SOURCE: “The Problem of Billy Budd,” in PMLA, Vol. LXXX, No. 5, December, 1965, pp. 489–98.

In the following essay, Rosenberry surveys the myriad of critical perspectives on Billy Budd.

When a monumental new edition of Billy Budd appeared in 1962, it was the hope of the editors that their exhaustive scholarship might contribute to a definitive interpretation of the novel. Such a wish might seem unnecessarily restrictive, but the extreme critical divergence on Billy Budd has created a genuine threat to its artistic integrity as a result of its apparent failure to support a demonstrable reading. This essay is an attempt to end the war, or to make the end more predictable.

Let it be clear at the outset that I am not proposing to limit the range of parallel and compatible interpretations. Billy Budd is sufficiently complex to present the many-layered phenomenon which criticism rightly expects in a fine work...