Electronic Editions and the Needs of Readers

Abstract

archive. It should offer diplomatic transcriptions of documents, and facsimiles of those documents. And it should avoid many of the things that scholarly editions have traditionally done, particularly the creation of critically-edited texts by means of editorial emendation. On this view, what readers need is access to original sources - to as many of them as possible, and avoiding as much as possible the shaping and selection that editors have traditionally engaged in. Although a lot of archives in the world were created and shaped to make specific points, this kind of archive-edition is not conceived of as doing that: it is instead imagined as a neutral witness.2 The archive model has its merits, and indeed its methodology is in part derived from the tradition of scholarly editing: there are obvious connections to the approach of the Malone Society's reprint series, for example. Access to original sources is certainly a good thing. But I do not think it is the only good thing an edition can do, and some of the other good things are especially important when we are working with Renaissance texts. Readers need more than just an archive when working with Renaissance texts, because the archive can give us only a limited representation of these texts. Let me illustrate this point by describing two different editions I am working on - the Thomas Middleton edition and the corpus of Renaissance texts from the Women Writers Project. The Middleton edition will collect all his extant writings - plays, poems, and pamphlets, in modern spelling, for the most part, and with full textual and explanatory notes. It will be published by Oxford University Press in both print and electronic forms; Gary Taylor is the general editor, but there are something like six dozen of us working on various aspects © CS 1997