Chapter 18

THE ELIZABETHAN DRAMA

Full bibliographies of both plays and critical works are to be found in Schelling's Elizabethan Drama and in the Cambridge History of English Literature, vols. v and vi.

1. EDITIONS OF PLAYS

Convenient collections, often with valuable introductions and notes, are: Dodsley's Old English Plays, ed. W. C. Hazlitt, 15 vols., 1874-1876; Manly's Pre-Shaksperean Drama, 2 vols., Boston; Neilson's Chief Elizabethan Dramatists, Boston, 1911 (30 plays in one volume); the Mermaid Series of the Old Dramatists (4 or 5 plays by one author in each vol.); the Belles Lettres Edition (with excellent bibliographies), Boston; Masterpieces of the English Drama, New York; Temple Dramatists. Valuable reprints of old plays and documents are found in the following series now in progress: The Tudor Facsimile Texts, ed. J. S. Farmer, 43 vols., 1907; Materialien zur Kunde des älteren englischen Dramas, ed. W. Bang, Louvain, 1902; Publications of the Malone Society, 1906.

Collected editions of the chief dramatists include those of Greene, Peele, Webster, Ford, Beaumont and Fletcher, and Shirley, ed. by Alexander Dyce; of Middleton, Marston, Marlowe, and Webster, by A. H. Bullen, and the more recent editions from the Clarendon Press,--Greene, ed. J. Churton Collins; Kyd, by F. S. Boas; Lyly, by W. Bond; Nash, by McKerrow; Marlowe, by Tucker Brooke. Massinger and Jonson exist only in the early nineteenth-century editions of Gifford. There are also recent editions of Beaumont and Fletcher by A. R. Waller, Cambridge, and by A. H. Bullen _et al._ (in progress), and an edition of Chapman by T. Parrott.

2. CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL

Die Geschichte des neueren Dramas. W. Creizenach (in progress). Halle, 1893-. This is the standard history of the modern drama, vol. iv dealing in a masterly fashion with the Shakespearean period. There is no English translation.

History of English Dramatic Literature to the Death of Queen Anne. A. W. Ward. 2d ed. 3 vols. 1899.

Elizabethan Drama. F. E. Schelling. 2 vols. Boston, 1902. This contains valuable bibliographies and a finding list for the plays.

The Mediæval Stage. E. K. Chambers. 2 vols. Oxford, 1903. Authoritative for the pre-Elizabethan drama, with valuable bibliography and appendices.

A Bibliographical Chronicle of the English Drama. F. G. Fleay. 1559-1642. A work of great value to scholars, but not of much service to the general reader.

Other works less comprehensive in scope, but dealing with special aspects or divisions of the drama, are: Tragedy, A. H. Thorndike, Boston, 1908; Shakespeare and his Predecessors, F. S. Boas, 1896; Tudor Drama, C. F. Tucker Brooke, Boston, 1912.

Special treatises which have also been drawn upon for this chapter are: F. E. Schelling's English Chronicle Play, New York, 1902; A. H. Thorndike's Influence of Beaumont and Fletcher on Shakspere, Lemcke and Buechner, N. Y., 1901; and Hamlet and the Revenge Plays, Publ. Mod. Lang. Assn., 1902; E. E. Stoll's John Webster, 1905; F. H. Ristine's English Tragi-Comedy, 1910; Reyher's Les Masques Anglais, Paris, 1909; W. W. Greg's Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama, 1906.