Page:The tragedy of Coriolanus.djvu/13



that the completion of this edition of Coriolanus, which came into my hands in 1909, has been perforce so long deferred, and that before Mr. Craig’s death deprived the Arden Shakespeare of his devotion and scholarship, he had not brought his work on the play to a stage at which I might have confined myself to little more than seeing it through the press. Unfortunately I have been obliged by the rough state in which it was left, to add, subtract, and alter on a large scale.

Mr. Craig had typed all headings of passages which he thought of annotating, leaving many blank, roughly explain- ing others, and illustrating these from his unrivalled stores with a generosity much beyond the scale of the edition. He would later have supplied omissions, cancelled superfluities, rewritten or replaced explanations, and selected and corrected examples; and all this 1 have done freely, sometimes also substituting examples where verification was both necessary and impossible. As he had, for the most part, reserved difficulties requiring thought, I am almost wholly responsible for the reasoned notes.

Mr. Craig had roughly fixed his text and prepared the Life of Coriolanus from North’s Plutarch for the press; but for his Introduction he had only made jottings, and I have been obliged to write what follows quite independently.

This edition keeps as close to the folio text as the plan of the series admits, generally retaining obsolete forms of words and obsolete grammatical forms. The old stage directions, if sufficient, and if clearly expressed, though less gracefully than by modern editors, are also reproduced. Debts to old and