2 Hubert Best, international copyright lawyer, illuminatingly informs me (by private email) that 'under Common Law […] the written contract is in fact only the evidence of the actual contract, which became a legally binding agreement when the parties entered into it. […] [W]ills and deeds […] require documentation and formalities (e.g. witnesses, in the case of a will).' This reinforces my insistence on the logical distinction between document and text. At the same time, it exemplifies a cultural transition from the oral to the written. The legally binding agreement constituting a contract was by a performative speech act and handshake entered into by two living partners. A will such as we know it, by contrast, since it becomes meaningful only on the death of the person expressing the will, could not exist without the document 'will'. Importantly, nonetheless, it is essentially not the material document, but the text contained in the document that the person witnessing testifies to.

elsewhere: works in language can be instantiated both materially and immaterially. As instantiated, we perceive works as texts. Any one given text instantiates the work. What binds the instantiations together is 'the work'. The work exists immaterially, yet it is at the same time more than a mere notion. It possesses conceptual substance, for it constitutes the energizing centre of the entirety of its textual instantiations. Among the work's many textual instantiations belong, too, texts as established in editions. An edited text may in fact be an instantiation optimally representing the work, even while it is never more—though commonly nothing less—than one considered textual representation of the work; or, a representation editorially preconsidered before being offered as a main textual foundation for a critical consideration of the work by interpreters and readers.3

## Author–authorship–authority and the variable text

If in this manner the exercise ground for the thought and labour of the textual critic and editor lies in precincts of overlap between the immateriality of the work and the materiality of its textual instantiations, textual critics and editors must have clear and well correlated conceptions of the forces here at play. A work is the outcome of its originator's creativity; 'by default' we term its originator its author. An author, in the first instance, is, or was, an historical person, even though, in the second instance, a work may have originated with a team of authors, or else may be anonymous, since who created it has failed to be recorded.

In relation to both works and authors, notions of authorship need to be taken into consideration. If and when they are, we discover that there is a pragmatically real as well as a conceptually abstract side to 'authorship'. Authorship may be defined as the activity of real-world authors, singly or collectively. But in reverse, it may be defined from the perspective of a body of writing subsumed under the label of an author name. The Scandinavian languages possess the term 'författarskap' [Swedish], which translates into English most readily as 'oeuvre', or

3 *Cf.* the preceding essays 'Editing Text—Editing Work', and 'Thoughts on Scholarly Editing'.

'works', or into German as 'das Werk' signifying the body of works carrying the label because empirically originating with the author or authors supplying the labelling name. Although defined grammatically in the possessive case of the author name (Shakespeare's oeuvre, Goethes Werke, Strindbergs författarskap), the 'oeuvre', 'die Werke', the 'författarskap' most immediately yet comprises the (immaterial) works of these authors in the (material) manifestation of their texts.

Such lines of argument lead to conceiving clearly of the 'author' as not an historical personage merely. On closer reflection, our awareness is sharpened that the 'author' not only is, but has always been, too, a projection from the works under his or her name—such as they existed in the public realm as texts subsumed under the titles of these works. The works' guarantors were, of old, Ovid, or Horace, or Seneca, or Cicero, or Aristotle—with the name not so much designating the historical personage as metonymically extrapolated from the work. For invoking the guarantors—the authorities—a paraphrase was as good as a *verbatim* citation, provided it expressed and was considered true to the author's thought, such as it was by cultural consensus understood from his works. In such manner, a medieval writer (Geoffrey Chaucer, say) would cite an author from antiquity (Ovid) as his 'authority'. We have as a matter of fact to this day not abandoned treating authors' names in like manner: we read Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Henry James or Virginia Woolf, or indeed '*our* Shakespeare', '*our* Goethe', which emphasises that we construct an author's image subjectively from the works read.

Or, more precisely: in the reading of the author, we create the author image from the works through their texts. Such texts differ. Texts are, and have always been, variant. This is a fact of life, and is a consequence of the ineluctable materiality, as well as the ever-pervasive instincts of renewal, that characterise the world we live in, as do our books and texts. The variability of texts therefore may be destructive in nature: the result of corruption or material decay; or it may be constructive: the outcome of renewed creative input, be it through revision, or through participatory, emendational or conjectural, editing. One way or another: that texts are always variant is an ontological truth. Yet at the same time, it is a truth that has always been largely elided. Our cultural urge

is for stable and immutable texts. Or, more cautiously put: our postenlightenment urge is for stability and immutability as the sovereign qualities of texts. This has to do with a new cultural estimate, as well as a new self-estimate, of authors—a point to which I shall return.

It is worth following up, first, the circumstance that the limitless variability of texts has been elided, or else accepted, differently in different historical periods. From this follows, in turn, a reversal in the definition of 'authority'. If it is accurate to say, as suggested, that medieval writers and audiences would cite 'authority' by author name, and in faithful reference mainly to thought and idea of given works, it seems to be a fact also that, as medievalist scholarship sees it, scribes and scriptoria in the Middle Ages, for all their endeavours to transmit 'good' texts, lived quite happily, at the same time, with, and in, the variability of the works' texts, and indeed actively participated in spawning further their variability. Yet unbeknownst to them these medieval agents of textual transmission also worked towards the emergence of an idea of the *textus receptus*—historically, a humanist achievement (and culturally closely related, as it happens, to the medial shift from a manuscriptbased to a print-based norm of communication and transmission). The establishment of the notion of the *textus receptus* marks a shift, too, from the canonising of works to a canonising of texts; or: of works as texts. This is the historical moment, furthermore, that marks the beginning of our own pervasive notion, or illusion, that in the shape of the text materially in our hands we have possession of the work, which yet this text can but represent, but can in truth not be.

It is at this point that the concept of 'authority' acquires a new definition. 'Authority' is no longer the author name that guarantees the genuineness of the thought and articulated ideas elicited from a reading memory of an author's works. It is now what is sought so as to authenticate the establishing of authors' texts with *literatim* accuracy. This is the view that textual criticism and editing still entertain today. It is, however, only seemingly self-evident. It subscribes to an understanding of 'authority' that is historically contingent and became fully codified only in the early nineteenth century. For even though the editing of surviving texts of works from classical antiquity had been carried forward in an unbroken tradition since the Age of Humanism, and a fresh tradition, moreover, of editing vernacular texts on the model of classical editing had latterly grown, it was only in the early nineteenth century that textual criticism and editing came into their own as scholarly disciplines.

## Historicism and textual scholarship

That the notion of 'authority' in the way we understand it today became the focus of the newly instituted disciplines was a main outcome, too, of the central innovation of the age in thought and method: the rise and eventual dominance of historicism. Thinking historically meant the ability to think and reason backward through history. In terms of texts, this meant establishing causes for the state and shape they took in the documents from the past in which they materially survived. If in two surviving documents they were found to differ, the assumption was that at least one exemplified an error. Reason sought a cause for the presumptive error, and this cause was logically situated at a lost stage and in a lost document of transmission. Among preserved stages and documents, at the same time, what texts survived in whole or in parts was often amply spread over time and place. Texts from all extant documents could therefore be collated, and from evaluating collations critically it became possible to establish chronologies of document transmission as well as to arrange textual differences diachronically. It remained to infer what the differences signified, which meant mainly, what they revealed about relationships among the extant documents and texts, as well as their relationship individually or in groups to lost antecedents.

For methods of analysis to impose on the patterns of presumptive relationships, a model was provided by enlightenment science. In the eighteenth century, the Swedish biologist Carl von Linné developed a binary-structured systematics of nature. This proved adaptable to the new text-critical thinking. Surviving texts differed between themselves as well as in relation to their lost antecedent states simply (it was assumed) in a binary fashion, by error or non-error. Under this assumption, they became relatable, moreover, in groupings apparently analogous to families, for which, consequently, family trees could be drawn. This move was the foundation of the stemmatic method in

textual criticism.4 (Incidentally, it anticipated, in a manner, Charles Darwin's genetically, hence historically, oriented adaptation of Carl von Linné's historically 'flat' taxonomies.) As method, stemmatics is double-tiered. For the purposes of textual criticism, it operates on the historical givens, the documents and their texts. Critically analysed, the results from collating all extant document texts are schematised in a graph, the stemma. The process of collation thus strives to be inclusive. The ensuing operation of critical editing, by contrast, is predicated on exclusion. For on the grounds of reasoning that the stemma provides, every document text that fails to meet the validity criterion underlying the analysis of the collational variation can, for the labour of critically constituting the edited text, be left aside. This leaves, ideally, just one document text on which to build a critically edited text. If this base text features what the analysis of variants has deemed to be an error, the erroneous reading is emended by what has been critically assessed as a genuine reading from another document text; or else by a conjectural reading devised by the editor's ingenuity. Else, all instances of variation from the body of collated document texts are recorded, if at all, in an apparatus (footnoted or appended).

The stemmatic method as a whole was (and, where practiced, still is) predicated on the assumption that family trees could be established: the very idea of family relationships meant that extant documents and their texts descended from an inferentially, if not materially, recoverable ancestry. This ancestry not only could, but positively had to be construed, if only to make sense of the collation evidence from the extant documents and their texts. In all material respects, admittedly, the fountainhead of a given text was irredeemably lost. To varying

4 Interestingly, the first known graph of a family tree for documents and their texts is documented from Sweden (not coincidentally, perhaps, considering the Linné connection). It was drawn up by Karl Johan Schlyter, the country's most penetratingly modern textual scholar of his time, who visualised for his 1827 edition of a legal codex, *Westgötalagen*, the relationship of the texts from ten extant and four inferred documents in a stemma he names '*Schema Cognationis Codicum manusc*'. *Cf.* Gösta Holm, 'Carl Johan Schlyter and Textual Scholarship', *Saga och Sed. Kungliga Gustav Adolfs Akademiens årsbok* (Uppsala: A. B. Lundequistska Bok Handeln, 1972), pp. 48–80. The Swedish precedence in the development of stemmatology that soon was to gather momentum in nineteenth and twentieth century classical and medieval textual scholarship appears hitherto to have gone unnoticed in Germany and elsewhere, where Karl Lachmann is, in the main, credited with its invention.

degrees, nonetheless, lost documents could be inferred by drawing logical conclusions from the variation between the texts of the extant ones. In fact, it was only by such inference that the missing links between the extant documents and their texts could be filled in, and thus the stemma as a graph of interconnections could be achieved at all. The lost documents were posited in terms of their presumptive texts: that is, they were furnished logically with text 'cloned' from the extant textual states. Ideally, a text could thus be diachronically reconstructed back to its very source, its (presumptive) *one* text of origin. And if the ideal—imagined, say, as that fountainhead, the very first manuscript to come from the author's hand—proved irretrievable, a 'real' common ancestor of all extant derivative texts could rationally (that is, by critical assessment of the collations performed) still be arrived at: the archetype.

### Real authors and stable texts

The rationale of stemmatics came at a price. It made no allowance for the 'fact of life' that variability is a natural condition of texts. Behind this blind spot lies the cultural assumption of a stable and finalised text. This notion in turn is rooted in the cultural role conceded to the author. As the editing of texts in the vernacular increased through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries all over Europe, their authors came to be perceived no longer as abstract, even though nameable, 'authorities', as in earlier times. They were instead known to be, or to have been, real, historically situated individuals. Texts transmitted were both attributable to, and claimed by them. What is more, these texts came in printed editions of multiple copies. No longer was every copy of a text different from another, as throughout the eras before print. The public awareness of texts from real identifiable authors was thus that they were identical, and in practical terms invariant (at least throughout given book editions). The (printed) text in hand came therefore not only to stand in for, and materially to represent, the work (as is common understanding still today). It was (as it still is) taken to be the work. The underlying conception of 'the work', in other words, was, and is, one of a self-identical text manifestation, invariant and closed. The cultural notion of the invariant text published by an empirical author, furthermore, was seen to coincide with, and to reinforce, the earlier

logical construct of (in stemmatic terms) an archetype, and *a fortiori* an original text ('Urtext'), constituting, as a posited material text, the work of the *auctor absconditus* of the distant past.

