Textual Introduction

Sophonisba has appeared in print five times, once independently and four times in collections of Marston’s plays. The first edition is a quarto printed in 1606 by John Windet; the second edition is in an octavo containing six plays by Marston printed for William Sheares in 1633. Thereafter, Sophonisba lay neglected until the nineteenth-century revival of interest in Shakespeare’s contemporaries; but during that revival it appeared in two three-volume editions of Marston’s works—one edited by J. O. Halliwell in 1856 and the other edited by A. H. Bullen in 1887. Finally, it is included in the three-volume edition of Marston’s plays edited by H. Harvey Wood and published between 1934 and 1938. ¹ Their dates of publication make it extremely unlikely that any editions other than those of 1606 and 1633 offer textual authority, and collation of all three modern editions against the 1606 quarto confirms that there is no authority in the modern texts.