The texts of the plays and masque included in this collection have all been newly edited from the earliest published editions with reference to later editions. Further details of editions consulted are included in the headnote to each play. Typographical errors in the first edition have been silently corrected. Textual variants have been footnoted only where significant to the meaning. No typographical distinction has been made between stage directions from the first edition and those added by later editors. The spelling has been modernised throughout. The punctuation has been modernised where necessary to make the text clear to a modern reader, but no attempt has been made to make it conform to current conventions.
In the footnotes, the letters ‘SD’ indicate stage directions and ‘SP’ indicate speech prefixes. Where annotations from earlier editions are cited, the name of the editor is given in brackets. Works consulted in the preparation of the footnotes are given below. Any abbreviations used to refer to them are given in brackets.
Blakemore Evans, G. (ed.) (1987) Elizabethan-Jacobean Drama, London: A. & C. Black.
Greenblatt, Stephen, Cohen, Walter, Howard, Jean E. and Maus, Katharine Eisaman (eds) (1997) The Norton Shakespeare, based on the Oxford edition, New York, NY, London: W. W. Norton and Company.
Harvey, Paul (ed.) (1967) The Oxford Companion to English Literature, 4th edition, revised by Dorothy Eagle, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Linthicum, M. C. (1935) Costume in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Partridge, Eric (1947; this edition 1968) Shakespeare’s Bawdy, London: Routledge.
—— (1973) The Routledge Dictionary of Historical Slang, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Ruoff, James E. (1975) The Macmillan Handbook of Elizabethan and Stuart Literature, London: Macmillan.
Simpson, J. A. and Weiner, E. S. C. (eds) (1989) Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition, Oxford: Clarendon Press (OED).
Stephen, Leslie, Smith, George and Lee, Sydney (eds) (1917) The Dictionary of National Biography, 22 vols, London: Oxford University Press (DNB).
Stow, John (1971) A Survey of London, C. L. Kingsford (ed.), Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Sugden, E. H. (1925) A Topographical Dictionary to the Works of Shakespeare and his Fellow Dramatists, Manchester: The University Press (Sugden).
Tilley, M. P. (1950) A Dictionary of Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, Ann Arbor, MI: Michigan University Press (Tilley).
Whiting, B. J. (1968) Proverbs, Sentences, and Proverbial Phrases from English Writings mainly before 1500, Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press.
Wynne-Davies, Marion (ed.) (1992) Bloomsbury Guides to English Literature: The Renaissance, London: Bloomsbury.