The Life of Texts: Evidence in Textual Production, Transmission and Reception

摘要

THIS VOLUME PUBLISHES A SERIES OF LECTURES originally delivered at the University of Durham in 2014; put like this, it sounds boring, but the result is an impressive one. Though none of the authors actually cites it, the approach and outcome are largely reminiscent of Philip Gaskell's wonderful volume From Writer to Reader (1978), which analysed the intricacies of textual transmission, including the edition of short extracts, of a dozen English or American authors, from Harington to Stoppard (see the important, if nit-picking, review by G. T. Tanselle in The Library, Ⅵ, 3 (1980), 337-50). Here instead, several different hands are at work, ranging across much wider chronologies and literatures, each explaining their own peculiar speciality, and the parameters are more general. In a perceptive and thought-provoking introduction, Richard Gameson surveys the ways in which texts appropriate and approximate separate existences, taking as his example lines 13-16 of Laurence Binyon's For the Fallen, where the first verse-often slightly misremem-bered-reads 'They shall grow not old as we that are left grow old'. The autograph at the author's Oxford college, Trinity, reproduced here, shows several differences, in particular the weakening of the Shakespearian echo in line 14: 'Age shall not [wither ＞] weary them, nor the years condemn.' The poem was written and published in The Times in September 1914, before the real slaughter began; since then this particular stanza has been memorized by numerous generations and features-often in a distorted fashion-on countless war memorials and gravestones (see The Library, Ⅶ, 1 (2000), 197-200). As primarily a manuscript scholar, Gameson is less certain of his ground, however, when he comes to speak of print and printing technologies. For instance, when he asserts that texts were copied 'by the hand of a typesetter who, as he was setting in reverse, was more likely than a scribe to make errors' (p. 12), one might add that the sorts in the composing stick were also upside down. Just as Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, backwards and in high heels, no compositor had the slightest difficulty in setting or reading an upside-down text (not 'reverse', since it actually went from left to right). Likewise, the assertion that 'proof-reading could only begin once printing was underway' (p. 13) ignores solutions such as reading in the lead, contact proofs where pieces of paper were laid on the ink surface and rubbed lightly, as well as formal proofs, once the forme was locked up and trialled; stop-press correction could still occur once printing had started, but in most instances the changes are trivial. It is certainly true as a consequence that 'each finished book could in principle be composed of a different selection of corrected and uncorrected' sheets (not 'pages') (p. 13), and it should be added that sheets were often reset, either wholly or partially, in order to correct mistakes or alter readings, sometimes after the distribution of the first copies (in technical parlance: cancels).