The texts in this volume have been freshly edited from the earliest printed editions of Marlowe’s plays. The spellings, punctuation, speech-prefixes, stage directions and lineation preserved in the original editions have been silently modernized in accordance with the particular needs of each text, given that Marlowe’s plays were subject to the diverse conventions of printers. We have undertaken these modernizations conservatively, and have not sought to impose an arbitrary consistency across the volume: the grand rhetorical speeches of Tamburlaine, for example, require a different presentation from that demanded by the rapid conversational exchanges of The Jew of Malta. Elizabethan compositors’ punctuation does not necessarily respect the sense-units of the original. Richard Jones’s printing of Tamburlaine the Great, for example, contains many verse lines ending with full stops which affect the intelligibility of the text. We have freely repunctuated with the aim of making the syntactic structure as clear as possible for the modern reader.
Elizabethan spellings have been modernized, so ‘mushrump’, ‘centronel’ and ‘vild’ become ‘mushroom’, ‘sentinel’ and ‘vile’. All ‘-ed’ endings have been standardized, so ‘serv’d’ becomes ‘served’ and ‘returnd’ becomes ‘returned’. Syllabic ‘-ed’ endings have been marked ‘-èd’. Contractions in the original have been retained but in their modern form, so ‘swolne’ and ‘tane’ become ‘swoll’n’ and ‘ta’en’. We have followed the original lineation of the copy-texts, except when it is evident that verse has been mistakenly printed as prose and vice versa. These alterations have not been noted. Substantive changes to the wording of the original texts, on the other hand, have been recorded with some discussion in the Notes.
Printing-house errors such as turned letters, misplaced and transposed type and obvious cases of missing type have been silently corrected. Where ‘and’ is used, meaning ‘if’, we have silently adopted the modern form, ‘an’. The abbreviations ‘Mr’ and ‘S.’ have been expanded to ‘Master’ and ‘Saint’, respectively. All numbers in the copy-texts have also been expanded, so ‘24’ becomes ‘four and twenty’.
Speech-prefixes and character names have been standardized throughout in accordance with the designations given in the Dramatis Personae. Where no act-division is present in the original text (Doctor Faustus, Edward the Second and The Massacre at Paris), the text has been sub-divided into scenes only. Foreign languages have been corrected throughout, and are translated in the Notes. We have regularized the Latin except in the case of Doctor Faustus, where some incorrect usages seem to have comic, or other, significance.
We have been sparing in the use of editorial stage-directions, which are enclosed in square brackets; these are added to clarify rather than prescribe the stage action. Where possible, we have reproduced the original positioning of stage-directions as set in the copy-texts, but in some cases, it has made better sense to move those stage-directions which do not correspond with the stage action implied by the text. A number of ‘late entries’ in the copy-text have therefore been repositioned to indicate when a character is most likely to enter the stage.