Authors of the present as of the past came to be seen, and indeed defined, as canonical authors. This view, too, emerged from the rise of historicism. Its finest flower was the perception of the artist, and for our purposes specifically of the author, as an original genius. This mode of appreciation carried a double aspect. It conferred upon the author a societal recognition. It reciprocally shaped an author's self-image and imbued the author with a sense of his or her public identity and role. Johann Wolfgang Goethe was probably Germany's most exalted exponent of the new author type. He became Johann Wolfgang *von* Goethe, in fact, precisely in recognition of his eminent public role. He was seen along the canonical lines of the cultural tradition. Since he so also saw himself, he helped in person, too, to shape his public image for his time and for posterity.5 One means by which he did so was his editing, or his overseeing of the editing, of his work, that is: of his oeuvre. Behind such editing stood Goethe's authority. Even allowing that this was to a significant degree the authority of the writer, it was fundamentally as well the authority of the man, the citizen, the courtier, and the public figure.

The standing of the historical personage in life raises the question: what relation does this empirical, real-life authority bear to the concept of 'authority' in textual criticism and editing? The more immediate the real presence of authors has become to readers, as well as to societies, the stronger, naturally, has grown, on the one hand, their claim to authority over their work, together specifically with authority over the text(s) of that work; and, on the other hand, the readiness of society and the body politic to concede their claim. Such encompassing authority has in fact been legally codified. Real authors' copyrights and moral rights are protected today virtually throughout the world. Yet this laudable acceptance of real-life authors and their personal rights in the societies in which we live obscures, rather than clarifies or resolves, the fundamental systemic problem of whether or how to relate the empiric

5 Klaus Hurlebusch, 'Conceptualisations for Procedures of Authorship', *Studies in Bibliography*, 41 (1988), 100–35, suggestively discusses the interaction between individual author and society in the forming of 'author images'.

and societal conceptions of 'authority' to the scholarly endeavour of securing the written cultural heritage of texts. In one respect, it must remain uncontested that authors can do whatever they wish with the material record of their authoring enterprises. Specifically, they can exercise practical authority over acts of copying and publication. Their wishes must carry weight in the endeavours of bringing their work as texts to their readers. Anywhere along the way, too, they are of course free to discard any amount of traces of their work, for instance throw away (or, in our digital age, attempt to erase) notes or drafts, or shred typescripts or marked-up proofs. In another light, however, any such pragmatics in real-life situations bear but obliquely on assessments of textual authority.

## The fallacies of document and textual authority

But what kind of animal, we should pause to reflect, is 'textual *authority*' at all? In devising the methodology of stemmatics, and in particular in the endeavour of critical analysis of patterns of text relationships revealed through collation, the aim, as we have noted, was to establish textual validity against errors of transmission. The texts by hypothetical logic constructed for the inferred documents—the archetype or, exceptionally, the fountainhead texts—could not meaningfully be seen as invested with authority, since they were mere retro-projections from their surviving descendants. Even less meaningfully could they so be seen, considering that there were not—not even for any posited originals—any public or legal, or private, let alone any manifest writing acts of their authors' on record from which to infer, or by which to confer 'authority'. Such considerations should lead us to discern the fallacy underlying the very concept of '*textual* authority'.6

To this end, we might profitably attempt to disentangle, for the benefit also of textual criticism and scholarly editing, the real-life author from the author function that, in terms of theory, texts both imply and indeed generate and constitute. If it can be said that Roland

6 Peter L. Shillingsburg's monograph, *Scholarly Editing in the Computer Age: Theory and Practice. Third Edition* (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1996), by contrast, is, from its opening sentence in 'Part 1. Theory' onwards, wholly predicated on 'concepts of textual authority'.

Barthes's 'death of the author' has, as a slogan, generally tended to overshadow Michel Foucault's significant elucidation of the 'author function',7 it would probably also be true that textual critics, and editors in particular, must be counted among those who still hold both tenets in scorn. (They will insist: 'The author is real: look, these manuscripts are incontrovertible proof that the author is not dead—or was not when he wrote them!') Seen with a colder eye, however, the proof of the author that manuscripts provide, in truth, only evidences (alike to footprints in the sand) that an author once (or, as the case may be, repeatedly) traced his hand and writing implement over the manuscript page. The real-life author, consequently, cannot honestly be conceded to be more—though also no less—than an empirical and legal authority over the documents carrying the texts of his works. To concede to him or her an overriding authority over those texts, and on top of that to consider those texts, as texts, themselves invested with an innate authority, amounts to performing an argumentative leap akin to what psychology terms a displacement. It is this that constitutes the fallacy suggested.

This brings us back, in passing, to our initial consideration of the contract and the will as legal documents. The validity of contracts and wills by civil and legal convention is attested by the material documents as such. Their texts are, as it were, by definition free from error,8 and particularly so as, and when, they accord with formulaic conventions. Signature and seal, moreover, reinforce that the document vouches absolutely for the text it contains. It appears that, from the formalisms that characterise this pragmatic model of negotiating legal states of authority, evolved the formalisations of authority and authorisation in the triangle relationship of text, document and author. Yet the purported analogy, for all that it has gone unquestioned for centuries, does not in truth hold. Texts in the cultural realms of transmission are by definition not faultless, but on the contrary prone to error. The documents that

7 Roland Barthes, 'The Death of the Author' [1967], in *Image Music Text*, essays selected and translated by Stephen Heath (London: Fontana Press, 1977), pp. 142–48, https://grrrr.org/data/edu/20110509-cascone/Barthes-image\_music\_text. pdf; Michel Foucault, 'What is an Author?' [1969], in *The Foucault Reader*, ed. by Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), pp. 101–20.

8 Hubert Best (see footnote 2) adds the legal specification: 'where the common law contract is merely evidence of the actual contract, if the document plainly does not conform with the actual agreement, it is set aside (doctrine of "mistake").'

carry them are, in their great variety, 'formless', and they are private. As such, they exist outside societal conventions and laws. The creative subjectivity of authors, and indeed their freedom of will in making decisions, finally, cannot affect in their essence either documents or the texts they carry. Documents and texts are entities outside of authors as real-life individuals. Hence authors, even though they are pragmatically their agents, cannot themselves rise to a position of essential authority over them, so as to decree an authoritative status for documents and texts. At most, they can testify to, and attest their relative validity.

How the elision of the pragmatic and the essential came about can be historically retraced, too, in terms of the progression of a methodology for the emerging discipline of textual criticism and scholarly editing. Stemmatology was, as we have seen, the discipline's early method for analysing and editing transmissions of texts from antiquity and the middle ages. These were distinctly transmissions of texts. On top of that, they were transmissions spread over unique document exemplars, individually variant among each other. They were, to use the technical term, radiating transmissions. The rules for regulating the correlation of the texts in a radiating stemma, even while text-centred, were at the same time influenced, admittedly, by the cultural ascendancy of the author in that age of historicism when the stemmatic method developed. For its *a priori* assumption was that of the past author's presumptively one and only original text (or the archetype as its prophet). This however did not deflect, but on the contrary strengthened, the text-critical and editorial procedures aimed at the validation of transmitted text. The concomitant strategies of radical disregard for manuscript texts critically adjudicated as inferior resulted in choosing one document text that escaped such adjudication as the foundation for a critical text to represent a work.

Such selection by rational variant analysis, and thus from within the material of transmission itself, proved not to be feasible, however, given modern, and often actually contemporary, text situations and transmissions. Yet towards these the interest and engagement of textual criticism and editing increasingly turned. What they required were procedures to deal with a largely linear descent of texts in transmission, often combined, moreover, with processes of composition, and empirically controlled, moreover, by real-life authors insistently present. Under the authorial eye, the decision on which, and from

which document and text to build a critical edition, was no longer felt to be the editor's responsibility alone. Though procedurally it belonged to the editor, it was conceptually deferred to the author. An alternative methodology to stemmatics was thus devised to support an 'authorcentric turn'. Methods in textual criticism and editing turned from being indigenously based on a critically established validity of text, to being exogenously predicated on (authorial) authority. 9

As a basis for the procedures of scholarly editing, the new principles stipulated the 'authorised document'. The text it carried was declared to possess 'textual authority'. By embedding itself in cultural conventions, moreover, the method invested the real-life author with the power, the pragmatic authority, to declare both document authorisation and textual authority. Such, in outline, was the new methodological framework considered best suited to post-medieval textual and transmissional situations. They also resituated the editor. Stemmatology, as said, had operated without a comparably encapsulating framework. Its methods, aimed at text validation, were essentially rooted in the editor's critical judgement. The notions of authorisation and textual authority, by contrast, constituted and constitute *a priori* regulators for the establishing of edited texts.

### Author-centricity *versus* the author function

Founded mainly on empiric and societal convention, the authorcentric framework for scholarly editing is arbitrary and, as indicated, exogenous to texts. Its inherent difficulties, which are logical as well as methodological, have nonetheless been insistently elided, or (more generally) not even perceived. They can be made out, however, on at least two levels. Firstly, the empiric and arbitrary conferral of authority amounts to a set of vicarious gestures (on the part of real-life authors) and assumptions (on the part of textual critics and editors, not to mention the cultural environment at large). Secondly, and more essentially, that conferral depends on the assumption that texts represent not only

9 Peter L. Shillingsburg (see above, note 6) proposes, in 'Chapter Two: Forms', a set of 'orientations' for scholarly editing, among which one is the 'authorial orientation'. My present argument is an attempt to give a historical depth perspective to Shillingsburg's formal, and thus 'flat' taxonomy.

finalised acts of will by authors, but are in themselves invariant, stable, (pre)determinant, and closed. Yet according to present-day positions taken by theorists of language and of literature, none of these *a prioria* can in truth be upheld. Pivotal today is the insight that texts are variable and in principle always open. They are constant not in stability and closure, conferred by a finalising authorial *fiat*, but constant, if constant at all, only in that they are always capable of also being otherwise.

This recognition can be made operable, too, in terms of textual scholarship and editing; yet if so, it can be made operable from inside the material body of texts only. The key would seem to lie in the notion of the author function. As a theoretical tenet, it has amply proved its applicability to, for instance, the critical analysis of narrative. It can equally, I suggest, be utilised to deal analytically and critically with texts and their materials of composition and transmission. If in an ontological sense it is in the nature of texts to be variable, and if at the same time texts are the creations of authors, then variability is the mark that texts carry of their authors' creativity, as well as of their own inexhaustible potential, as texts, for being otherwise.10 Systemically, therefore, in terms of the autonomy of texts, their variability is an expression of the author function, which is inscribed into them, and thus contributes to constituting texts as texts. Constituting texts in ways predicated on variability—the quality that is of their nature as it is of the nature of language, out of which texts are generated—is in terms of creativity the primary prerogative of authors. Secondarily, and in critical terms, such constituting should be acknowledged, too, as a goal of scholarly editing. From the perspective of today we should see it as incumbent on scholarly editions of the future not only to record variation of texts through their processes of past transmission. This is and will be, as it has hitherto been, the function of apparatus presentations of variants. Yet editions to come should equally endeavour to do justice to the variability within texts throughout the processes of their very creation. For this, as one may already dimly discern, it will not be sufficient to devise new formats for scholarly editions. The ways in which to embed textual criticism and scholarly editing in literary criticism and theory

10 Such understanding provides the foundation for Roger Lüdeke's theory of revision, developed in his *Wi(e)derlesen. Revisionspraxis und Autorschaft bei Henry James* (Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 2002).

will themselves demand to be thought through with renewed attention. The reflections on authority (as it is conceded to real-life authors), on document authorisation, or on textual authority here entertained, with the suggestion of abandoning these concepts, may pave the way towards such rethinking.

## The author's intention rooted in copy-text editing

First, however, a concept that has become central yet needs to be broached, and to be recognised as a hindrance to the progression—in theory as in pragmatics—of textual criticism and scholarly editing, literary criticism and literary theory together. This is the concept of the author's intention. Invoking the author's intention as the final arbiter for establishing scholarly editions is what gives the ultimate twist to that author-centred methodology, which (as we have argued) today appears untenable, since it is predicated on texts' invariance, stability, (pre)determinacy, and closure. The notions herein of predeterminacy and final intention, in particular, disastrously reinforce each other. Firstly they imply that a text, as achieved at the final point in time of its recorded development, does not only represent but positively constitutes the work. Over and above this misperception, they imply, too, a teleological model for creative writing still unreflectively rooted in original-genius aesthetics.

