theoryofliteratu00inwell

The Ordering and Establishing of Evidence 53
all abbreviations and scribal errors and all the vagaries of the
original punctuation. This may be important for other editors
or sometimes for linguists but is a needless impediment for the
literary scholar. We plead not for modernized texts but for readable
texts which will avoid unnecessary guesses and changes and
give reasonable help by minimizing attention to purely scribal
conventions and habits.
The problems of editing printed materials are usually somewhat
simpler than those of editing manuscripts, though in gen-
eral they are similar. But there is a distinction, formerly not
always understood. In the case of nearly all classical MSS, we
are met with documents from very different times and places,
centuries remote from the original, and hence are free to use
most of these MSS, as each may be presumed to be derived from
some ultimate ancient authority. In the case of books, however,
usually only one or two editions have any kind of independent
authority. A choice has to be made of a basic edition, which will
usually be either the first edition or the last edition supervised by
the author. In some cases, such as Whitman's Leaves of Grass,
which underwent many successive additions and revisions, or
Pope's Dunciad, which exists in at least two widely divergent
versions, it may be necessary, for a critical edition, to print all or
both versions. 14 On the whole, modern editors are more reluctant
to produce complete eclectic texts, though one should realize that
practically all editions of Hamlet have been hybrids between the
Second Quarto and the Folio. With Elizabethan plays, one may
have to come to the conclusion that sometimes there was no final
version which can be reconstructed. As in oral poetry (e.g., the
ballads), the hunt for a single archetype is futile. It was long be-
fore editors of ballads gave up the search for it. Percy and Scott
"contaminated" different versions freely (and even rewrote
them), while the first scientific editors such as Motherwell
chose one version as superior and original. Finally Child decided
to print all versions. 15
Elizabethan plays represent, in some way, unique textual
problems: their corruption is far greater than that of most
contemporary books, partly because plays were not considered
worth much attention in proofreading and partly because the
MSS from which they were printed were often the much re-