=Life.=--George Peele, probably sprung from a Devonshire family, and
the son of James Peele, clerk of Christ's Hospital, is known to have
been in 1565 a free scholar of the grammar school connected with that
foundation. He went to Oxford in 1571; studied at Broadgates Hall, now
Pembroke College, and at Christ Church; took his B.A. in 1577, his M.A.
in 1579, and went up to London about 1580. At Oxford he already had the
name of poet, scholar, and dramatist. He was married, it would seem, as
early as 1583, to a wife who brought him some property; this, however,
soon vanished, and left the poet dependent upon his wits. Although the
stories in the _Jests_ are musty old tales, fastened upon Peele, it
is unlikely that they settled on his name without a sense of fitness
on the part of a public that had known his ways,--his hopeless lack
of pence, his good nature and popularity, his shifts to beg, borrow,
and cozen. With Greene, Nashe, Marlowe, and a few lesser lights, he
belonged to that group of scholars who wrote plays, translations,
occasional poems, pageants, and whatever else would find a market.
Now and then, it is almost certain, he appeared as an actor. Of his
dissolute course of life, its misery and squalour, there can be no
doubt whatever; "driven as myself," says Greene, "to extreme shifts."
As early as 1579 Peele had made trouble for his father; he lived in
poverty; and the curtain falls upon an ignoble end. Dying before 1598,
the poet barely saw his fortieth year.
=Plays assigned to Peele.=--The best plays of Peele are _The
Arraignment of Paris_, published in 1584, and, in Fleay's opinion,
played as early as 1581,--a "first encrease," Nashe calls it, written
in smooth metres which doubtless had influence on Marlowe's own verse;
_The Old Wives' Tale_, published 1595; and the saccharine _David
and Bethsabe_, beloved of German critics. _Edward I._, with wofully
corrupt text, is good only in parts; _The Battle of Alcazar_, published
anonymously in 1594, is almost certainly Peele's, but does not help his
reputation; while _Sir Clyomon and Sir Clamydes_ is quite certainly
not Peele's in any way. Fleay, _Biographical Chronicle of the English
Drama_, II. 296, assigns it, along with _Common Conditions_ and _Appius
and Virginia_, to R. B. (Richard Bower?), whose initials appear on
the title-page of the last-named play. Professor Kittredge, however,
_Journal of Germanic Philology_, II. 8, suggests, as author of _Sir
Clyomon_, Thomas Preston of _Cambyses_ fame. By way of compensation
for this loss, Fleay (work quoted, II. 155) attributes to Peele _The
Wisdome of Doctor Doddipoll_, published in 1600; there is dialect in
the play, but overdone, good blank verse, and an indifferent plot. The
song, _What Thing is Love_, hardly makes foundation enough for the
assumption that Peele wrote the play, even with the aid of an enchanter
among the characters, and a metre like that of _David and Bethsabe_.
Further, Fleay presents our author with _Wily Beguiled_, possibly, he
thinks, a university play; but his proof is not convincing. Kirkman, in
a catalogue of plays added to his edition of _Tom Tiler and his Wife_,
1661, credits George Peele not only with _David and Bethsabe_, but
with _Alphonsus, Emperor of Germany_, while Will Shakespeare has the
_Arraignment of Paris_. _The Old Wives' Tale_ is set down as anonymous.
In regard to Peele's miscellaneous and occasional poetry there need be
noted here only his clever use of blank verse in shorter poems, his
charming lyrics, and those noble lines at the end of the _Polyhymnia_,
beginning--
"His golden locks time hath to silver turn'd."
=Peele's Place in the Development of English Drama.=--Although we had a
text of absolute authority and a minutely accurate life of the author,
we should gain with all this lore no real stay for a study, a critical
understanding of _The Old Wives' Tale_, regarded as an element in the
making of English comedy. Peele and his play, along with any hints of
sources and models that are to be heeded, and with whatever help may
come from study of his other works, must be fused into a single fact
and compared with those "environmental conditions" which influence all
literary production. This will determine the equation between art and
nature, between the centrifugal forces, which are always expressing
themselves in terms of what is called genius or originality, and the
centripetal forces of a great literary and popular development. It
will determine the relation of Peele's comedy to the line of English
comedies.
