1
A shorter version of this article was read at the Modern Language Association Convention in San Francisco in December, 1987.
2
Téllez, Gabriel, Los Cigarrales de Toledo, Ed. Víctor Said Armesto (Madrid: Imprenta Renacimiento, 1913) 20-21.
3
James McLaverty poses this question, first formulated by F. W. Bateson with regard to the Mona Lisa and Hamlet, in his article «The Mode of Existence of Literary Works of Art: The Case of the Dunciad Variorum», Studies in Bibliography 37 (1984) 82-105. Bateson's answer was that the physical basis of the literary work of art is «'human articulations'; 'the literary original exists physically in a substratum of articulated sound'». (Essays in Critical Dissent, 1972, pp. 7-8) A book, he asserts, is a «translation» of the original, as is a photograph of the person photographed; therefore, bibliographers who devote themselves to preserving accidentals are worrying about the wrong thing. McLaverty contests this answer, saying that in many cases, since the transition from oral to written culture, the physical appearance of the literary work is extremely important, including that of Pope's Dunciad Variorum, which simultaneously employs and satirizes the pomp of scholarly apparatus. Probably no one answer to the question can be found which will adequately describe different literary forms from periods whose relationships to the written versus the spoken word were considerably different. In the case of Golden Age dramas, Bateson seems closer to the truth than McLaverty.
4
Lope de Vega Carpio, Fuenteovejuna, trans. Roy Campbell, ed. Eric Bentley, in Life is a Dream and other Spanish Classics (New York: Applause, 1985) 65-135.
5
John Garrett Underhill, trans., Four Plays by Lope de Vega (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1936) 277-355.
6
Lope de Vega Carpio, Fuente Ovejuna, ed. F. López Estrada (Madrid: Clásicos Castalia, 1969); and ed. María Grazi Profeti (Madrid: Cupsa Editorial, 1978).
7
For my summary, I am indebted to that provided by Jerome J. McGann in A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1983). William F. Hunter provides another good summary highlighting the areas in which comedia editing differs from this model, in his article, «Editing Texts in Multiple Versions», in Frank P. Casa and Michael D. McGaha, Editing the Comedia, Michigan Romance Studies 5 (1985) 24-51.
8
Bowers maintained that the author's manuscript should be the copy text, because it clearly represents the author's final intentions, and should only be emended from the first printed edition in case of obvious mechanical errors in the holograph. As McGann points out, Bowers implicitly classes modern editors/printers with medieval scribes, considering all emendations to the original to be corruptions. Others have argued against Bowers that editorial changes such as regularization of spelling and punctuation often are «authoritative» in that the author entrusts his manuscript to an editor expecting him to perform such functions, and even to suggest substantive improvements, as in the famous relationship of Thomas Wolfe to Maxwell Perkins. Tirso, however, shared Bowers' view of publishers as text corrupters. See quote above.
9
«A Defence of Poetry», in Shelley's Prose, rev. ed., ed. David Lee Clark (Albuquerque, 1966) 294. Cited in McGann, Textual Criticism, 102-103.
10
Hunter points out the difficulty of pinning down the true «original» in a footnote to his article. See p. 40, note 15.