This text is created direct from the earliest printed
text — the small, cheap books in quarto format sold by
the booksellers of St Paul's Churchyard for around
sixpence. It has not been edited, and so you can
experience the idiosyncrasies of early modern print. In
an age when spelling was not standardised, a range of
ways of spelling even quite simple words was usual. Often
homophones — words such as to
and
too
which sound the same but are distinguished in
modern spelling — are not clear, and this is one
of the great sources of puns for early modern
writers. Speech prefixes and stage directions are also
not presented in the form readers of modern playtexts are
used to, and nor did these early texts include a list of
characters or an index of acts and scenes. Some features
of early modern printing may also be unfamiliar —
the interchangeability of the letters u
and
v
, for example, or i
and y
. There
was no letter j
in the sets of type used by
printers, so that letter is signalled with the letter
i
or I
.
To find out more about
early modern print and how and why plays were printed see
the Furness Collection, University of Pennsylvania's
multimedia online tutorials at