The Chief Elizabethan Dramatists, Excluding Shakespeare: Selected Plays Lyly, Peele, Greene, Marlowe, Kyd, Chapman, Jonson, Dekker, Marston, Heywood, Beaumont, Fletcher, Webster, Middleton, Massinger, Ford, Shirley (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from The Chief Elizabethan Dramatists, Excluding Shakespeare: Selected Plays Lyly, Peele, Greene, Marlowe, Kyd, Chapman, Jonson, Dekker, Marston, Heywood, Beaumont, Fletcher, Webster, Middleton, Massinger, Ford, Shirley

The aim in the selection of the plays in this volume has been twofold first, to present typical examples of the work of the most important of Shakespeare's contemporaries, so that, read with Shakespeare's own writings, they might afford a view of the development of the English drama through its most brilliant period secondly, to present, as far as it was possible in one volume, the most distinguished plays of that period, regarded merely from the point of view of their intrinsic value. It is clear that these two purposes could not always be perfectly combined; but it is hoped that each has been in good measure achieved without undue sacrifice of the other, and that the interests of the academic stu dent and the general reader have been fairly harmonized.

In the treatment of the text, the same principles have been followed as in the editor's edition of Shakespeare's works in the Cambridge Poets Series. Each play has been printed from the most authentic text accessible, and emendations have been ad0pted Sparingly. Modern stage directions, and divisions into scenes and acts which do not appear in the original editions, have been distinguished by square brackets modern notes of place at the beginning of scenes have been relegated to the footnotes and indications given by the early copies of the authors' intentions with regard to the reading of the metre have been carefully preserved, especially in the matter of elided vowels. It is probable that, in the case of most of the present plays, the final -cd of verbs was intended to be pronounced as a separate syllable whenever it is spelled in full. The spelling and punctuation have been modernized throughout, except when the older spelling implied a different pronunciation.

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