Textual Issues

Students of Wordsworth are confronted with an unusual array of different editions, especially of the poetry, which represent much more than commercial competition. Some of the leading issues in contemporary textual criticism have been pioneered in the conception of these editions as they have progressively sought to redefine the poet's works. So much is this so that an informed choice of texts must nowadays be the basis of any serious engagement with Wordsworth's writings.

The prevailing questions have been long standing. Wordsworth’s extraordinary lifelong habits of constant revision presented his nineteenth-century editors with the problem of judging the relative status of many considerably variant readings and versions. Though his final intentions were authoritatively registered in his latest edition of Poetical Works, 1849–50, those readings indirectly efface previously completed works which had in many cases already produced a separate history of reception. Also, from Poems, 1815 the poet arranged his poems according to a psychological or subject focus system which for the most part ignored a chronological reading. While Edward Dowden followed Wordsworth’s final wishes in respect of versions and arrangement (the ‘Aldine’, 1892–3), as did Thomas Hutchinson in his edition of Poetical Works (the ‘Oxford’, 1895), William Knight attempted to reconstruct a chronological ordering in his (1882–9; the ‘Eversley’, revised and corrected, 1896), though the dates of composition were often uncertain, and yet to retain the final versions for the main texts.

The appeal of the Left

The literary category of US Writers on the Left was initially delimited by Daniel Aaron in his 1961 Writers on the Left: Episodes in American Literary Communism. The genus pertains chiefly to mid-twentieth century authors and literary intellectuals inspired by the ideas of Marxism, most notably through an attraction to the Communist-led cultural movement. During the first two decades, only a modest number of distinguished poets, novelists, critics, and dramatists declared themselves socialists; they fashioned an amorphous, somewhat Bohemian legacy of art in the service of the emancipation of the working class in the pages of publications such as the Masses and the Liberator. This heritage would be revivified in new form as a repercussion of the social crisis of the 1930s when an extraordinary number of the most gifted writers veered precipitously in the direction of the revolutionary Left. During the 1940s, this tradition of “littérature engagée” evolved as a constituent component of the cultural mainstream, but in the 1950s it was ultimately marginalized by the anti-radical political repression of the McCarthy era.

The Bolshevik rendition of Marxism is the conspicuous political feature at the heart of this legacy. Sundry of the most capable writers were passionately enthralled by the ideals of the 1917 October Revolution in Russia, which they believed to be embodied in the activities and ideology of the Communist Party. Even Left critics of the Stalin regime often based their condemnation on writings by Lenin and Trotsky. The attraction remained potent through World War II but waned as the Cold War began.

We know more about Wordsworth than before. The Cornell Wordsworth Series and new biographies - Gill, Johnston, Barker, Wu - have enhanced understanding of the poems and the life. And there have been startling discoveries. The National Library of Scotland yielded a manuscript of Wordsworth's Imitation of Juvenal, a satire on government and aristocracy dating from 1795 which the poet had determined should be suppressed. The Public Record Office, London, disclosed correspondence between the Home Office and their agent James Walsh who in August 1797 was sent to spy on Coleridge and the Wordsworths at Nether Stowey. Wordsworth's letters to Mary Hutchinson, found in 1977 among scrap paper at Carlisle, offered unprecedented insight into their marriage. So we do know more about Wordsworth, but not all about Wordsworth. Gaps and silences in The Prelude, and the conjectured career of the 'hidden Wordsworth', now seem as significant as the documented life. Emile Legouis's pioneering Early Life of William Wordsworth, 1770-1798, first published in 1896, announced its source and subject as 'A Study of The Prelude'. One hundred years later Kenneth Johnston's The Hidden Wordsworth (1998) set out to dispel the 'Wordsworthian cover-up' by revealing how what 'seem to be metaphors' in the poetry 'often turn out to have a literal correspondence to the life'.

