Item 43 - Letter from Harold Jenkins to Sir Walter Greg

1 single sheet

University College, London.—Discusses his review of Greg’s parallel-text edition of Doctor Faustus and his ‘conjectural reconstruction’ of the play.

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Transcript

University College London, Gower Street, W.C.1
June 18. 1951.

Dear Sir Walter,

It was of course a great honour to me to be given the task of reviewing your Faustus books {1}, & it is a still greater one to have a letter from you in which, instead of pouncing on me for my presumption, you seem to take serious notice of my views. I was aware that in venturing to disagree with you I was showing great temerity. But fearlessness in the expression of views honestly come by was one of the things I learnt from you to aim at when I was your M.A. student. I gratefully remember how you encouraged me—& never more than in a long M.A. oral examination—to argue my own views while you patiently corrected some of my fallacies & errors.

Thank you very much indeed for The Rationale of Copy-Text. Although I was already familiar with the article, it is something that I am delighted to possess. And I wish to say at once how much I welcome in it your firm statement of a principle which must surely command general acceptance. When I first read it it gave me pleasure to find you putting the weight of your authority against the too-mechanical school of editing, & I am saddened to discover how much I now seem to be tarred with their brush. I had not seen this article at the time I wrote my review. (You will know only too well how long these things are in the press.) How substantially I should have altered my review if I had seen the article first I don’t know. I should certainly have wanted to modify the passage about its being “more scientific” to follow the generally more reliable authority: for the phrasing at least makes me seem to be holding the very position your article attacks. I hope, however, you will have observed that I elsewhere use the word “scientific” in praise of your own practice; & I hope my third paragraph on p. 83 may have suggested that I am not really an advocate of mechanical procedures. Indeed, as I have said, I accept the principle which your article would apply “whenever there is more than one substantive text of comparable authority” (p. 29). If I had to defend the criticism I made in the paragraph beginning at the foot of p. 83, I should do so on the ground that the two Faustus texts are, as you have so convincingly shown, not of “comparable authority.” And I should appeal to your principle that the choice of substantive readings should be “determined partly by the opinion the editor may form respecting the nature of the copy from which each substantive edition was printed.” The difference between us, I think, finds a focus in the word partly. It is a question of how much weight you should allow to your opinion of the general nature of the Faustus A & B texts. For my part I wished you had allowed more weight than you did to the fact that your opinion of A in general was a low one.

As for the date, this is something that has always troubled me. Every couple of years or so I go over the evidence afresh as I take each new batch of students through their Marlowe & warn them against making their much-loved generalizations about Marlowe’s dramatic (and spiritual) ‘development’ without so much as inquiring into the chronology. For myself I can only leave the matter open; & I have always regretted that in his 1932 introduction Dr Boas expressed himself so confidently & then in his book on Marlowe made his acceptance of the 1592 date for Faustus integral to the plan of his argument. Students, of course, are only too eager to catch hold of a conclusion without the need of examining the evidence!

There is always a tendency for a review to give more emphasis—or at least more space—to those matters on which the reviewer does not fully agree with the author. Up to a point this is no doubt justified; for it is precisely those things which admit of a difference of opinion which it is desirable to have aird. But of course in the present case what I said by way of disagreement over particular details was intended to be read only within the context of my very great admiration for the work as a whole. I am glad to find from your letter that I do seem to have made this context of general admiration clear, & I am grateful to you for having read my review so justly. Indeed I am flattered that you should have read it with such care. That alone repays me for the pains I took over it.

Yours very sincerely,
Harold Jenkins.

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{1} Jenkins’s review of Greg’s parallel-text edition and conjectural reconstruction of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, in the Modern Language Review, vol. 46 (1950), pp. 82-6.

Formerly inserted in Greg's copy of his parallel-text edition of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus (1950) (Adv. c. 26. 8).

This description was created by A. C. Green in 2020.