Paul Dawson (2005) has demonstrated that John Clare certainlyhad mixed feelings about the changes introduced in the manuscriptversion(s) of his Poems Descriptive (1820) by his publisher JohnTaylor, yet generally agreed to his amendments. A complex negotia-

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tion of authority, then, is visible even in minute (but frequently notso trivial) matters of punctuation – and even, at times, of page lay-out or book format: Wordsworth asked his publisher to have hisPeter Bell (1819) “printed upon similar paper & in the same form asthe Thanksgiving Ode” (Walker 1996: 71; Bajetta (ed.) 2005: 63-72).

To make matters less straightforward, authors may expect and gethelp from copyists (which sometimes include relatives and friendswho, as in the Wordsworth, Byron and Shelley circles, may substan-tially intervene on the text) and transcribers, who may interact withthem in curious ways. Richard Ellmann (1954: 359-360; cf. alsoThorpe 1972: 22) once provided a memorable example from JamesJoyce. The latter was dictating Finnegans Wake to Samuel Beckett,when

there was a knock on the door and Joyce said “Come in”. Beckett,who hadn’t heard the knock, by mistake wrote down “Come in” aspart of the dictated texts. Afterwards, he read it back to Joyce whosaid, “what’s that ‘come in’?” “That’s what you dictated,” Beckettreplied. Joyce thought for a moment, realizing that Beckett hadn’theard the knock; then he said, “Let it stand”.

At times what has happened to a text may be much less linearthan documentary evidence may show. An analysis of the printedwitnesses points to the fact that Swift revised the 1735 edition ofGulliver’s Travels (first published in 1726). This seems confirmed bythe note on the frontispiece which states that “in this Impressionseveral Errors in the London and Dublin Editions are corrected”.The 1735 volume, moreover, includes a letter (dated, however,“April 2, 1727”), written in the persona of Gulliver. Gulliver writesthat the first edition (i.e., 1726) of this work was marred by dele-tions and additions which had originated with his cousin, Sympson,fearful “of giving Offence” to “People in Power”, quite probably anoblique reference to Swift’s printer, Motte. However, in a letter ofthe same year, Swift claimed that the 1735 edition was printed “ut-terly against my will” – something denied categorically by hisprinter, who declared the author had “corrected every Sheet” of theseven-volume Works that he published during his lifetime (Rawson

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(ed.) 2005: ix-xxiii). Far from simply dismissing Swift’s denial, oneshould keep in mind how, being involved in the political and reli-gious controversies of his time, Swift was frequently both concealingand affirming his authorship. In the Drapier’s Letters (1724) and AModest Proposal (1729), for example, Swift styled himself a“Hibernian Patriot”, and he never openly acknowledged his brilliantbut controversial A Tale of a Tub (1704). As Michael Seidel has re-cently observed (2006), Swift implicated himself in his own satire:one wonders if Gulliver’s Travels’ complex interplay between storyand reality, irony and fictional text, authorial identities and charac-ter’s beliefs may account for an equally complex authorial attitude tothe text (for which, incidentally, no holograph manuscript survives;cf. Dixon et al. (eds) 1983: 31-32; Rawson (ed.) 2005: xvi).

When situations, incidents, and author’s intentions and revisionsmay vary so much, why insist on any single theoretical approach?Even refined differentiations between “primary” and “secondary”variants (interventions by people other than the author) proposed byHans Zeller, or rather cacophonic distinctions between “authorial”and “non-authorial authority” (Siegfried Scheibe) do not always helpto solve the problem of an author’s whim, of a painful self-imposedcensorship (from which at times an author may try to escape) or, asseen above, of the acceptance of external intervention (see Zeller1975; Shillingsburg 1998; Scheibe 1995; Mathiessen 2002). Really,as David McKitterick has observed, “authorial intention [...] is atbest a moving target, one having many shapes and forms, and enjoy-ing several natures” (McKitterick 2004: 225).

4. The Power of Theory, Editors and Publishers

The problem is that being too concerned with theory has hadmany consequences for the presentation (and thus for our reading)of several canonical authors. The case of Shakespeare is in this re-spect emblematic: the analytical bibliographers of the Greg-Bowersschool thought they could reconstruct his plays “as Shakespearewrote them” (an attempt still perceivable, incidentally, in Harold

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Jenkins’ edition of Hamlet (1982), based on the second quarto). By1987 the Oxford Shakespeare had opted for a radically differentperspective, which has been maintained also in the 2005 second re-vised edition:

The theatrical version is, inevitably, that which comes closest to the“final” version of the play. We have ample testimony from the thea-tre of all periods, including our own, that play scripts undergo aprocess of, often, considerable modification on their way from thewriting table to the stage. [...] We know too that plays may be muchimproved by intelligent cutting, and that dramatists of great literarytalent may benefit from the discipline of the theatre. It is, of course,possible that Shakespeare’s colleagues occasionally overruled him,forcing him to omit cherished lines, or that practical circumstances –such as the incapacity of a particular actor to do justice to every as-pect of his role – necessitated adjustments that Shakespeare wouldhave preferred not to make. But he was himself, supremely, a man ofthe theatre [...]. The very fact that those texts of his plays that con-tain cuts also give evidence of more “literary” revision suggest that hewas deeply involved in the process by which his plays came to bemodified in performance. For these reasons, this edition chooses,when possible, to print the more theatrical version of each play.(Wells et al. (eds.) 1987: xxxvi-xxxvii; 2005 edition: xxxviii-xxxix)

