The Works of John Dryden, Volume XI: Plays: The Conquest of Granada, Part I and Part II; Marriage-à-la-Mode and The Assignation: Or, Love in a Nunnery

Textual Notes

T E X T U A L N O T E S This page intentionally left blank Tex tual No tes K61 •./ Introduction CHOICE OF THE COPY TEXT The copy text is normally the first printing, on the theory that its accidentals are likely to be closest to the author's practice; but a manuscript or a subsequent printing may be chosen where there is reasonable evidence either that it represents more accurately the original manuscript as finally revised by the author or that the author revised the accidentals. REPRODUCTION OF THE COPY TEXT The copy text is normally reprinted literatim, but there are certain classes of exceptions. In the first place, apparently authoritative variants found in other texts are introduced as they occur, except that their purely accidental features are made to conform to the style of the copy text. These substitutions, but not their minor adjustments in accidentals, are recorded in footnotes as they occur. In the second place, the editors have introduced nonauthoritative emendations, whether found in earlier texts or not, where the sense seems to demand them. These emendations are also listed in the footnotes. In the third place, accidentals, speech headings, stage directions, scene headings, and so forth, are introduced or altered where it seems helpful to the reader. All such changes also are recorded in footnotes as they occur. In the fourth place, turned b, q, d, p, n, and u are accepted as q, b, p, d, u, and n, respectively, and if they result in spelling errors are corrected in the text and listed in the footnotes. The textual footnotes show the agreements among the texts only with respect to the precise variation of the present edition from the copy text; for example, in Marriage A-la-Mode at IV, iii, 155, the footnote "Hero] F; Hero Qi-4, D" has reference to the change from italics to romans; F actually reads "Heroe." Certain purely mechanical details have been normalized without special mention. Long "s" has been changed to round "s," "VV" to "W"; swash italics have been represented by plain italics; head titles and any accompanying rules, act and scene headings, and display initials and any accompanying capitalization, have been made uniform with the style of the present edition; when a speech begins in the middle of a verse line, it has been appropriately indented; the position of speech headings and stage directions and their line division have been freely altered (braces in the speech tags have been omitted; those in the stage directions have been replaced by brackets; erratic uses of capitals in stage directions have been normalized ); wrong font, and turned letters other than q, b, p, d, u, and n have been adjusted; medial apostrophes that failed to print have been restored; italicized plurals in -'s have been distinguished (by italic final "s") from possessives (roman final "s"); quotations have been marked with inverted commas at the beginning and end only and always; spacing between words and before and after punctuation has been normalized when no change in meaning results; the common contractions have been counted as single words, but otherwise words abbreviated by elision have been separated 562 Textual Notes from those before and after if the apostrophe is present; if the elided syllable is written out as well as marked by an apostrophe, the words have been run together ("speak'it"). TEXTUAL NOTES The textual notes list the relevant manuscripts and printings, assign them sigla, and give references to the bibliographies where they are more fully described. Normally only the seventeenth-century manuscripts and the printed editions through Congreve's (1717)! are cited, since there is normally no likelihood that authoritative readings will be found in any later manuscripts or editions. The textual notes also outline the descent of the text through its various manuscripts and printings, indicate which are the authorized texts, and explain how the copy text was selected in each instance . A list of copies collated follows. If the differences between variant copies are sufficient to warrant a tabular view of them, it will follow the list of copies collated. The sigla indicate the format of printed books (F = folio, Q = quarto, O = octavo, etc.) and the order of printing, if this is determinable, within the format group (F may have been printed after Qi and before Qa). If order of printing is in doubt, the numbers are arbitrary, and they...