W. W. Greg Fifty Years On

The papers in this issue of Textual Cultures were all originally delivered at a conference, "W. W. Greg: Aspects of a Life" held at Trinity College, Cambridge on 14 March 2009. This conference grew out of conversations between Henry Woudhuysen (Dean of Arts at University College, London and a distinguished Renaissance textual scholar), David McKitterick (Fellow and Librarian of Trinity College and a leading bibliographer), and myself. When it became clear that none of the bodies with which Greg had been associated was intending to mark the fiftieth anniversary of his death, which falls in 2009, we decided that it would be appropriate for various admirers of Greg's achievements to offer some personal acknowledgements of aspects of his work in different fields. It was particularly pleasing to be able to mark this anniversary in Greg's own college, through the efforts of one his successors as Librarian. I am grateful both to Trinity College, Cambridge and to the Centre for Textual Scholarship, De Montfort University, for their help in making this conference possible. I am also deeply indebted to Wayne Storey who has encouraged this undertaking from an early stage and has responded to these essays with constructively critical acumen. My gratitude to those speakers who so promptly readied their spoken remarks for publication goes beyond words.

Why Greg? Walter Wilson Greg (9 July 1875–4 March 1959) never held a regular university position and for only a brief period, from 1906–1911, had a full-time job, as Trinity College Librarian (he resigned on the occasion of his marriage). Hence, for most of his life he worked outside conventional academic structures and his early, most influential associates were also not professional academics: his closest scholarly friends were R. B. McKerrow, who was a publisher, and A. W. Pollard, on the staff of the British Museum. Only later in his life does he seem to have enjoyed close relationships with scholars in his fields of interest from within the university world, such as J. Dover Wilson, F. P. Wilson, Alice Walker, and Fredson Bowers.

Greg's private income meant that he never had to submit himself to the tediums of academic life, the tiresome meeting, the dim student, and the inept essay. Instead he remained, in every sense of the term, independent. The liberation from such burdens could, in a lesser intellect, have led to languid bellelettrism. Instead, Greg developed a multi-faceted series of approaches to bibliography in its widest possibilities: editorial theory and practise, the description and enumeration of manuscript and printed books, and the creation of crucial materials for what we now term the history of the book. His focus was firmly on England and primarily, but not exclusively on the Renaissance, and is reflected in a scholarly career that extended over sixty years in a range of books, editions, articles, reviews and letters that amount to nearly eight hundred items.

His influence has extended beyond his own writings. Most notably it is seen in the work of Fredson Bowers, who was inspired by Greg's example in his own work, particularly in his fundamental writings on bibliographical description and on the implications of Greg's theories of copy text for post-Renaissance editing. Fifty years after his death Greg is still a crucial figure in discussions of such matters and much of his work has not been superseded. These essays assess both the scholar and the man, to remind us not just what he achieved but also of the personality that made his achievements possible. They must stand, for the time being at least, as a substitute for the comprehensive assessment of Greg's work that would only be possible in an full critical biography, a startling omission from the history of English studies. But they may serve to acknowledge, if incompletely, the debt our age owes to one of the indisputably great English bibliographical and textual scholars.