New ways of looking at old texts: papers of the Renaissance English text society, 1985-1991 (review)

166 Reviews is safe to say that it has now been superseded in almost every respect by Western plainchant. Robert Curry Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts Hill, W. Speed, ed., New ways of looking at old texts: papers of the Renaissance English text society, 1985-1991, (Medieval & Renaissance texts & studies, Vol. 107), Binghamton, Medieval & Renaissance texts & studies, 1993; cloth; pp. xi, 319; 6 illustrations; R.R.P. US$25.00. The argument of the compiler of this collection is that the editing of Renaissance texts has been preoccupied with Shakespeare, and with theorizing prompted by the question: 'What was the nature of the copy for the First Folio?'. Although Renaissance non-dramatic texts are much more extensive, this area has remained 'untheorized'. The introductory essay distinguishes four editorial models which have occupied the field. Thefirstis the documentary edition, which seeks to provide a facsimile or an approximation to it. The second is the genealogical edition, following the principles applied by Karl Lachmann to classical texts, which seeks to recover a lost archetype from a number of later witnesses, producing a critical text superior to any exemplar. I am not sure why this is distinguished from the copy-text edition, where the intention is the same. Professor Speed Hill wishes to relate the genealogical edition to manuscript transmissions, and the copy-text edition to printed sources of the kind discussed by W . W . Greg in "The rationale of copy-text' and pursued further by Fredson Bowers and G. Thomas Tanselle. The fourth model, the multiple-version edition, is for two or more authoritative versions of the same work. None of these models is really untheorized. The issue is rather that they are now under siege. The motive of all four editing models is to represent the intention of the author, using a variety of means to that end. As the paper on 'Editing Daniel' makes clear, it is sometimes necessary to dispense with 'system' to achieve this, but it remains the object of the exercise. The fifth model that Speed Hill and some of his contributors see emerging is one that would resist these 'author-centred' approaches. He attributes it to the N e w Historicism, but its provenance is wider. Textual Reviews 167 studies are catching up with those other areas of English studies which recoil from the author as an 'authorityfigure',and where a genealogical approach is seen as 'patriarchal'. The argument for a 'sociocentric' as against an 'author-centric' text is already established in the editing of Shakespeare, when the supposed interpolations of the actors and the accretions to the prompt-book are accorded the same status as the words of Shakespeare himself, assuming that his words could ever be recovered. Much Renaissance verse is anonymous, and much of acknowledged authorship was circulated in manuscript, or was collected in miscellanies and commonplace books. The papers dealing with print and manuscript miscellanies make a good case for the 'malleable text', the poem assuming different forms in the process of transmission. Australian bush ballads provide such a case, where often there is no 'original', and a version modified, say, to express resentment of the squatters may be of more interest than a text of twenty years earlier. From this perspective, the more the points of social reference, the better. It may therefore be appropriate to describe certain poems of Donne as 'socially-generated constructs', and 'Donne' not so much as an author as 'an historically-evolving, socially-produced literary identity' (p. 215). If w e can arrive at no better 'Donne' than that, w e shall have to be reconciled to it. In the case of verse miscellanies, no 'better' text may be identifiable. But if we happen to have in Donne's handwriting his verse-letter to Lady Carey and Mrs Essex Riche (available since 1972), then might not this have a superior textual claim? The answer will depend on the value assigned to an 'author-dominated' text compared to a 'socially-generated construct', and that depends in m m on one's purpose in view and one's philosophy of life. This point happens to be enforced by the sessions of the Renaissance English Text Society in...