An old-spelling critical edition of Thomas Lodge's A̲ M̲a̲ṟg̲a̲ṟi̲ṯe̲ o̲f̲ A̲m̲e̲ṟi̲c̲a̲ (1596)

I undertook doing an old-spelling, critical edition because of my interest in Thomas Lodge and his romances and because of my major professor's, Dr. Norman Sanders, interest in both Lodge and textual editing. Growing out of a course I took from Dr. Sanders--a course in Elizabethan prose--the dissertation grew in my mind and was helped along by advice from Dr. Barry Gaines, an excellent editor of the school of Fredson Bowers. I wished when I began the project to provide a definitive text of A Margarite of America, a text that would stick close to the original Quarto but would offer emendation based on sound bibliographical principles. I wished the text to be old-spelling because I felt that only in the original state would the beauty and artistry be communicated. Further, I desired the text to be critical because there had never been a complete critical edition of this major Renaissance prose romance; in fact, there had been only four printings of the text since l596 (two of those in very limited editions).

The first problem with the edition was gaining access to the needed materials--the Quarto texts. The extant three copies of the Quarto were all in British libraries, and, since working with photographic copies would not suffice in such close textual editing, I applied for and received a travel grant from the Hodges Fund of the Department of English at The University of Tennessee, Knoxville. bThis enabled me to overcome the first problem, and I was able to collate all known texts and record all variants--both accidental and substantive. From these lists, I compiled the appendixes that follow the text in iv

this section. A student of Elizabethan prose texts will find these records invaluable if he wishes either to reconstruct the absent text or to do close compositorial analysis.

My findings are that prose romances such as A Margarite of America must be studied in their line of development to be understood. By examining the five prose romances of Thomas Lodge, I was able to see not only the author's method of composition, but also the evolution of the form as well. Lodge sought to combine his structures, themes, symbols, plots, characterizations, and styles into a single amalgam-a hybrid, combinative form unique in the Renaissance. By applying recent critical theory to this synthetic composition, I was able to see what had remained hidden for centuries and appreciate what had been obscured by continued application of faulty, inappropriate criticism.

From my study, I came to view the prose romance--a form which culminates in A Margarite of America--not as the precursor of the English novel but as the definite, significant, and separate entity that it is. Thus, by examining A Margarite and the preceding four romances with an open mind and an unbiased critical eye, I discovered, rather ironically, the reasons for the misunderstanding and neglect which have characterized the study of both Lodge and the prose romance.