Authority (textual criticism)
The authority of a text is its reliability as a witness to the author's intentions. These intentions could be initial, medial or final, but intentionalist editors (most notably represented by Fredson Bowers and G. Thomas Tanselle editing school) generally attempt to retrieve final authorial intentions. The concept is of particular importance for textual critics, whether they believe that authorial intention is recoverable, or whether they think that this recovery is impossible. Here are some examples of authority: The only authority for the works of the Roman poet Catullus derives from a lost manuscript, of which three copies reside in the National Library in Paris, the Bodleian Library at Oxford, and the Vatican Library in Rome (the Codex Vaticanus). No one knows, or can ever know, how close this manuscript comes to Catullus' intentions—in other words, how great its authority is. It is generally thought that the Q1 ('bad quarto') edition of Shakespeare's Hamlet is an unauthorized copy, reconstructed from memory by one of the actors. If this is so, then it has some authority, but much less than the first authorized quarto, Q2 (1602). In comparison, however, it might be a useful authority to the cuts and adaptations made in