A variorum, short for (editio) cum notis variorum, is a work that collates all known variants of a text. It is a work of textual criticism, whereby all variations and emendations are set side by side so that a reader can track how textual decisions have been made in the preparation of a text for publication. The Bible and the works of William Shakespeare have often been the subjects of variorum editions, although the same techniques have been applied with less frequency to many other works.
The word variorum is Latin for 'of various [persons]' and derives from the phrase cum notis variorum ('with notes by various people') which was often used in the title-pages of Dutch books of the 17th century.
An older meaning of the word refers not to the text itself but to the assortment of illustrative notes printed with it: 'an edition of a text (usually Latin or Greek) which includes annotations by a variety of critics and commentators'. Variorum editions of this kind were a speciality of Dutch publishers of the 17th century, including the house of Elzevir. In these editions the text is usually taken, with little or no attempt at constructive modification, from a single widely accepted critical edition of the period; the interest lies in the notes, which often fill three-quarters of each page, and which typically embody the complete commentaries of two or three recognised specialists in the work of the author in question, together with selected passages from several other commentators. The notes will usually include textual variants, both documented and conjectural, together with examples of parallel usages and (for non-fiction texts) historical information. Usually some middle-ranking literary man was appointed as general editor; occasionally, however, a first-rate scholar would preside over the edition and include original work of his own within it, Nicolaas Heinsius's edition of Claudian (Elsevier, 1661) being a good example.
A variorum of the Bible has been produced at various times in history and of various scopes. Documenting each line of text with all variants in wording, from all known source documents, presented chronologically, helps translators of the Bible establish primacy and prevalence of various line readings.
There have also been noteworthy variorums of the works of William Shakespeare, including the readings of all quartos and folios; the textual decisions, or choices, of past editors; and a compilation of all critical notes. The first was that of Isaac Reed in 1803. Variorum editions help editors and scholars understand the historical evolution of the Shakespeare texts, whether to decode dubious lines and elucidate claims of authorial intent or using a more contextualist hermeneutics to uncover other explanations for the textual variations.
Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason is typically presented in variorum format, with both the 1781 and 1787 editions printed side-by-side in nearly all modern editions.
Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species went through six editions with extensive changes. The text became a third larger, with numerous parts rewritten five times. A variorum [1] was published in 1959.
There is also a variorum of Leaves of Grass . Walt Whitman produced either six or nine editions during his lifetime. The New York University Press produced a variorum in 1980 of these various editions. [2]
The James Strachey translation of Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams in volumes four and five of The Standard Edition of The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud collates eight editions.
Rabindranath Tagore's works have been collated to produce a voluminous digital variorum. It can be viewed on the Bichitra website.
H. P. Lovecraft’s stories have been collected into a four volume variorum edition by Hippocampus Press.
The King James Version (KJV), also the King James Bible (KJB) and the Authorized Version (AV), is an Early Modern English translation of the Christian Bible for the Church of England, which was commissioned in 1604 and published in 1611, by sponsorship of King James VI and I. The 80 books of the King James Version include 39 books of the Old Testament, 14 books of Apocrypha, and the 27 books of the New Testament.
Walter Whitman Jr. was an American poet, essayist, and journalist. He is considered one of the most influential poets in American literature. Whitman incorporated both transcendentalism and realism in his writings and is often called the father of free verse. His work was controversial in his time, particularly his 1855 poetry collection Leaves of Grass, which was described by some as obscene for its overt sensuality.
The Masoretic Text is the authoritative Hebrew and Aramaic text of the 24 books of the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) in Rabbinic Judaism. The Masoretic Text defines the Jewish canon and its precise letter-text, with its vocalization and accentuation known as the mas'sora. Referring to the Masoretic Text, masorah specifically means the diacritic markings of the text of the Jewish scriptures and the concise marginal notes in manuscripts of the Tanakh which note textual details, usually about the precise spelling of words. It was primarily copied, edited, and distributed by a group of Jews known as the Masoretes between the 7th and 10th centuries of the Common Era (CE). The oldest known complete copy, the Leningrad Codex, dates from the early 11th century CE.
Textual criticism is a branch of textual scholarship, philology, and literary criticism that is concerned with the identification of textual variants, or different versions, of either manuscripts (mss) or of printed books. Such texts may range in dates from the earliest writing in cuneiform, impressed on clay, for example, to multiple unpublished versions of a 21st-century author's work. Historically, scribes who were paid to copy documents may have been literate, but many were simply copyists, mimicking the shapes of letters without necessarily understanding what they meant. This means that unintentional alterations were common when copying manuscripts by hand. Intentional alterations may have been made as well, for example, the censoring of printed work for political, religious or cultural reasons.
