By the time that Fredson Bowers published the foundational essay on the “rationale” of copy-text by his “great hero” W. W. Greg (as Bowers once described Greg to me) in Studies in Bibliography in 1950, textual scholars and editors were keen to regard their predecessors as heroes, whereas in the past such predecessors were more commonly made out to be villains. For example, the name-calling and quarrels among eighteenth-century Shakespearean editors, consigned for centuries to print in indignant prefaces and introductions, still make for particularly entertaining reading.
Although there was some pushing and shoving among leading textual critics throughout the twentieth century, these debates remained within the discipline. The seemingly all-encompassing rise of theory, however, pushed scores of literary critics into the specialized and arcane world of the editing of early modern literary texts. These critics were, for the most part, untrained in textual study (particularly in manuscript study and the transmission of the text), and sometimes this lack of training became all too apparent in their completed editions. Meanwhile, those of us who had been carefully trained in the methods of Greg or Bowers or their later interrogators, such as Jerome McGann or G. Thomas Tanselle, keenly felt the encroachment of literary critics into our discipline. After all, we had paid our dues by spending countless years in libraries and record offices, hunched over rare books and manuscripts, ruining our eyesight in doing manuscript transcriptions and print collations, and getting little thanks from anyone, including literary critics, for our trouble.
If ever there were a time to reconcile the demands of new editors (and their publishers) and the concerns of old textual critics, it is now, in the digital age. Michael Hunter's impressive and welcome book Editing Early Modern Texts is not only conciliatory but shrewd, intellectual, and tightly focused. Most of all, it is generous, both to trained and to untrained editors, allowing them to learn not only how to resolve their differences with each other but with the principles of the editions they produce. Hunter begins this process in his introduction, in which he sensitively works his way through modern editorial methods, seemingly endlessly reshaped, and “the intensity of the debates which have arisen in the field” (4); as Hunter notes, both have served, perhaps deliberately, to alienate nonspecialists.
Hunter modestly claims that the “understanding of the decisions involved in producing editions of such texts will undoubtedly be enhanced by careful consideration of the issues raised in this book” (13). He more than fulfills this complex task in his careful consideration of manuscripts, the role of print, the types of editions, the presentation of texts (printed as well as manuscript), the modernization of texts, the form and role of the apparatus, and the possibilities for indexing and searching; to each of these subjects he devotes a briskly written and informative chapter. His five appendices each present a set of challenging editorial issues and ways in which to handle them. Throughout, Hunter's quiet but firm guidance offers a great deal not just for the novice but for the experienced, and often jaded, editor. In addition, Editing Early Modern Texts would make a marvelous textbook for any course in editing or the history of the book.
Hunter is especially engaging in chapter 2 in discussing manuscripts, as in his statement that “there is something almost visceral about handling a manuscript dating from the early modern period. Such documents arguably bring us as close as we can ever get to the early modern authors and scribes who created and transmitted the texts that have come down to us, their hesitations, errors and second thoughts.” In these two sentences, he indeed captures the excitement of manuscript study, allowing him to insist that “the study and understanding of manuscripts is therefore central to textual scholarship” (14).
Hunter's ability to break down complex and intimidating documents into comprehensible and intriguing works of literature continues in chapter 3 as he discusses the format and physical production of early printed texts. In chapter 4, he provides a very useful bridge, and breathing space, as he considers the original production of texts and then turns to the modern reproduction of them by an editor. His most technical discussion comes in chapter 8, with a clear discussion of that most arcane subject—the textual apparatus. This chapter, like the others, also shows Hunter's grasp of the ways in which electronic editions are not the future but the present.
I would have liked to have seen him spend more time noting that the transmission of an early modern play (not immediately meant for publication and subject to censorship by the Master of the Revels) differs in important ways from the transmission of a prose text or poem (more immediately meant for scribal or printed publication). Yet throughout the book, with patience and generosity, Hunter reminds us just how much fun textual scholarship and editing can be, which is a wonderful accomplishment in itself.
