"Good" and "Bad" Manuscripts: Texts and Critics George Kane University ofNorth Carolina I,wa,John Fleming, our distinguished rh,irmw, who proposed th, topic for this panel. I added the quotation marks because I surmised (correctly) that panelists might view the terms with reserve, as I do myself. Not because they have moral overtones: We talk of good and bad cheese or wine: W hy not manuscripts? Not because they express value judgments: In my view it is delusory to believe that these can be avoided, and a genuinely relativist position maintained, in the study of literature. I object to the terms because they are disincentive to critical thought, unspecifically ap plied, confuse editorial issues, and even, as Stephen Barney has argued, impose harmful constraints upon an editor. For today's purpose, however, they are useful because they direct consid eration of the critical attitudes and thus the practices of editors when they engage in the activity defined by my dictionary as publishing, that is, giving to the world a literary work by an earlier author, previously existing in manuscript. If I inay say so, it is timely that editorial attitudes and the circumstances that form them should be considered. I must share any blame assignable in this situation for failing to make clear, in the introduc tion to Piers A, that this was not a do-it-yourself kit for theorizing about editing but an account of a single editor's predicament and his attempts to resolve it. I did not sufficiently emphasize the qualifying effect of the kind of text the editor is "giving to the world." My co-panelists have already addressed this matter, but it is worth a moment to consider how great the variety, merely of Middle English texts, actually is when seen from an editor's point of view. The literary work of art (Trot/us, ofcourse), andBoece, the record of an attemptfirst to understand and then to replicate in a language quite inadequate for the purpose one of the most intellectually sophisticated and elegantly written ofphilosophical works, are only two instances, albeit in extreme contrast, of support for a generalization that almost every Middle English text poses a distinct 137 FIFTH INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS editorial problem. Think of the Brut of Layamon who, in Ben Jonson's reported words about Shakespeare, "writ no language," or King Horn, where the possibility ofmemorial transmission has to be allowed, or The Scale ofPerfection, of which some copyists appear to have been adepts in mystical ascesis, capable of technically improving the discourse, or Wy cliffite texts, where it seems there was continuous editorial adaptation by copyists themselves progressively more radical evangelists. Every such dis tinctive situation, and there are many more, qualifies the editor's attitude and should in principle define his objective and determine his procedures, his treatment ofthe manuscript evidence. Another qualifying circumstance is the state ofa text as a composition. Did its author consider it ready to copy and formally publish it, as Chaucer did Trozlus, or is it from its condition evidently unfinished, as are the large works we call The Canterbury Tales and the C version ofPiers Plowman? Further, is the text absolute, or one of a succession of revisions, or even merely suspect ofrevision, like Trozlus? Then there is the state ofpreservation ofa text. Any editor's attitude to the manuscript which uniquely preserves his text is bound to differ from that ofone whose text survives in sixteen or sixty copies. He may believe it to be larded with errors of transcription and riddled with deliberate substitutions. Whatever his opinion it must still, axiomatically, differ from the first exemplar and is thus "bad," and moreover indeterminably "bad"; yet in preserving the work, however imperfectly, it is necessarily "good." Where a text survives in many copies there is a relativity: every copy will necessarily differ to some extent from the authorial examplar; those that seem to the editor, for whatever presumptive reason, to differ least become "good" and are welcomed as evidence ofthe physical features, that is the language, of their original. There is another significant circumstance of preservation: Where a text is preserved inmany manuscripts, do these show the features ofa manuscript...
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Jul 1, 2002
Garrett Cullity 
