himself into the character and thus revealed his own nature and point of view. In any case he has presented for his hero a whimperer who can command neither our sympathy nor our respect when he cries above the bodies of his benefactor and her who is that benefactor’s daughter, his own wife, and the mother of his child: _Ist dies Stück denn aus, Weil jene starb? Und ich? An mich denkt keiner?_ We have come a long way from Massinger and Field and the early seventeenth century. The shadow of the old dramatists reaches far, even to our own time; we have seen their play redeveloped, but never improved upon, by pseudo-classicist, and popularizer, and Decadent hyper-aesthete. That which was the vulnerable point in the original production--its two-fold plot--has been still for every imitator a stone of stumbling. Rowe tried to escape it by the suppression of the antecedent half, and the fraction which remained in his hand was an artificial thing without the breath of life, that had to be attenuated and padded out with speechifying to fill the compass of its five Acts. Beer-Hofmann tried to escape it by superimposing an idea not proper to the story, and beneath the weight of this his tragedy collapsed in the middle, for its addition over-packed the drama, and left him not room enough to make convincing the conduct of his characters. The first essayers, who attacked in straightforward fashion their unwieldy theme, succeeded best; all attempts to obviate its essential defect have marred rather than mended. Perhaps the theme is by its nature unsuited to dramatic treatment, and yet there is much that is dramatic about that theme, as is evinced by the fact that playwrights have been unable to let it lie. EDITOR’S NOTE ON TEXT The present text aims to reproduce exactly the Quarto edition of 1632, retaining its punctuation, spelling, capitals, italics, and stage directions--amending only the metrical alignment.[14] Mere mistakes of printing--inverted and broken letters--are restored, but are duly catalogued in the foot notes. The division into scenes, as made by Gifford, and his affixment of the _locus_ of each, are inserted into the text, inclosed in brackets. In the foot notes are recorded all variants of all subsequent editions. Differences of punctuation are given, if they could possibly alter the meaning, but not otherwise--nor mere differences _in wording_ of stage directions, nor differences in spelling, nor elision for metre. In the Quarto the elder Novall is sometimes designated before his lines as _Novall Senior_, sometimes merely as _Novall_--no confusion is possible, since he and his son are never on the stage at the same time. Gifford and Symons always write _Novall Senior_, while Coxeter and Mason write _Novall_ alone in I, i, and _Novall Senior_ thereafter. I have not thought it worth while to note the variants of the several texts on this point. Q.--The Quarto--1632 C.--Coxeter’s edition, 1759