Notes
[1] As discussed in his "Crafting Editorial Settlements," Romanticism on the Net 1996-2006: Celebrating Ten Years of Online Publishing (February-May 2006), http://www.erudit.org/revue/ron/2006/v/n41-42/013150ar.html, these are "something like treaties with term limits" that operate "by negotiation and mutual accommodation, but they usually have built into them elements of forceful imposition. They are most often [. . .] imposed by the requirements of the editors' time and situation—the editorial version of posterity—and imposed by the living upon the defenseless dead" (par. 6). In Eaves's sweeping historical overview, well worth summarizing here, the nineteenth century settlement of radical normalization established a literary and artistic niche for Blake by splitting his legacy into conventional categories of words and pictures, culling out and repackaging his words in a form envisioned by W. M. Rossetti, "with clear print, reasonable division of lines, and like aids to business-like perusal" (qtd. in par. 8), and shifting the art to the sidelines. The twentieth century settlement of consolidation and institutionalization led to the Keynes edition and then to the work of scholars and art historians, within their respective fields, who created the essential disciplinary resources of "printed editions of rigorously edited texts [Erdman and Bentley], extensive catalogues of engravings [Bindman, Essick], drawings, and paintings [Butlin], extensive bibliographies [Bentley]" and biographical records [Bentley] (par. 18; my bracketed insertions). The early twenty-first century settlement of reorienting, reverting, and superconsolidation has so far led to "x-editing," the interactive, collaborative, offsite, highly adaptive, approximate, tentative, experimental, and "radically incomplete" process (par. 28) that is producing the ongoing Blake Archive, simultaneously "liberat[ing] editing from old compromises" and "generating fresh compromises whose hallmark is daunting, potentially paralyzing uncertainty," "on the brink of the known editorial universe" (par. 33).
[2] There is much to be said in favor of a reader-friendly text: as Essick has confessed, "When I read Blake just for fun, even serious fun, I read the Geoffrey Keynes edition. I think he [. . .] did a fine job at using twentieth-century punctuation conventions to represent Blake's verbal content" (Kraus 188-89). Readers of Blake are blessed with a wide array of options. Besides the Stevenson and Fuller editions discussed in this issue, and Alicia Ostriker's highly regarded, fully annotated Penguin edition, substantial editions in print prepared with students and nonspecialists in mind include, most recently, selections by G. E. Bentley, Jr. (Penguin) in which, according to "A Note on the Texts," xxxii-xxxv, the editor has "silently added punctuation where there might otherwise be confusion" and "retained Blake's eighteenth-century and sometimes idiosyncratic spelling [ . . .] but [. . .] silently corrected mere errors in transcription [. . . ]." (xxxiii) and by Michael Mason (Oxford World's Classics)—reviewed, with negative comparisons to annotations in the 1979 Norton Blake by E. B. Murray (esp. 147-53). Of the two non-facsimile specialist editions, that of David V. Erdman, Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, first published in 1965 and most recently revised in 1988, has remained the standard in advanced courses and in scholarly citations in part because of its portability and affordability. On the many merits of G. E. Bentley, Jr.'s 1978 sholarly edition, see John E. Grant's essay review.
[3] Discussed most fully in "Theory, Literary Pragmatics, and the Editorial Horizon," the opening chapter of his The Textual Condition (19-47); presented more briefly in "Literary Pragmatics and the Editorial Horizon."
[4] A strong exception is Morris Eaves's cri di coeur on electronic editing in "Multimedia Body Plans: A Self-Assessment": "If you listen closely to editors editing, you will always hear the harsh sounds of primal conflict as visionary aspirations clash with reality. In a techno-commercial world the pressures of hard necessity bear down no less on editing with electrons than with ink, wood, or flesh. Yet somehow the fleshly editors of the amazing William Blake Archive continue to provide electronic access to images of all of Blake's illuminated books (and eventually all copies of all of these books) as well as works in other media while also keeping their electronic existence current through waves of technological change. (On a doomed, too-early, pre-Web effort with similar first-phase goals, see my account of the Iowa Blake Videodisc Project.)
[5] This was of course long before McGann's revolutionary work on editing texts of Blake's period in A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism, in which McGann insists that "good nonspecialist editions can involve as much scholarly intelligence as critical editions" in that they "incorporate in the reading text alone a process of historical translation analogous to what the scholar sets forth through his critical apparatus (95-96) and notes that "The nonspecialist editor [unlike the critical editor] is perforce highly conscious of [contemporary] demands" and may even be in a position to "pass a corresponding judgment upon the work of critical editors" (96).
