ABSTRACT
This edition attempts to modernize the spelling and punctuation of the 1640 quarto as thoroughly as is possible without sacrificing the meter and sense of the text. Within these limitations I have adopted the modern American spellings of words still in use and the OED spellings of obsolete words. When modern spelling adds or deletes a syllable, as with “thoroughly” for “throughly” at 1.1.32, and would thus change the meter, I retain the Q spelling. I likewise retain the forms of the quarto’s contractions and elisions, since printing, for example, “wi’ ye” for “w’ee” or “won’t” for “wo’not” would alter the meter, while, in the latter case, printing “will not” for “wo’not” would misleadingly formalize the colloquial. Q prints both “and” and “an” in the sense “if,” “and” several times and “an” once. For consistency’s sake I always print “and.” “An” gradually replaced “and” for this meaning during the course of the seventeenth century, and many editors have adopted it, but since the meaning “if” does not survive in modern English, it seems preferable to use the form of the word still most common in the first part of the century, as the Arden editors do. Stanley Wells’s point that “an” at least alerts readers to the different meaning, while “and” might be 83confusing, does have merit, though (16). Most past participles in Q are spelled “d” or simply “-d.” I have expanded these to “-ed.”
