The Palace of Pleasure, Volume 1

Note that “Tome I” refers to the two-volume editions of Painter and Haslewood, while “Volume I” refers to Jacobs’s three-volume edition (the present text). Tome I goes up to Novel LX VI (i.66); Volume I ends at Novel XL VI (i.46).


Indented or italicized items were added by the transcriber. Italicized terms do not appear in the printed text. The “Tome I” link leads to a separate file containing novels I - XLVI.

The present edition of Painter’s “Palace of Pleasure,” the storehouse of Elizabethan plot, follows page for page and line for line the privately printed and very limited edition made by Joseph Haslewood in 1813. One of the 172 copies then printed by him has been used as “copy” for the printer, but this has been revised in proof from the British Museum examples of the second edition of 1575. The collation has for the most part only served to confirm Haslewood’s reputation for careful editing. Though the present edition can claim to come nearer the original in many thousands of passages, it is chiefly in the mint and cummin of capitals and italics that we have been able to improve on Haslewood: in all the weightier matters of editing he shows only the minimum of fallibility. We have however divided his two tomes, for greater convenience, into three volumes of as nearly as possible equal size. This arrangement has enabled us to give the title pages of both editions of the two tomes, those of the first edition in facsimile, those of the second (at the beginning of vols. ii. and iii.) with as near an approach to the original as modern founts of type will permit.
I have also reprinted Haslewood’s “Preliminary Matter,” which give the Dryasdust details about the biography of Painter and the bibliography of his book in a manner not too Dryasdust. With regard to the literary apparatus of the book, I have perhaps been able to add something to Haslewood’s work. From the Record Office and British Museum I have given a number of documents about Painter, and have recovered the only extant letter of our author. I have also gone more thoroughly into the literary history of each of the stories in the “Palace of Pleasure” than Haslewood thought it necessary to do. I have found Oesterley’s edition of Kirchhof and Landau’s Quellen des Dekameron useful for this purpose. I have to thank Dr. F. J. Furnivall for lending me his copies of Bandello and Belleforest.