The invocation of the author's intentions has played a dominant role particularly in Anglo-American textual criticism and editing throughout most of the second half of the twentieth century. Here, intentionalist editing was codified as a result of the generalisation of the methods of copy-text editing that originated in Shakespearean textual scholarship.11

For the larger part of the twentieth century, Shakespearean textual scholarship was driven by twin forces of methodology. One was its submission to analytical and textual bibliography. The other, which concerns us here, was the transfer of procedures of text-critical

11 Again, Peter L. Shillingsburg's *Scholarly Editing in the Computer Age*, may be cited here for its convenient overview, in the chapter 'Intention', pp. 29–39 in the book's 'Part I. Theory', of the concept of authorial intention and its application to Anglo-American scholarly editing in the latter half of the twentieth century. Of greater complexity is David C. Greetham, *Theories of the Text* (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), chapter 4: 'Intention in the Text', pp. 157–205.

treatment of the radial dispersion of texts in medieval manuscripts to the early post-Gutenberg linear transmissions of texts from manuscript printers' copies to first and subsequent editions in book form. The main precepts of the methods applied to texts in print were developed by the eminent British textual scholar of the first half of the twentieth century, W. W. Greg. Greg's strengths lay in the application of an all but unrivalled faculty of analytic logic to a rich archival observation and experience. They were rooted, moreover, in classical and medievalist methodologies of textual criticism. In his perception of texts and their transmission, he was at bottom a stemmatologist. Consequently, he understood how the extant earliest printings of Shakespeare's texts naturally derive from lost manuscripts. At the same time, he recognised how close they were to their state and shape in those antecedent, if lost, scribal, or even autograph, documents. From this understanding, he pronounced rules for copy-text editing by which to constitute edited texts by reconstituting a textual state and shape critically inferred for the lost documents. It was archetype-directed text-critical and editorial thinking that thus claimed to be recovering a maximum, with luck even an optimum, of original Shakespeare text from the derivative witnessesin-print to these texts.

However, this adaptation of a methodology originally devised for pre-Gutenberg manuscript transmissions had its pitfalls. For instance, Greg disastrously misjudged the textual situation for William Shakespeare's *King Lear*. Here were two first printings—a Quarto single-play edition and the play's rendering in the First Folio volume that diverged widely. So strong was Greg's stemmatological bent that he dogmatically refused to entertain the hypothesis that these two textual states reflected two distinct versions of the play. He held the variation between the two printings to be due to errors of transmission entirely. The alternative proposition is that the dramatist's progressive development of the play in composition and revision may be captured from the divergence in variation between the two printed versions. This is the hypothesis that in Shakespeare criticism and textual criticism has meanwhile been thoroughly tested and validated.12

12 The late 1970s and the 1980s saw the liveliest debates of the fresh, and distinctly critically motivated views of the *Lear* question. Most diversified in its approaches

Where Greg recognised the need for adjustment to the inherited methodology, however, was with respect to conditions of transmission due to printing technology which were naturally unprecedented in the pre-Gutenberg manuscript era. Texts published in first editions, or in earlier editions more generally, could be observed to have been modified by their authors after publication. Technically, the authors had been given the opportunity to mark revisions on the earlier editions' pages that were then worked in, in the printing house, into the resettings from those preceding editions. The existence of resettings of earlier printings that still contained authorial revisions puzzled R. B. McKerrow in his 1939 *Prolegomena* to a complete edition of Shakespeare he was preparing to edit, though he did not live to realise the edition.13 While conceding that derivative editions would not only perpetuate errors generated in setting the first editions, but would also add to them their own errors, McKerrow saw no alternative to choosing the texts from the derivative editions as his copy-texts. He thus took two generations of error into the bargain, since among these the genuine post-first-edition revisions would be contained. It was W. W. Greg who, posthumously for McKerrow, proposed a solution to the dilemma. By logically conceptualising materially evident text—printed text—under two aspects, an aspect of state (the text's 'substantive' readings) and an aspect of shape (its 'accidentals', i.e., spellings, punctuation and the like), he devised rules for copytext editing. They were published in 1950–195114 and triggered the so-called 'copy-text theory of editing', dominant in Anglo-American editorial scholarship from the 1960s onwards.

The rules stipulated that the first-edition text, or otherwise earliest text, was always to be chosen as copy-text for a scholarly, or critical, edition. This would ensure that the edited text came as close as possible to the lost manuscript printer's copy. It would do so anyhow in its substance of readings that remained invariant throughout first and

is the book of essays, *The Division of the Kingdoms*, ed. by Gary Taylor and Michael Warren (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983; [paperback] 1987).

13 Ronald B. McKerrow, *Prolegomena for the Oxford Shakespeare. A Study in Editorial Method* (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1939).

14 W. W. Greg, 'The Rationale of Copy-Text', *Studies in Bibliography*, 3 (1950–1951), 19–36; and *Collected Papers*, ed. by J. C. Maxwell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), pp. 374–91.

subsequent editions, but equally, and most particularly, also in its accidentals, regardless of whether these remained constant or varied in subsequent editions. Considering that accidentals were in early hand-printing largely left to the discretion of printers' compositors, it was only in first editions, if at all (so Greg's argument went), that the compositors might have followed copy and thus taken over its accidentals. In some cases that copy could actually be argued to have been an autograph. To this clear-cut ruling with regard to first-edition substantives and accidentals, there was, too, an important subsidiary. It stipulated that the (first-edition) copy-text was to be followed as well in cases of indifferent substantive variants. Such 'indifferent variants' naturally turned up among the body of substantive variants between first edition and revised edition. Since they were variants, they needed to be critically weighed as to whether or not they were revisions. If the assessment was inconclusive (indifferent) because they might easily be typesetters' errors, the revised-edition variant was not to be admitted to the edited text.

It was essential in terms of Greg's rulings, in other words, to isolate from the subsequent edition such readings as by their quality could be critically assessed as revisions. They, and they alone, were (text-) critically singled out from derivative but revised editions and were then editorially used to modify the copy-text into the critically edited text. Procedurally, the modification was done by way of emending the revisions into the copy-text. Within the texture of the (first-edition) copy-text the first-edition-state substantive readings were replaced by the corresponding substantive readings from the revised-state edition that had been critically assessed individually as revised readings.

This was the first time in Anglo-American scholarly editing that not only textual variation-in-transmission was scrutinised: that is, variation originating with agents other than the author (inferred for lost, or evident at extant, stages of transmissions). This was variation of an extraneous nature, and hence, virtually by definition, variation as 'error'. Now, by way of critically discerning and isolating revisions in (bibliographically, and thus transmissionally) derivative editions, variation in the progression of texts was taken account of, too—variation by definition not 'error', since integral to the text(s) of the work in question in its

(their) evolution over time.15 Interestingly though, as we have seen, Greg, thanks to his analytical powers, found a way of bending such new departures in the concerns of textual criticism back onto the inherited patterns of reaching out behind the surviving manifestations of texts. The composite, critically eclectic edition text was the mirror image, as it were, of the successfully reconstructed archetype text. Gregian copytext editing was thus still firmly modelled on archetype editing, even while, paradoxically, the infusion by emendation of post-copy-text revisions into the copy-text substratum of the edited text was allowed, although it had no imaginable connection, or rather: bore an imaginary relation only, to a given text's pre-survival state, materially lost.

Greg's rules provided the foundation for the specifically Anglo-American mode of critical eclecticism in scholarly editing. Critical eclecticism to construct, as edited text, a composite of readings early and late in a textual development, and before, as well as after, its first material manifestation in the state and shape of a public text, requires belief in a teleology of texts, coupled with confidence that telescoping a textual development over time into the one plane of the edited text is a legitimate procedure. The adjective 'critical' is the important face-saver, forestalling the negative view that the procedure contaminates. It has of old in scholarly editing been branded as 'contamination' to implant readings from one historical instantiation, one version, of a text into another. For this reason, 'critical eclecticism' has been generally viewed with acute suspicion outside the Anglo-American sphere.

Greg's copy-text editing itself was rooted in origin-oriented textual criticism as inherited from stemmatology. Yet from assumptions of a teleology of texts, at the same time, it nodded towards author-centred textual criticism and editing. The author—William Shakespeare to boot—incontestably played a role in Greg's devising of rules. The lure of an autograph fair copy was simply irresistible, if not indeed the dramatist's so-called foul papers, underlying, at the shortest transmissional distance, the surface of a play's first manifestation in

15 By contrast, landmark editions of German authors, as early as towards the end of the nineteenth century, had already given scope to the textual evolution of works under their authors' hands.

print. But even with Greg's acute awareness of the author as factor and agent in the textual transmission, his text-critical procedures remained squarely bent on validating text. Even emending a first-edition text with the substantive revisions critically ascertained from a subsequent edition was understood as an editorial measure to validate the authorial text for the work. The copy-text editing rules were not aimed at fulfilling authorial intentions.

Their acute potential for being precisely so transmuted, however, was soon perceived. Fredson Bowers, an American textual scholar of the generation after Greg, not only saw, but capitalised on the intentionalist implications of Greg's rules.16 The institution of these rules as the foundation for intention-oriented copy-text editing was Bowers's doing. The fusion came to be known as the 'Greg-Bowers theory' of copy-text editing—not a 'theory' strictly speaking, perhaps, but unquestionably a set of strong principles for scholarly editing. Their base was Greg's copy-text-editing rules generalised timelessly for the scholarly editing of texts (or at least of literary texts) of all kinds from all periods. Pragmatically, the generalisation was predicated on procedures of analytical and textual bibliography. The superstructure devised for the Greg-Bowers principles was the tenet that it was the ultimate task and duty of the critically eclectic scholarly edition to fulfil the author's intentions, or the author's final intentions, or the author's latest intentions—by variant adjectives, the goal, as it was progressively argued, came to be variously modified.

What Bowers performed in thus giving an intentionalist turn to textual criticism and scholarly editing was something of a *coup-d'êtat*, or usurpation. For it was precisely at the intellectual moment in the course of the twentieth century when New Criticism culminated in literary theory of the Wellek-Beardsley persuasion, which resoundingly proclaimed the intentional fallacy, 17 that Bowers defined fulfilling the author's intention the ultimate goal of scholarly editing.18 With New

16 It was Bowers who published Greg's 'Rationale of Copy-Text' in the 1950–1951 volume of the annual *Studies in Bibliography* that he had begun to edit.

17 W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley, 'The Intentional Fallacy', in *The Verbal Icon*, ed. by W. K. Wimsatt (Lexington: Kentucky University Press, 1954), pp. 3–18.

18 The range of Fredson Bowers's contributions to the forming of principles and practice of editorial scholarship in the second half of the twentieth century may be gauged from his collection *Essays in Bibliography, Text, and Editing* (Charlottesville:

Criticism in decline, and the critical invocation of intention banned as a fallacy, it was now the textual scholar and editor who bore through the throng the 'well-wrought urn' of the single, pristine, perfect text in shape of the critically eclectic text fulfilling the author's intentions. The 'Urtext' and archetype of past conception became transubstantiated into the absolute text of ideal finality.

# Intentionalist editing: some problems of hermeneutics

Clearly, fulfilling the author's intentions constitutes a fulfilment, too, of the author-centric orientation and dependency of textual criticism and scholarly editing of the past two centuries that we have been discussing. It goes beyond—indeed, it transgresses—the foundation in the materialities of transmissions that textual criticism and editing traditionally built and relied upon. For to realise the author's intentions means to establish text that is precisely not inscribed in any material document. More specifically still: since it is alone from material documents that written authorial text may be read, the procedure of arriving at the text of the author's intention must involve declaring what is written as somehow in error. This may be trivial, wherever, say, the mistake of a scribe, or a typist, or a printing-house compositor can be unambiguously made out and corrected—hardly an editorial measure, though, that were weighty enough to lay claim to fulfilling an authorial intention. Otherwise the making-out of the written as in error involves deeper enquiry. In such cases the scrutiny of the text as documented becomes genuinely interpretative.

