LONDON
Printed for Frederick Etchells and Hugh Macdonald at

ia Kensington Place, W.8,

1924

313

OF THIS EDITION, PRINTED IN ENGLAND BY THE PELICAN
PRESS ON KENTISH ALL RAG PAPER MADE SPECIALLY FOR
THE HASLEWOOD REPRINTS, 825 NUMBERED COPIES HAVE
BEEN ISSUED.

s-21-31

English

222.2 Sutheran

Mesh 4-7-30 2/28/. NOTE

1924 ARLOW died in May 1593, and on the 28th of

September of that year "a booke intituled Hero and Leander beinge an amorous poem devised by Christopher Marlow" was licensed by John Wolf who does not bowever appear to bave issued an edition. In 1998 Edward Blount published the poem, which Marlow bad left unfinished, in a 4to volume of which only one copy, formerly in the Heber and Britwell Court collections, but now in a private library in America, is known to exist.

In the meantime George Chapman bad finished the poem-
it is supposed on the authority of the line in the Third Sestyad
“Tell it how much his late desires I tender” that this was
at the request of Marlow himself—and in the same year
another edition containing the poem in its completed form,
divided into “Sestyads” and with “ Arguments" to each

”
Sestyad added by Chapman, was issued by Paul Linley. Of this
edition two copies discovered at Lamport Hallin 1867 are all that
appear to have survived. There is a small difference in the
spelling of “ Leander" on the title pages of these two copies, and
according to Hazlitt they vary slightly throughout. Both passed
into the Britwell Court Library, one of them being subsequently
sold to the British Museum, and the other going to America
at the sale of a portion of the Britwell Library in 1923.

The poem was very popular and was reprinted in 1600,
1606, 1609, 1613, 1616, 1617, 1622, 1629 and 1637. Copies
of all these editions are now extremely rare.

The present edition is a page for page reprint of the fine and perfect Museum copy of Linley's edition (C: 40 e. 68 (1)) except that certain leaves which in the original have been bound up in the wrong place have here been printed in their proper order and the position of some lines at the end of the Second Sestyad has been altered (See note at the end of the volume).

The emendations in the text and the authority for them are noted at the end of the volume, except that a few obvious misprints, such as “Heor” for “Hero,” have been silently cor

"

· rected. Whilst it is now recognized that the system of punctuation in the 16th and 17th centuries was rather different to that of our day, there can be no doubt that printers occasionally either supplied their own stops or were careless in their printing, and a certain number of changes have been deemed necessary. They have been made only where the sense required it and the punctuation of the original appeared to have neither grammatical nor rhetorical object.

For the readings of Blount's edition we are indebted to the Clarendon Press edition of Marlow.