Editing Textual criticism (section)

==== Application to works of all periods ====
[[Image:A Midsummer Night's Dream.jpg|thumb|200px|William Shakespeare, ''[[A Midsummer Night's Dream]]'' ([[First Folio]])]]
In his 1964 essay, "Some Principles for Scholarly Editions of Nineteenth-Century American Authors", Bowers said that "the theory of copy-text proposed by Sir Walter Greg rules supreme".{{sfn|Bowers|1964|p=224}} Bowers's assertion of "supremacy" was in contrast to Greg's more modest claim that "My desire is rather to provoke discussion than to lay down the law".{{sfn|Greg|1950|p=36}}

Whereas Greg had limited his illustrative examples to English Renaissance drama, where his expertise lay, Bowers argued that the rationale was "the most workable editorial principle yet contrived to produce a critical text that is authoritative in the maximum of its details whether the author be Shakespeare, [[John Dryden|Dryden]], [[Henry Fielding|Fielding]], [[Nathaniel Hawthorne]], or [[Stephen Crane]]. The principle is sound without regard for the literary period."{{sfn|Bowers|1972|p=86}} For works where an author's manuscript survived—a case Greg had not considered—Bowers concluded that the manuscript should generally serve as copy-text. Citing the example of Nathaniel Hawthorne, he noted:

{{blockquote|When an author's manuscript is preserved, this has paramount authority, of course. Yet the fallacy is still maintained that since the first edition was proofread by the author, it must represent his final intentions and hence should be chosen as copy-text. Practical experience shows the contrary. When one collates the manuscript of ''[[The House of the Seven Gables]]'' against the first printed edition, one finds an average of ten to fifteen differences per page between the manuscript and the print, many of them consistent alterations from the manuscript system of punctuation, capitalization, spelling, and word-division. It would be ridiculous to argue that Hawthorne made approximately three to four thousand small changes in proof, and then wrote the manuscript of ''[[The Blithedale Romance]]'' according to the same system as the manuscript of the ''Seven Gables'', a system that he had rejected in proof.{{sfn|Bowers|1964|p=226}}}}

Following Greg, the editor would then replace any of the manuscript readings with substantives from printed editions that could be reliably attributed to the author: "Obviously, an editor cannot simply reprint the manuscript, and he must substitute for its readings any words that he believes Hawthorne changed in proof."{{sfn|Bowers|1964|p=226}}