This ought to give rise to concerns about the role and expertise of the textual critic and editor. They have but seldom, it is true, been denied critical faculties; nor should they themselves ever abdicate them. The question however is in what modes they should opt to exercise and invest them. The analysis of documents or of collations of texts demands of textual critics and editors critical skills. Such

University Press of Virginia, 1975). Of particular relevance to our discussion here are the essays 'Multiple Authority: New Concepts of Copy-Text', pp. 447–87 (reprinted from *The Library*, 5/27 [1972], 81–115) and 'Remarks on Eclectic Texts', pp. 488–528 (reprinted from *Proof*, 4 [1974], 13–58).

skills, moreover, are absolutely called upon to validate texts and text readings for the purpose of accepting or rejecting them for the edited texts of scholarly editions. Even when, under the ascendancy of the author, an overall responsibility for editorial decisions and results was increasingly delegated to authors—real-life authors to boot—and editors consequently tended rather to hide behind the author, their textspecific expertise and skills remained a (usually) sufficiently secure foundation for professionally executed scholarly editions. But when it was further imposed upon editions that they should aspire to fulfil authors' intentions, not only was the question left unexplored what extension of expertise and skills this would entail; more fundamentally still, it appears that the intentionalist reconception of textual criticism and scholarly editing was proposed, unaware of the very nature of the imposition. Yet if our critique holds, the Greg-Bowers principles clearly empower the editor not just, as by older dispensations of textual editing, to assess and adjudicate, out of a specialised professionalism, the extant material record of given transmissions. In addition, the principles invest the editor with a hermeneutic dominance over the work. For if under teleological premises the author's final intentions enter integrally into configuring the meaning of a text (as the expression of a work), then it follows that it is the author's final intentions as supplied editorially that provide the textual capstone to realising the work's ultimate meaning. This conundrum has a theory dimension that awaits a solution—unless it is a genuine alternative simply to abandon the intentionalist stance in editorial scholarship.

## Reconceptions

Beyond the point at which it culminated in the intentionalism of twentieth-century Anglo-American textual criticism and editing, the author-centric trend in nineteenth- and twentieth-century editorial scholarship began to recede. Spearheaded by some twenty years (in the 1980s and 1990s) of invigorating theoretical debate in the Society for Textual Scholarship and its yearbook *TEXT*, 19 as well as by single

19 *TEXT: An Interdisciplinary Annual of Textual Studies*. Published from 1984 (for 1981) to 2006, 16 volumes in all.

studies such as Jerome J. McGann's *Critique of Modern Textual Criticism* (1983), there grew a diversification of concepts for textual and editorial scholarship that Peter L. Shillingsburg has meanwhile found categorisable into the (formal) 'orientations' he specifies20 alongside the 'authorial orientation' that we have singled out for our present reflections.

At virtually the same time in editorial history when the fulfilling of authorial intention was proclaimed the ultimate goal of scholarly editing in the Anglo-American domain, authorial intention was within the German editorial school declared outright unfit to provide a base for editors' decisions towards establishing edition texts. The key pronouncement in the matter came from Hans Zeller, the Swiss-German Nestor of German textual scholarship: 'A principle such as authorial intention cannot serve as a central criterion for the constitution of text [because it] remains a mere idea of the author on the part of the editor, and as such cannot be established reliably.' Though so published in English only in 1995, the verdict in the German original is of 1971.21 At the same time, however, the landmark collection of German essays on textual criticism *Texte und Varianten* of 1971 adheres to, and embraces, what is present-day consensus still, namely the author-centric conceptions, attitudes and practices of inherited textual scholarship. The German variety of the discipline, it is true, has its own favourite problem areas, among which figure prominently the notion of the version (*Fassung*) and the textual fault (*Textfehler*). Yet the fundamental critique of authorcentricity proposed here should apply as much to German textual scholarship as it does to its Anglo-American near-relation.

To return to Zeller's pronouncement on intention: his salient specification is that 'authorial intention cannot serve as a central criterion for the constitution of text.' It thus does not rule out critical investigations of authorial intentions, be they manifestly expressed or

20 The 'documentary, aesthetic, authorial, sociological, and bibliographic' orientations, Shillingsburg, *Scholarly Editing in the Computer Age*, p. 16ff.

21 Hans Zeller, 'Record and Interpretation', in *Contemporary German Editorial Theory*, ed. by Hans Walter Gabler, George Bornstein, and Gillian Borland Pierce (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1995), pp. 17–59 (pp. 24–25). The original essay in German, 'Befund und Deutung', appeared in *Texte und Varianten. Probleme ihrer Edition und Interpretation*, ed. by Hans Zeller and Gunter Martens (München: C. H. Beck, 1971), pp. 45–89.

inferable, nor does it disallow consideration, or even observance, of authorial intentions in establishing edited texts. Yet what it categorically denies is the usefulness of authorial intention as the ultimate arbiter and guide to editorial decisions in the critical constitution of edited texts. To differentiate so precisely is a stance from which to arrive at positive criteria for establishing edited texts. A scholarly edition, if and when referring to authorial intention, could under exceptional (meaning: particularly clear-cut) circumstances, introduce authorially intended readings, as critically recognised, into the edited text itself, but it would do this in the manner of conjectural emendation, strictly as the editor's responsibility. Yet, commonly, an edition would present its editor's critical assessment of authorial intention discursively in an editorial introduction and/or textual note. This would be the textual critic's and editor's ground from which to share in the hermeneutical exploration of a work through its texts. Conversely, the establishment as such of the edited text for a work would remain firmly grounded in the document-supported material evidence for the composition, revision, and transmission of the work's text, or texts.

Renewed beginnings beyond author-centricity are possible and indeed conceivable for textual scholarship and critical editing. Summing up from what we have here considered and reflected upon, I would propose, simply, that texts themselves in their material manifestations in documents should again become the focus of textual criticism and scholarly editing. Here, the lodestar would no longer be 'authority' under the exogenous construction of authorisation and textual authority, superstructured moreover by deference to an authorial intention, in duty to be fulfilled by editors and editions. Textual criticism and scholarly editing will be well served to focus once more on textual validity, as erstwhile under the stemmatic dispensation. Ascertaining and establishing textual validity should thus constitute the core of a renewed methodology. Measures of textual validity would be gained from the author function. Pertaining ontologically to language composed as text, the author function is inscribed universally at any stage or moment of text composition or transmission.

This holds true even where real-life authors impinge most closely on textual traces, which is when we encounter them even physically (or at least in the mediate author-physicality of their handwriting or

doodling) in documents of composition. Yet so distinctly, at the same time, is the author function as a compositional function present in drafts, that to edit writing from documents of composition means to edit from their material record not solely validated text as resulting from the acts of writing, but additionally a distinct authorship dimension emerging from the processes of that writing.

What this might mean should be as good a point of entry as any for sustained explorations of the hermeneutic dimension specific to textual criticism and scholarly editing. It is a question hitherto little considered. This is paradoxical, given the extent to which 'meaning' has demanded attention in recent theorisings of textual and editorial scholarship. Significantly, though, the need to reflect on 'meaning' has followed in the wake of explicating the notion of authorial intention, 22 and debates have correspondingly been enacted at a middle, or even a total, distance from texts as materially evidenced. The considerations are, and have been, stimulating; in principle they concede to editorial scholarship an interpretative, and thus ultimately hermeneutic, dimension. What remains to be assessed, however, is the place and quality of interpretative criticism—the hermeneutic stance, in other words—as indissolubly tied back to the manifest materiality of texts and their transmissions.

As for texts as the materialisations of the authoring of works, I believe I have sufficiently indicated that the author dimension and perspective cannot, and must not be abandoned or sacrificed under renewed methodological tenets for the combined disciplines of textual criticism and editing. Yet here, in terms of text, 'the author' would cease to be an exogenous legislator and arbitrator, and instead be perceived from the inside, as it were, and thus as a systemically integrated text function within the body of the text-critical and editorial endeavour itself. In terms of textual transmission, the author would be definable as a function of the extant material documents. Simultaneously, though, it

22 Representative samplings are to be found in Peter L. Shillingsburg, *Scholarly Editing in the Computer Age*, D. C. Greetham, *Theories of the Text*, and Paul Eggert, *Securing The Past* (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Dario Compagno, 'Theories of Authorship and Intention in the Twentieth Century: an Overview', in *Journal of Early Modern Studies*, 1/1 (2012), 37–53, furthermore, helps to recognise how these investigations chime with the mainstream arguments in hermeneutics and literary theory.

should go without saying that the existence of real-life authors would not be negated, nor would expressions of the will of empirical authors, nor would closely critical considerations of authorial intention, by dint of method, be anathematised. Text-critical investigations would continue to be directed towards them, and these would continue to be accounted for in introduction and commentary discourses of editions. In view, furthermore, of the future importance of editing distinct authorship dimensions for texts, considerations of authorial intention (which would similarly have their place in an edition's discourses collateral to the edited text) should be matched by assessments of authorial responses to self-performed acts of writing (texts, once in the process of composition, will insist on 'talking back' to their authors—as anybody knows from everyday experience; and this basically dialogic situation of writing often enough leaves material traces in draft documents which intrinsically is of both compositional and critical interest). A renewed methodology for textual criticism and scholarly editing, lastly, would as ever be geared towards the closest scrutiny of transmissions for exogenous error. In validating text against error it would still draw all that can be gained from subsidiary methods such as analytical and textual bibliography, palaeography, paper analysis, or digital imaging in all their highly advanced forms. The digital medium, finally, should itself, as no doubt it will, become the future home and environment for the scholarly edition. The present essay may be considered as contributing to reflections on principles towards a praxis of editions ultimately to live as digital scholarly editions.

# 9. Sourcing and Editing Shakespeare: The Bibliographical Fallacy

In the 1980s a debate was resuscitated around the two material instantiations of William Shakespeare's *King Lear*, the text given in the Quarto printing (Q1) of 1608, as against the text contained in the posthumous Folio collection (F1) of Shakespeare's dramatic works of 1623. Back in the eighteenth century, Samuel Johnson, as the acute intuitive critic he was, opined that the Q and F texts represented two distinct versions of this Shakespeare play. Throughout the nineteenth and far into the twentieth century, this remained an outsider view. Madeleine Doran in the early 1930s substantiated Samuel Johnson's hunch in much detail, but her critical conclusions from precise analysis of the textual and bibliographic data were quelled by W. W. Greg. His textcritical conviction held sway that the two printed texts of Shakespeare's work *King Lear* were derived by different corruption from one, and one only, Shakespearean original. Editorially, consequently, *King Lear* continued to be established as composite text conflating elements from the two material source texts in Q1 and F1.

But the text-critical orthodoxy on which such editions relied was eventually rocked. Bypassing preconceptions from traditions of textual criticism and consequent rules of editing, Shakespeare criticism turned directly to the givens of the material transmissions in the source documents to argue the differences between the divergent texts interpretatively. Initially, the renewed proposition caused great upheaval that behind the Q and F texts lay two distinct versions. Today, by and large, it is the default assumption with regard to *King Lear*. What editorial consequences might, or should, be drawn from it, is as yet still a relatively open question. To advance into that field may in fact first require a reconsideration of the might, as well as the historical rootedness, of analytical and textual bibliography in Shakespearean textual criticism. This essay wishes to gesture towards such reassessment. Arising as it does from my review of an amazingly untimely book: Sir Brian Vickers, *The One King Lear* of 2016,1 it is strictly an occasional essay. Vickers reargues strongly the tenet else ousted that Shakespeare's 'One King Lear' descended via different routes of corruption to Q1 and F1. With a masterly command of the rules and techniques of the bibliographic game, he does so exclusively on bibliographical grounds. Conspicuously, the book refrains from developing editorial models by which to operationalise as text the textcritical proposition. This gives rise to the fundamental question whether analytical and textual bibliography, even though proven text-critical instruments, can be considered to provide sufficient grounding also for meeting the editorial challenge of the material transmissions they help to analyse.