Within a few decades, as W. Speed Hill has observed, “the au-tonomous author as writer was transformed into the socialized au-thor as actor/director/sharer” (Speed Hill 1999: 111). Paul Werstinehas noted, however, that the Oxford editors

always assumed, as with Hamlet, that they could determine which ofmultiple printed texts was composed later and that the later text wasa theatrical one. Their later text always turns out to be either a foliotext or a “bad” quarto, never a “good” quarto. The textual narrative isalways suspiciously the same despite variety of texts. (Werstine 1995:270)

Idealizing the writer as autonomous genius or socialized authormay, thus, engender an edition which is fundamentally dependanton one’s theoretical bias.

Both a radically idealistic and a post-structuralist view of authors(and authorial intention) construe a text which lives without a

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writer, and ultimately transfer authority to editors. Unfortunatelythese often surrender their authority to the power of abstract ideas,instead of exercising their independent reasoning. Declining, in aHousman phrase, to apply thought to textual criticism, that is, to“base procedures” on one’s “own critical judgement as much as ongeneral principles” (Gaskell 1978: 6), has engendered a theory ofediting which has several disadvantages. On the one hand, fashion-able modern trends, frequently expressed in almost esoteric language“that often substitutes complexity of expression for careful thought”(Tanselle 2005: 138), have, paradoxically, prompted conservativeediting. Thus we have editions which reproduce verbatim et literatimmultiple texts where a traditional apparatus would serve perfectlywell. On the other hand, these editions are self-referential, and oftenend up affirming their own authority merely by invoking the new-ness of their theory.

One may note that this is not peculiarly novel: literary historyshows that some editions became standard simply because they werebacked up by the critics and intellectuals of the day, convinced ofthe necessity of such an up-to-date approach. The earlier version ofDickens’s Great Expectations was for instance championed byGeorge Bernard Shaw (cf. Thorpe 1972: 41). Katherine Sutherlandhas recently argued that the Oxford edition of Jane Austen becamea classic precisely because of R.W. Chapman’s skilful construction ofAusten as a “classic”. Chapman rallied to himself a team of editorsof Latin and Greek texts who edited Austen’s novels according totheir conception of textual criticism, that is, emending these as theywould emend Aeschylus or Homer: as a result “many readings fromChapman’s classicist colleagues ousted perfectly acceptable passagesfrom the first-edition texts. The Austen novels as OUP continues topublish them remain home to a range of verbal and grammaticalimprovements” derived from such a treatment of the text (Suther-land 2006a: 13; see, however, Todd 2006 and Sutherland 2006b).This last example may serve to understand the final disadvantage ofthe prevailing of trendy theory over sensible editorial practice: im-portant publishing companies often become the guarantee of thequality of an edition.

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Speaking in front of a large group of scholars, many of whomwere textual editors, R.B. McKerrow concluded his 1928 Cam-bridge Sandars Lectures by reminding everybody how gratifying tex-tual criticism can be:

there is a very real pleasure in the pursuit of truth, in whatever wayand in respect of whatever subject we seek it; and there is certainlythis to be said: that although too much study of other peoples’ opin-ions about a great writer may easily lead to boredom and to loss ofinterest in the writer himself, one’s own investigations and attempt toform one’s own opinions never do this. Rather, the further one goes,the more interesting does the subject of one’s enquiry become.(McKerrow 2000: 60)

He also admonished his fellow scholars: “let us as editors and astextual critics, having learnt our job as well as we can, be humbleabout it” (ibid.); about fifty years later James Thorpe was still speak-ing of the textual critic as a unassuming mediator, a “go-between”whose function was to bring the words of an author to an audience(1972: 50), and Gaskell would entitle his seminal book on editingFrom Writer to Reader.

These researchers were aware of a simple fact: theory, no matterhow à la page, is not enough. Letting the text determine our edito-rial principles, that is, partially forgoing the right to assert one’s au-thority as editor, means allowing readers their freedom, that of theauthentic literary encounter with the text of an author. In this way,reading becomes something unhindered by the influence of thecumbersome, self-important scholar – or by the prestige of an im-posing publishing company.

REFERENCES

Andersen F.I, 1995, “The Hebrew Bible (Old Testament)”, in D.C. Greetham(ed.), Scholarly Editing: A Guide to Research, The Modern Language Associationof America, New York, pp. 33-59.

Bajetta C.M. (ed.), 2005, William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Ham-ilton Reynolds, Peter Bell: the 1819 Texts, 2nd rev. ed., Cusl, Milan.

Bajetta C.M., 2006, “Presenting Romantic Texts: Editorial Theory and Practice”,Literature Compass 3/4, pp. 818-839.

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Bennett A., 2005a, “The Idea of the Author”, in N. Roe (ed.), Romanticism: AnOxford Guide, O.U.P., Oxford and New York, pp. 654-664.

Bennett A., 2005b, The Author, Routledge, London.Bornstein G., 1993, “Introduction”, in G. Bornstein and R.G. Williams (eds),

Palimpsests: Editorial Theory in the Humanities, U. of Michigan P., Ann Arbor,pp. 1-6.

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