Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: INTRODUCTION THE BIRTH OF MERLIN. THE TliXT OP THE PRESENT EDITION. This play was first published by Kirkman and Marsh, in 1662, one of the most slovenly editions that ever issued from the press. The blank verse is printed therein as prose, and the task of restoring the original verse is by no means easy as the orthography is anything but trustworthy, words being abbreviated where the verse required the full form and vice versd ; the tenses altered ; explanatory words incorporated with the text, and the stage directions sometimes tacked on to the dialogue. In 1869 this play appeared in a volume entitled Doubtful Plays of the Tauchnitz edition. The text of the present edition is that of the edition of 1662, but, as this series is, in the main, intended for the million, a compromise has lieen attempted in this way. The spelling has been modernized, and the obvious misprints and errors of the original text have been corrected. With these exceptions, scholars may rely on this edition as an accurate reprint of the edition of 1662. In the task of restoring the text, the editor has derived material assistance from the German translation of the play in Ludwig Tieck's Shakespeare's Vorschule (1823). In this admirable version the clown is permitted to speak once or twice in blank verse, and the words in question will scan no doubt, as a great deal of prose will; but we have tied the clown to prose on all occasions, as the clowns seldom talked in blank verse, which the Elizabethan dramatists seem to consider as too respectable an instrument for these interesting gentry. ANALYSIS OF THE PLAY. The play opens admirably. Donobert, a British nobleman, had two daughters, Constantia and Modestia, the contrast between whose characters is well drawn. Constantia accepted the hand of ...