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The Aesthetics of Textual Criticism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

James Thorpe
James Thorpe*
Affiliation:
Princeton University, Princeton, N. J.
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Extract

Many people on occasion prefer a textual error to an authentic reading. One mistake by a compositor of Melville's White-Jacket—setting “soiled fish of the sea” instead of “coiled fish of the sea”—achieved an adventitious fame some years ago. Various readers have since declared themselves in favor of the error, on the grounds that “soiled fish” makes a richer, more interesting passage than the ordinary “coiled fish of the sea.” In short, the error seems to them to create a better work.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 80 , Issue 5 , December 1965 , pp. 465 - 482
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1965

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References

1 Wesley Trimpi, Ben Jonson's Poems: A Study of the Plain Style (Stanford, 1962), p. 151.

2 London, 1930, pp. 260–261, 83; see also p. 34. These examples were retained in the revised edition (London, 1947).

3 Notes to Hamlet (iv.iv.84 in modern editions, iv.v in Johnson's edition).

4 Ed., The Tragedy of Hamlet (Boston, 1939), p. viii.

5 “Concerning Le Cimetière marin” (1933), in Paul Valéry, The Art of Poetry (New York, 1958), p. 152.

6 The Poems of Emily Dickinson (Cambridge, Mass., 1955), i, xxvi.

7 A History of American Magazines 1741–1850 (New York, 1930), p. 504.

8 A History of American Magazines 1865–1885 (Cambridge, Mass., 1938), p. 21.

9 A History of American Magazines 1885–1905 (Cambridge, Mass., 1957), p. 37.

10 Arthur L. Scott, “The Century Magazine Edits Huckleberry Finn, 1884–1885,” AL, xxvii (1955), 356–362.

11 Seymour L. Gross and Alfred J. Levy, “Some Remarks on the Extant Manuscripts of Hawthorne's Short Stories,” SB, xiv (1961), 254–257.

12 John R. Roberson, “The Manuscript of Page's ‘Marse Chan’,” SB, ix (1957), 259–262.

13 Royal A. Gettman, “Henry James's Revision of The American,” AL, xvi (1945), 295.

14 Oscar Maurer, “ ‘My Squeamish Public’: Some Problems of Victorian Magazine Publishers and Editors,” SB, xii (1958), 21–40.

15 Carl J. Weber, “The Manuscript of Hardy's Two on a Tower,” PBSA, xl (1946), 1–21.

16 Editor to Author: The Letters of Maxwell E. Perkins, ed. John Hall Wheelock (New York, 1950), pp. 171–174, 175–180, 286–294, 227–230, 98–102.

17 Francis E. Skipp, “The Editing of Look Homeward, Angel,” PBSA, lvii (1963), 1–13. On the basis of analyzing the material cut, Skipp is of the opinion that the changes improved the work.

18 Robert H. Elias, rev. of Letters to Louise: Theodore Dreiser's Letters to Louise Campbell (Philadelphia, 1959), AL, xxxiii (1961), 90–91.

19 For an interesting account by a noted editor (of O'Neill and Faulkner, for example) who had been a prolific ghost writer, see Saxe Commins, “Confessions of a Ghost,” PULC, xxii (1960), 26–35.

20 Marcel Proust, Jean Santeuil (London, 1955), pp. ix, xxi-xxii.

21 The Scarlet Letter (Columbus, Ohio, 1962), p. xlvii.

22 Matthew J. Bruccoli, “A Collation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise,” SB, ix (1957), 263–265.

23 Matthew J. Bruccoli, “Textual Variants in Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt,” SB, xi (1958), 263–268.

24 M. R. Ridley, “The Perpetuated Misprint,” TLS, 28 August 1959, p. 495.

25 “The Backgrounds of Ulysses;' KR, xvi (1954), 359–360. I have heard it said that Joyce retained some of the printer's errors in Ulysses because he preferred them to what he had written, but I have been unable to find any evidence for this claim.

