Let's say you have three versions of a poem. Greg thinks that approach is wrong, and that Textual Critics have become enslaved to the copy-text. They find a version of the literary work that they believe to be "the best"-that is, the cleanest version available and the closest to the author's intentions-and then they base their own edition on that. Greg is building on and challenging McKerrow's definition of "copy-text." He's saying that we put way too much importance on one copy-text of a literary work, when we should be considering multiple versions of a literary work to arrive at the most authoritative version of the work.Īccording to Greg, most editors love to base their editions of a literary work on one copy-text. It's a Textual Critic's job to clean all that stuff up: to get rid of the weird signs, fix up the punctuation, and so on, in order to make sure that the "accidentals" of the speech-punctuation, word division, spelling and so on-correspond as closely as possible to the original play. There are weird signs in there, the punctuation's off, words are stuck together that shouldn't be. That printer's really messed with Juliet. The speech, when it's printed, comes out like this: "What's&#in a name? that#!!which we call a rose / By anyothername# would!! smell as sweet / So Romeo would?$$, were he not Romeo call'd, / %$#Retain that dear perfection which# he owes / Without thattitle." Let's say you want to read this speech out loud in class, and you print it out on your old, busted printer from 1989. So let's take Juliet's speech from Romeo and Juliet again. The second thing that Textual Critics look out for is "accidentals." These are things like spelling, punctuation, word-division, and so on. You would know this because you know that Shakespeare wasn't writing in 20th-century American slang back during the English Renaissance. If Juliet starts speaking like that, then you know something's up: you know that the version of Romeo and Juliet in your hands is not providing you with "substantive reading" of the text, because Shakespeare's expression and his meaning have been affected. When the hell are we running away? I'm getting kinda sick of waiting around." You're just reading along, and you get to Juliet's famous speech: "What's in a name? that which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet / So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call'd, / Retain that dear perfection which he owes/ Without that title." So far, so good.īut then suddenly, in her next speech, image that in your text, Juliet starts speaking in slang: "Yo, Romeo, what's up.
Imagine, for example, that someone gives you a version of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. This kind of reading pays attention to whether the text being edited accurately reflects the author's true meaning and expression. The first is a "substantive reading" of the text. When Textual Critics analyze a text, there are two things in particular they're concerned with.
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