LONDON: GEORGE BELL AND SONS PORTUGAL ST. LINCOLN'S INN, W.C. CAMBRIDGE: DEIGHTON, BELL & CO. NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN CO. BOMBAY : A. H. WHEELER & CO. ENGLISH STAGE OR A SERIES OF DRAMATIC CRITICISMS BY WILLIAM HAZLITT EDITED BY W. SPENCER JACKSON LONDON GEORGE BELL AND SONS TH INTRODUCTION HIS edition of Hazlitt's View of the English Stage contains the whole of that book as first issued in 1818. The articles were selected by the author from his contributions to various newspapers, as he states in his preface, and were reprinted with the very slightest revision from the papers in which they first appeared, but with considerable omissions. They have been compared for this edition with the original newspapers, and those portions which were omitted in 1818 have been supplied between square brackets. The author's own notes are given: those which were in the periodical and in the reprint are marked "Original Note"; those which were in the paper but not in the volume are marked "Note in" (with the name of the journal); and those which first appeared in 1818 are marked "W. H." The dates at the head of the articles are those of the original publication, as that plan was adopted with more or less accuracy by the author. Many other contributions of Hazlitt to these newspapers have been identified with confidence almost amounting to certainty; only two of them are printed in the Appendix to this volume. These are a letter to The Examiner in reply to the dramatic critic's strictures on the two articles of July 24 and August 7, 1814, on Mr. Kean's Iago, which appear at pages 54 151358 |