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 extensive, as was done for the folio, even the best texts of the plays have reached us. Whether it is sound or not—I think that it probably is—there were other playwrights who were far from adopting Shakespeare's attitude of detachment from the literary fate of his works. Jonson was a careful editor. Marston, Middleton, and Heywood all apologize for misprints in various plays, which they say were printed without their knowledge, or when they were urgently occupied elsewhere; and the inference must be that in normal circumstances the responsibility would have rested with them. Marston, indeed, definitely says that he had 'perused' the second edition of The Fawn, in order 'to make some satisfaction for the first faulty impression'.

The modern editions, with their uniform system of acts and scenes and their fanciful notes of locality—'A room in the palace', 'Another room in the palace'—are again misleading in their relation to the early prints, especially those based upon the play-house. Notes of locality are very rare. Occasionally a definite shift from one country or town to another is recorded; and a few edited plays, such as Ben Jonson's, prefix, with a 'dramatis personae', a general indication of 'The scene'. For the rest, the reader is left to his own inferences, with such help as the dialogue and the presenters give him; and the modern editors, with a post-Restoration tradition of staging in their minds, have often inferred wrongly. Even the shoulder-notes appended to the accurate reprints of the Malone Society, although they do not attempt localities, err by introducing too many new scenes. In the