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Editing Victorian Playwrights: Some Problems, Priorities, and Principles
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 July 2009
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In his “Defence of Nineteenth-Century English Drama,” Michael R. Booth could confidently declare, “I am not preaching to my friends but to my enemies, and am resolved to do so unaided in this particular sermon.” I envy Professor Booth's easy task of separating friends from foes, for as a bibliographer and textual editor, I am faced with the dilemma of so many others in this field: the lines of demarcation are blurred or often nonexistent; friend and enemy are frequently one and the same. I find it unlikely that anyone to whom these remarks are addressed questions the value of nineteenth-century theatre and drama as legitimate scholarly pursuits, but I am equally confident that some—as is proportionally true in the entire community of literary scholars—have not the slightest concern for the precise and accurate transcription of the words and their forms that make up the extant theatrical texts. If these remarks sound somewhat defensive, I make no apology, for while it is probably true that “theatre scholars are not generally given to engaging in polemics,” the sad fact is that bibliographers and textual critics often are (or are forced to), thanks to the recalcitrance or shortsightedness of what seems a majority of scholars of literature and theatre. So while Professor Booth could cheerfully face his enemies “unaided,” I feel no shame in having at my back a small but valiant army of textual scholars ready to assist in defending the value of preparing authoritative critical editions—if and when they feel a work or body of works worth editing at all.
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- Copyright © American Society for Theatre Research 1976
References
1 Booth, Michael R., “A Defence of Nineteenth-Century English Drama,” ETJ, 26 (1974), p. 5Google Scholar.
2 Booth, “A Defence,” p. 5.
3 Booth, Michael R., ed., English Plays of the Nineteenth Century: Dramas (Oxford, 1969), I, viGoogle Scholar.
4 Fredson Bowers, “Practical Texts and Definitive Editions,” in Hinman, Charlton and Bowers, Fredson, Two Lectures on Editing: Shakespeare and Hawthorne (Columbus, 1969), pp. 23–25Google Scholar.
5 Bowers, Fredson, “Old Wine in New Bottles: Problems of Machine Printing,” in Editing Nineteenth-Century Texts, ed. Robson, John M. (Toronto, 1967), p. 35Google Scholar.
6 Booth, , English Plays, I, viGoogle Scholar.
7 Aside from a few anthologies reprinting London Assurance, Booth's inclusion of The Corsican Brothers in his collection, and Myron Matlaw's anthologizing of one version of The Octoroon and the Jefferson-Boucicault Rip Van Winkle in The Black Crook and Other Plays (New York, 1967)Google Scholar, Boucicault appears most frequently to modern readers only as the writer of his “Irish plays,” frequently anthologized and also brought together in The Dolmen Boucicault, ed. Krause, David (Dublin, 1964)Google Scholar.
8 The words of A. E. Wilson, the editor of J. M. Barrie's “Definitive Edition,” provide a glaring example of what criteria not to use in selecting plays: “The task of selecting the shorter plays has not been easy. Barrie wrote a great many playlets for his own amusement and for the entertainment of his friends. … Clearly, Barrie would no more have wished such items to be preserved than he would have cared to have that autumnal revue indiscretion Rosy Rapture. Pride of the Beauty Chorus, included in any edition of his plays.” From The Plays of J. M. Barrie, ed. Wilson, A. E. (London, 1928), p. ixGoogle Scholar.
9 The information regarding funding and expenditures for CEAA editions comes from telephone conversations with Harrison Hayford of the Northwestern-Newberry Library Melville edition, and Matthew J. Bruccoli of the Center for Editions of American Authors, both of whom expressed their consent for my quoting and paraphrasing their remarks in this paper.
10 Information about these series comes, respectively, from Guide to Microforms in Print (Washington, D.C., 1973), p. 127Google Scholar, and Readex Microprint Publications 1972–73: Catalog and Price List (n.p., n.d.), p. 28Google Scholar.
11 For the full definition of practical texts and a discussion of their quality and usefulness, see Bowers, “Practical Texts,” passim.
12 Center for Editions of American Authors, Statement of Editorial Principles (New York, 1967), p. 1Google Scholar. Both Bailey and Rowell in their respective introductions indicate some concern for reprinting what they consider to be the “best” or most representative forms of the plays they anthologize: “There are no ‘definitive’ editions for many of these plays. They were printed ‘as produced’ at this theatre or that one, in this or that acting version. For example, I have examined four printings of Maturin's Bertram, each different in many details from the others, and chosen what seems to me the best to exhibit the essential play”—from Bailey, J. O., ed., British Plays of the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1966), p. viGoogle Scholar; and, “The texts here printed aim at reproducing the play as originally performed, though the conditions of play-printing in the nineteenth century must make the fulfilment of that aim uncertain. A collation of variant texts has been undertaken in several instances” —from Rowell, George, ed., Nineteenth Century Plays (London, 1953), p. xiiGoogle Scholar.
