Final Intentions or Process?: Editing Greville’s Caelica

Abstract

This article discusses the challenge of editing Fulke Greville’s lyric sequence Caelica for the new Oxford Greville edition. Printed posthumously, though a few poems had leaked into print during Greville’s long lifetime, the work evolved over nearly fifty years, reaching an almost final form in the Warwick manuscript, a scribal copy heavily annotated with Greville’s revisions, many in his own hand. How does the editor both fix a text and represent the process of its evolution?