"This Son of Yorke": Textual and Literary Criticism Again

Abstract

PERHAPS IT IS TIME AGAIN TO PUT IN A WORD IN FAVOR of the exercise of literary judgment in coping with textual problems and in making editorial decisions, though G. Thomas Tanselle's lucid and persuasive essay on the need to combine literary and textual criticism appeared not so long ago that it should already have passed out of memory. ' Still, the questions with which Tanselle grappled are complicated even further when a scholarly editor undertakes to produce a modern reading edition of an early work, for the decisions made for an old-spelling edition must sometimes be re-thought for a modernized edition., I am persuaded that Tanselle's principles apply in both cases, but in that of a modernized edition the scale may have to be tipped even further in the direction of critical judgment. What I have in mind here is the problem of words which are both substantive variants and spelling variants in early modern English. I plan to argue a specific case, namely that it is impossible, in a modernized edition, to know what to do with all the sons and suns in the texts of Richard III on the basis of pure textual principles, and, moreover, that without resort to literary principles the decisions reached for an old-spelling edition will not only mislead the reader of a modernized text but will misrepresent Shakespeare as well. The example I propose to set forth is a complicated one because the textual history of Richard III is itself complex. Nevertheless, while acknowledging that various details are still debatable, we can say that the prevailing view of the textual transmission, in outline form, is that summarized by G. Blakemore Evans in The Riverside Shakespeare.2 According to Evans, the six quartos which preceded the Folio text of 1623 were printed in a simple series, each descending from the immediately preceding edition. Fl printed partly from Q3 and partly from Q6, the copy of Q6 having been corrected against an independent manuscript, which Evans thinks was possibly Shakespeare's 'foul papers', but in any case almost certainly not a manuscript with theatrical connections. The upshot of this state of affairs is that Fl must be the copy-text for the whole play except for III.i.1-158 and V.iii.48 to the end, which portions were set from Q3; for those parts, Qi is the copy-text, since Q3 is essentially nothing but a twice-removed reprint of Q1. The texts of editorial concern, then, are Qi, Q6, and Fl. Thus much is widely agreed upon, and it shall suffice for my purposes here.