Textus Receptus refers to the succession of printed editions of the Greek New Testament, starting with Erasmus' Novum Instrumentum omne (1516) and including the editions of Stephanus, Beza, Elzevir, Colinaeus and Scrivener. Additionally, although not being derived from the work of Erasmus, some such as the Trinitarian Bible Society also associate the Complutensian Polyglot with the Textus Receptus tradition.
The Bible has been translated into many languages from the biblical languages of Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. As of September 2023 all of the Bible has been translated into 736 languages, the New Testament has been translated into an additional 1,658 languages, and smaller portions of the Bible have been translated into 1,264 other languages according to Wycliffe Global Alliance. Thus, at least some portions of the Bible have been translated into 3,658 languages.
George SteevensFRS was an English Shakespearean commentator.
Horace Howard Furness was an American Shakespearean scholar of the 19th century.
Lewis Theobald, English textual editor and author, was a landmark figure both in the history of Shakespearean editing and in literary satire. He was vital for the establishment of fair texts for Shakespeare, and he was the first avatar of Dulness in Alexander Pope's The Dunciad.
Novum Testamentum Graece is a critical edition of the New Testament in its original Koine Greek, forming the basis of most modern Bible translations and biblical criticism. It is also known as the Nestle–Aland edition after its most influential editors, Eberhard Nestle and Kurt Aland. The text, edited by the Institute for New Testament Textual Research, is currently in its 28th edition, abbreviated NA28.
Gian (Giovanni) Domenico Mansi was an Italian prelate, theologian, scholar and historian, known for his massive works on the Church councils.
A critical apparatus in textual criticism of primary source material, is an organized system of notations to represent, in a single text, the complex history of that text in a concise form useful to diligent readers and scholars. The apparatus typically includes footnotes, standardized abbreviations for the source manuscripts, and symbols for denoting recurring problems.
Shakespeare's editors were essential in the development of the modern practice of producing printed books and the evolution of textual criticism.
Over 30 years ago a renowned Hamlet scholar expressed his astonishment that some 400 works a year dealing with the play were being received at the Shakespeare Quarterly. The rate of Hamlet studies has increased quite considerably since then. To make any headway in the study of any aspect of Hamlet, the use of bibliographies—annotated, if at all possible—is often necessary. The most up-to-date resource is the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C.; their publication, the Shakespeare Quarterly, has one issue per year devoted entirely to bibliography. As to their on-line searching, a search of the keyword "Hamlet" in Folger's web-based catalog, HamnetArchived 19 July 2011 at the Wayback Machine returned 2245 entries; the result does not include the number of entries in the library's card-catalog.
In Biblical studies, a gloss or glossa is an annotation written on margins or within the text of biblical manuscripts or printed editions of the scriptures. With regard to the Hebrew texts, the glosses chiefly contained explanations of purely verbal difficulties of the text; some of these glosses are of importance for the correct reading or understanding of the original Hebrew, while nearly all have contributed to its uniform transmission since the 11th century. Later on, Christian glosses also contained scriptural commentaries; St. Jerome extensively used glosses in the process of translation of the Latin Vulgate Bible.
The Plays of William Shakespeare was an 18th-century edition of the dramatic works of William Shakespeare, edited by Samuel Johnson and George Steevens. Johnson announced his intention to edit Shakespeare's plays in his Miscellaneous Observations on Macbeth (1745), and a full Proposal for the edition was published in 1756. The edition was finally published in 1765.
Fredson Thayer Bowers (1905–1991) was an American bibliographer and scholar of textual editing.
The Cambridge Shakespeare is a long-running series of critical editions of William Shakespeare's works published by Cambridge University Press. The name encompasses three distinct series: The Cambridge Shakespeare (1863–1866), The New Shakespeare (1921–1969), and The New Cambridge Shakespeare (1984–present).
Eric Rasmussen is an American scholar, academic and author. He is Regents Teaching Professor and Foundation Professor of English at the University of Nevada.
Passage to India is a poetry collection published by Walt Whitman in 1871. The first edition was 120 pages long and held seventy-four poems, including twenty-three or twenty-four first published in the collection. Whitman likely intended the work as a supplementary volume to his collection Leaves of Grass and included it as part of some copies of that year's edition of Leaves of Grass. The following year all of the supplement was included as part of Leaves of Grass, but it was a separate volume for the 1876 edition and the supplement Two Rivulets was instead included as part of Leaves of Grass. In the 1881 Leaves of Grass both the poems contained in Passage to India and Two Rivulets were distributed throughout Leaves of Grass.