theoryofliteratu00inwell

The Ordering and Establishing of Evidence 5 I
tinctions between editions may allow us to trace the stages of the
author's revision and thus throw light on problems of the genesis
and evolution of the work of art. A skillfully edited bibliography
such as the CBEL maps out vast areas for research ; and specialized
bibliographies such as Greg's Bibliography of English
Drama, Johnson's Spenser Bibliography, Macdonald's Dryden
Bibliography, Griffith's Pope 5 may be guides to many problems
of literary history. Such bibliographies may necessitate investi-
gations into printing house practices, booksellers' and publishers'
histories; and they require knowledge of printers' devices, watermarks,
type fonts, compositors' practices, and bindings. Some-
thing like a library science, or certainly an immense erudition
on the history of book production, is needed to decide questions
which, by their implications as to date, order of editions, etc.,
may be important for literary history. "Descriptive" bibliog-
raphy, which uses all the arts of collating and examining of the
actual make-up of a book, must thus be distinguished from
"enumerative" bibliography, the compiling of book lists which
give descriptive data only sufficient for identification. 6
Once the preliminary task of assembly and cataloguing is
completed, the process of editing begins. Editing is often an
extremely complex series of labors, inclusive of both interpre-
tation and historical research. There are editions which in the
introductions and notes contain important criticism. Indeed, an
edition may be a complex of almost every kind of literary study.
Editions have played a very important role in the history of
literary studies : they may—to quote a recent example, like F. N.
Robinson's edition of Chaucer—serve as a repository of learning,
as a handbook of all the knowledge about an author. But
taken in its central meaning as the establishment of the text of
a work, editing has its own problems, among which actual "tex-
tual criticism" is a highly developed technique with a long his-
tory especially in classical and Biblical scholarship. 7
One must distinguish rather sharply between the problems
which arise in editing classical or medieval MSS on the one
hand and, on the other, printed matter. MS materials will neces-
sitate, first, a knowledge of paleography, a study which has
established very subtle criteria for the dating of MSS and has
produced useful manuals for the deciphering of abbreviations. 8