Such a critical process leaves one with two qualities in mind that seem
to have had an initial force. They belong to Peele on contemporary
testimony confirmed by a study of his works. Tom Nashe, more in eulogy
than in discrimination, yet surely not without a dash of critical
discernment, calls Peele "the chief supporter of pleasance now living,
the atlas of poetry, and _primus verborum artifex_...."[989]
Nashe undoubtedly flatters, but another of the "college," Greene, in
that death-bed appeal to his brother playwrights, was in no mood for
flattery; and it is probably sincere, even if mistaken, praise when he
calls Peele "in some things rarer, in nothing inferior," to Marlowe,
and to that "young juvenall" who may be Nashe or Lodge. In what things
Peele was "rarer," Greene fails to say, but a study of _The Arraignment
of Paris_, of _David and Bethsabe_, even of portions of _Edward I._,
and of the _Battle of Alcazar_, supports the reputation of Peele as
an artist in words, and in prose as "well-languaged"; while in _The
Old Wives' Tale_ there greets the critic, not too openly, it is true,
but unmistakably, the quality of humour. Moreover, there are the
_Jests_ which, apocryphal as they doubtless are, and sorry stuff by
any reckoning, nevertheless show that to people of his day Peele was
counted a merry fellow, a humourist in our sense of the word.[990]
Perhaps Shakespeare's jests would seem as stale and flat if we had the
anecdotes that passed current among his successors at the playhouse.
In any case, George had a sense of humour which found utterance in
this _Old Wives' Tale_; it is not the classical humour of _Roister
Doister_, not the hearty but clumsy mirth of _Gammer Gurton_, but
rather a hint of the extravagant and romantic which turns upon itself
with audible merriment at its own pretences, a hint, not of farce or
of wit merely, but of genuine humour, something not to be found in
Greene's lighter work,[991] or in Lyly's _Mother Bombie_, or in any of
those earlier plays that did fealty to the comic muse. Such, then, is
the contemporary formula for Peele as a power in the making of English
drama: "_primus verborum artifex_," and "chief supporter of pleasance."
He was an artist in words, and he had the gift of humour.
As regards this artistry in words, it is well known that the conditions
of English life, the vigour of speech as quickened by intercourse in
the street, the market-place, the exchange, where a spoken word even in
traffic and commerce still counted better than a written word, dialogue
and conversation better than oratory, and the conditions of the stage
itself, with its slender resources of scenery and its confident appeal
to the imagination, all helped to push this pomp and mastery of phrase
into the forefront of an Elizabethan playwright's qualifications.
Probably the spectator at a play felt something of the interest which
was then so rife in the world of books and learning,--the interest in
words as words, in the course of a sentence as indicating more or less
triumph over a still untrained tongue. Nietzsche is extravagant but
suggestive in certain remarks that bear upon this verbal artistry in
the drama. Speaking of Nature and Art,[992] he insists that the Greeks
taught men to like pompous dramatic verse and an unnatural eloquence
in those tragic situations where mere nature is either stammering or
silent. The Italians went further and taught us to endure, in the
opera, something still more artificial and unnatural--a passion which
not only declaims, but sings. Tragic eloquence, sundered from nature,
feeds that pride which "loves art as the expression of a high heroic
unnaturalness and conventionality." "The Athenian," Nietzsche goes on
to say with cheerful heresy, "went into the theatre not to be roused
by pity and terror, but to listen to fine speeches." One is inclined
to think that this desire for fine speeches had a large share in the
motive which sent an Elizabethan to the play. Certainly the drama
responded to this demand more quickly than to any demand for coherence
of plot and delicacy of characterization. Who led in this movement?
