Margins of Error: Performance, Text, and the Editing of Early Modern Sermons

It is a paradox of early modern editing that in the pursuit of an error-free text editors spend considerable time analysing error.¹ But error is a slippery thing. An error exists only in relation to the 'correct' text an editor is seeking to establish, and yet that very text has been the subject of extended scholarly debate. For some it is a reconstructed holograph, for others a final revised text, for still others it can be a particular 'version' of a work.² One editor's error is another's (legitimate) variant. As Spenser's narrator in The Faerie Queene sagely observes, 'God helpe the man so wrapt in Errours endlesse traine'.³ Error is also refracted by a text's form and genre and nowhere is this more true than in the case of early modern sermons. Unlike other performance genres such as plays and masques, the vast majority of sermons were transcribed in full only after delivery in the pulpit.⁴ In other words, in contrast to a genre like poetry where it can make sense to think of composing and writing as synonymous, most sermons existed in a form prior to any paper witness. This challenges assumptions about editing which are often based on the synchronicity of the author's holograph and the composition of the work. If an editor of a sermon is to recover a performance, not a holograph text, then the editing process will need to involve a new approach to paper witnesses and a new perspective on error. A specific performance of an early modern sermon will always, to a greater or lesser extent, be lost in time. However, I want to suggest that traces of this event can be captured if we are willing to re-think the status of moments of textual complexity. Focusing on 'error', not through the lens of 'corruption', but in terms of a sermon's evolution from performance to text, offers a route, albeit imperfect, back to the sermon in the pulpit. The editor's heroic struggle with error is for the most part invisible to the reader, consigned to a marginal textual apparatus which few will study in detail. But in this article I want to place the margins of early modern texts centre page, peeling back the textual apparatus to consider again how editors identify and use error. Specifically, I will be asking how work editing the performance texts of Donne's sermons can shed new light on these challenges, questioning what error might look like in the complex processes by which a performance becomes a text, or a series of texts. I will argue that the sermon offers a unique perspective from which to re-examine the endeavour of editing early modern works, just as, in turn, the process of editing sheds new light on the complicated relationships between a pulpit performance and its textual afterlives.

The Place of Error

Attitudes to error need to be understood in the context of theories of editing. Crucial here is W. W. Greg's seminal essay 'The Rationale of Copy-Text'.⁵ Greg's main focus is the principles which should guide an editor's interventions to their copy text. He argues that an editor should follow their copy text in relation to accidentals, which he defines as readings which mainly affect a text's 'formal presentation', but be prepared to exercise their own judgement in the case of substantive variants, which affect an author's meaning. These substantive variants can be legitimately 'corrected' using another witness if that establishes a 'better' text.⁶ By 'better', Greg means closest to the author's original. Indeed, Greg's entire argument is predicated on the assumption that an editor's duty is to restore a text to its original state as it was conceived and written by the author. Greg's work was developed by Fredson Bowers and G. Thomas Tanselle who make explicit the argument that the author's intention should be understood as their 'final intention', in other words their 'final wishes about...