After struggling in his middle years to win more than a coterie readership, William Wordsworth lived to savour success. He died full of honours in 1850, Poet Laureate to Queen Victoria, a man recognized, in John Keble's words, as 'raised up to be a chief minister, not only of noblest poesy, but of high and sacred truth'. Over the next fifty years his status as an English classic was confirmed in innumerable printings of his works, anthologies, and eventually scholarly studies. By 1950, however, it seemed that his time was over. At an event to mark the centenary of Wordsworth's death, Lionel Trilling, one of the foremost American critics of his generation, summed up what he took to be the current perception of the poet: 'Wordsworth is not attractive and not an intellectual possibility.' Although Trilling's lecture went on to demonstrate that this was not his own view, his decisive and memorable formulation sounded right, as if Keble's words on the plaque in Grasmere Church were being given their sad but inevitable addendum. But such has not been the judgement of history. Since the muted celebrations in 1950, shifts in intellectual concerns have brought the Romantics into new focus and have rediscovered Wordsworth as a fully 'intellectually possible' figure. Western culture's preoccupation with identity and the self; the linguistic turn of much current theory; the interest in power and politics and nationhood; the return to history; environmental issues - all of these dominant features of the cultural landscape of the last half-century have been mapped across the terrain of Wordsworth's poetry and prose.

America as a site of Jewish liberation has been one of the guiding myths of the modern Jewish imagination. Above all, America meant redemption from Europe, which symbolized both Judaism's subservience to Christianity and Jews' confinement within the strictures of Judaism. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Jewish thinkers spoke of America as the great hope for the future of Judaism because its democratic principles embodied the true moral essence of Judaism. American Judaism was the real Judaism, while Europe represented a Judaism distorted by centuries of persecution and economic discrimination. Protestant thinkers, well before the colonial period, had identified the New Land with the Bible, and themselves with Israel; as Herman Melville declared in White Jacket (1850), “We Americans are the peculiar, chosen people - the Israel of our time; we bear the ark of the liberties of the world” (Redburn, White Jacket, Moby Dick, 506). For Jewish thinkers, Protestantism could not stand alone in claiming a privileged place in America; Judaism, the original Israel, had to stand beside it as the religion informing the American democratic enterprise and bearing its own manifest destiny in the world. In an 1898 resolution, leaders of Reform Judaism in America declared that “America is our Zion...The mission of Judaism is spiritual, not political...to spread the truths of religion and humanity throughout the world” (Sarna, “Converts to Zionism,” 189).

Until well into the twentieth century, America was imaginatively constituted by Jewish thinkers through a set of projections drawn from Enlightenment ideals of tolerance, pluralism, and freedom of religion, all of which were identified as biblical ideals.

How do you know that someone is a virgin? This question is implicitly posed in the Nativity pageant of the N-town collection of biblical drama, just after Mary has given birth. Salomée, one of the two midwives attendant on Mary, refuses to believe that the Virgin is still a virgin. She insists on 'touching' Mary's body. Terrifyingly, her hand turns 'ded and drye [withered] as claye [earth]' (line 256). An angel appears, and orders her to touch Jesus' swaddling-clothes. Frightened, Salomée obeys the angel and the hand is miraculously restored to health. But a number of questions are left unanswered. Since female roles were all played by men, the scene calls for some ingenuities of staging and suspension of audience disbelief. Readers today may wonder why Mary's virginity, and medieval virginities in general, are invested with such powers of magic and danger. And what exactly does Salomée touch? Does she really touch inside Mary's body? Surely (we think now) this is sacrilege - or bad taste? In the Chester version, the figure of Expositor steers the audience towards a general moral, 'that unbeleeffe [lack of faith] is a fowle [evil] sinne' (line 721), keeping the audience from pondering too closely the troubling complexities of Mary's physiology.

But the N-town pageant goes out of its way to emphasize physical ‘touch’. Zelomye, the other midwife, asks to ‘towch and fele’ Mary’s body to see if she needs medicine, and Mary invites her to ‘[t]ast [feel] with 3oure hand’ to find out if she is a ‘clene mayde and pure virgyn’ (lines 224–5). The Latin stage directions say that Zelomye ‘palpat . . . Beatam Virginem . . .’ [feels the Blessed Virgin]. Though the exact form of verification is unclear, Zelomye is satisfied: ‘Here opynly I fele and se: / A fayr chylde of a maydon is born’ (lines 238–9). But sceptical Salom´e demands to ‘preve’ [test] Mary’s virginity by ‘hand towchynge’ (line 247). Mary assents: ‘Towch with 3oure hand and wele asay [find out]’ (line 251).