[6] For an informative overview of the editorial approach that I once believed was timeless, see Paul Werstine, who notes that, in all fairness, copy-text editors were the first to follow up on W. W. Greg's caveat that his method applied only to sixteenth- and seventeeth-century publishing conditions. Werstine cites Bowers on "radiating texts" in Library 5th ser., 27 (June 1972): 81-115; Thomas Tanselle, "Editorial Apparatus for Editing Radiating Texts," Library 5th ser., 29 (September 1974): 330-337 and his "Editing without a Copy-Text," Studies in Bibliography 47 (1994): 1-22; and Richard Bucci, "Tanselle's 'Editing without a Copy-Text: Genesis, Issues, Prospects," Studies in Bibliography 56 (2003-2004): 1-44. These matters are also helpfully reviewed by W. Speed Hill.
[7] Our sense of what constitutes syntactical egregiousness has greatly mellowed over time. For example, "Damn braces: Bless relaxes," the 1979 Norton text for item 57 in "Proverbs of Hell," follows Keynes in utterly effacing Blake's indubitable dot after "Damn." But the 2008 Norton text, "Damn, braces: Bless relaxes," despite its further complicating parsing ambiguities (noted in my "The Devil's Syntax and the OED"), follows editors of the Blake Archive in at least acknowledging the existence of some sort of mark in our source text printed from Blake's now lost etched plate—whether a true authorial period introduced perversely or indifferently; or an autographically original comma that lost its tail in the etching bath, mentioned by Viscomi (Kraus 185); or "an ovoid shape somewhere between a period and a comma," mentioned by Essick (Kraus 188); or just a random (or purposeful?) protrusion that made a different impression in different copies. Embarrassingly, a 2008 error that must be corrected in future printings occurs in the very line cited to illustrate the problem of Blake's intrusive dots (601): the 2008 comma in Visions of the Daughters of Albion 9/6:21 (63), changed from a period, should be a semicolon, as in the 1979 edition (please see the appendix, "'Illuminated Woks': Errata in the 2008 Norton Blake").
[8] For Jerusalem, as part of our agreement to contribute $1,000 to IATH, the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia, which then housed the William Blake Archive, the Archive editors generously provided the services of the then-assistant Justin Van Kleeck, to remove the Archive's formatting and convert the text to .rtf format, a time-consuming task which Justin graciously completed off the clock. For conversion of other texts, we hired a local assistant to help with the most efficient method I could devise: assign the "Paste Special" command in Word to control-shift-v, followed by "u" for "unformatted," to bring the words into .rtf; then use "Find-Special-Any Digit," followed by "Replace All," to get rid of the Archive's left-side line numbering, and renumber manually on the right. Incidentally, a drawback of taking on a revised edition as a retirement project is that all institutionally provided part-time research assistant services, quite rightly, are devoted to supporting the work of active-duty faculty members (as acknowledged in our first edition [xxvii]). In the Preface to the second edition, I neglected to express my gratitude to the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies and its director, Jay Semel, on the University of Iowa's Oakdale Research Campus, for giving me a much-needed summer pied-à-terre for my transition back to the scholarly life during my phased retirement from the President's Office in 2000.
[9] Similarly, our heavy use of the wonderfully convenient and fast-operating Blake Concordance of "eE," the electronic Erdman on Nelson Hilton's University of Georgia site, <http://www.english.uga.edu/Blake Concordance/>, enabled us to catch scanning errors that Hilton immediately fixed. By the time the 2008 Norton Blake finally appeared, some of our other links to the UGA site had ceased to work, but when Nelson noticed the problem after receiving an early copy, he generously retrofitted repairs from his end. We deeply regret that our attempted recognition of the eE Concordance in "Abbreviations" (xvii), a section added after the first-pass proofs, resulted in a third-pass proof error that forced deletion of the whole entry.
[10] For an example, as if one were needed, of the shifting horizon of editorial perspective, see Grant's 1982 forecast: "Now that Erdman's complete edition has appeared, scholars will be able to abandon the Erdman/Keynes dual citations without feeling compelled to take up a Bentley/Erdman system. [. . .] Bentley's new system of plate numbering is inherently preferable to the one established by Keynes and followed, with modifications, by Erdman, but Keynes's system is now too well established, and too many scholarly and critical works are keyed to it, to justify another radical change that would necessitate future use of dual plate references" (Grant, "Who Shall Bind the Infinite? " 283-84). At present, in addition to its own "object" numbers, the William Blake Archive provides the Bentley, Erdman, and Keynes plate numbers but refrains from cluttering its renumbered lines with a dual lineation system.
