Title:  The Works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher Vol. 2 of 10:  Introduction to The Elder Brother

Author:  Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher

Release Date:  April 21, 2004 [EBook #12098]

Language:  English

Character set encoding:  ASCII

*** Start of this project gutenberg EBOOK Beaumont and Fletcher ***

Produced by Jonathan Ingram, Jonathan Ingram, Charles M. Bidwell and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.

FRANCIS BEAUMONT

Born 1584
Died 1616

JOHN FLETCHER

Born 1579
Died 1625

THE ELDER BROTHER

THE SPANISH CURATE

WIT WITHOUT MONEY

BEGGARS BUSH

THE HUMOUROUS LIEUTENANT

THE FAITHFUL SHEPHERDESS

THE TEXT EDITED BY

Arnold Glover, M.A.

OF TRINITY COLLEGE AND THE INNER TEMPLE

AND

A.R.  Waller, M.A.

OF PETERHOUSE

CAMBRIDGE:  at the University Press 1906

Cambridge University press warehouse,
C.F.  Clay, manager. 
London:  Fetter Lane, E.C. 
Glasgow:  50, Wellington Street. 
Leipzig:  F.A.  Brockhaus. 
New York:  The MACMILLAN company. 
Bombay and Calcutta:  MACMILLAN and Co., Ltd.

[All Rights reserved.]

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.’