13 In addition to the articles cited in notes 4, 5, and 14, and the CEAA Statement mentioned in note 12 (together with its 1972 revised edition), see also the following standard treatments: Bowers, Fredson, “Some Principles for Scholarly Editions of Nineteenth-Century American Authors,” SB, 17 (1964), 223–228Google Scholar; rpt. in Brack, O. M. Jr., and Barnes, Warner, eds., Bibliography and Textual Criticism (Chicago, 1969), pp. 194–201Google Scholar; Bowers, Fredson, “The Method for a Critical Edition,” in On Editing Shakespeare (Charlottesville, 1966), pp. 67–101Google Scholar; Fredson Bowers, “A Preface to the Text,” in each volume of the Hawthorne Centenary Edition; and the textual introductions to individual volumes in the various CEAA editions.
14 Bowers, Fredson, “Textual Criticism,” in The Aims and Methods of Scholarship in Modern Languages and Literatures, ed. Thorpe, James, 2nd edn. (New York, 1970), p. 54Google Scholar.
15 Booth, , English Plays, I, viGoogle Scholar.
16 Herring, Paul D., “Nineteenth-Century Drama” [rev. art. of five anthologies], MP, 68 (1970), p. 88Google Scholar.
17 Krause, p. 246.
18 Booth, Michael, rev. of The Dolmen Boucicault, edited and with an Introduction by Krause, David, TN, 20 (1965), p. 84Google Scholar.
19 Bailey, p. vi. Booth's reasoning is virtually identical: “ … to facilitate reading, I have mostly discarded stage directions relating to particular entrance and exit positions and to exact places characters take up on stage” (English Plays, I, vi)Google Scholar.
20 Rowell, p. xii.
21 Rowell, p. xii.
22 Allen, Reginald, ed., The First Night Gilbert and Sullivan (New York, 1958), p. xviiiGoogle Scholar.
23 Bridget D'Oyly Carte “Introduction,” in Gilbert, W. S., The Savoy Operas, II (London, 1963), vii-xiii, passimGoogle Scholar.
24 For an extended discussion of this principle see Bowers, “Textual Criticism,” p. 46 and pp. 46–47, n. 31.
25 Booth, , English Plays, II, 170Google Scholar.
26 Information about the Lilly Library collection comes from Stump, Walter Ray, “Indiana University Acquires New Collection of Nineteenth Century Plays,” TN, 22 (1968), 120–121Google Scholar, and from personal communication with John A. Degen, a nineteenth-century theatre specialist currently a graduate assistant in the Theatre Department at Indiana University. Mr. Degen informs me that Stump's article is in error in stating that the collection is of plays from 1800 to 1850; the entire century is represented with the greatest strength seeming to be roughly for the years 1840–1870.
27 She writes that “in working on a corrected text for the Oxford University Press it has been such sources as … the various prompt books, letters, and libretti that I possess that have had to be considered in arriving at a decision as to which cuts and additions were finally authorized by Gilbert and which were not” (The Savoy Operas, II, ix)Google Scholar. It is Miss D'Oyly Carte's use of the term “authorized” here that inspired my greatly expanded application of “authoritative” revisions with reference to Victorian plays. (See below in the main text of this paper.) Not being a trained bibliographer, however, Miss D'Oyly Carte prematurely despairs of ever fully recovering all authorized variants, even from printed texts, in her statement that “it has to be admitted that a hard core exists of differences to which no authoritative answer can be given” (The Savoy Operas, II, xiii)Google Scholar. (Literally, of course, this is true since that which is authoritative must emanate from the author and poor Gilbert is long since dead; here, regrettably, is one of those instances wherein Miss D'Oyly Carte uses this term too loosely to be editorially meaningful). But she and other editors need not mourn the irrecoverable loss of authoritative readings if only they learn the bibliographer's art and heed Fredson Bowers' cheering words that the study of facts about the printing of a work “is a blessing, as any editor can testify, because it removes subjective judgment from the choice of readings among the … extant authorities” (“Old Wine in New Bottles,” p. 34).
28 Booth, , English Plays, I, 240Google Scholar.
29 I take strenuous exception to Professor Booth's dismissal of accidentals by simply noting in his introduction that “misprints have been corrected and punctuation improved, a task necessary in the often badly printed acting editions” (English Plays, I, vi)Google Scholar. Without careful determination of the value any given playwright places on his punctuation as a guide to the actor (a task best performed by reference to extant manuscripts), such “improvements” could seriously damage the fabric of the text. Furthermore, in a critical edition, the reader is entitled, in Professor Bowers' words, to “be in possession of the whole number of facts from which the editor constructed his text” (“Textual Criticism,” p.53). In this way the reader is free to accept or reject any emendations of the editor; but he cannot do this unless all of them are systematically laid out before him.
30 Statement of Editorial Principles, pp. 11–12.