ABSTRACT
The design of this book has followed what I believe to be a natural (even an inevitable) narrative-from gaining access to the text in its various forms, to discovering its bibliographical characteristics and interpreting its surface features, to defining its transmissional history. The narrative has moved therefore from enumerative bibliography to analytical and descriptive bibliography, from paleography and typography to historical bibliography and textual bibliography, and on to textual criticism or critical bibliography. Theoretically the process could stop there (and some important theorists in textual studies have been content to do so); but the culmination of textual scholarship is in editing the text, in using all of this information to prepare a version of the author's work for presentation to a reading public. It is with this task and with the decisions and problems attending it that this book concludes.