Most critics brush aside all rivals from the path of Marlowe and credit
him alone with the "mighty line," the pomp of diction, the sweep of
word and figure, which brought the drama from those puerilities of
phrase and manner up to its noble estate. This is true in the sense
that Marlowe was infinitely greater as a poet and a tragedian than
either Greene or Peele. But as _verborum artifex_ it is probable that
Marlowe has had considerable credit which belongs to the others,
particularly Peele; and the testimony of Nashe and Greene, who knew
the craft, must not be rejected so utterly. Campbell, it is true,
praised Peele as "the oldest genuine dramatic poet of our language";
but Symonds, and with him are such scholars as Mr. A. W. Ward, asserts
that Peele "discovered no new vein." Symonds is inclined to look on
Greene as herald[993] and Marlowe as founder; Peele is a pleasant but
unimportant maker of plays and verse. Greene, he thinks, began the
school of gentleman and scholars who wrote for the stage at a time when
rhyming plays were in vogue; but none of those which Greene wrote has
come down to our day. Marlowe now comes imperiously upon the scene,
forces his blank verse into favour, and is at last reluctantly admitted
by Greene and the others into their "college." So runs the theory of
Symonds. Quite opposed to this view of the case is Mr. Fleay, who
declares that Marlowe followed George Peele in the article of "flowing
blank verse."[994] There can be no question, moreover, that certain
critics have exalted Greene too high and put Peele too low. Peele had
quite as much as Greene to do with the refining and energizing of
English dramatic diction, a process aptly described by Thomas Heywood
in his _Apology for Actors_:[995] "Our English tongue ... is now _by
this secondary meanes of playing_ continually refined, every writer
striving in himselfe to adde a new florish unto it." Plots remained
clumsy, crude; but what change in the diction of plays! In _Appius and
Virginia_ there is still puerile diction and jog-trot metre,--
"They framèd also after this, out of his tender side,
A piece of much formosity, with him for to abide."
From this to blank verse and compressed or energetic diction, as
(_Jeronimo_),--
"My knee sings thanks unto your Highness bounty,"--
is a progress involving vast reformings, and some deformings,[996]
in diction and in metre, of such sweep that Elizabethans put these
qualities first when they went about to judge a play. "Your nine
comœdies," writes Harvey to Spenser, come nearer to Ariosto's, "eyther
for the finenesse of plausible Elocution, or the rareness of Poetical
Invention," than the _Faery Queene_ to the _Orlando Furioso_. In this
ennobling of diction, Peele may not have led the column of playwrights,
but he was certainly in the van. His achievement must not be dashed by
a comparison with Shakespeare, who covered up absurdities of plot--as
in the _Merchant of Venice_--by brilliant characterization, where this
earlier group depended upon the art of words.[997] For the related art
of brave metres, of a "flowing blank verse" in plays, we have no space
to argue upon the claims of leadership. Enough is done for the matter
if one remembers that Peele, who wrote admirable blank verse before
Marlowe was out of his teens, had nothing to learn from the greater
poet about the management of this metre in and for itself.[998]
Certainly he got more music out of the pentameter than any earlier
dramatist had done; witness such a movement as,--
"What sign is rainy and what star is fair,"
or,--
"And water running from the silver spring."
=The Old Wives' Tale, an Innovation in Comedy.=--It may be conceded
that Peele "discovered no new vein" in diction and in metre, although
his work in each was of a high order, not far removed from leadership.
Different is the case when one considers his claims for innovation in
comedy. He was the first to blend romantic drama with a realism which
turns romance back upon itself, and produces the comedy of subconscious
humour. The tragedies, and even the miracle plays, while extravagant
in form, had not been altogether unnatural in action. The supernatural
in that age was not unnatural. The unnatural was mainly confined to
the diction. Gradually, as every one knows, the romantic element, in
a wide sense, got upper hand and ruled the English drama. In _The Old
Wives' Tale_ this romantic spirit comes in, not as a new element, but
as a new kind of "art" grafted upon the "nature" of the rough and comic
stock; and to the reader's surprise draws away all unnaturalness from
the dialogue, which is now plain, natural, commonplace.[999] Realism
in diction was no new thing; romance in plot was not an innovation;
it was the clash, the interplay, the subjective element, the appeal
to something more than a literal understanding of what is said and
done, a new appeal to a deeper sense of humour--here lay the new
vein discovered by George Peele. The romantic drama, we repeat, was
known; witness that little group of "folk-lore romances," as Mr. Fleay
calls them, _Common Conditions_, _Sir Clyomon and Sir Clamydes_, and
_Appius and Virginia_; the two former are full of adventures, of
amorous knights and wandering ladies, a Forest of Strange Marvels,
an Isle of Strange Marshes, what not. In all of them, however, the
romance is presented in unnatural diction, to suit such unnatural
doings, and justifies those bitter words of the _Second and Third
Blast of Retrait from Plaies and Theaters_,[1000] that "the notablest
lier is become the best Poet ... for the strangest Comedie brings
greatest delectation ... faining countries neuer heard of, monsters
and prodigious creatures that are not...." A milder romantic drama,
but without the humour which we mean, is Greene's _Orlando Furioso_.