The sources for Mozart's biography

The principal source for Mozart's biography is the family correspondence (MBA), comprising a large collection of letters from Mozart, his father Leopold, mother, sister Nannerl and wife Constanze. They are marvellously informative but also problematic, in that they are a patchy record of Mozart's life, fullest for those times when, still based in Salzburg, he was travelling and he and his father were writing home. They are much thinner for his final decade in Vienna (1781–91) when the bulk of his great work was written; letters sent to him were not preserved, and letters from him vary in number (only four survive for 1786). The fact that a substantial proportion of the surviving letters from between 1788 and 1790 are to his fellow mason and banker Michael Puchberg requesting loans may have given biographers an exaggerated sense of his financial difficulties and professional distress in those years. The information contained in Mozart's letters was only gradually exploited by biographers. His sister Nannerl consulted some of them in order to answer the queries of his obituarist Friedrich Schlichtegroll. The majority were entrusted by Nannerl to Constanze and her second husband Georg Nikolaus von Nissen, and a heavily (and tendentiously) edited selection was printed in the Nissen biography of 1828. They were deposited in the Salzburg Dommusikverein und Mozarteum in the 1840s and 1850s where scholars could consult them. The majority but not all were made readily available in the editions by Ludwig Schiedermair in 1914 and Emily Anderson in 1938; the definitive seven-volume German edition was issued between 1962 and 1975.

A visitor to the Cemetery of Pere Lachaise, east of Paris, may come across the canopied Gothic Revival tomb of Heloise and Abelard. They are a much visited couple in that crowded suburb of the dead - though less than Jim Morrison, less than Colette - and were among the first there, moved with the permission of Napoleon in 1804. For Père Lachaise was a commercial venture and needed some famous bodies to attract the monied corpses of the Second Empire. Thus was Heloise written into the emerging romance of capital.

It was not the first time Heloise had been cast into romance, not to speak of other genres, at the beck of masculine power. In her own youth she had heard herself written by Abelard into heartfelt lyrics of their passion, and in the early 1130s she encountered his narrative of the subsequent castration and fall from ecclesiastical pride, the Historia calamitatum. In the late 1270s Heloise was recast (in that part of the Romance of the Rose by Jean de Meun) as an instance of womanly virtue within an otherwise misogynist diatribe by a jealous husband;1 and later a treatise on courtly love was posthumously written under her (explicitly learned) authorship. Heloise’s own writings, however, record a profound and persistent will to choose her role, often in conflict with the men and institutional expectations around her, including Abelard, and their efforts to inscribe and circumscribe her. What she sometimes willed, and how she expressed that will in her letters, remain shocking.

For the eighteenth-century traveller, Salzburg could be a paradise. Off the beaten track and set at the foot of the Alps, it boasted natural beauties and a rich history: the city owed its post-Roman origin to the founding of the abbey of St Peter by St Rupert of Worms in 696 and of the cathedral by St Virgil in 774. In 1278 Rudolph of Habsburg made the archbishops of Salzburg imperial princes and during centuries of relative peace (except for the Peasants' War of 1525–6) the power and prestige of the court increased until it was the most important and influential archdiocese and sacred state in German-speaking Europe. By 1700, half a century before Mozart's birth, its boundaries stretched north and west into what is now Bavaria and east and south as far as Wiener Neustadt and Graz.

What the anonymous visitor to Salzburg praised so highly was the mechanical clock tower facing what is now the Mozartplatz. Constructed in the early eighteenth century, it was renovated in the 1750s to include music by the Kapellmeister Johann Ernst Eberlin and the court violinist Leopold Mozart. The works were published in 1759 by Lotter of Augsburg, together with a lengthy description of the Salzburg fortress, a short history of the city, and a charming, engraved cityscape. More than a music print, it was a souvenir for the sophisticated tourist, a memento of pleasant hours spent near the banks of the river Salzach or roaming the numerous churches, open squares and fountains that gave Salzburg its nickname, ‘the German Rome’.

