"Take your choice of those that best can ayde your action": Editing and
the Electronic Text
Hardy M. Cook
Bowie State University
David Scott Kastan contends in his piece for the 1996 Shakespeare
Studies Forum: Editing Early Modern Texts that "Editing has suddenly
become hot, or, if not exactly hot as an activity to undertake (it does,
after all, involve a lot of very tedious, numbingly cold, work), at
least a hot topic (arguably the hot topic) to debate" (My emphasis).
Kastan's principal reason for this contention centers on the manner in
which many postmodern scholars approach early modern texts: "Never has
the materiality of the texts we study seemed so compelling, so
unavoidable, and so exhilaratingly problematic" (30). Whether one
agrees that editing is "the hot topic" to debate, certainly much has
been written on the subject in the past fifteen years since Jerome J.
McGann's A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism, prompting many to
reexamine the New Bibliography and their assumptions about editing and
edited texts.
Despite the controversy, few would object to D. C. Greetham's definition
of textual scholarship: "Textual scholarship is more than just
'criticism,' however, and it is best defined as the general term for all
the activities associated with discovering, describing, transcribing,
editing, glossing, annotating, and commenting on texts" (103). Current
disagreements concentrate less on the activities of editing than its
methods or approaches. G. Thomas Tanselle in "The Varieties of
Scholarly Editing" provides in a convenient chart a taxonomy of these
approaches (11). Tanselle begins by distinguishing between
Nonhistorical and Historical Editing. Historical Editing is divided
into editing that reproduces documentary texts without alterations
(facsimiles and literal, that is diplomatic, transcriptions) and editing
that introduces alterations into documentary texts. This latter
category differentiates between degrees of editorial alteration and
applies equally to the next division between works viewed as products of
individuals and works viewed as collaborative (social) products, both of
which are further subdivided. All the activities described by Greetham
also apply to the editing of electronic versions of the texts in
Tanselle's taxonomy, whether they be electronic diplomatic
transcriptions of Shakespeare's plays as they originally appeared in
print or electronic modern critical editions of those same works. In
this paper, I will not concentrate on the technical aspects of editing
electronic texts - TEI (The Text Encoding Initiative) or the intricacies
of SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language) -I will, however, strive
to demonstrate that when one edits an electronic text that editor not
only performs the activities that Greetham describes but also encodes or
tags the electronic text for the particular purpose or use for which it
is being created, editing that "best can aid your action" to appropriate
Cominius' remark to Caius Martius at the Battle of Corioles.
Shakespeareans familiar with the Malone Society facsimiles, the Allen
and Muir Shakespeare's Plays in Quarto, and the Hinman Norton Facsimile
of the First Folio will be delighted to know that electronic facsimiles
are steadily increasing in availability. The Shakespeare: His Life,
Times, Works and Sources CD-ROM, for example, contains black and white
facsimiles of approximately 5,000 images of 169 scanned documents,
including the complete texts of Venus and Adonis (Q1, 1593), The Rape of
Lucrece (Q1, 1594), Shakespeare's Sonnets (Q1, 1609), The true Tragedie
of Richard Duke of York, and the death of good King Henrie the Sixt (Q1,
1595), Richard II (Q1, 1597; Q2, 1598 title page; and Q4, 1608), Hamlet
(Q2, 1604-5), Pericles (Q1 1609), and Two Noble Kinsmen (Q1, 1634).
Other facsimiles of Shakespeare and early modern texts also appear on
the Internet. Perhaps the finest of these sites is the University of
Pennsylvania's Center for Electronic Text and Image, which offers
stunning JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group) images of the Furness
Shakespeare Library's Q2 King Lear (1619) and portions of its First
Folio. Other facsimiles available here are the Tate (1681) and Pope
(1723) King Lear, Benson's 1640 Poems: written by Wil. Shake-speare.
