Oroonoko, or, The Royal Slave: A Critical Edition (review)

Abstract

248 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION This is, then, a rather traditional study of generally rather obscure texts; but it is thoughtful and well written, and provides a precious aid to those involved in the effort to understand the evolution of French fiction immediately before and after 1700. Patrick Brady University of Tennessee Aphra Behn. Oroonoko, or, The Royal Slave: A Critical Edition. Edited with an introduction by Adelaide P. Amore. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1987. xliv + 86pp. US$24.25 cloth; US$11.25 paper. In a recent essay Richard Altick quotes from a "deservedly scathing review" that appeared in Literary Research Newsletter, and seconds the reviewer's assertion that "[a]ny publisher honorably engaged in the production of academic books ... must be willing to accept a burden of responsibility to enforce standards of excellence." "Quality control," he added, "should be the concern of everybody involved in the gathering, evaluating, and disseminating of bibliographical information" (Literary Reviewing, ed. J.O. Hoge, 1987, p. 68). The same standards of excellence must also be maintained in textual criticism, and so the editor and the publisher have much to answer for in this edition of Aphra Behn's Oroonoko, an edition that fails every test of a good edition. The first problem with this text comes on the title page where the words "A Critical Edition" are prominent. Since a critical edition of Behn's Oroonoko has been done—and done well—by Gerald Duchovnay (Ph.D. dissertation, Indiana University, 1971), what could a new critical edition have to offer? What texts might have been examined other than those Duchovnay collated? To my knowledge , Duchovnay missed only two copies of the 1688 Oroonoko, neither one significantly different from seven of the eight he examined. Adelaide Amore claims to have examined only three copies of the first edition: the Bodleian's as copy-text, the Beinecke's, and the British Library's (which seems to have reappeared after a long disappearance). Ignored are the Huntington and Harvard copies readily available in the University Microfilms Early English Book series. This, then, is a "critical edition" with no textual apparatus. Duchovnay adopted twenty-six emendations in his critical text and recorded close to one hundred accidental variants and over two hundred substantive variants in his collations, including two press variants in the 1688 text. One of these press variants, extant only in the Bodleian text of Behn's dedication to Maitland , was suppressed in a stop-press cancellation because it revealed Behn's Roman Catholicism. Yet this most important textual (and biographical) detail is buried in square brackets in the Dedication on page 2 of this editor's text. REVIEWS 249 But these are not the only problems with this edition. I fear that Restoration scholars for years will be correcting students' errors generated by the introduction , the notes, and the primary and secondary bibliography. The list of Behn's works is so filled with misdatings, mangled titles and subtitles, significant omissions, and ghosts that it would take pages here to offer corrections. The same carelessness with titles and dates surfaces in the "Selected Bibliography " (pp. 83-86). Here, under "Alphra" [sic] Behn, are listed the 1688 edition of Oroonoko, the 1871 publication in Pearson's edition (although it is not identified as such), Sey's 1977 edition published in Ghana (not Chana), two of La Place's five known editions (but the editor does not seem to realize that La Place rewrote half the novel to give it a happy ending), and the 1709 Hamburg edition with the German title butchered. Other Behn works, such as the 1698 third edition of the collected novels and Summer's edition, are listed by title, while the first edition (1696) of the collected novels is omitted. Significantly absent from the bibliography are twentieth-century editions of Oroonoko in English, of which there have been six others (to 1985) not counting Summers's or Sey's. Surely the two most important editions of the past twenty years, Duchovnay's invaluable critical edition (with its 145-page introduction) and Lore Metzger's Norton edition (which follows Summers's), merit notice. Yet they are not listed. The preliminary matter of...