John Donne Methodized; Or, How to Improve Donne's Impossible Text with the Assistance of His Several Editors
| Autor: | C. A. Patrides |
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| Rok vydání: | 1985 |
| Předmět: | |
| Zdroj: | Modern Philology. 82:365-373 |
| ISSN: | 1545-6951 0026-8232 |
| DOI: | 10.1086/391404 |
| Popis: | When in the course of textual criticism it becomes necessary for an editor to dissolve the bands which connect him with every other, and to assume the separate and equal station to which he invariably believes the laws of scholarship entitle him, a decent respect to the opinions of his predecessors requires that he should declare the causes which impelled him to the separation. Or so one might claim, somewhat too ardently. But an editor cannot in fact dissolve the bands with his predecessors since (1) he depends on their cumulative wisdom to resolve countless problems and (2) he compounds their errors by committing at least as many himself, and often alas! quite a number more. As a result of my own experience with several texts-the poetry of Herbert and Milton as well as the prose of Sir Walter Ralegh, Sir Thomas Browne, Milton, and the Cambridge Platonists'-I inclined toward optimism in all textual matters until I embarked on an edition of the poetry of Donne.2 Nine years later, properly chastened, I have very few illusions left that Donne can ever be edited to one's satisfaction, not to mention the satisfaction of his discriminating readers. Countless hours spent with the texts prepared by our foremost editors-first the mighty Sir Herbert Grierson, and next: John Hayward, Helen Gardner, W. Milgate, John T. Shawcross, and A. J. Smith3-have impelled me to the resolution that Donne's text is both far more and far less complex than I had reason to believe. It is less complex, I discovered, in the sense that all the elaborate theories about the State of the Manuscripts and the equally elaborate statements of Editorial Principles should be approached with extreme skepticism since the former tend often toward the merely ingenious, while the latter (as we are to observe in the ensuing pages) are in practice violated rather too frequently. Donne's text is at the same time more complex in the sense that an editor is constantly obliged to determine the "correct" readings on the basis of sources that, jointly considered, cannot be regarded as indisputably authoritative. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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