Miscellaneous Writings Associated with George Villiers, Second Duke of Buckingham

摘要

Readers of The Library may well remember the prospectus set out for this edition by one of its editors, Robert D. Hume, in 2003. The title of his essay gave a brief and pungent sense of the problem he and his collaborator Harold Love faced in 'Editing a Nebulous Author', the author being George Villiers (1628-87),tne second Duke of Buckingham. One section of the essay was called 'The Attribution Morass', and Hume summed up their joint editorial task in a succinct form: 'What, then, is an editor to do when there is no "authorized" and verifiable canon either in print or in manuscript?' Four years later and in two volumes of over 1,400 pages that they typeset themselves, Hume and Love have produced a magnificent answer to their question. The edition will be a source of enormous value to anyone interested in the courtier wits of the Restoration, but also to those concerned with editorial theory and practice. Editing without an author means that it is the work itself and its transmission rather than the person or people who wrote it that has to be the focus of critical attention. This places pressure on traditional ideas about choice of copy-texts, hence in their edition of Buckingham's most famous (perhaps his only famous) work, The Rehearsal, Hume and Love choose the first rather than the third quarto — the third supposedly containing Buckingham's final revisions in which, as they argue, he may well not have had a hand.