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PREFACE

Meredith's Essay on Comedy is not seldom employed as a text-book, or for supplementary reading, in courses on the drama, on literary types, and on the theory of poetry in general. Indeed, it has on occasion been termed 'a classic.' That it may properly be so called, in every sense of the word classic, I am not prepared to assert. But when American students are expected to read it in any part of the curriculum, it seems to deserve and require a measure of elucidation and comment. For certain teachers its principal value may lie in the stimulus it gives the student to read the great authors with whose works Meredith is patently familiar, while the student is not; and the suggestion might be made that here is a reason why the Essay should not be systematically annotated. Yet there seems to be no real ground for the fear that the presence of notes would diminish the stimulating effect in question. On the contrary, my experience points to the belief that, for want of fuller

indications respecting the masterpieces (and their authors) to which Meredith refers, many of the allusions in the Essay escape due attention from the reader. Consequently I have done my best to satisfy the demand of my own pupils that the Essay be rendered more intelligible to them through the customary apparatus of an introduction, notes, bibliography, and index. If I have not solved every difficulty of interpretation or reference, I have not consciously neglected any; and where my efforts have not been altogether successful, the Notes in each case, as I hope, clearly indicate the deficiency.

In reprinting the Essay, I have not regarded minor oversights of its author as sacred. A few misquotations from other authors have been rectified in the text, and the changes recorded in the Notes. And in the matter of punctuation and the employment of capital letters I have normalized with a free hand so long as I was sure of the intended meaning, in an effort to conform to the best usage of the present. There can be no adequate reason for perpetuating chance infelicities that tend only to obscure the sense of Meredith's words or to disfigure the page; and there is the less reason in view of his complaint (see p. 27) that

he was not very successful in revising his own proof-sheets. Meanwhile I have spared no pains to reproduce his actual words with the utmost fidelity.

Since the Essay may serve as an introduction to the study of comedy, I have included what purports to be a select and relatively brief Bibliography, consisting first, in the main, of standard or particularly accessible editions of the chief comic writers, and secondly of a few more scholarly or scientific, and a few more popular, works on comedy, laughter, and the like.

CORNELL UNIVERSITY

LANE COOPER

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