'Tis Pity She's a Whore, BB 215 (Regents Renaissance Drama)

The purpose of the Regents Renaissance Drama Series is to provide soundly editied texts, in modern spelling, of more significant plays of the Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline theatre. Each text in the series is based on a fresh collation of all sixteenth - and seventeenth - century editions. The textual notes, which appear above the line at the bottom of each page, record all substantive departures from the edition used as the copy-text. Variant substantive readings among sixteenth - and seventeenth - century editions are listed there as well. In cases where two or more of the old editions present widely divergent readings. a list of substantive variants in editions through the seventeenth century is given in a appendix. Editions after 1700 are referred to in the textual notes only when emendation originating in some one of them is received into the copy-text. Variants of accidentals (spelling, punctuation, capitalization) are not recorded in the notes. Contracted forms of characters' names are silently expanded in speech prefixes and stage directions, and, in the case of speech prefixes, are regularized. Additions to the stage directions of the copy-text are enclosed in brackets. Stage directions such as "within" or "aside" are enclosed in parentheses when they ocur in the copy-text. --- from books preface