Eeyore

I think I am in love with A.E. Housman
wrote Wendy Cope
Which puts me in a worse than usual fix.
No woman ever stood a chance with Housman,
And besides he's been dead since 1936.
It's a well-known fact that dead gay men are peculiarly attractive, a theme I may embellish some other time; but my main reaction to Housman is one of daunted relief that I will never encounter him at a conference. This is because although I read A Shropshire Lad a long time ago -- and have come across a lot of men at Cambridge whose favourite poetry it is, unexpectedly -- I mainly meet him in the sphere of textual criticism, where he has the sharpest tongue there has ever been. I well remember our esteemed Prof., when we were little undergraduates doing the Part II Textual Criticism course, reading Housman to us, and then telling us not to imitate him because we didn't have the brilliance to pull it off. I've been rereading a particular article, for the paper I'm writing, called "The Application of Thought to Textual Criticism". It's worth having a look at for its complex and sometimes over-involved metaphors about rhinoceroses hunting for fleas. It ends:
"Knowledge is good, method is good, but one thing beyond all others is necessary; and that is to have a head, not a pumpkin, on your shoulders and brains, not pudding, in your head."
He made his life's work to edit Manilius, a bad and uninteresting Latin poet who had previously been edited by Scaliger and Bentley, solely on the grounds of the problems that the text presented, and his introduction is full of harsh things.
"An editor of no judgement, perpetually confronted with a couple of MSS to choose from, cannot but feel in every fibre of his being that he is a donkey between two bundles of hay. What shall he do now? Leave criticism to critics, you may say, and betake himself to any honest trade for which he is less unfit. But he prefers a more flattering solution: he confusedly imagines that if one bundle of hay is removed he will cease to be a donkey."
That's me! That's how I feel when I have to decide between two readings in one of my charters! Now, I don't try to remove a manuscript, I try to work out which of the two readings is better if either, and I record the other in the apparatus criticus, but I don't feel in the least fitted to choose between the two, especially if they both make grammatical sense. Nor do I feel that it is inappropriate, if one text is usually the better, to give its variants more weight. I'm not sure I'm even wrong there; but I still can't shake off the image of myself as donkey. I have not the shadow of a doubt that if Housman met me he would consider my head a pumpkin full of pudding.

Bentley was Housman's great hero: he was similarly acerbic in his judgements, and quite as certain that almost all other men were blockheads. Towards the end of his life he edited Milton's Paradise Lost. Observing that Milton was blind, and that he dictated to his daughters (Milton taught his daughters to read Greek letters but not to understand the Greek itself so that they could act as his ammanuenses, because he was a nasty piece of work), and that those daughters were ladies of the female persuasion and therefore stupid, he emended Milton's text like billy-ho, replacing words with other words which sounded similar and seemed to Bentley more worthy of Milton's greatness. No one was sure if he was joking. This is probably an idea whose time has come, in the same way that it took the world a few centuries to catch up with Tristram Shandy. It seems a bit like Pierre Menard rewriting Don Quixote word for word the same; it could be a witty comment on the way we interact with a text. Someone should get hold of Bentley's edition and stage a reading; it would be art, I tell you.

Bentley and Housman both are daunting figures, and if the theory of textual criticism has moved on from their time I don't think it has moved quite as far as some people think. You can pick a manuscript and do a diplomatic edition, that is a dot for dot reproduction of the manuscript's readings, essentially just a transcription, but anyone with half a brain will be better off with a facsimile, or the manuscript itself, which rather defeats the object, especially in these days of increasing digitisation. And how fair is it to ask an undergraduate or a historian to cope with that? It's not at all unreasonable for people to want an edition they can read, with expert advice on the text's variants, and that is the great strength of the old school text-critical method.

PS I know from reading her articles that Wendy Cope hates being quoted online, and sees it as equivalent to robbing her. Wendy Cope, I say you are wrong; that the more people know of you as a funny poet the more they will buy your books. Not that this blog is going to spread your fame. Maybe I'll buy your latest sometime to appease my guilt.