I wrote:

> this is the province of critical or variorum editions, and I'm
> more than happy to have them. The interpolations in Macbeth
> are well known; they come primarily in the so-called Hecate
> scene and are probably from Middleton's The Witch. On the
> whole, I think the play is genuine S, but there are certainly
> passages that are suspect. This is true in several
> Shakespeare plays, by the way, and only reinforces the
> necessity for a good text to begin with before any
> interpretive reading or criticism.

You replied in part:

[Here is the heart of the matter. What possible difference can it make in the understanding of any work - that is, what it says - that texts are interpolated, or that variora are available? Strictly speaking, there are no authors, only the works before us; a difference in texts dictates that each should be treated as a distinct work. ]

Well, I guess we are going to have to disagree, to a degree, on this. If I’m dealing with the understanding a work by any author, I want to be sure that that’s what I have. To repeat my first example from Moby Dick (“soiled” v. “coiled”), in this instance I would be working from a corrupt text that Melville did not write at all, and any interpretation of the work would not be based on what Melville put there; it does not result in understanding of the authors “work,” because it isn’t what it may appear to be. The quotes from Mann and Sayers are undoubtedly right, but would either of them have thought themselves well represented by a spurious text? I do not know about Sayres, but Mann corrected proofs to a fare-thee-well. I could point to any number of letters of Swinburne in which he states that careless proofreading has spolied the meaning of a line or stanza.

For the same reason, I want to know – in so far as is possible – what the author wanted his text to be. Errors and Interpolations, in so far as they can be excised, I think ought to go. That doesn’t mean that I can’t read Macbeth both with and without interpolations as two separate texts, each with its own meaning/structure, but I want to know which is which. The same is true for variora, which are often interesting in their own right, revealing differences in an author’s thought and understanding of his own work as directly reflected in the text.. Note that I am not calling for reading the text through some external knowledge of the author; I am calling for making sure that what I have is a coherent text to read. Nothing prevents me then from reading a poem in two versions as two different texts, each entitled to its own understanding; think of the “Rape of the Lock” with and without the machinery of the sylphs.

You say:

"Historical criticism of literature should fall under the aegis of History classes and stand clear of any Literature class."

I quite agree. But I do not think guaranteeing the authenticity of a text or looking at different versions of a text undermines literary understanding. In fact, my feeling is rather the opposite.

Best,

Lee