ABSTRACT
The Opportunity was entered in the Stationers’ Register to Andrew Crooke and William Cooke on 25 April 1639 with two other Shirley plays, Love’s Cruelty and The Coronation, and two plays by John Fletcher, The Night Walker and Wit without Money, both of which Shirley may have revised. The Opportunity and the plays entered with it were printed by Thomas Cotes, who had taken over the Jaggards’ shop in 1627. Cotes had printed the three Shirley plays entered by Cooke and Crooke on 13 April 1637, as well as The Royal Master in 1638 for John Crooke and Richard Serger and The Ball and Chabot for Cooke and Crooke in 1639. The relatively large number of surviving copies of the quarto implies a large edition. Stevenson argues for an edition of 1,500 copies, in part on the basis of the distribution of particular watermarks in the quarto.
