The corrections in this play are nearly all good: thus the metre is restored at I., 2, 178, and III., 2, 93, and improved in III., 4, 132. V., 3, 85 is an excellent emendation. On the other hand, I do not think the author would have made such a stupid mistake as the one found at IV., 1, 14, for Chrysapius is there addressing the Empress, about Pulcheria.
The Maid of Honour
Nil.
Note by Mr. Edmund Gosse.
In 1877, when he was breaking up his home at Clifton, and disposing of his books, John Addington Symonds gave Mr. Edmund Gosse a thick volume containing eight first editions of plays by Massinger. The book was bound in worn old calf of the period, and had stamped on the back the author's name. Symonds, in giving the book to Mr. Gosse, called his attention to the contemporary corrections in ink, and said there was “a tradition” that they were in the handwriting of Massinger himself. Mr. Gosse, unfortunately, broke up the volume and had the eight plays separately bound, but the old binding had contained no further indication. In 1882 Swinburne made a careful examination of the corrections, and again in 1883, when he urged that they should be published. He became persuaded that they were made by Massinger himself. Nothing, however, has until now been done [pg 223] with them. The volume came from the Harbord library at Gunton in Norfolk, and was sold, with other old books, at the death of the fourth Lord Suffield in 1853. Symonds bought it of an Oxford bookseller when he was an undergraduate.
Appendix XX. Bibliography
W. Archer: “The Elizabethan Stage” (Quarterly Review, No. 415, April, 1908).
R. Boyle: Dictionary of National Biography: “Massinger.”
" Englische Studien (Heilbronn): “On Beaumont, Fletcher, and Massinger,” v. 74, vii, 66, viii. 39, ix. 209, x. 383.