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This project grew out of an exercise designed primarily to give graduate students practical experience in the processes of textual bibliography. It was continued and completed based on two beliefs: first, that the errors found amoung extant editions are signific ....

Middle of Essay
.... was chosen because it is based primarily upon a 1724 collection of Behn’s dramatic pieces--a collection that, according to Summers, is “by far the best and most reliable edition of the collected theater.” Most of the changes documented in the textual notes stem from substantive discrepancies between these three texts. Often these discrepancies are the result of words or phrases being inverted from one edition to another. Note 44, for instance, concerns the stage directions in a scene where Florinda hugs Belvile and his vizard falls off. In the earliest edition, the hugging precedes the unmasquing, but in the 1697 edition, the masq ....