26 William Gibson, The Seesaw Log: A Chronicle of the Stage Production, with the Text, of “Two for the Seesaw” (New York, 1959), pp. 32, 37, 101, 43, 140.

27 “Often the rehearsals of an O'Neill play would degenerate into a series of running battles between the playwright and the producer, the director, and the actors. Invariably, O'Neill was able to stand his ground against them all.” Croswell Bowen, “Rehearsing The Iceman Cometh,” in O'Neill and His Plays: Four Decades of Criticism, ed. Oscar Cargill and others (New York, 1961), p. 460.

28 “The Staging of a Play,” Esquire, ii (May 1959), 144–158.

29 There is considerable evidence in Shakespeare's plays, for example, of revision for production. “All of the texts of the First Folio of 1623 for which there are documents for comparison show stage alteration in varying degrees, and in that fact there is a proof of the universality of stage influence on acted plays. … One may say that stage alteration appears in all plays that have been acted on the stage.” Hardin Craig, “Textual Degeneration of Elizabethan and Stuart Plays: An Examination of Plays in Manuscript,” Rice Institute Pamphlets, Vol. xlvi, No. 4 (1960), p. 74. See also Craig's A New Look at Shakespeare's Quartos (Stanford, 1961).

30 A vast amount of modern Shakespearean scholarship has been concerned with trying to infer which of these was the basis for the first printed edition of a given play. There seems to be a tacit assumption among some scholars that the earliest editors of Shakespeare were most interested in printing the words that he wrote. Alice Walker (with whom one fears to disagree) believes that Heminge and Condell “may have known that the Lear prompt-book better represented what Shakespeare wrote than the Hamlet prompt-book” (Textual Problems of the First Folio, Cambridge, Eng., 1953, p. 136). It seems a more plausible assumption that men of the theatre like Heminge and Condell would (unlike many modern scholars) have preferred the text which better represented the play in a good production.

31 Boswell's Journal of A Tour to the Hebrides With Samuel Johnson, LL.D., ed. Frederick A. Pottle and Charles H. Bennett (New York, 1936), p. 173. Entry for Wednesday, 15 September 1773.

32 These various emendations are recorded in the notes to Henry John Todd's edition of Milton's poetical works (London, 1801, and many later editions). The most elaborate and extensive of all unnecessary emendations to Milton were undoubtedly those made by the great classical scholar Richard Bentley in his edition of Paradise Lost (1732).

33 See, for example, the history of the reading “mid-May” in Keats's “The Fall of Hyperion,” l. 92.

34 “Preface to Shakespeare,” The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (Oxford, 1825), v, 151, 150, 149.

35 This is the “god kissing carrion” passage in Hamlet: “For if the sun breed maggots in a dead dog, being a god kissing carrion—Have you a daughter?” (ii.ii.181–183). The folios and quartos concur in the reading “good,” which Warburton emended (without any external evidence) to “god”—a reading which has been pretty generally accepted, although W. W. Greg objected, a little primly: “It is facile and plausible, but I think unnecessary. Hamlet's fancies are not always as nice as editors would have them” (Principles of Emendation in Shakespeare, London, 1928, p. 68). Johnson's observation appears in his edition of Shakespeare at the conclusion of his reprinting of Warburton's note to the passage.

36 For an account of the very numerous revisions, excisions, and eliminations which Auden silently made in preparing his text for the Collected Poetry (New York, 1945) and Collected Shorter Poems (London, 1950), see Joseph Warren Beach, The Making of the Auden Canon (Minneapolis, 1957); his remarks on “In Time of War” are on pp. 5–10. Auden has continued to revise: the unsuspecting reader may be surprised to discover that there is a strong possibility of a significant change in any given poem reprinted in one of the “collected” volumes.

37 See Otis B. Wheeler, “Four Versions of The Return of the Native,” NCF, xiv (1959), 27–44. See also John Paterson, The Making of “The Return of The Native” (Berkeley, Calif., 1960), particularly for Hardy's first intentions.