The other plays, however, have no humour at all except the traditional
humour of the Vice; and of the three representatives, Conditions, who
finally turns pirate, is certainly a far merrier person than Haphazard
in _Appius_ or Subtle Shift in _Sir Clyomon_. There is realistic
setting in _Common Conditions_, with some lively dialogue, and a
distinctly catching song and chorus[1001] of tinkers, at the opening
of the play. It is "business" here, however, not that dramatic irony,
springing from contrast of romantic plot and realistic diction, which
makes a sufficiently timid beginning in _The Old Wives' Tale_, and
grows so insistent in _The Knight of the Burning Pestle_. Moreover,
Peele's realistic work shows the control and consciousness of a higher
art. There are no peasants like Hodge in _Gammer Gurton_, Corin in _Sir
Clyomon_, and Hob and Lob in _Cambyses_.[1002] There is an outburst or
two of yokel wit in Peele's play; but there is no breaking of heads, no
chance for the clown to sing a song while drunk, as Hance does in the
interlude of _Like Wil to Like_. These signs of a subtler conception
of his art should be placed to Peele's credit; for while an obvious
dialect marks Hodge and Corin and the rest, Clunch and Madge speak a
plain English, reminding one irresistibly of the milk-woman's talk with
Piscator: it smacks of cottage and field and hedge-rows and, as Nashe
would say, has "old King Harrie sinceritie." There is a difference
as between the exaggerated "hayseed" of a comic paper and the finer
drawing in one of Hardy's peasants. Exaggeration would spoil the sense
of contrast between honest Madge and the high pretences of the plot.
In Huanebango there is girding not only at Harvey, but at the romance
hero in general; this big-mouthed, impossible fellow, with Corebus as a
foil, foreshadows, however dimly, the far more clever presentation of
an English Don Quixote in the person of Ralph.
A second element of humour in this realistic treatment of romance is
the use of an induction, or rather of a combination of the induction
and the play within the play, as a means of expressing dramatic irony.
Although the induction springs from the prologue, and although the
opening of _The Old Wives' Tale_ is technically an induction, like many
another of the time, it has to our thinking a distinctly new vein. What
Schwab[1003] calls the first example of the use of an induction--in
_The Rare Triumphs of Love and Fortune_--makes both induction and
play connected parts of a whole. It is a dramatic device, wholly
objective in character, external, with no demand upon the sense of
contrast. Different, but hardly a new idea,[1004] is the induction as
employed by Greene in _Alphonsus_ and _James IV._; here is a return
to the old notion of the prologue, a justifying of the playwright's
way. Will Summer, the pet jester,[1005] who ushers in Nashe's play,
calls himself outright a kind of chorus. In the old _Taming of a
Shrew_, printed in 1594, Sly, while only a casual commentator upon
the play, is entirely outside of the main action, which, as Schwab
points out, thus becomes an actual play within the play. Still, even
in these cases, the contrast is objective and direct. The induction
is a clever device to heighten interest in the play. Before, it had
served the playwright as an expression of his purpose in the main
drama; later, as with Ben Jonson, it voiced his critical opinions.
Whether objective or subjective, however, the contrast between play and
induction is direct. Quite different is that induction, which Schwab
rightly calls remarkable, in _The Knight of the Burning Pestle_; and
different, too, is that earlier attempt, which Schwab unaccountably
fails to mention, in _The Old Wives' Tale_. These both appeal to a
sense of humour awakened by the interplay of theme and treatment,
of character and situation. In Peele's play this involution of epic,
drama, and comment--a seeming confusion which has distressed many
of the critics--really heightens the dramatic power of the piece.
