Attribution Tests and the Editing of Seventeenth-Century Poetry

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For Richard Bentley (1662-1742), editing was in essence a branch of stylistics. Lacking even the most rudimentary interest in the genetic relationship of sources, he directed his attention to the ratio et res ipsa of the work which were 'of greater weight than a hundred codexes'.[1] Classical texts, riddled with transmissional error, were to be perfected from a profound understanding of the author's meaning and habits of style. The editor's brilliance was displayed through the ingenuity of his emendations; nor was this so capricious a process as it is sometimes represented. Authors were assumed to use language in a way that was unique both to their age and themselves: the editor able to internalize that usus loquendi was in a position to sweep away the accretions and distortions of centuries of transmission by scribes who had lacked any such understanding. Reasoning of this kind is an accepted part of the editing of musical works and the restoration of visual art works. In the first case the principal tool is an analytic understanding of the composer's harmonic and contrapuntal practice and in the second a knowledge of brush-strokes, pigments, methods of preparing surfaces and ways of constructing a composition. Bentley, thinking along similar lines, was convinced not only that he could detect the verbal voice-leading or brush-strokes of a Horace or a Milton, but that it was his duty in cases where words or phrases in the original had been replaced by the substitutes of an inferior hand to repair the impertinence to the best of his ability. His method, under the name of divinatio, is still an acknowledged part of the editing of Greek and Latin texts, with a collection of exercises in it appearing as recently as 1974.[2] If competently performed, it should at worst provide a replacement, in a manner not remote from that of the author, for evident falsity or nonsense. Notoriously, Bentley was often wrong. His edition of Milton, published in 1732, was so arbitrary in its marginal emendations that the apparatus of Thomas Newton's edition of 1749 is largely concerned with confuting them.[3] And yet, in the famous instance of the epistles attributed to Phalaris, his triumph is still acknowledged. Here, as is well known to students of Swift's The Battle of the Books, Bentley was responding to an edition of the epistles produced at Christ Church, Oxford by the Honourable Charles Boyle. Phalaris had been recommended in Sir William Temple's 'Essay on Ancient and Modern Learning' as a representative of the simplicity and force of the earliest period of Greek composition. Among the ancients, who were generally to be preferred to the moderns, he counted as an 'ancient' ancient, and thus doubly instructive. Bentley in his Dissertation on the Epistles of Phalaris (1699)hadno difficulty in showing that the epistles were a Hellenistic forgery. The case of Bentley exhibits three ways in which stylistics is important to editors. The first is to test whether works were actually the work of their presumed authors. The second is to test for contributions to those works by revisers or collaborators. The third is to assist in the emendation of corrupt passages. But Bentley's career also illustrates the danger of stylistic judgements when they are made on the basis of a mistaken theory of the genesis of the work or rely on impressionism rather than the careful assessment of language use. Awareness of this led to a series of attempts to establish controls on what Sir Walter Greg deprecates in 'The Rationale of Copy-text' as 'eclectic freedom and reliance on personal taste'.[4] The nineteenth-century solution was Lachmannian textual genetics, though here the change was more apparent than real; for, while late derived readings could by this means be excluded from consideration, the identification of what classicists call 'original' readings still usually relied on stylistic judgements. A later reaction, especially among editors of mediaeval texts, led to 'best manuscript' editing in which, Greg considered, editors content themselves with producing 'not editions of their authors' works at all, but only editions of particular authorities for those works' (p. …