38 See Helen Darbishire's revision of Ernest de Selincourt's edition (Oxford, 1959), pp. liv-lxxiv.

39 See, for example, Edgar F. Shannon, Jr, “The History of A Poem: Tennyson's Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington,” SB, xiii (1960), 149–177; or Shannon, “The Proofs of Gareth and Lynette in the Widener Collection,” PBSA, xli (1947), 321–340; or W. D. Paden, “A Note on the Variants of In Memoriam and Lucretius,” Library, 5th ser., viii (1953), 259–273.

40 See Thomas H. Johnson, “Emily Dickinson: Creating the Poems,” Harvard Library Bulletin, vii (1953), 257–270; or, more comprehensively, The Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Johnson (Cambridge, Mass., 1955), esp. i, xxxiii-xxxviii and 163–165.

41 Morse Peckham, “English Editions of Philip James Bailey's Festus,” PBSA, xliv (1950), 55–58.

42 The consideration of this possibility will, of course, complicate the reasoning of the textual critic. On the whole, it is a possibility which has usually been disregarded unless the evidence to demonstrate the fact of revision has been overwhelming.

43 Charles Dickens: The World of His Novels (Cambridge, Mass., 1958), p. 278.

44 Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph (New York, 1952), ii, 988, 992–993.

45 Jean-Jacques Denonain, ed., Religio Medici (Cambridge, Eng., 1953), pp. xxiv-xxviii.

46 EETS (Extra Series), lxxvii (1899), 6–8. (The Lydgate translation.)

47 Quoted by James M. Osborn, John Dryden: Some Biographical Facts and Problems (New York, 1940), p. 131.

48 “On Mallarmé” in Selected Writings (New York, 1950), pp. 217, 216.

49 “Concerning Le Cimetière marin” in The Art of Poetry (New York, 1958), pp. 140–141.

50 For discussion and examples of authorial revision of work in progress, see Poets at Work, ed. Charles D. Abbott (New York, 1948), and Robert H. Taylor and H. W. Liebert, Authors at Work (New York, 1957).

51 “Concerning Le Cimetière marin” in The Art of Poetry, p. 144.

52 Untitled poem ss, in The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W. B. Yeats, ed. Peter Allt and Russell K. Alspach (New York, 1957), p. 778. (This poem is not included in the “definitive” edition.)

53 The Prefaces to Roderick Hudson and The Golden Bowl (Vols. i and xxiii, respectively, in the New York edition) set forth James's central ideas on revision. In the collection of his Prefaces called The Art of the Novel, with an introduction by Richard P. Blackmur (New York, 1934), the passage about revision in the Preface to Roderick Hudson is on pp. 10–12 and the one in the Preface to The Golden Bowl on pp. 335–340. My exposition of James's views is based mainly on the latter passage and includes close paraphrase of what I take to be the major issues.

54 See Sister Mary Brian Durkin, “Henry James's Revisions of the Style of The Reverberator,” AL, xxxiii (1961), 330–349. There has been, I dare say, more extensive scholarly investigation, in books and articles and theses, of the revisions by James for the New York edition than of those by any other writer on any occasion. The three novels in which the revisions have so far been examined the most thoroughly are, probably, The American, The Portrait of a Lady, and The Ambassadors. Such fertile fields are attractive to the husbandman, and we can expect every last one of the twenty-four volumes to be harrowed in each direction.

55 The first quotation is from R. W. Chapman, “The Textual Criticism of English Classics,” in English Critical Essays: Twentieth Century, ed. Phyllis M. Jones (London, 1933), p. 274. The second is from Sir Harold Williams, The Text of “Gulliver's Travels” (Cambridge, Eng., 1952), p. 36. The third is from Zahava Karl Dorinson, “ ‘I Taste a Liquor Never Brewed’: A Problem in Editing,” AL, xxxv (1963), 363, n. 1.