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Excerpt from The Works of Cyril Tourneur
IN preparing this edition of the works of Cyril Tourneur I have been guided by two principles: the first, to present a text which remains as faithful as possible to the original editions; and the second, to make the volume a complete record of Tourneur's literary activities. The obvious duties of an editor necessarily demanded a certain amount of emendation, but nowhere is a reading of my own introduced without full indication of the fact, and nowhere has any alteration been made, even in punctuation, where the original version made sense. From a possibly too conservative treatment of the text I have allowed only two general deviations. Long f has, throughout, been silently levelled under s, and many passages in The Atheist's Tragedie which, although clearly intended to be verse had been printed as prose in the quarto, have been ref arranged. Such rearrangement, however, is duly noted in the textual commentary, where the original quarto lining is restored. It will be understood that these methods have rendered the notes somewhat lengthy; but it seems incumbent upon an editor who does not give merely a type/facsimile of his material to note, and note fully, all the changes, however minute and seemingly unimportant, he has made. Perhaps at times one may feel that scholarship is rapidly becoming a fetish in these modern days, and is so divorcing the study of literature both from literature and from life; but, in the preparation of an edition such as this, the only secure method on which to work seems to be that which will allow the reader to convert, if he desires, the lines printed in the text into the original wording or punctuation of the first editions, and that which demands as little variation as possible from those editions themselves.
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