The Duchess of Malfi

Abstract

This text is created direct from the earliest printed text — the small, cheap books in quarto format sold by the booksellers of St Paul's Churchyard for around sixpence. It has not been edited, and so you can experience the idiosyncrasies of early modern print. In an age when spelling was not standardised, a range of ways of spelling even quite simple words was usual. Often homophones — words such as to and too which sound the same but are distinguished in modern spelling — are not clear, and this is one of the great sources of puns for early modern writers. Speech prefixes and stage directions are also not presented in the form readers of modern playtexts are used to, and nor did these early texts include a list of characters or an index of acts and scenes. Some features of early modern printing may also be unfamiliar — the interchangeability of the letters u and v, for example, or i and y. There was no letter j in the sets of type used by printers, so that letter is signalled with the letter i or I. To find out more about early modern print and how and why plays were printed see the Furness Collection, University of Pennsylvania's multimedia online tutorials at