task of following in detail the fortunes of the individual playing companies and the individual theatres, with such fullness as the available records permit. The Fifth deals with the surviving plays, not in their literary aspect, which lies outside my plan, but as documents helping to throw light upon the history of the institution which produced them. I have not for the most part carried my investigations beyond the death of Shakespeare, and although I have sometimes regretted that I did not push on to the closing of the theatres, the decision not to do so has long been irretrievable.
Obviously I am treading a region far more carefully charted by predecessors than that of The Mediaeval Stage; but the progress of Elizabethan scholarship during recent years has been so great as to render a fresh attempt at a synthesis justifiable. I am conscious of a deeper debt than I can express to many fellow-workers, notably to my friends Dr. W. W. Greg and Mr. A. W. Pollard and Professor Feuillerat of Rennes, and to a growing band of American students, of whom I may name Professor C. W. Wallace and Mr. J. T. Murray as examples.
January, 1923.