Gent., passages and woodcuts from Holinshed's Chronicles (1577),
Heywood's Fair Maid of the West (1631), and woodcuts from Foxe's Actes
and Monuments. With electronic facsimiles, about the only editorial
decision one needs to make involves deciding on what kind of image to
use, with the choices ranging from scanned images to the highest quality
JPEG ones.
In the discussion that follows regarding machine-readable texts, I will
be moving in a progression from unformatted text (text that contains
only content) to formatted text (text that includes some descriptive
information) to encoded text (text that consists of information about
the text as well as the text itself).
For a long time, the most common electronic texts of Shakespeare were
ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) texts, better
know as plain or unformatted text files. Plain text files are just that
- they can be read, searched, or printed using a file in a
word-processing program, or on a CD-ROM, or from the Internet - but, in
general, they are not manipulated in any other manner. Probably the
most easily obtainable plain text edition of Shakespeare on the web is
The Complete Moby(tm) Shakespeare, an edition based on The Stratford
Town modern-spelling edition of 1911, edited by Arthur Bullen and
released on the Internet by Grady Ward. The Moby Shakespeare can be
download from a number of sites,
, and is the edition
upon which the MIT "The Complete Works of William Shakespeare,"
, and Matty Farrow's
"The Works of the Bard,"
, sites are
based. Both sites note, however, that "There may be differences between
a copy of a play that you happen to be familiar with and the one of this
server." This is a bit of an understatement. The Moby Shakespeare is
derived from a text that is about ninety years old and contains
inaccuracies and unconventional pointing.
The Oxford Text Archives (OTA), , sells ASCII
old-spelling versions of original editions of Shakespeare's works,
prepared by Trevor Howard-Hill. These editions adopt limited encoding,
such as the use of curly brackets to indicate italic and angle brackets
to enclose speech prefixes as seen in the OTA's Q1 Hamlet, which also
uses angle brackets to include page numbers. Of course, Q1 Hamlet did
not, in fact, have page numbers, pages being identified in early modern
texts by their signatures. The OTA's F1 Macbeth contains a bit more
encoding, still using the curly brackets for italic but adding tags for
such features as the title, stage directions, scene divisions, and line
numbers; other features such as ornaments, column divisions, titling
fonts, and block letters are not encoded.
The advantage that plain texts had in the early days of the personal
computing revolution was that they could be read by any word-processing
program or used on any platform from mainframe to minicomputer, from PC
to Mac, and they could be exchanged electronically by disks, e-mail, or
file transfer. The disadvantage of these same texts was that they were
unformatted texts. If one wanted to represent italic or bold, one had
to use conventions like curly brackets or asterisks or other ASCII
characters. Nevertheless, plain texts were less intended for reading on
the screen than for early forms of textual analysis, with the most basic
of these functions being searching for words or phrases. The editor's
task when producing a plain text is to convert that text, whether it be
a "modern" edition or an old-spelling one, from print into electronic
form, usually by transcribing it on a computer and then checking the
resultant text for accuracy.
Hypertext editions, found on CD-ROMs and the Internet, look much like
their print counterparts as evident in the five plays (MND, MV, 1H4,
Ham., Oth., and Tmp.) included in The Norton Shakespeare Workshop CD-ROM
and the Oxford edition of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare on
CD-ROM from Andromeda Interactive, yet hypertext editions can go much
further than print editions. The BBC Shakespeare on CD-ROM: Macbeth and
The Voyager Shakespeare Macbeth include imbedded annotations, audio
tracks, film clips, and commentary and notes. The BBC version that can
be packaged with the Bevington Complete Works is glitzier and more media
savvy than The Voyager, but The Voyager far surpasses the BBC with the
depth of its scholarship in the commentary and textual notes by David
Rodes and A. R. Braunmuller. The BBC uses the Peter Alexander text,
clips from The BBC TV Shakespeare, a BBC Radio audio version with
Anthony Quayle, and BBC interviews with actors, directors, and critics.