Were there women authors in the Middle Ages? The answer depends on which term we consider to be in question, 'women' or 'author'. The burden of proof has long rested on the former, following the assumption that medieval authors were exclusively men. Accordingly, nearly every major work believed to have been written by a medieval woman - including the letters of Heloise, The Book of Margery Kempe, and many works by Christine de Pizan - has at various times been attributed to a male author. More recently, however, the term 'author' itself has come into question, as some scholars have asked whether authorship - at least in its familiar, modern sense - could be said to have existed in the Middle Ages at all. The author holds a privileged status in literary studies; more than simply a work's writer, the author carries an ideological function as the figure around whom ideas about literary tradition, authority, and creativity are organized. Yet what counts as an author has been historically variable.1 The idea that authors were the sole originators of their texts is a relatively recent one, supplanting earlier models that invested those origins in divine or historically remote sources; likewise, the modern idea of the author as a single, creative individual holds limited relevance for medieval textual culture, in which many texts were collaborative, anonymous, or adopted as common property. Those who study literature by medieval women find themselves facing a critical quandary: is it possible to speak of medieval women authors if the ‘author’ did not exist in the Middle Ages?

A sharp impression of medieval women's role 'beneath the pulpit' in the sense 'subjected to the institutional power of the Church' is first implied, and then defied, in Chaucer's Friar's Tale. This tale criticizes the abuse of ecclesiastical law to extort money from a woman. It is introduced by the Friar after he has ostensibly complimented the Wife of Bath on her learning, but urged her to leave discussion of serious moral matters to expert preachers and religious educators (male, university-trained, such as himself). Following this reassertion of masculine control of the theological domain the Friar proceeds to a tale expressly concerned with contested jurisdiction in which, however, an old woman unexpectedly has the final say. It will be useful to dwell on this tale by way of introduction to a chapter devoted to the rights, limitations, rituals, and contributions of women in relation to Mother Church.

Where the view is held that a body contains something - as it is now and was in the Middle Ages - every person lives in an enclosure. But a particular form of medieval devotion also elaborated this structural metaphor as an entire way of life, arranging a person's every daily thought and activity so as to limit even the body's contact with the world, enclosing that person permanently within the protections of a dwelling. Because the defining gesture of such devotion was complete withdrawal from social encounters, enclosed men and women were called 'anchorites' after the Greek anachorein, meaning 'to retire, retreat'. Since such isolation was, by its nature, a piety of strict discipline, an anchorite also tried to leave behind all physical comfort, and the anchoritic dwelling was itself often painfully small, sometimes no more than eight feet (2.4 m) square. It was commonly attached to the north side of a church so that the anchorite’s main outward view would be through a window which faced the altar (but even this opening was sometimes no more than twenty-one inches (53 cm) square). The dwelling could also have two other windows, one for obtaining food and other necessities, the other for communicating with priests or visitors, but, even here, communication was limited; these windows were mostly kept closed, and when opened were still to be covered with a curtain. Although the dwelling had to have a door for the anchorite to enter in the first place, it was blocked up as part of the ceremony of enclosure, at which point the Office for the Dead and prayers for the dying were said. Once enclosed, in other words, the anchorite was only meant to leave his or her dwelling in death, and its narrow confine was therefore, in principle as well as practice, not so much a house as a tomb.

If the name of Mozart is a touchstone for innate, absolute musicality, probably no genre has done more to accomplish this than the composer's keyboard sonatas. Collectively associated with such attributes as simplicity and naturalness of material, modesty of tone and facility of technique, they encapsulate the reception not only of Mozart but of a whole ‘Classical style’. This state of affairs has been encouraged by the tendency to view the keyboard as a ‘neutral’ medium, one useful for theoretical demonstrations in the classroom, in which Mozart is, as it were, a model pupil. It has certainly also been encouraged by the works' very wide exposure as piano teaching material. Both cases help to determine, and continually reinforce, the centrality of this repertory to the canon of Western music.

