Page:Sir Thomas More play.djvu/21

INTRODUCTION. SIR THOMAS MORE was first printed in 1844, from the Harleian MS. 7868, by Alexander Dyce for the Shakespeare Society. The MS. is in the British Museum, and for upwards of a century has been accessible to the public;'considering the merit of the work and the interest attached to some portion of the manuscript, it is surprising it was not printed before, and that up to the present time it has received so little attention. The MS. presents a very confused condition; consisting of the original sketch as it left the author's or theatrical transcriber's hands, with additions and corrections sometimes on separate sheets, and occasionally on the margin of the original transcript. In some instances where a scene has been revised or re-written, it has been pasted over the first sketch of the corresponding scene; and in one instance the leaf containing the first draft of a scene (ii. 4,) has been wholly removed. In some cases leaves have been wrongly placed; matter that should properly come in near the commencement of the play has been inserted towards the end, and vice versa ; and to make confusion worse confounded, the handwriting of the additions