NOTE:


The text of the present volume was passed for press by Arnold Glover and
some progress had been made in his lifetime in the collection of the
material given in the Appendix. Mrs. Glover's help has again been most
valuable in the completion of the work.

_The Elder Brother_ is printed entirely in prose in the Second Folio, and
I have therefore printed in the Appendix the play in verse, as it appeared
in the First Quarto. The case is an interesting one, and readers will be
glad, I think, to have both forms in the same volume.

I have not concerned myself with passages in the Second Folio in prose
which have since been printed as verse. On the whole I agree with a recent
critic who characterises as 'vexatious' the 'later practice of printing
much manifest prose as verse, each post-seventeenth century editor
apparently making it a point of honour to discover metre where no one had
found it before, and where no one with an ear can find it now.'

I am glad to have had the opportunity of seeing the 1625 manuscript of
_Demetrius and Enanthe_, the play first printed in a somewhat mutilated
form in the First Folio of 1647, where it is called _The Humorous
Lieutenant_. It is stated in the _Dictionary of National Biography_ (Vol.
XIX, p. 306) that this MS. is preserved in the Dyce Library but the
statement is incorrect. The MS. has never been a part of the Dyce
collection. It was printed by Dyce in 1830 and after that date it rested
for many years in obscurity. To Mrs. Glover is due the credit for having
traced it to its present home. For help in this search our thanks are due
to Lord Stanley of Alderley, to W.R.M. Wynne, Esq., of Peniarth, Towyn,
Merioneth (whose father owned the MS. and left a note in his copy of
Dyce's reprint that he had given the MS. to his "old friend the late W.
Ormsby Gore, Esq., M.P. for North Shropshire") and to Lord Harlech, the
grandson of Mr. Ormsby Gore. Lord Harlech re-discovered the MS. in his
library at Brogyntyn, Oswestry, and he has very kindly permitted a
thorough examination of it. Dyce's 1830 publication is described as a
reprint "verbatim et literatim," but it has little claim to be so called.
The punctuation is altered throughout, the spelling is altered in scores
of words and though the actual verbal differences between the original MS.
and Dyce's reprint of it are not very many, yet these occur here and there
throughout the play. Later editors, therefore, relying upon Dyce, have
been led into recording as 'MS.' readings variations which do not occur in
the MS. A brief description of the MS. will be found in the Appendix, pp.
509-18, together with the passages omitted from the Folios and a complete
record of the verbal variations. The present collation omits readings
incorrectly given by Dyce.