THE TRAGEDIE OF MACBETH -BY WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE EDITED, WITH NOTES, INTRODUCTION CHARLOTTE PORTER AND NEW YORK THOMAS Y. CROWELL & CO. PUBLISHERS EDITORS' PREFACE CH HAUCER and Spenser have been privileged to reach the modern reader in the forms of speech tefitting them and belonging to their time. Shakespeare, as it happens, has not hitherto been permitted to become familiar in the quaint Elizabethan setting befitting him and betraying the conditions belonging to the first publication of the Plays. Yet Chaucer is, of course, far more archaic, and Spenser is, though so little earlier, much more affected and remote in style, than Shakespeare. Without as much need for it, Shakespeare has been modernized to sui: each succeeding epoch. Yet barring only the long for s, the interchangeable and j, u and v, an occasional y for th, and the for them, the sign of abbreviation commonly used in printing of that age in order to get in all the words of a line without overlapping there is practically nothing in the form of the first complete text of the Plays published in 1623, and commonly called the First Folio, particularly if these few changes mentioned be made, which should cause the present-day reader to stumble in reading it. The advantage of typographical fidelity to the first edition, so long withheld from the public, is obvious, and with no other changes whatever beyond those mentioned, either in wording, spelling, punctuation, or in |