There is no doubt that Shakespeare wrote *one* work *King Lear*—just as Milton wrote one work *Paradise Lost*; or Wordsworth, say, one work, *The Prelude*; or Henry James, *Roderick Hudson*, or Virginia Woolf, *To the Lighthouse*. From *Paradise Lost* onwards in this series, we have no difficulty in recognising that the works each materialised in two versions: *Paradise Lost* structurally distinct in at first ten (1667), then twelve books (1674); *The Prelude* (1805 and 1850), as well as *Roderick Hudson* (1875 and 1904–1907), respectively, attained deeply revised textual shapes. *To the Lighthouse*, even while by the author's order published in London and in New York on the self-same day, 5 May 1927, came out, thus simultaneously, in two significantly distinct authorial versions. Preceding all these, we also have the case of *Hamlet*. It survives in three texts materialised in separate documents, Q1, Q2 and F, of

1 Brian Vickers, *The One King Lear* (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 2016). Reviewed in *Editionen in der Kritik 9* (Berliner Beiträge zur Editionswissenschaft, vol. 17), ed. by Alfred Noe (Berlin: Weidler Verlag, 2017), pp. 30–43.

which two—Q1 and Q2—are the extant witnesses to radically distinct versions; while F provides the material text for (at the least) a theatre arrangement of the Q2 version of the play.

It is a fundamental norm in cultural and literary history and tradition that works perceivable as one, and usually meant so to be perceived, nonetheless have their material existence in manifold texts studded with variants. These arise naturally in processes of composition, or indeed as variation constitutive of distinct versions. Seen from the compositional angle, therefore, variants and variation are concomitant with, are part and parcel of the creativity invested in writing. A writer, an author, engaged in writing lives and thinks in constant reciprocity *vis-*à*-vis* the text forming in the writing process. The variant is always a dialogic response to the text in the making, be it local and small or large-scale and constitutive of a distinct version. Nor, in truth, does the compositional, the creative urge cease with the attainment of text in states or versions committed to the processes of transmission, and agents and agencies other than the writer, the author, of origin. At any given moment, whether at pre-publication or post-publication stages, the author may respond dialogically afresh to the text as then encountered. The opportunities to do so are likely to be especially rich when the medium of transmission is the stage, its agents the performing players, and, as in the case of Shakespeare, its author of origin himself one of the company.

Engagement with the text resulting (potentially at least) in changes is also perceived as a duty of printers' or publishers' editors, book-keepers in Elizabethan playhouses—or whatever analogous functionaries may be recognised as intercalated between text materialisations of works and the reception of works through such texts. When the matter is seen from this angle, a noxious sub-class of variants and variation arises, it is true, from the transmission of texts and the investment of understanding and concentration on the technical accomplishment always involved in the labour of transmission. Scribes or typesetters, typists, as well as editors of every description (the scholarly editor not excluded), produce errors, be it inadvertently; or, since they, too, engage as readers with the texts transmitted, through varying them advertently and thereby creating their own sub-sets of variants through miscorrection, correction, emendation or conjecture.

Textual criticism focused on transmissions operates in the field of material documents, the material inscriptions on them and, by inference, the scribes and copyists who performed the inscriptions. Positing this framework has enabled structured reasoning for understanding the transmission and evaluating it in terms of the text(s) it represented. Traditionally, the argument led back from documents and text inscriptions materially extant to antecedent text instantiations which, though lost with their carrier documents, appeared, or were, reconstructable through application of logic to the comparative analysis of the instantiations in extant documents; and in the process, too, allowing for, defining, and eliminating disturbances in the transmission. Textual criticism by such rearward-directed methodology claimed to be capable of arriving at, and editorially realising, one stable source text, inferred as the text carried by one lost document. This text, by definition a materially non-existent construct, was posited as the node of origin, dubbed the archetype, of the multiplicity of the extant variant texts.

Within the game, the discipline, of textual criticism as initially so conceived and played out, authors as authors were not considered players. This was logical: for textual criticism so construed—which was textual criticism as applied dominantly to the transmissions from antiquity and the middle ages in manuscripts—text and texts existed, and could exist, only in material instantiations of inscription and their respective embeddings in documents of transmission that were (consequently) by definition not authorial documents. The mindset of the textual critic of written heritage from antiquity through to the middle ages was deeply ingrained, too, in the founders of Shakespearean, bibliography-based textual criticism in Britain in the early twentieth century. W. W. Greg, foremost and in the long run the most influential among them, was by original training a medievalist. The merger of bibliographical analysis with the inference in retrospection of the archetype text out of which he forged his methodology carried great, at times indeed overpowering, intellectual conviction. Its next-to-irresistible appeal arose from the logic of the text-critical argument leading to the inference—inference, admittedly, often close to, or even amounting to, positive proof—that it was now the author's autograph writing that held the position of the archetype. In the case of Shakespeare, such autograph writing was posited predominantly to have been his drafts, or 'foul papers' (by Elizabethan nomenclature).

The evidence accumulated by Shakespearean scholarship is impressive that, taken as a whole, the surviving Shakespeare texts in print are at only a short remove from the author's writing as it originally took shape under his hand. Yet conclusions as to the author's text from empirical analysis of its extant variant derivatives in print are one thing; equating them with the concept of the archetype as a logical abstraction and, by such definition, an invariant stable text, is another. Whether it be legitimate to conflate the empirical with the abstraction would seem questionable. In Shakespearean textual criticism, however, the danger inherent in the equation has not been seen or heeded. Consequently, Shakespearean textual criticism as systematised by its founding fathers in the first half of the twentieth century left little or no room for conceptualising or text-critically and editorially handling variation, let alone versions. On the contrary: textual bibliography was, in the service of Shakespearean textual criticism, raised to the status of a procedural underpinning akin to science for the retrospective analysis capable of opening up vistas onto the existence and shape of texts in documents no longer extant. With sharpened powers of adjudication, it identified variants—yet it did so still under the default assumption that instances of variation indicated moments of textual error.

Thus inherited orthodoxies were shaped to fit patterns developed for text transmissions from pre-Gutenberg eras. Leaving, as said, little or no room for conceiving of variants other than errors, and even less for positing versions, they also saw no urgency at first to involve the authors of texts when assessing the nature of the material reality, evidenced or inferred, of transmissions. But the bibliography-based Shakespearean textual criticism that evolved from this seed-bed redirected, on the one hand, the strict text orientation (retrospective to the archetype) into a fervent author orientation (still retrospective, but to Shakespeare's 'foul papers'). On the other hand, it allowed little or no forward movement in terms of the growth and development of texts. It remained reticent towards authorial variants, and intensely sceptical towards the notion of versions originating from and shaped (in whole or in part) by authors, such as William Shakespeare himself.

Nonetheless, the notion that *King Lear* should be considered in terms of authorial versions began to attract insistent attention in the 1980s. That the impulse came from the realms of Shakespeare criticism

is no doubt indicative of the division between (textual) scholarship and (literary) criticism that by the late twentieth century had become ingrained in the Anglo-American humanities. It was not the textual scholars who began to critique their own methodology and *a priori* assumptions; it was instead their 'opposite numbers', the Shakespeare critics who raised their voices by strength of their native concerns with the structures, aesthetics and meaning of literary works. Their voices were heard—though only under great storms of controversy in Shakespearean textual criticism, and but as a faint murmur in Anglo-American editorial scholarship at large that, for the establishment of edited texts, had proceeded to turn the retrospective author orientation into a prospective orientation towards the fulfilment of authorial intention. Elsewhere than in these precincts, which means in schools of textual criticism and editing outside the Anglo-American tradition, it was meanwhile the *a priori* assumption that text variation and versions were to be reckoned with as norm and reality and that they had, moreover, not uncommonly left material traces in text transmissions pertaining to given works. This amounted to a fundamental shift in the mindset informing textual criticism towards establishing edited texts: the normative assumption for texts in their material instantiation was no longer that they were error-ridden and that their readings had to prove legitimacy. On the contrary, texts were *prima facie* not faulty, and declaring individual readings to be textual faults or errors was admissible only after the strictest scrutiny; the default assumption for variants and variation was that they signalled revision and, in given cases, alternative versions. The focus on error built into the handling of the tools of analytic and textual bibliography were not amenable to such an understanding of texts and transmissions.

\* \* \*

Against the understanding prevailing today that *King Lear* has come down to us in two texts reflecting two distinct versions of the work, *The One King Lear* positions itself still uncompromisingly within the twentieth-century mode of Shakespeare textual criticism based on textual bibliography. Positing *a priori* one singular and unique manuscript text penned by the author is tantamount to defining a conjectural archetype text for the play. This assumption rules out the possibility that variants

evident between the Quarto and Folio texts, whether small or largescale, originated with Shakespeare, the author. By prejudice of method, instead the text differences between the two extant printings are made to appear as nothing but transmissional corruptions. For these, the printer and type-setters (for Q), or the playhouse book-keepers and the King's Men themselves (for F), are given the blame.

On such a premise, can case-by-case assessments of variants be grouped as either possible, probable, or demonstrable? The classification 'demonstrable', alas, is ruled out absolutely. The copy from which Q was printed, while in great likelihood a manuscript in Shakespeare's hand, is lost and hence unavailable for comparison. Nor is direct demonstration feasible for textual specifics of F. The F text stands at more than one remove from whatever author-inscribed source spawned it. Intermediary document identities and text states may be assumed, but are indefinite. The Folio text can therefore not, by comparison with the Quarto text or otherwise, demonstrate the text state of any posited original manuscript.

Might the textual correlation between the Q and the F texts, if bibliographically not demonstrable, at least be argued as possible? A bibliographical investigation founded on strict logic, such as that exercised by Brian Vickers, makes its results seem on the whole possible. That they are, however, only seemingly possible is due to the fundamental flaw of textual criticism as analytical bibliography striving towards the fulfilment of its Gregian definition as 'science'. This reduces 'textual criticism' to an analytical exercise and shears it of its critical dimension, specifically its potential as, dependence on, and integration into, literary criticism. The impasse becomes dramatically apparent in assessing specific correlations of the formal findings from bibliographical investigation to text and text meaning. This is where text-critical reasoning from bibliographical analysis must prove itself. Its probability must depend thoroughly on critical assessment and judgement.

\* \* \*

For my own argument, I wish to cast into exemplary focus one detail from an essay on the two versions of *King Lear* that I contributed (collaboratively with my late friend and colleague Klaus Bartenschlager) three decades ago to the *Deutsche Shakespeare-Gesellschaft West: Jahrbuch*  *1988*. 2 As subtitled, the essay explicitly assesses '[das neue] Verhältnis von Textkritik und Literaturkritik' ('the new relationship of textual criticism and literary criticism'). It gives weight straightaway—as has, true enough, been done repeatedly elsewhere—to Lear's declaring, at the opening of the state scene, scene 1(Q)/Act I.1(F), his intention to divide in three his kingdom. I give the main part of the speech here in a fusion of the two document texts:

> Meane time we will/**shal** expresse our darker purposes,/**purpose**. **Giue me** the Map there. Know, **that** we haue diuided In three our Kingdome: and 'tis our first/**fast** intent, To shake all Cares and Businesse of/**from** our Age, Confirming**/Conferring** them on yonger yeares/**strengths, while we Vnburthen'd crawle toward death. Our son of** *Cornwal,* **And you our no lesse louing Sonne of** *Albany,* **We haue this houre a constant will to publish Our daughters seuerall Dowers, that future strife May be preuented now**.

