GENERAL INTRODUCTION THE present edition of the Works of Shakespeare forms a part of the now well-known Eversley series of the English classics. Its scope and character have been largely determined by the general intention of that series. It is designed, in other words, rather for the cultivated but not learned reader than for the professed Shakespearean or the examinee, though neither of these, it is hoped, will turn to it altogether in vain. The text is founded upon the labours of the editors of the Cambridge and Globe Shakespeares, without following either implicitly. A detailed critical apparatus would have been foreign to the aims of this edition; textual notes have, as a rule, been limited to the two purposes of specifying important departures from the old texts, and, where the old texts are incorrigibly corrupt, of indicating the least unlikely conjectures. The bulk of the notes are intended to provide, in the briefest possible form, such information as may serve to smooth the reader's path without insulting his intelligence. The Introductions offer brief surveys of the literary data of the several plays and poems, with some indication of the bearing of each upon the eternal problem of Shakespeare's mind and art. VOL. I vii b In the arrangement of the plays it has been sought to reflect, as far as may be, the actual groups which critical scrutiny discovers in his work. This does not imply that the entire series is arranged in chronological order. For this order, though at many points extremely instructive, perhaps obscures. as many affinities as it discloses; much is lost as well as gained by the reader who studies, as he is invited to do in a justly popular edition, Venus and Adonis between The Comedy of Errors and The Second Part of Henry VI., or The Phoenix and the Turtle between The Merry Wives and Twelfth Night. To write the annals of a mind so versatile and flexible as Shakespeare's is not quite the same thing as to trace its history. Where the activity of such a mind is distributed among detached provinces of art, each imposing its own conditions and the pursuit of its own species of delight, we often learn more by watching the phases of its separate procedure in each. Mere convenience, moreover, demands that a work in many volumes, however technical it may be in its minutest subdivisions, should rest in its larger grouping upon elementary and familiar distinctions. Now, the distinction, Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies, is not only universally familiar, but corresponds to actual provinces of Shakespeare's work, each of which has its continuous story. His first editors, as is well known, though otherwise presenting the plays in most admired disorder, founded the First Folio upon this threefold division. On both grounds it has been thought well, in the present edition, to retain the |