XVIII * Bibliography and Textual Criticism

Abstract

Last year’s survey began with a lament for the absence of Studies in Bibliography . Volume 58 ( SB 58[2007–8]) was published in September 2010. The question is, was it worth waiting for? It has eight articles, but no apology for its lateness in appearing. It opens with Richard Bucci’s ‘Mind and Textual Matter’ ( SB 58[2007–8] 1–47). Bucci’s is an extensive consideration of ‘the critical editorial approach to Anglophone literary works which arose alongside the “new bibliography” ’ (p. 4). Amongst texts and theories about them, considered are essays in Stephen Orgel’s The Authentic Shakespeare and other problems of the Early Modern Stage [2002], Paul Werstine’s writings in Shakespeare Quarterly , Text and elsewhere. Interestingly, some of Bucci’s text is concerned with responses to W.W. Greg’s ‘The Rationale of Copy-Text’ (pp. 11ff.) and McKerrow, Bowers, Tanselle, and McGann’s reactions to it, see for instance specifically p. 18 n. 25. For Bucci, there was ‘an initial lack of clarity on the part of some author-focused editors about the need to deepen the definition of their editorial goal’. Additionally, with the exception of Bowers and Tanselle, ‘few contributions to the scholarly journals published little in the way of meaningful assessments of the editions’ (p. 21). He finds, however, Hans Zeller’s ‘A New Approach to the Critical Constitution of Literary Texts’ ( SB 28[1975] 231–64) ‘provocative and helpful’ and also the work of the ‘learned German Jewish philologist Ernst Grumach (1902–67)’ who was the first editor of ‘the edition of Goethe’s works prepared by the Deutsche Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin (DDR), from 1949’ (p. 22).