Rendered in bold type are pronouncements absent from the Quarto text. In close proximity, and in their vein, too, follow two further lines in the Folio text:

> **[…] Since now we will diuest vs both of Rule, interest of Territory, Cares of State**

On the *a priori* assumption that there was only ever *one* text of Shakespeare's original writing from which the Q and F texts differently descend, these text elements (in bold type) must be posited as present in that authorial manuscript and declared as abridgements, cuts (by whomever) or omissions by oversight in Q. This is a rationalisation entirely confined to, and in terms of, the bibliographical analysis, deployed not to test, but to suggest that the observed bibliographical data self-evidently prove, the premise. Genuine testing would need to resort to an evaluation at the level of criticism. A critical approach would,

2 Hans Walter Gabler and Klaus Bartenschlager, 'Die zwei Fassungen von Shakespeares *King Lear*: Zum neuen Verhältnis von Textkritik und Literaturkritik', in *Deutsche Shakespeare-Gesellschaft West: Jahrbuch 1988*, ed. by Werner Habicht, Manfred Pfister und Kurt Tetzeli von Rosador (Bochum: Verlag Ferdinand Kamp, 1988), pp. 163–86.

for example, take into consideration distinctions of meaning between the texts materially in evidence and, by interpreting the differences between them, venture beyond the materially and bibliographically manifest, so as to verify or falsify conclusions from bibliography at a complementary critical level. Critical approaches in our day would to this end be able to draw on text-critical experience gained from wideranging analyses of compositional and transmissional processes since the onset of the modern period in Western culture, which are more richly documented than in the particular instance of William Shakespeare. This would allow measuring the text divergences for *King Lear* as they have come down to us against what is empirically known elsewhere of authors writing in creative dialogue with their texts, as well as of the transmission of texts of acknowledged origin in authorial papers. Texts in the process and progress of composition and transmission are ever changeable. Whether at an author's desk, in cooperation with printers and publishers or at moments of review after publication, while texts may always strive towards stability, they are at the same time also always open to modification and revision. In this manner, they implement throughout the potentiality of the stuff they are made of: language. Grounded in, and resorting to language to express itself, a text can always also be otherwise.

In the case of drama, in particular, a critical approach will be wise not to leave out of its account the fact that the texts that have come down to us are but the substratum of the play thereby represented, and are by nature akin to musical scores in ways not matched by literary texts of other genres. Play texts always remain textually open in particular to performance-oriented modification, exercised cooperatively by the author (in recent times one might think of Samuel Beckett, say, or Tom Stoppard) and 'the theatre': in Elizabethan and Jacobean terms, bookkeepers and the fellowship of actors in the playhouse. To say so is of course to invoke the social dimension of textual criticism, which has gained ground in the discipline over the past decades. As a matter of fact, though, textual criticism has traditionally always acknowledged the 'social dimension' of transmission—only that it has over the centuries been seen exclusively as the source of error and text corruption. Before the advent of print, medieval scribes were—while in effect agents of social collaboration in transmissions—seen as perpetrators of error.

Under the aegis of early book printing, scribes were in such detestable function joined by typesetters and both printing-house editors and correctors. Textual criticism by way of bibliographical print analysis did not revise its attitude to their social agency as corruptive. This remained a highly effective bar to appreciating variation and versions as being in the very nature of texts. By contrast, textual criticism under the umbrella of literary criticism, recognising that texts are ever changeable, will begin from assessing neutrally that texts, materially extant to represent works, by default manifest themselves as variant from each other; and will proceed from there to differentiate the nature and quality of nonidentity in instantiations of text. To accept changeability as a basic given of texts defines variation and versions as fundamentally distinct from error. The age-old procedures of recognising and eliminating error from texts in transmission do not serve and cannot be adapted to realities of text variation. Texts are formed in language. Language is, and depends in essence on being, open and processual (or communication and understanding would be impossible). Consequently, variability that is of the nature of language is a natural condition, too, of texts. Their variability, moreover, is always also prone to leaving material traces in source and transmission documents whose texts become subject to the scrutiny of textual criticism. To do both text-critical and literarycritical justice to variation, such scrutiny demands an autonomous methodology, separate from carrying forward the traditional business of textual criticism and editing by methods and procedures of identifying and eliminating error.

To refocus on my example from the first scene of *King Lear*: a literary-critical argument joined to bibliographical analysis will begin its approach from a text-genetic vantage point. This provides us with the knowledge of patterns recurrently identifiable in authorial writing, widely observed to indicate that, with composition already far advanced, there will be a reworking of beginnings so as to prepare for, and bring into (as it were) prospective focus, later moments in the text's development and resolution. Measuring the variation in Lear's opening speech against such general empirical knowledge brings within ranges of the possible that the play's first scene was so revisited: that, on rereading the play's beginning, the protagonist's sense of age became

intensified, his will to abdicate and divide up the kingdom between his daughters' husbands made more explicit, and all this together projected into, and heightened by, the image of divestiture—textually as well as bodily and theatrically performed as this had meanwhile been through unbuttonings and the taking off of clothes in the play realised since the first drafting of its opening scene.

But then again: the point here is not to put forward as inescapable a conclusion that between what was behind Q and what behind F the play's text was revised—much as I personally am convinced that it was. The point is, rather, to emphasise that the one-text-only as well as the revision rationalisation of the text divergences as documented in Q and F for *King Lear* cannot but each be hypothetical. These material survivors from an originally (by all inference) wider and more diverse substance of transmission demonstrate neither hypothesis incontrovertibly. What is more: neither do they permit incontrovertibly defining and identifying the respective agents of text variation and versioning. Against the fact that Q and F furnish us with two textual representations of a play, and that materially, therefore, the Q and F texts as such simply *are* two versions: which they are, regardless of whether it be in any way conceded or not that they represent two authorial versions; against, furthermore, either the possibility or the probability (respectively) that either Q and F constitute two divergent corruptions of one, and one only, archetype text; or else that in the transmission's lost past there existed already, and maybe at different points in time, two versions of the play to which Q and F derivatively bear separate witness—against any of these hypothetical assumptions, and so against all of them, the question or questions must take second place with whom, i.e., with which agent or agents, any given variant, any group of variants, or the variation in its entirety, originated. Given only Q and F as the material instantiations of text for *King Lear* that have come down to us, the differentiation of these versions remains hypothetical in the first degree. Positing agents for the text variation into versions is hypothetical at one further remove. What is more: here the forming of hypotheses encompasses, too, the author. While on all accounts originator of the play, that is of the work, it depends on the assessment of the variation between the two material instantiations of text for the work whether or not the author be

proposed as one among undoubtedly several agents to have introduced the variation—and if so, what bibliographically, critically, or otherwise he should be declared responsible, or indeed should be given credit, for.

In consideration of all the complexities offered by the transmissions of Shakespeare's plays in general, and *King Lear* in particular, scholarship that integrates text- and transmission-focused with literary-critical perspectives may profitably return to textual criticism in the discipline's modes prevailing before the onset of its fully-fledged author-centricity of today.3 By its older traditions, textual criticism, and scholarly editing resulting from it, focused on texts in the given—meaning essentially the surviving—materiality of their transmission. If, for the old school of Shakespearean textual criticism and editing, the author's foul papers as the one-and-only *urtext* usurped the systemic position of the archetype, then fresh systematics and methods of textual criticism and consequent editing would appear today to be called for in this specialised pocket of editorial scholarship, and a wider understanding of textual criticism than prevailed throughout the twentieth century.

\* \* \*

Therefore, as said: William Shakespeare wrote one work *King Lear*. It has come down to us in two material texts. By objective definition, they are different text versions, one of them (Q), just on its own terms, apparently more deficient than the other. Opinions may still differ whether behind each stands a different version of the play, or whether both material texts derive by different routes from one-only original text. The Folio instantiation, more discernibly than the Quarto instantiation, betrays that distinct elements of theatrical origin were interlaced into text of authorial composition. One may assume that the opportunities to respond in creative dialogue to a text as at any given moment it existed are likely to be especially rich when the medium of transmission is the stage, its agents the performing players, and, as was the case for Shakespeare or Beckett, and is still for Tom Stoppard, its author of origin himself one of the company. This means no less than that in the surviving testimony to the work *King Lear* of William Shakespeare's writing we already find distinct foot- and fingerprints bearing witness to its public

3 See the preceding essay, 'Beyond Author-Centricity in Scholarly Editing', p. 169.

life as drama. What the company of the King's Men established over the years, until the documentation thereof reached stability in the 1623 printing, was their text of William Shakespeare's *King Lear*. The Q text and the F texts, which together we possess, are records in print of a play as play in versions relating to texts for performance. The textual heritage of *King Lear* at its manifest sources—meaning: in its earliest materialisations before, downstream in transmission, they surface for posterity—on all accounts therefore offers itself already enriched with versioning potential for the theatre.

This, to conclude, begs trenchant questions of editing. The editorial enterprise will ever anew be obliged to sift the total materiality of a play's transmission. Recurrent endeavour will need to be invested to differentiate the span of its variation, assumed to range from authorial input via collaborative modification to corruption in transmission. As a condition of its genre, a dramatic text as play will also ever prove dynamic and ever anew be caught playing in the theatre. Every realisation on stage in fact constitutes a performance edition of a score text underlying it. Against such score texts, text editions of works for the stage will ever, too, need to be adjusted, so as in scholarly editions to bring the dynamics of drama as caught in the dynamics of dramatic texts into the realms of experience of readers and users.

# 10. The Draft Manuscript as Material Foundation for Genetic Editing and Genetic Criticism

There is an essential distinction to be made between 'genetic criticism' and 'genetic editing'.1 Genetic criticism belongs to the range of discourses available to literary criticism. It is a mode of discourse to engage with a work of literature and the texts in which we meet the work, or the work meets us. The engagement always issues in discourse: commonly in the critic's free discoursing. Genetic criticism is thus an extension of the traditional modes of articulating literary criticism. Genetic editing, by contrast, is a mode of scholarly editing. As such, it is the answer in the pragmatics of editing to an extension of the spectrum of concerns of textual criticism, through an intensified observance of the traces of the conception and growth of writing and text itself in the materiality of documents.

Throughout the twentieth century, German textual criticism, for one, was at the forefront of developing a genetic awareness of textual heritages, specifically such as could be traced back through authorial papers before publication of given works. From this grew a subgenre of

1 A version of this essay has appeared in Swedish (translated by Jon Viklund and Paula Henrikson from an earlier version of the underlying conference paper) under the title 'Handskriften som en mötesplats för genetisk utgivning och genetisk kritik' in *Kladd, utkast, avskrift. Studier av litterära tillkomstprocesser* (Uppsala: Avdelningen för litteratursociologi, Uppsala universitet, 2015), pp. 21–32. In its present form, it was published as an article in *Variants: The Journal of the European Society for Textual Scholarship*, 12–13 (2016), 65-76, http://variants.revues.org/299

scholarly editions in print classed as *Handschrifteneditionen* (manuscript editions). Genetic criticism, by contrast, was an answer in France to the dominance of a structuralist approach in mid-century, and in the second half of the century, in French literary criticism. Genetic critics of the French critical persuasion engage with the same categories of evidence of writing and the same classes of documents that preserve textual heritages as do the textual critics: with notes, prolegomena, drafts and their revisions, with proofs. But their analyses are not geared as were and are those of the traditional textual critic towards edited presentation of the textual materials. The genetic critic focuses, rather, on drawing critical conclusions from compositional, commonly pre-publication, material evidence.2 Engagement with such materials however is of a complexity far greater than is the reading of (and perhaps parallel notetaking from) texts in print. To order—even just as aid to future recall the thickets and snares of a draft manuscript, demands transcribing what one sees and believes to have recognised in and of its writing. Transcription became standard within French genetic criticism, but was at the same time understood as auxiliary to always also seeing (images of) the manuscript pages. Transcription and image in conjunction constituted, and constitute together, the genetic dossier. (The term gives the document perspective on what, from the text perspective, is named *avant-texte*.) They are requisite and suffice as reference base and working materials for the genetic critic. Seeing the French genetic critics relying on these working materials in what was, for them, their critical engagement with the genesis of text and work, the genetically aware scholarly editors from the German text-critical and editorial school mistook the presentations that were supplementary to the genetically critical arguments for fully-fledged editions—as did, eventually, their Anglo-American peers. Yet this turned out to be a fruitful misperception, since it stimulated the conceptualisation of what a genetic edition might

2 The current, *portmanteau* term for such material is *avant-texte*. To a non-French ear, it is a problematic term, since it suggests that what comes before the end of composition and before publication ('*avant*') is not yet '*texte*'. This is correct only by a French understanding of *texte*, which is different (it seems) from the denotation of 'text' in English or German. I have had occasion to discuss this slippage between denotations in my 'Daniel Ferrer: *Logiques du brouillon. Modèles pour une critique génétique.* Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2011', *Ecdotica,* 8 (2011), 276–80. Ferrer's book is the most elegant explication of the essence of French genetic criticism imaginable.

be and how it could be realised. The process of realising such editions is, as we know, fully predicated on the digital medium: the type of genetic edition striven for today is the digital genetic edition. What is essential to note, moreover, is that owing to the greater recognition that genetic criticism has come to enjoy as a form of critical inquiry, the demands it places on editing are distinctly broader than has been habitually the case in traditional textual criticism. This is entirely due to the growing awareness of the critical significance of the genetics of writing and text that genetic criticism has generated. It is from this premise that I wish to discuss the (in my view) singular status of the draft manuscript and to argue that the draft manuscript is even ontologically distinct from all other forms and modes of 'manuscript'.