The Voyager contains the 1993 New Cambridge edition, an RSC Performance
(Thames Productions, 1976) with Ian McKellen, and clips from Orson
Welles's (Republic Pictures, 1948) and Roman Polanski's (Playboy
Productions and Columbia, 1971) films as well as Akira Kurasawa's Throne
of Blood (Toko, 1958). With both these CD-ROMs, one can read the text
while listening to the audio version, view clips of various scenes,
access commentary and notes at any time, and click on highlighted words
for annotations.
Hypertext editions on the Internet also encourage forms of non-linear
reading. Bernice Kilman's electronic edition of The Enfolded Hamlet,
, has text common to Q2 and F1 in
blue, text only in Q2 in green, and text only in F1 in red. One can
read the enfolded version or the Q2 green text or the F1 red text.
Another Internet site of scholarly interest is Ian Lancashire's
Renaissance Electronic Texts
. The RET is a
"series of old-spelling, SGML-encoded editions of early individual
copies of English Renaissance books and manuscripts, and of plain
transcriptions of such works, published on the World Wide Web as a free
resource for students of the period." The edition of Shake-speares
Sonnets (Q1, 1609) that Ian Lancashire and I have prepared for the RET
consists of a critical introduction, three versions of the text - HTML
(for reading on the screen), SGML (for advanced study), and COCOA (for
use with TACT and OCP, text concordance and analysis programs discussed
below) - and supporting appendices. RET editions provide significant
amounts of bibliographical information embedded in each text. Even the
HTML text, the least bibliographically detailed version, records
signatures, forms, compositors, the long-s, ligatures, line numbers,
rhyme schemes, and catchwords. Michael Best's Internet Shakespeare
Editions, , is more ambitious: "The aim
of the Internet Shakespeare Editions is to make scholarly, fully
annotated texts of Shakespeare's plays available in a form native to the
medium of the Internet." The ISA appears to be just what Greetham had
in mind when he wrote approximately seven years ago: "While computers
have been used to research, edit, produce, and typeset printed critical
editions, fully electronic texts, marketed in computer-readable form and
even manipulated by the reader and used to create reader-designed
critical editions, are still in the planning stages - although, there is
little doubt that they will come soon. The very notion of 'hypertext,'
a cumulative electronic storage of all forms and states of text forming
that text's history, will assuredly provide the raw and combinatory
materials for the production of reader- or, more correctly,
viewer-created editions in the near future . . . (121)." All these
varieties of hypertext editions are possible because an editor encodes
them in HTML (HyperText Markup Language), thus enabling the effects
described above.
Others forms of encoding are used to produce texts for concordance and
analysis programs. The Oxford Concordance Program (OCP), originally
developed as a mainframe concordance program then implemented for
micro-computers, and TACT (Text-Analysis Computing Tools), developed at
the Centre for Computing in the Humanities, University of Toronto,
require texts encoded in COCOA, whose "tags are used to assign values to
variables at certain positions in a text" (Lancashire 13).
WordCruncher, developed in the early 1980s at Brigham Young University,
employs a much simpler three-level tagging system. The editor tags or
encodes texts to enable them to be manipulated and analyzed by these
programs.
