The Editor, the Critic, and the Multiple Texts of Donne's "A Hymne to God the Father"

Abstract

Everyone engaged in the study of literature undoubtedly has a clear idea of the respective functions of the textual editor and the literary critic. Though the two tasks themselves are seldom simple, their definitions are straightforward. According to received wisdom, the editor's vocation is to recover and present-insofar as possible-the text that an author actually wrote; and the critic's calling is to elucidate the text established by the editor. Using John Donne's A Hymne to God the Father as an illustration, I would like to address an area of growing dissatisfaction with those definitions as just stated, namely, the recent challenge to the implicit assumption that every literary text is inevitably singular. And if the texts of some-indeed, many-literary works, among them Donne's hymn, are not singular, how do we as textual editors and as literary critics handle them? Progressively throughout the twentieth century, our thinking about literary texts as objects has become anachronistic. Influenced by New Criticism-even if we do not now subscribe to all or even most of its tenets-we as critics and editors have wanted texts to be singular and self-contained, ultimately independent of social and historical and biographical issues, even when we appeal to such issues to help explain the texts we examine. We want a single text of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus and of Shakespeare's King Lear, for example, to study, to teach, and to write about, though in fact each of these plays exists in two different early texts that many scholars consider to be irreconcilable. We want the creative experience to have been a single unbroken thread leading from inspiration directly to fulfillment for all time in a single set of words and punctuation marks-that is, the text. There is no doubt that we as editors and critics are nervous in the presence of multiple texts. It is disturbing to have to consider alternatives in wording and punctuation when what we want is a finished product on which to work our elucidating magic.