The comedy which appears in the following pages is reprinted from “the second impression,” as it is called on the title page, made by Francis Kirkman in the year 1661: the first edition is apparently no longer extant. Francis Kirkman occupies an interesting position in the history of the English drama as the first man to interest himself in the collection and preservation of old English plays. To him we owe the reprint of Lust's Dominion, which has been attributed to Marlowe, of The Thracian Wonder, of Gammer Gurton's Nedle, and of other plays; and from Kirkman we have the first attempt at a catalogue of English dramas, the foundation on which Langbaine, Baker, Reed, and others were later to build. The earlier form of Kirkman's “an exact Catalogue of all the playes that were ever yet printed” appeared as a supplement to the present play, and included six hundred and ninety items. A few years later Kirkman had increased his list to eight hundred and six. He tells us that he had seen and read all these plays and that he possesses most of them, which he is willing to sell or lend upon reasonable consideration.

The present paper is drawn from a number of notes gradually collected and is intended to be one of a series of studies upon those plays of Shakespeare belonging to his earliest dramatic period. It is a period of vital interest in Shakespeare's work, because artistically it is his formative one and historically it connects our greatest dramatist with his predecessors and with characteristic contemporary fashions and productions.

Few of the Germanic suffixes have recently been discussed so often as the suffix -ar-ja, the most widespread and extensively used suffix of the Germanic dialects. Grimm's theory that this suffix is identical with the suffix -ja plus an additional -r, which, in a modified form, was adopted by Kluge in the first edition of his Stammbildungslehre, has been given up and most scholars seem now to agree with Sütterlin-Möller's explanation, according to which -ar-ja was borrowed from the Latin ārius. This borrowing, as Orthoff suggests, must have been done at two different periods, because it would explain the twofold form -ari and -āri in O.H.G.

The following edition of the Vita Meriadoci is based on an exact transcript of the Cottonian ms. made for me by Mr. F. B. Bickley, of the Department of Manuscripts of the British Museum, during the months of June and July, 1899, and shortly after collated by me with the original ms. The edition is similar in character to that of the other Latin romance, De Ortu Waluuanii, contained in the same ms. which appeared in these Publications (vol. xiii, No. 3) two years ago. The only particular in which I have departed from the plan of that edition is in regard to the abstract of the story printed at the end, which in this instance can no longer be termed a paraphrase. Further experience in the comparative study of stories of this kind has convinced me that translations and paraphrases are less useful to the student than briefer summaries and I should indeed reproach myself for the length of the present abstract but for the fact that the barbarous character of the language in which it is composed renders a perusal of the Latin text rather tedious to the reader and it accordingly seemed advisable to render the original with a certain amount of detail.