TALLIS, BYRD AND THE 'INCORRECTED COPY': SOME CAUTIONARY NOTES FOR EDITORS OF EARLY MUSIC PRINTED FROM MOVABLE TYPE

Abstract

ONE OF THE liveliest images created by Oswald Barrett ('Batt') for The Oxford Companion to Music is his illustration of William Byrd scanning proof pages of that milestone of English music engraving, Parthenia.' To what extent Batt's fantasy represents reality we shall probably never know, for only one copy of the first issue of Parthenia survives, and, far from being free of errors, it can hardly be held up as a model of scrupulous proof-reading.2 But in a sense Batt's prophecy has been brought to pass. Recent scholarship has shown that other editions of Byrd's music published in the composer's lifetime, all of them printed from movable type rather than engraved, were checked for accuracy with great care.3 In almost every case where more than one copy of an edition survives, examples of stop-press corrections and other forms of emendation have been found. Clearly someone took pains to ensure that Byrd's publications were as free from error as was technically and commercially viable. Whether the watchful eyes were Byrd's or those of an employee of the printing-house it is not possible to say, yet the image of Byrd the eager proofreader surely contains at least an element of truth. The editors of The Byrd Edition have been among the staunchest promoters of bibliographical methods that are taken for granted in other fields but are all too often overlooked by editors of early music. How many of us have assumed that a single copy of a sixteenth-century music print is all we need in order to make an edition? How many editors, even of the standard library editions we use every day, never went beyond the stage of consulting the copy (or the microfilm of a copy) that came most conveniently to hand? When the number of surviving copies of a print is large, how many editors have devoted the time and labour to examining every one of them in detail? Yet, as The Byrd Edition and a few other bibliographically-aware projects have shown, it is a short cut that we take at our own risk. Not all copies of a printed book are identical, even when produced during the course of a single print run and issued as part of the same edition.4 In the words of Philip Brett, 'Musical editors