The induction is double. First come a bit of romance, with the lost
wanderers in the wood, and a realistic foil in their own dialogue--by
no means the "heavy prose" of Collier's censure. Secondly comes
outright realism with Clunch, Madge, the bread and cheese, and the
old joke about bedfellows, cleverly followed by Madge's abrupt raid
upon romantic ground. She is well started, but stumbling, when the
other actors break in; and the inner play, not without some confusion
and mystification, runs its course. Perhaps the sense of huddling,
abruptness, confusion, is intentional as part of an old wives' tale
indeed; perhaps, again, this must be laid to the charge of Peele's
carelessness in "plotting plaies." Be that as it may be, the interplay
of these elements makes a new kind of comedy; and the humour of this
play, crude and tentative as it seems when compared with the humour of
Uncle Toby[1006] and of those lesser lights that revolve in the orbit
of the Quixotic contrast, differs from earlier essays of the sort in
that it is not a separate element of fun, but rather something which
exists in solution with the comedy itself. _The Old Wives' Tale_ lies
midway between the utter lack of coherence in Nashe's play and the
subtlety of Beaumont and Fletcher. Will Summer is often irrelevant
and tiresome; the main action, on which he comments, is now pathetic,
now farcical, now merely spectacular; but in our play the thread of
romance runs throughout unbroken and keeps the piece in a sort of
unity, while the comment, whether direct or hinted, has a vastly finer
vein of irony. The romantic side of folk-lore has its due withal, as
in the test of fidelity at the end between Eumenides and Jack, with
the proposed division of Delia--a _casus_ always acceptable to such
an audience, and here of acute though subordinate interest. Moreover,
Peele has a kind of reticence and control in his art; he suggests in
a whisper what Will Summer would have roared into commonplace and
horse-play.
=The Background of Folk-Lore.=--Finally, the very _Old Wives' Tale_
itself, with its background of folk-lore, that tryst of ancient
splendour with modern poverty and ignorance on the territory of a
forgotten faith, is a thing of quietly humorous contrasts. Several
elements are to be considered in the charming little medley which
Peele has made from the folk-lore of his day--"that curious _mélange_
of nursery tales," as Mr. Joseph Jacobs calls it. The enchanter and
his spells, the stolen daughter and her brothers' quest, make a
familiar central group. Perhaps Madge set out to tell the story of
_Childe Rowland_, familiar to Elizabethans,[1007] although _Jack the
Giant Killer_ has his claims. The _fee-fa-fum_, as every one knows,
occurs also in Shakespeare's _Lear_. The help of the White Bear--a
transformation, like the saws and prophecies, sufficiently familiar in
these tales--is similar to that of Merlin in _Childe Rowland_; but the
ghost of Jack reminds one of the other story. Mr. Jacobs quotes Kennedy
that in a parallel Irish tale "Jack the servant is the spirit of the
buried man." One has only to make this substitution, and the vicarious
gratitude of the Giant Killer[1008] is better explained. Perhaps,
too, Peele has borrowed some of his thunder and lightning, as well as
Huanebango's _fee-fa-fum_, from the giants; and the disenchantment
at the hands of an invisible hero may belong, in part, to this tale.
Two other folk-tales may be named--_The Well of the World's End_,
mentioned, if a slight emendation be allowed, in _The Complaynt of
Scotland_, and _The Three Heads of the Well_--as known, in some form,
to Peele, and used directly in the story of the two daughters. The
familiar theme of the so-called "death index"[1009] is touched but
slightly; and perhaps it is unnecessary to go to the _Red Ettin_ for a
parallel to Huanebango and Corebus, who respectively refuse and give a
piece of cake to the helpful old man. The theme is common in folk-lore.
It is interesting to note that Beaumont and Fletcher show a liking for
folk-tales, as well as for traditional songs and ballads, in that play,
which by its induction and general spirit most closely resembles this
_Old Wives' Tale_. More dignified sources were long ago pointed out by
Warton, who remarked that "the names of some of the characters ... are
taken from the _Orlando Furioso_." Meroe, in Apuleius, was invoked. But
it seems clear enough that English folk-lore must be the mainstay of
critics who think all is done for a work of literature when they have
found out every possible and impossible source for plot, sideplot, and
allusion.