Yet there is another strand of reception that suggests anxiety about this very image of the sonatas, one that tends to imply that better Mozart can be found in other instrumental genres, including those in which the piano features either as soloist or in an ensemble. Within the output for solo piano alone, there is undoubtedly much that is more colourful, dramatic and elaborate than the governing image would suggest, including some of the sonatas themselves. In this context the pedagogical explanation has often been invoked. Thus the discourse of the sonatas precisely reflects the original teaching purposes the works were meant to serve, and more broadly the amateur market for such works at the time, considerations that have retained their relevance up to the present.

In a memorable scene from Peter Shaffer's Amadeus, Salieri is introduced to Mozart's music through a performance of the Adagio from the Serenade for Winds in B flat major, K.361. It causes him to swoon: ‘It seemed to me that I had heard a voice of God,’ Salieri exclaims in a mixture of admiration and bitterness, ‘and that it issued from a creature whose own voice I had also heard – and it was the voice of an obscene child!’ (Act 1, scene 5). Although Shaffer's play takes many poetic liberties with historical facts, this remark reflects much of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century reception of Mozart: a child prodigy (or idiot savant) who never grew up, yet wrote inspired, virtually perfect music. This comment put in the fictional Salieri's mouth also makes clear that Mozart's melodic gift is not limited to vocal music; indeed, for Shaffer you are as likely to hear the ‘voice of God’ in one of his secular instrumental works as in Mozart's sacred vocal music.

In fact, vocal music was of great importance to Mozart, and he was a gifted composer for the human voice. In the hierarchy of music before 1800, vocal genres – opera, oratorio and cantatas – reigned supreme, while even the loftier forms of orchestral music – symphonies and concertos – took a subordinate place. The main problem was summed up in Fontanelle's oft-repeated question: how could a sonata express an Affekt or emotion without words to guide the performer and listener? Vocal music and professional singers enjoyed a prestige that simply was not yet available to instrumental music.

Mozart was a prolific composer of orchestral music, writing numerous symphonies, divertimenti, serenades and cassations in the 1760s and 1770s, and six remarkable symphonies while based in Vienna in the 1780s. Although his contribution to the orchestral literature is predictably diverse, the genres in which he works are not as musically distinct in practical terms as nomenclature would seem to suggest. Divertimento, serenade and cassation each carried slightly different connotations in eighteenth-century Europe – according to the theorist Heinrich Christoph Koch the cassation was specifically designed for performance ‘in the evenings, outdoors, or on public streets’, for example – but Mozart uses the terms more or less interchangeably. Many of Mozart's Salzburg symphonies, too, are closely linked to his serenade and operatic overture repertories, the symphonies K.45, 87, 120, 135, 161/163, 121 and 102 either deriving from or being transformed into the overtures to Mozart's operas La finta semplice, Mitridate re di Ponto, Ascanio in Alba, Lucio Silla, Il sogno di Scipione, La finta giardiniera and Il re pastore respectively, and the cassation K.100 and the serenades K.204, 250 and 320 all reappearing in symphonic versions by Mozart or his father Leopold.

Irrespective of generic context, Mozart was acutely sensitive to matters of instrumentation and instrumental effect where orchestral writing was concerned. His meticulous attitude towards the spacing of chords in the wind section is evident not only in adjustments he makes to his own manuscripts, but also in amendments to the work of his pupil Thomas Attwood. Even in his very earliest compositions, Mozart is attuned to issues of orchestration, asking Nannerl to ‘remind me to give the horn something worthwhile to do’ in a symphony written in London in 1764. Throughout his life, in fact, Mozart reacts to orchestral colours and effects he witnesses at home and abroad. After experiencing the famed Mannheim orchestra first-hand in 1778, Mozart laments to his father: ‘Ah, if only we had clarinets too [in Salzburg]! You cannot imagine the glorious effect of a symphony with flutes, oboes and clarinets.’