Transcriber's Note. A list of the changes made can be found at the end of the book. Mark up: _italic_ =bold= Representative English Comedies FROM THE BEGINNINGS TO SHAKESPEARE [Illustration] REPRESENTATIVE ENGLISH COMEDIES WITH INTRODUCTORY ESSAYS AND NOTES AN HISTORICAL VIEW OF OUR EARLIER COMEDY _AND OTHER MONOGRAPHS_ BY VARIOUS WRITERS UNDER THE GENERAL EDITORSHIP OF CHARLES MILLS GAYLEY, LITT.D., LL.D. _Professor of the English Language and Literature in the University of California_ FROM THE BEGINNINGS TO SHAKESPEARE New York: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., LTD. 1926 _All rights reserved._ COPYRIGHT, 1903, BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. Set up, electrotyped, and published March, 1903. Norwood Press _J. S. Cushing & Co.--Berwick & Smith Co. Norwood, Mass., U.S.A._ PREFACE "'Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale ... nor ginger hot i' the mouth?' Or knowest not that while man, casting the dice with Fate and Mistress Grundy, imagineth a new luck, there shall be new comedy? Why, then, reprint these old?" In part, because the comedies of a nation are for literature as well as for the footlights, and literature, in most cases, begins after the footlights are out. In part, because old comedies make good reading, not only for lovers of fiction and the stage, but for the student of society and the historian. Until rival forms of literary art began to usurp their function, comedies were--in England, not to speak of other and older lands--the recognized and cherished exponent of the successive phases of contemporary life. For us they still are living sketches of the social manners, morals, vanities, and ideals of generations of our ancestors; history "unbeknownst" as written by contemporaries. Unfortunately, many of these old comedies are inaccessible to the public; and, therefore, we venture to hope that the general reader may find such a collection as the present acceptable, whether he care to enter upon a historical and technical study of the subject or not.