## The draft manuscript

Among the great variety of documents that materialise the texts of our cultures and civilisations, authorial draft manuscripts form a class of their own. What they carry and convey is never only text. Their significance lies equally in the tracing patterns of the writing they evidence. The materiality of their inscription finds expression not only in letters and numerals and their groupings into tokens of recognisable numbers, words, sentences—or, simply: into intelligible language. Essential to the inscriptions is equally their relative positioning on the writing surface, are the changes in ink or hands, or even the extra-textual authorial alerts or doodles signalling moments of non-writing or nontexting. Moreover, what acts of writing produce in draft documents does not (yet) automatically result in, or achieve, 'text' in continuous linear readability. Draft manuscript writing is but incipiently a mode of writing for reading; it is never comprehensively, let alone exclusively text. The total evidence of draft writing cannot be reduced to text only.

Text is the result of a writing-for-reading and is preconditioned by the rules and habits of reading: it advances linearly, two-dimensionally, from upper left-hand to bottom right-hand corner of a given material support, e.g. a page or sheet, and thence through a sequence of pages. But writing in draft documents is not so vectored. The prime function of draft documents, and the writing in them, is not to record text for reading, but to record, support and further engender composition. For

the processes of composition, a writing space is not predetermined by expectations of linear text reading. What we encounter as writing in the pages of original draft documents, therefore, are the traces of how the document space was filled in the course of composition. Analysing and interpreting the traces, we gain a sense of how the writing gradually, that is in time, came into being in three visible dimensions as it spreads randomly over the document's two-dimensional surface and in many instances 'rises above' that surface. The latter is the case for instance when traces in differently coloured ink or pencil run across the original inscription. At its best, the 'reading' of a draft inscription amounts to a process of deciphering. This requires both a spatial comprehension and a comprehension of the temporal succession, the diachrony, of the inscription.

In draft manuscripts, consequently, the writing and its material support form an inseparable unity. To understand draft documents fully one must understand the interdependence of all their dimensions, the visual apprehension and the analytical and interpretive perception must always interact. Therefore, they must also always be conjointly communicated. This interaction requires presenting the documents visually through digital facsimiles and establishing around them a research environment in the digital medium. Presenting digital facsimiles may indeed be considered the primary concern and duty of scholarly manuscript editing today. What this requires under the premise of scholarship, at the same time, is to stabilise the communication of the manuscript images by means of transcriptions of the highest professional precision, even while always strictly understanding these as supplementary to the visual perception.

Writing, then, is not just inscribed on, but inseparably grafted into its material support. It is visually traceable *within* (rather than merely *from*) the document. Its essence lies in its appearance bodied forth in its materiality. The documents thus, quite simply, do not host or harbour texts, or 'text', in the sense of linearly consecutive reading matter. Text as linear reading matter is always what is copied from the draft document, whether in acts of reading or acts of transcribing. In reproduction so initiated in reading or copying, and in subsequent potentially endless re-reproduction, text remains (or should ideally remain) essentially unaltered (in print or in digital files, say, or even in perfect, clean, manuscript fair copy). In Nelson Goodman's terminology, text so reproducible is 'allographic'.3

But writing, and the as yet only seeming text, in original draft manuscripts cannot be subsumed under the 'allographic' category. Admittedly, writing in drafts commonly coalesces into text formation and the disposition of incipiently linear text segments over the manuscript space: such 'texting', after all, is the main objective of drafting. Yet it is overridingly true that draft writing is thus grafted into, and hence consubstantial with, its material support. For original draft manuscripts it is true to say that document and inscription form an 'autographic' unity. The term, again appropriated from Goodman (1968), refers not to the circumstance that drafts are produced—performed, as it were—in autograph, i.e., written in the author's hand. That they are commonly autographs in the bibliographical sense is their accidental quality. What makes them 'autographic' in essence is their encompassing materiality: it is because, in drafting, the writing is grafted into unity with its material support, that drafts qualify as 'autographic' according to the 'allograph'/'autograph' pairing. As a result of this unity, draft documents are originals (in the manner, say, of paintings) and, by strength of their materiality, unique. Whereas fair copies and books exist materially mainly to make possible the reading of text, which consequently is always 'allographically' detachable from any given material support, the materiality of draft manuscripts is as essential as is what is inscribed into it. How writing by common conventions, i.e., inscription of text, as well as interspersed random graphics are found to be spread over the space of a manuscript page is as significant as is the draft's readability. Hence, the textually intelligible content of manuscripts alone is never coequal to, and does not define, the manuscripts carrying it. Consequently, what is still persistently called 'manuscript text' is not simply copyable, as text, out of the original manuscripts, the way text is always copyable from a fair copy into a typescript, or out of one book into the next, or from digital file to digital file. From drafts, rather, 'text' can only be abstracted, which means it must be traced through the spatial and graphic patterning of the writing so as to separate it from its symbiotic unity with ink and paper. For this labour of extraction, it is

3 Nelson Goodman, *Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbol* (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968; Brighton: Harvester Press, 1981).

necessary first visually to analyse the manuscript and then to correlate the resulting text to the document. In digital editions, the correlation will be self-evidently effected through linking the extracted transcription with a digital facsimile of the original.

Thus to make what ultimately amounts to an ontological distinction between, on the one hand, the material manifestation of writing in ('autographic') draft manuscripts for texts and of text in ('allographic') transmission through post-draft documents, on the other, is a fresh proposition that has only tentatively been gaining ground in recent years. What is helping to sharpen perceptions and focus definitions, as well as to stimulate the rethinking and reshaping of critical and editorial practice, is the exploration of original manuscripts by genetic criticism in France and elsewhere, as well as the migration of scholarly editing from the book medium to the digital medium. The draft manuscript provides the meeting ground for genetic editing and genetic criticism.

Writing, as I have argued, invades a draft's writing area spatially, and the traces it leaves in a draft are doubly vectored. In one respect, the writing serves composition, whereby language is composed of words and syntax that proleptically tend towards the readability of text. We customarily disentangle from a draft what appears readable, and so extract from it a linearly successive, albeit a frequently fragmented and incipient, text. Copied out by author, scribe or editor, text so discerned transcends the document into which it was first inscribed and thereby acquires its allographic nature. But in another respect, the writing traces in a draft, insofar as they are not just text, are indicators of the engendering impulses of and behind the composition. The spatial arrangement of the writing as such, as well as its manifold graphic features, give—or have the potential to give—clues to the engendering impulses and thought processes that governed, or may have governed, the processes of text construction and composition. They form the core constituents of the draft as autograph, and its writing as autographic. The graphic and topographic features by which drafts, and only drafts, may be identified, never transcend the borders of the material document in which they reside; copying out the allographic text from the draft leaves them irretrievably behind. Thus, drafts feature a double reading order: the order of text and the order of material traces of text construction and composition. It is this singularity of the draft manuscript—autograph in

production and autographic in nature—which, in its turn, categorises manuscript editing (*Handschriftenedition*) as a mode of genetic scholarly editing of its own.

# The genetic trajectory of editing

The idea of editing manuscripts is thus freshly brought into focus. The 'manuscript edition' needs to be conceived anew with the aim of bringing out the 'autographic' singularity of the draft manuscript. To define manuscript editing (*Handschriftenedition*) as indeed a distinct editorial mode, it is necessary, both in theory and in practice, to make a fundamental distinction between text editions and manuscript editions, as well as to take full measure of the difference between the book and the digital medium for organising and presenting scholarly editions. Both 'text' and 'manuscript' modes of editing are familiar by name, and German *Handschrifteneditionen* in particular have in their practice attempted to convert the specificities of manuscripts into editorial presentation. Yet, if even just from technical necessity, these editions came out as books.4 However ingeniously they endeavoured to translate the processes of writing into symbolic coding, and (within affordable limits) provided facsimiles, they could only favour the text extracted from drafts, while under-representing, or eliding, the processual nature of the writing. Manuscript editions in book form basically assumed the guise and mode of text editions. Only today, as the digital medium is in the process of becoming—or perhaps has already become—the native medium for scholarly editions can text editions and manuscript editions be distinguished in kind and each realised specifically according to the nature of the object to be edited—and of the objective(s) editorially pursued. We are no longer reduced to merely thinking the categorical distinction, but are in a position to realise, or at least are on the verge of realising, the difference via distinct modes of editorial approach

4 In terms of a history of scholarly editing in the twentieth century, it may be said that the climactic end of the publication of *Handschrifteneditionen* in book form was reached with Hans Zeller's edition of the poems of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, *Sämtliche Werke: Gedichte*, ed. by Hans Zeller, 7 vols. (Bern: Benteli, 1963‒96) and Dietrich E. Sattler's editing of the works of Friedrich Hölderlin, *Sämtliche Werke*, ed. by Dietrich E. Sattler, 19 vols. (Frankfurt: Stroemfeld, 1975‒2007).

under the auspices, today, of the digital medium. In this, what is fundamental to the mode of the manuscript edition are new forms and modes of 'taking in' the manuscript materially as document, and also as inscription—*manu scriptum*—on that document.

# Manuscript writing under text and document perspectives

It has been customary in editorial scholarship to record the physical properties of manuscripts—the paper, the size, the watermarks and suchlike of the document carrying the *manu scriptum*—and to communicate all such observations in editorial prose. For the essential 'editing of the manuscript', the convention has been to transcribe what is predominantly (if not exclusively) discernible as text from all that is found inscribed on, and into, the document. Transcription has always implied the lifting-off from the manuscript all writing acknowledged as text and transferring it to a fresh support. With the shift to the digital medium, such lifting-off and reinscribing is naturally still a part of the operational practice. However, digital editorial projects that focus on manuscript sources have increasingly found themselves grappling with the problem that the lifting-off does not cleanly yield text alone. To put it another way, these projects have become aware of the considerable varieties of written traces that are present in the draft manuscript. These traces, moreover, are increasingly coming to be seen to carry meaning, i.e., they are interpretable, and thus they elucidate not only the text drafted, but also the writing process that leads up to the final text that results from the drafting. Of course, such traces had not, or not wholly, been overlooked by editors in the pre-digital era, but they were not considered relevant to the editorial process. Hence, print editions would omit anything that in the source documents was not readable as text or would at most (selectively) footnote or otherwise comment on instances of inextricable symbiosis between text-readable and nontext-readable traces in the draft writing. Editions midwifed into the digital medium, by contrast, must and can convey such information by combining reinscription with digital revisualisation and so render the writing traces in draft manuscripts interpretable in their full complexity of interaction.

