Bibliographical Studies in the Plays of John Ford

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

The present project has the following three objectives : (1) to record pressvariants in the first quartos of John Ford's seven plays (i. e., The Broken Heart, 1633 ; Perkin Warbeck, 1634 ; The Fancies, Chaste and Noble, 1638 ; The Lady's Trial, 163 9 ; The Lover's Melancholy, 1629 ; Love's Sacrifice, 1633 ; and 'Tis Pitv She's a Whore, 1633) discovered in the course of collation of the extant copies of the quartos ; (2) to describe professional characteristics of their compositors through application of various methods of analytical bibliography to the printed texts ; and (3) to establish Ford's dramatic texts.The project was started in April 1989 with identification of 123 copies of the quartos and was ended in March 1992 with that of 233 copies, which are in the possession of forty-one libraries in the United Kingdom, the United States of America, Japan, Holland and Sweden, as recorded in the "CENSUS OF EXTANT COPIES" section of the separate report in book form entitled BIBLIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES IN THE PLAYS OF JOHN FORD : A Tentative Record of Press-Variants in the Quarto, pp. 13-15.Conclusions of the first-and the second years of the present project were already reported in the form of an "Abstract" for their respective year. They were the results of more or less faithful achievement of the plans as scheduled : collecting from abroad new primary material mostly in microform and recording every variant discovered in the copies, while carrying out computer-aided textual analyses, though rather imperfect.I would like to emphasize the quality of the collection of the primary research material, which I am sure is of the first rate the world over. I am also certain that the record of press-variants, which is the first objective of the present project, is of the most comprehensive.Further effort, however, ought to be made for the establishment of Ford's dramatic texts on the basis of the analyses of compositorial characteristics discovered in the quartos.