I began this paper by citing Kastan's contention that editing has become
a hot topic of debate because of interest in the "materiality" of early
modern texts. Stephen Orgel notes, for example, ". . . clearly the
idea of a book embodying the final, perfected text was not a Renaissance
one, and what the Renaissance practice produced was an edition in which
it was unlikely that any copy of a book would be identical to any other
copy" (23). Thus, an interest in the materiality of an early modern
text entails an interest in what Randall McLeod refers to in one place
as "the iconicity of the text" ("UNEditing" 38) and in another, under
the pseudonym Random Clod, as the early modern typographical medium's
"complex, ambiguous, contradictory, unhomogeneous" face ("Information"
246). Susan Zimmerman in her "Afterword to the Forum: Editing Early
Modern Texts" summarizes the position of poststructuralist editors: "As
its critics see it, the New Bibliography represents an effort to
structure early modern texts in ways that are inappropriate to the
conditions of their production, to impose an arbitrary order on
processes that are fundamentally 'unstable' . . . . According to this
view, those agencies which render early modern texts "unstable" - for
example, literary conventions, printing house practices, extra-authorial
interventions (such as the circulation of scribal transcripts), and in
the case of playtexts, playhouse revisions - simultaneously render any
concept of unitary textual integrity untenable, particularly one
proceeding from the "original" intention of the author. It is, then,
textual instability itself that contemporary editions should try to
foreground, however, imperfectly, through multiple-version editions,
facsimile editions, hypertext editions, and so on (71)." In fact, Post
New Bibliographers evince less interest in "substantives" (content) and
"accidentals" (orthography) than in what McGann identifies as the
linguistic codes (the words) and bibliographical codes (the typography,
layout, paper, order, and so on) (Critique; "What" 23) or what McLeod
refers to as lexical items and the system of graphic codes (Clod 250).
Electronic editors who wish to record bibliographical codes as well as
linguistic ones can use SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language) and
identify every significant feature of an individual text. In the SGML
version of Venus and Adonis that I am preparing for the Internet
Shakespeare Editions, I identify by encoding features such as the
headpiece by its reference to Plomer, the printer's device by its
reference to McKerrow, each individual piece of type by font type as
well as the long-s and all ligatures. Throughout catchwords,
signatures, and forms as well as the corresponding physical page numbers
are tagged. Stanza numbers and rhymes, book division line numbers and
stanza line numbers, running titles, hung words, all are identified by
SGML tags.
Ian Lancashire has argued strongly that the Text Encoding Initiative's
"firm proposals for a standard way to represent textual knowledge in
SGML" do provide "valuable advice on most questions that arise in
tagging texts, it remains to be seen whether the humanities will accept
the TEI's proposed standard" (206). Nevertheless, SGML does enable
electronic editors to "represent textual knowledge" at the very least
for archival purposes. As the electronic age continues, the importance
of archiving all these features of material books into electronic form
cannot be underestimated, as Greetham has observed: "Another textual
control over the canon occurred, and occurs, during any major change in
medium. Just as the move from roll to codex (the familiar folded,
stitched book) during the early Christian Era determined the survival of
ancient works into the medieval canon, so later the move from script to
print and now the similar move from print to electronic publishing has
determined, and will determine, what materials are preserved for later
study (107)."
In the paper, I have illustrated the variety of electronic text. These
texts are made available through different means. For all these
electronic texts, electronic editors must make all the same decisions as
their print counterparts, but they must also encode those texts for the
purpose to which they are to be used and in doing so produce electronic
textual alternatives "that best can aid your action."
Works Cited
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Quarto: A Facsimile Edition of Copies Primarily from the Henry E.
Huntington Library. Berkeley: U of California P, 1981.
BBC Shakespeare on CD-ROM: Macbeth. CD-ROM. London: ATTICA, BBC,
HarperCollins, 1995.
Braunmuller, A. R., ed. The Voyager Shakespeare Macbeth. Commentary by
David S. Rodes. CD-ROM. New York: Voyager, 1994.
Center for Electronic and Text Image. The Furness Shakespeare Library.
.
Center for Electronic Text and Image. The History of King Lear [1619:
Q2]. October 8, 1997.
.
Center for Electronic Text and Image. The Tragedie of King Lear [1623:
F1]." October 8, 1997.
.
Clod, Random [Randall McLeod]. "Information of Information." TEXT 5
(1991): 241-81.
The Complete Moby(tm) Shakespeare.
.
Farrow, Matty. "The Works of the Bard."
.
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Modern Languages and Literatures. Ed. Joseph Gibaldi. 2nd ed. New
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Shakespeare. New York: Norton, 1968.
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Kastan, David Scott. "The Mechanics of Culture: Editing Shakespeare
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