Arber's *"Shakspere" Anthology:* Oxford University Press 0 2 0
£3 7 6


There were a number of brilliant minor writers in the seventeenth century
whose best work, often trifling in bulk, either scarcely merits
the acquisition of a separate volume for each author,
or cannot be obtained at all in a modern edition. Such authors,
however, may not be utterly neglected in the formation of a library.
It is to meet this difficulty that I have included
the last three volumes on the above list. Professor Arber's anthologies
are full of rare pieces, and comprise admirable specimens of the verse
of Samuel Daniel, Giles Fletcher, Countess of Pembroke, James I.,
George Peele, Sir Walter Raleigh, Thomas Sackville, Sir Philip Sidney,
Drummond of Hawthornden, Thomas Heywood, George Wither,
Sir Henry Wotton, Sir William Davenant, Thomas Randolph,
Frances Quarles, James Shirley, and other greater and lesser poets.

I have included all the important Elizabethan dramatists except
John Marston, all the editions of whose works, according to my researches,
are out of print.

In the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods talent was so extraordinarily
plentiful that the standard of excellence is quite properly raised,
and certain authors are thus relegated to the third, or excluded, class
who in a less fertile period would have counted as at least second-class.


SUMMARY OF THE FIRST PERIOD.