=Literary Estimate.=--The marvel, after all, is not that these
materials are huddled and confused in the combination; the confusion is
part of the artistic process, and if the figures move across the stage
without firm connection one with the other, that, too, is done after
the manner of the old tale. We are on romantic ground, and are to see
by glimpses. Here is no comedy of incident, in the usual meaning of
the term, no comedy of intrigue or of manners. It is rather a comedy
of comedies, a saucy challenge of romance, where art turns, however
timidly, upon itself. Perhaps Peele wrote this play, as Dryden wrote
_All for Love_, to please himself. Unquestionably, until Mr. Bullen
made a plea for mercy, _The Old Wives' Tale_ had been shamefully
treated. Collier[1010] calls it "nothing but a beldam's story, with
little to recommend it but heavy prose and not much lighter blank
verse," a most inadequate summary from any point of view. The play, he
thinks, has "a disgusting quantity of trash and absurdity." Dyce, while
regarding Peele's "superiority to Greene" as "unquestionable," is not
enthusiastic about _The Old Wives' Tale_. Mr. Ward speaks[1011] of "the
labyrinthine intricacy of the main scenes," knows not whether to call
it farce or interlude, and would pass it by save for the suggestion
of _Comus_. But Mr. Bullen very properly objects to this unfair
comparison. Symonds, to be sure, uses it even more unfairly. _The
Old Wives' Tale_, he makes bold to say, is the sow's ear to Milton's
silk purse.[1012] With an unusual blindness to literary perspective,
Symonds goes on to judge this flickering little candle of romance,
folk-lore, and half-roguish, half-ironical suggestion, by the sun-blaze
of Milton's high seriousness and full poetic splendours. Peele, it
seems, does not "lift his subject into the heavens of poetry.... The
wizard is a common conjurer. The spirit is a vulgar village ghost."
Why not, pray? What should they be for the purposes of this old wives'
tale? What would be left, say, of Chaucer's charming little story, that
"folye, as of a fox, or of a cok and hen," if one were to pulverize it
with such critical tools? Peele is not trying to raise comedy into the
heavens; he left that for his betters; and the ineffectual Delia is
a long remove from Hermia and Helena in the "wood near Athens." What
Peele, George Peele of the dingy jests, probably tried to do, and what
he surely succeeded in doing, was to bring a new and more subtle strain
of humour into the drama. _Itur in antiquam silvam._ Realism left
shabby and squalid things, alehouse wit, and laid hold of a sweeter
life. Reckless, good-natured scholar, George fairly followed the call
which haunted so many academic outcasts, the call which Marlowe and
Greene and Dekker answered with those sweet songs of country life, and
which led Peele to the making of this play. He wove romance and realism
into a fabric that may well show a coarse pattern and often very clumsy
workmanship, but, on the whole, it is a pleasing pattern and a new.
Moreover, it is all made of sound English stuff. The tales he used
for his main drama were familiar to English ears; the persons of his
framework play were kindly folk of any English village, and the air of
it all is as fresh and wholesome as an English summer morning.
=Sources, Title, Text.=--The sources of the play, so far as one may
speak of sources, are indicated in general above, and in particular
by notes to the following text. The plural form of the title ought
probably to be singular, in spite of common usage, the gloss _ealdra
cwéna spel_ (Wright, _Voc._), and 1 Timothy iv, 7; Mr. Fleay, perhaps
as a concession to Madge, prints _Old Wifes' Tale_ (_Biog. Chron. Eng.
Drama_, II. 154).[1013] He puts the date of composition "clearly 1590,"
on the theory that Harvey--Huanebango--is here satirized by Peele as
a consequence of Harvey's attack upon Lyly in 1589,--circulated then
in manuscript though not printed until 1593. Lämmerhirt[1014] argues,
but not conclusively, that the play was written before 1588,--partly
because of the allusions to Harvey, and partly because style and
form point to an early period in the author's development. Until a
surer date can be established, however, 1590 will serve as the time
of composition for this play. _The Old Wives' Tale_, says Dyce, "had
sunk into complete oblivion, till Steevens ... communicated to Reed
the account of it which appeared in the _Biographia Dramatica_." In
1783 Steevens writes to Warton: "All I have learned in relation to the
original from which the idea of Milton's _Comus_ might be borrowed, I
communicated to Mr. Reed.... Only a single copy of his [_sic_] _Old
Wives' Tale_ has hitherto appeared, and even that is at present out of
my reach...."[1015] As to the rhythmic structure, E. Penner notes[1016]
that of 964 lines of this play 192 are five-stress or ordinary heroic
verse, 7 are hexameters, and 100 short verses. The rest is prose.
The best edition is, of course, that of Bullen, in 3 vols., 1888-[B];
but there were excellent editions by Dyce, one in 1828 ff., and another
in 1861-[Dy.]. The present text of _The Old Wives' Tale_ is from
the 1595 quarto in the British Museum; the title-page is, with the
exception of the vignettes, a fair representation of the original.