M.L. West (1937-2015), "Problems in Euripides'
Orestes,"
Classical Quarterly 37.2 (1987) 281-293 (at 281, footnote omitted):
'Begin at the beginning, go on until you come to the end, and then stop.' Hardly any
literary artist succeeds in composing substantial works in quite such a straightforward
way, by uninterrupted linear progression from start to finish. As he composes, he has
new ideas, and sometimes he goes back and changes what he has already written or
makes insertions in it. If he is not very careful, this is liable to lead, if not to actual
contradictions, at least to mild discontinuities and interruptions of the logical sequence
of thought.
The occurrence of such discontinuities and interruptions in classical texts often
provokes proposals for deletion or transposition. In some cases these are no doubt
the correct answers. But it seems to me extraordinary how little use scholars have made
of the concept of the author's afterthought — something that nearly all texts must
contain, whether detectable or not — to account for irregularities of those kinds. In
many instances what is recognizable as an insertion is at least as likely to be due to
the author as to a second hand, unless one takes the a priori view (easily disprovable
by experience) that an author will not fail to notice all the structural implications of
an insertion in his own work. In certain instances we may recognize interpolations or
rearrangements that cannot plausibly be ascribed to anyone but the author himself.
Id. (at 285):
I anticipate two kinds of adverse reaction to all these hypotheses of Euripidean
afterthoughts. One is to say that it is all empty speculation, because we have no
evidence for prior drafts and never will have. Of course there is no documentary
evidence. The position is not much better for other sorts of textual criticism: in
exceptional cases a new papyrus may confirm a conjecture, but in the vast majority
of cases there is not going to be a new papyrus. That does not mean that in the absence
of manuscript variation it is pointless to try to identify corruptions. The evidence is
internal, in the coherence or otherwise of the text. It is the same with authorial
revisions. There is evidence of that kind, whatever conclusions one ventures to draw
from it.
The other possible objection is that our concern should be with the text as the author
finally intended it to be, and that it is not our business to pry into the stages by which
he arrived at it. I disagree. The creative process is a legitimate object of scholarly
interest, and especially when it holds the key to difficulties that the finished text poses.