The Works of John Webster. An Old-Spelling Critical Edition. Vol. III. Ed. David Gunby, David Carnegie and Mac Donald P. Jackson

• Richard Rowland

With this, the third and final volume of the Cambridge edition of Webster’s works, the project to replace the four volume edition produced by F. L. Lucas back in 1927, achieves completion. In terms of new texts, only two items appear here that were not included in the Lucas edition: these are the additions to John Marston’s The Malcontent that the Cambridge editors believe to be the work of Webster alone (Lucas included only the new ‘Induction’, undoubtedly Webster’s, that was affixed to the play when it transferred from the boys’ company for whom Marston wrote it to the King’s Men), and the verses Webster supplied to accompany the engraving of The Progeny of the Most Renowned Prince James, published in 1633 but composed around 1624. A further text, known as the Melbourne manuscript – a four page draft of a play scene discovered in 1986 – was promised in the Preface to the first volume of the series, but subsequently the editors have lost confidence in this attribution, and this fascinating fragment, disappointingly if reasonably, does not appear in the volume.

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