[11] The 1979 Norton Blake was the first to use Blake's title for this work (bracketed after the conventional title, The Laocoön), a practice since strongly advocated by Morton D. Paley (53-100). The full design (titled Laocoön) is reproduced most clearly in Milton a Poem and the Final Illuminated Works: Blake's Illuminated Books 5, ed. Robert N. Essick and Joseph Viscomi (Princeton: William Blake Trust / Princeton University Press, 1993) and, as Laocoön, in the William Blake Archive and in Fuller's edition. The text is harder to read in the reduced reproduction in Bentley and in the accidentally reversed white-on-black reproduction in the 1988 Erdman edition (corrected, but terribly blurred, in the 2008 edition). Another innovation of the 1979 Norton Blake, the "Conclusion"-"Application"-"Therefore" closing page sequence of Blake's unsorted and unnumbered plates for There is No Natural Religion (1979, 15; 2008, 7) has since been generally adopted.
[12] On pp. 18-22 the Group critiques Harold Bloom's unrevised Commentary, a section unchanged in the latest "newly revised" edition of 2008. Citing the Santa Cruz Study Group's review, McGann goes so far as to call the Erdman edition "[i]n one sense [. . .] a travesty of Blake's original authorial intentions" because "the typographical format has forced Erdman into attempting a translation of the linguistic components of Blake's work only, the lexical and grammatical levels of its textuality"—its "linguistic" but not its "bibliographical signifiers" ("What is Critical Editing?"—originally in A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism; here quoted from McGann's The Textual Condition 53, 56-57).
[13] For example, Wolfson as an editor retains the short, doubly hyphenated prose lines of All Religions are One and There is No Natural Religion and the double columns of "The Fly" in her Longman edition (107-08, 119), in keeping with her attention as a critic to the "semantic beyond the semantic of words" in Blake's "scriptive signifying" that "operates in lines, in discrete words, even in syllables" in her Formal Charges (33). Eaves amusingly recalls the Blake Archive editors' arguing for months over line numbering (Kraus 176-77).
[14] Wolfson, who graciously read an earlier draft of this piece, was of course fully aware of Blake's numbering of stanzas in the Notebook, but as she noted in a follow-up e-mail (on an unrelated subject), she considers the plate
a separate, if not independent, version of the poem, the arrangement of which, accidentally or intentionally, offers new interpretive horizons. This is not a compositor's design, but Blake's own, and he was nothing if not attentive. But even if he had been just thinking in columns, with no side-thought about horizontal reading, the design he creates has the effect of inviting the latter. So I would not exclude it. The reader has agency as well as the author—this is the old argument about the absolute prescription and government of authorial intentions over textual effects. But I think it also supplies yet another instance for Don Reiman's theory of textual versioning, of all texts having a place in the discussion. [ . . .] The Fly is completely unique in Songs for this column arrangement, and it compels attention, I think, rather than rejection.
Wolfson also recalled, referring to The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, that she "had a real fight, with every edition of the anthology, to maintain this page-expensive format"—something that the much narrower pages of the Norton edition physically could not have accommodated. In connection with Reiman's "versioning," see also Stillinger's "practical theory of versions" (118-40).
[15] First-pass proofreading was slowed by extra-large headings and titles, some marked as major section heads requiring page breaks, making art placement difficult and exaggerating the overall page count. To stay on schedule, we focused mainly on page-altering problems at this stage and deferred to the next round, when we had recomposed pages in hand, most of the ordinary chores of proofreading such as catching editorial and printer's errors, filling in cross-references, and flagging misplaced or poorly coordinated designs, some of which persisted into and beyond the third-pass proofs.
[16] For example, in the last "Memorable Fancy" of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (on plate 23), the new footnote (80, n. 2) glossing an Angel's colorful reaction to a Devil's unorthodox remark stops with comparing Raphael's blushing response to Adam's question about angelic lovemaking in Paradise Lost 8.619, omitting the extensive quotation from True Christian Religion in the first edition to illustrate the point that "Such disputations in the spiritual world are common in Swedenborg's visions" (99, n. 8). Sometimes, though, our cuts went too far: in simplifying the timing of the charity schoolchildren's procession to St. Paul's to thank their benefactors, we referred to "annual springtime services" (22, n. 1) but neglected to note, as in the first edition, that the event occurred neither "on Maundy Thursday (before Easter) or Ascension Day (forty days thereafter)" (21, n. 4), with a citation of Thomas E. Connolly's 1975 research. (Ascension Day is the thirty-ninth day after Easter, the fortieth day of Eastertide in the church calendar.) On balance, nevertheless, the notes collectively serve their intended purpose, and some—such as the one on the origin of "Woman! lovely woman!" in Thomas Otway's Venice Preserv'd (101, n. 3)—actually contain information unavailable elsewhere.