This is the tenth and final volume in a ten-volume series of the critical old-spelling texts of the plays in the Beaumont and Fletcher canon, in which the texts are established on modern bibliographical principles. This volume contains the texts of six plays written by Fletcher and his collaborators, Nathan Field, Philip Massinger, Ben Jonson, George Chapman, John Ford and John Webster. Each play is introduced by a discussion of the text and authorship, has variant readings in footnotes, and is followed by full textual notes and lists of press-variants, emendations of accidentals and historical collations. At the back of this concluding volume there is a useful index showing how the plays are distributed between the volumes, and a table giving the authorship of the plays.
More than fifty specialists have contributed to this new edition of volume 1 of The Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature. The design of the original work has established itself so firmly as a workable solution to the immense problems of analysis, articulation and coordination that it has been retained in all its essentials for the new edition. The task of the new contributors has been to revise and integrate the lists of 1940 and 1957, to add materials of the following decade, to correct and refine the bibliographical details already available, and to re-shape the whole according to a new series of conventions devised to give greater clarity and consistency to the entries.