ABSTRACT
PREFACE THIS volume was originally intended to include consideration both of the Roman plays and of the other plays on ostensibly 'classical' themes. While gathering the material, however, I came to see the advisability of lengthening the Introductions so as to trace the growth of the Caesar and Cleopatra legends, and of omitting as little as possible of the three major Lives in Plutarch. Moreover, realizing that no modern editions of the Countess of Pembroke's Antonie and Samuel Daniel's Cleopatra are accessible to students, I determined to include complete texts of these plays, since they are valuable not only as sources or analogues but also for themselves as dramatic experiments in the classical mode. (In these as in other texts I have occasionally amended punctuation and spelling, but as seldom and slightly as possible.) In consequence what was meant to be one volume must become two, and Titus Andronicus, Troilus and Cressida, Timon and Pericles will be discussed in Volume VI, leaving the four greatest tragedies and the Romances for Vol. VII.