Transcription into the digital medium is organised by way of mark-up; it is at the same time *argued* through mark-up. The mark-up we have hitherto been conditioned and trained to employ, championed by the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), has been predominantly 'text mark-up'. 'Text', by its original understanding, was seen as the *result* of writing processes, and therefore foreshortened as being purely synchronic. Only very recently has the encoding repertoire of the TEI acquired the added dimension of guidelines and rules for genetic mark-up—a reorientation that finally acknowledges the essentially diachronic nature of writing and text.5 This has been, and is still being designed to deal with all aspects of draft manuscripts, including those traces or patterns in the writing which cannot easily—or not all—be subsumed under the categories 'texting' and text. It is the non-textreadable traces of the writing that constitute the image nature of the draft. If it is fundamental to the digital manuscript edition (as I said) to combine reinscription with digital revisualisation, it is, over and above marked-up text transcription, equally essential to redefine the nature and function of the digitised manuscript image. The digital image in a digital edition is not merely illustrative (as was the facsimile image in a book). Just as the traces of text writing and non-text-writing interact in the material draft, so must they be rendered interactive in the digital edition. Hence, and in analogy to the mark-up for the text writing, marking-up is required, too, for the digital image. This serves to identify and render retrievable the manuscript's multiple trace patterns and critically establishes their interconnection, as well as their connection with the marked-up rendering of the manuscript's text content. The marking-up in its entirety constitutes the codification of all critical activity that goes into the editorial enterprise. Consequently, it is into the mark-up systems encompassing text writing and image that all critical judgement and decision is distilled that goes to shape the digital manuscript edition. The mark-up is where the edition's argument resides, so that from it may be extracted and visualised, for dynamically interactive communication at interface level, what the edition succeeds in offering.

5 See further the new TEI module for the encoding of Documents and Genetic Criticism at http://www.tei-c.org/SIG/Manuscripts/genetic.html

The implementation of genetic mark-up in editorial projects is gaining ground. In Germany, it has been spearheaded by the genetic edition—calling itself a 'genetisch-kritische Hybrid-Edition'—of J. W. Goethe's *Faust* (2016). The editorial team's intense engagement over more than five years has been ground-breaking, and has developed manifold templates for future digital genetic editions to use, adapt or emulate. At the fundamental level of transcription and encoding through mark-up, the *Faust* edition has introduced a redoubled approach. The draft manuscript materials are twice marked-up, once from a document perspective and once from a text perspective. This approach recognises the twice redoubled nature of the draft manuscript as a document that is both material in itself and that is materially inscribed; and whose inscription, moreover, is the material record both of the processes of the writing as such and of the writing as texting, resulting in text.6

For my argument here, the *Faust* edition's double transcription practice has in turn a twofold significance. The separation of a document perspective and a text perspective is consistent, firstly, with our fresh definition of the draft manuscript as 'autographic', and thus a document type *sui generis* where materiality, writing and text symbiotically merge. This redoubled view of the draft manuscript thus, secondly, allows (and indeed requires), engaging critically with processes of composition and revision not only in the dimensions of texting and text alone, but also in their interdependence with the document materiality. So stated, this circumscribes anew the compass of manuscript exploration through genetic criticism.

Genetic manuscript editing, by contrast, is only beginning to assert itself and has not yet developed tested—let alone widely proven and accepted—practices for bringing the tenets and objectives of genetic criticism to the interface level of the digital medium. Designing modes of genetic editing and editions in terms both of organisation and structure, as well as of visualisation and ports for analytic access,

6 Space does not permit me to go into the Frankfurt *Faust* edition's overall rationale, or even just its safeguarding of correctness and accuracy in the complementary transcriptions. A comprehensive account of the edition is given in Anne Bohnenkamp, *et al.*, 'Perspektiven auf Goethes "Faust": Werkstattbericht der historisch-kritischen Hybridedition', in *Jahrbuch des Freien Deutschen Hochstifts 2011*, ed. by Anne Bohnenkamp (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2012), pp. 25–67 (pp. 44–45) especially for an illustration of the application of the double mark-up approach.

involves significant modifications and extensions of received editorial methodology, and indeed of the very concept of the 'edition' as a product of scholarship. The Frankfurt digital edition of Goethe's *Faust*, remarkably high-powered in both scholarly expertise and in funding, has after close to six years of intense research and development only very recently managed to put its beta version on the net. There, it joins, for instance, the Samuel Beckett Digital Manuscript Project http:// www.beckettarchive.org, today's flagship among editorial enterprises navigating seas of genetic editing that are as yet only partially charted.7 Their compass settings, however, point towards research sites whose hubs are digitally edited and organised text repositories, but which as research platforms are comprehensively sites for the dynamic and interactive acquisition, exchange and increase of knowledge and interpretative understanding. In terms of draft documents, they should be designed to present and communicate as well as render analysable the full range of the documents and the materials inscribed in these documents, including their semiotic and semantic features; to do so, they should be powered for dynamic interactivity such as the digital medium allows. To engage with a digital manuscript edition would permit not just the study, but the active experience of the genetic dynamics of manuscript writing.

7 For a discussion of the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project's procedures of creating interface environments for digital manuscript editing, see Malte Rehbein with Hans Walter Gabler, 'On Reading Environments for Genetic Editions', *Scholarly and Research Communcation*, 4/3 (2013), 1–21, http://src-online.ca/index.php/src/article/ viewFile/123/260

11. A Tale of Two Texts: Or, How One Might Edit Virginia Woolf's *To the Lighthouse*

The Hogarth Press edition is our text, say the British readers, critics, editors. The Harcourt, Brace edition is ours, say the Americans. But the two editions together are Virginia Woolf's public text of *To the Lighthouse*. 1 The doubling holds theoretical, critical and editorial challenges that the present essay will explore.

The source materials for the novel, though not consistently preserved, are well defined. There is a complete holograph draft, and there are the first proofs from the Edinburgh printers, Clark & Clark, whom the Hogarth Press regularly employed. One set of these, marked up by Virginia Woolf herself, and a fragment of a second set, from page 273 to the end of the book, also marked up by her, have survived.2 They were sent as printer's copy to Harcourt, Brace in New York. The set that carried the mark-up for the Hogarth Press edition, on the other hand, is no longer extant. That both main sets were identical, however—the preserved printer's copy for New York and the lost proof set used for a first round of corrections and revisions for the Hogarth Press edition may be inferred from the significant textual identity in substantives as

1 Virginia Woolf, *To the Lighthouse* (London: Hogarth Press, 1927) (E1); Virginia Woolf, *To the Lighthouse* (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1927) (A1).

2 These are now housed in the Frances Hooper Collection, William Allan Neilson Library, Smith College, Northampton, Mass. The library's courtesy in supporting the research for the present investigation is gratefully acknowledged.

well as accidentals between the New York and London editions. More decisively, it is demonstrable from the close typographical congruence between the extant Clark & Clark first proofs and the Hogarth Press first edition. Unless text has been changed, or spacings have been adjusted by meticulous compositors, their line and page breaks fully coincide.

Since the novel's holograph draft survives,3 the proofs make it possible, by retrospective exploration, to compare draft and revision states in terms of the structuring of the novel and the composition of its text. Although this would be a fascinating field to explore, I do not intend to do so here. Prospectively, the proofs document the textual point of departure towards the novel's public appearance. In the case of *To the Lighthouse*, this was a double appearance, manifested in the London and New York editions. These editions were published simultaneously—quite literally so, as they appeared on the same day, 5 May 1927, on both sides of the Atlantic. But, as is well known, they are not identical, since in a significant number of instances Virginia Woolf marked up the first proofs differently for each of them. She furthermore continued to revise the text for the Hogarth Press edition alone, making additional changes to the Clark & Clark revised proofs; this final stage of revision has not before been clearly distinguished, but I shall argue for it below.

*To the Lighthouse* was thus given to the public in two distinct texts. In terms of their difference, the two first editions constitute two versions of the novel. In terms of their simultaneous appearance, these must be termed simultaneous versions. This is a new, or certainly an unaccustomed, category for the textual critic and editor, to whom versions are commonly consecutive. Versions as Siamese twins, simultaneous versions, have not been much reflected upon in textual scholarship. By contrast, criticism has in specific cases, such as those created by Virginia Woolf for a surprising number of her publications, sometimes at least shown itself aware of them—if only as an irritant. Yet such simultaneity holds a critical challenge. So it is under an angle of

3 It is item M31, in three parts, among the Virginia Woolf holdings in the Berg Collection, New York Public Library. It has been published in a transcript: Virginia Woolf, *To the Lighthouse*: *The Original Holograph Draft*, ed. by Susan Dick (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982).

its critical implications, in the first place, that one should approach the text-critical as well as editorial problem of simultaneous versions.

From the outset, though, it is important to look at the problem from the perspective of textual materiality. In the case of *To the Lighthouse*, before the anomaly of the simultaneous versions takes effect, there is plentiful evidence of the normal identity, or else the simple difference, between the proofs and the published text. The *Lighthouse* proof text and the London and New York published texts are to a large extent identical. Where they differ, the proofs record a textual state that did not reach publication, while the British and American editions together manifest precisely the (one and only) public-text alternative to the pre-publication state. Simple acts of revision have created simple textual alternatives or, looked at the other way round, the acts of revision have left textual alternatives altogether behind in the work's pre-publication state. To the extent that the two first editions of *To the Lighthouse* conform to such normality, they do so because the mark-up for revision (that is, the author's mark-up) on the two first-proof exemplars (basically identical in themselves) was identical. Nonetheless, however, the two editions present two distinct text versions of the novel. They do so because the mark-up of the proofs was not only identical; it also differed. Where it differed, we may distinguish three mark-up patterns. Sometimes, the proof text was revised for the New York edition but left unchanged for the London edition; sometimes, the proof text was revised for the London edition but left unchanged for the New York edition; and sometimes, although the proof text was altered for both editions, it was revised differently for each.

From these three mark-up patterns, two reasons for the versional difference follow. The London and New York texts differ either because the proof text was doubly, and differently, overwritten; or else, because it was only half overwritten; the difference thereby created meant that one line of the transmission from the proof-text state to publication retained unaltered a reading changed in the other. The double alterations with a difference have the same effect as has the identical mark-up of the printer's copies for the New York and London editions: they leave the proof text altogether behind in the novel's pre-publication realm of existence. The double and divergent overwriting of the proofs might be

termed the active cause of the versional distinction. On the other hand, the one-edition-only revisions also contribute to establishing the public texts' versional difference; but here, the difference arises because the proof text is not tracelessly overwritten. Textual elements of the proof text thereby become public text. They do so, however, not because the work's text at the instances in question remains invariant, but because, paradoxically, it fails (as it were) to be touched and changed for either the one or the other of the two simultaneously published editions.

Taken in all, the situation is not easy to deal with. It is in fact impossible to contain it in terms of text-critical and editorial orthodoxies focused upon authorial intention. In terms of these orthodoxies, editors seek to establish an unambiguously perfected text—something that, as its circumstances of composition and transmission will suggest, is hard to determine for *To the Lighthouse*. The editorial aim so defined is posited, moreover, on the assumption of an authorial intention that is itself conceived of as directed towards an unambiguously perfected text. Implicit in this alliance between an intentionalist orientation and a teleology of the text is a notion of the closed text. This is a concept, however, that recent theories of literature and text would hesitate to uphold; as a matter of fact, it was the practice of modernist writing in the twentieth century in particular that induced literary theory to question its viability. But if this is the case, how can textual criticism and editing take legitimate guidance from it? And how, specifically, could text-critical and editorial justice be done to a modernist text in the light of a concept that literary theory has relinquished? The transmissional situation of the two simultaneous versions of *To the Lighthouse* should therefore not only suggest pragmatic non-intentionalist solutions to what is clearly a challenging editorial problem. To face its critical and theoretical implications may also lead, beyond pragmatics, to an adjustment of critical thinking and of the methodologies of criticism to both a modernist sense of the literary text and to some fresh conceptualisations in terms of theories of literature. The acts of revision as they result in the simultaneous versions of *To the Lighthouse* may help to suggest fresh ways of thinking about the very notion of text, of textual processes, and of both the construction of, and the construction of meaning in, texts.

Examples should advance the argument. Let us begin with the (deceptively) easy cases of identical revision of the proof text for the London and New York editions.4 Changes such as:

19.4 every footstep could be plainly heard and the sob of the [us] ===== ======== ===== == ======= ===== === === [eng] ===== ======== ===== == ======= ===== === === 19.5 Swiss girl whose father was dying of cancer [us] ===== ==== sobbing for her ====== who === ===== == ====== [eng] ===== ==== sobbing for her ====== who === ===== == ====== (A1, 16; E1, 19)

or:

(A1, 164; E1, 169)

or—a reenvisioning revision this—: