Critic speak is tough, but we've got you covered.
Quote :"The Rationale of Copy-Text" Quote 1
[W]e need to draw a distinction between the significant, or as I shall call them "substantive", readings of the text, those namely that affect the author's meaning or the essence of his expression, and others, such in general as spelling, punctuation, word-division, and the like, affecting mainly its formal presentation, which may be regarded as accidents, or as I shall call them "accidentals".
When Textual Critics analyze a text, there are two things in particular they're concerned with. The first is a "substantive reading" of the text. This kind of reading pays attention to whether the text being edited accurately reflects the author's true meaning and expression.
Imagine, for example, that someone gives you a version of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. 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.
But then suddenly, in her next speech, image that in your text, Juliet starts speaking in slang: "Yo, Romeo, what's up. When the hell are we running away? I'm getting kinda sick of waiting around."
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. You would know this because you know that Shakespeare wasn't writing in 20th-century American slang back during the English Renaissance.
The second thing that Textual Critics look out for is "accidentals." These are things like spelling, punctuation, word-division, and so on.
So let's take Juliet's speech from Romeo and Juliet again. 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. 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."
Yeah. That printer's really messed with Juliet. There are weird signs in there, the punctuation's off, words are stuck together that shouldn't be. 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.
Quote :"The Rationale of Copy-Text" Quote 2
The true theory is, I contend, that the copy-text should govern (generally) in the matter of accidentals, but that the choice between substantive readings belongs to the general theory of textual criticism and lies altogether beyond the narrow principle of the copy-text. Thus it may happen that in a critical edition the text rightly chosen as copy may not by any means be the one that supplies most substantive readings in cases of variation. The failure to make this distinction and to apply this principle has naturally led to too close and too general a reliance upon the text chosen as basis for an edition, and there has arisen what may be called the tyranny of the copy-text, a tyranny that has, in my opinion, vitiated much of the best editorial work of the past generation.
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.
According to Greg, most editors love to base their editions of a literary work on one 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 thinks that approach is wrong, and that Textual Critics have become enslaved to the copy-text.
Let's say you have three versions of a poem. When you analyze these three versions, you notice that each version seems to be corrupt in some parts (maybe someone other than the author inserted things that shouldn't be there). But each version also seems to be "authoritative" in other parts.
How do you know which of these three versions is the most "authentic" version? Which of these three versions do you take to be the copy-text? You can't know. And so, according to Greg, you shouldn't just randomly pick one of them as the copy-text for our own edition of the poem. You should see what we can get out of each of these versions.
So far, so good, but you do need to rely on one copy-text when it comes to figuring out the accidentals of the text—things like spelling, punctuation, and so on. So, according to Greg, while we can identify and rely on a copy-text to figure out the accidentals of a text, you should not rely on one copy-text to arrive at a substantive reading of the text. Got that?