Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from A List of English Plays Written Before 1643 and Printed Before 1700
A few words perhaps should be said as to the plan of the present work. Though the list only purports to give plays written before the closing of the theatres in 1642 and printed before the end of the century, I have for convenience included all the works of authors who are known to have written plays, whether extant or not, previous to that date. On the other hand, reprints of plays by the more popular authors, Shakespeare, Beaumont and Fletcher, and Ben Jonson, become so numerous towards the end of the century, and are at the same time so unimportant, that it would merely have been waste of space to have included them. In the case of Shake speare, therefore, I have excluded all editions of separate plays printed after the appearance in 1664 of the third folio, which contains the additional plays; in the case of Beaumont and Fletcher all after the complete plays had appeared in the folio of 1679; and in the case of Jonson all after the publication in 1640 of the second volume, which completed the folio edition of his works with the exception of 2726 M20 Ime, which did not appear in a collected edition till 1692. Similarly in other cases in which collected editions of an author's plays appeared, subsequent separate editions are as a rule omitted. The list does not include works which remained in manuscript after the end of the seventeenth century, nor masques, pageants, triumphs, dialogues, or such unclassable productions as Day's Parliament of Bees, Heywood's Amplm'sa (a miniature pastoral drama), D'avenant's Crueley of Spaniards in Peru and slog of Sir Prana's Drake (both of which were later included in Me Play/muse to 5e Let), or the anonymous Cantereury Iris C/zange of Diet or pvz'ne, Beer andx introd uction.
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