[282] The fact that the play was never published as a separate work makes it difficult to estimate its popularity with the reading public.  The whole collection was freqnently reprinted, 1638, 1640, 1643, 1652, 1664 and 1668 twice.  In 1703 appeared the Fickle Shepherdess, ’As it is Acted in the New Theatre in Lincolns-Inn Fields.  By Her Majesties Servants.  Play’d all by Women.’  This piece is said in the epistle dedicatory to Lady Gower to be ‘abreviated from an Author famous in his Time.’  It is in fact a prose rendering, much compressed, of the main action of Randolph’s play, the language being for the most part just sufficiently altered to turn good verse into bad prose.

[283] Vide post, p. 382.

[284] For a detailed discussion of the evidence I must refer the reader to the Introduction to my reprint of the play in the Materialien zur Kunde des aelteren Englischen Dramas (vol. xi, 1905).  The following summary may be quoted. ’(i) There is no ground for supposing that there ever existed more of the Sad Shepherd than we at present possess. (ii) The theory of the substantial identity of the Sad Shepherd and the May Lord must be rejected, there being no reason to suppose that the latter was dramatic at all. (iii) The two works may, however, have been to some extent connected in subject, and fragments of the one may survive embedded in the other. (iv) The May Lord was most probably written in the autumn of 1613. (v) The date of the Sad Shepherd cannot be fixed with certainty; but there is no definite evidence to oppose to the first line of the prologue and the allusion in Falkland’s elegy [in Jonsonus Virbius], which agree in placing it in the few years preceding Jonson’s death.’

[285] The play has no doubt been somewhat lost in the big collected editions of the author’s works, and has also suffered from its fragmentary state.  Previous to my own reprint it had only once been issued as a separate publication, namely, by F. G. Waldrou, whose edition, with continuation, appeared in 1783.  One of the best passages, however (II. viii), was given in Lamb’s Specimens.  In quoting from the play I have preferred to follow the original of 1640, as in my own reprint, merely correcting certain obvions errors, rather than Gifford’s edition, in which wholly unwarrantable liberties are taken with the text.

[286] Waldron, in his continuation, matches her with Clarion.

[287] It involves, moreover, the critical fallacy of supposing that poetry is a sort of richly embroidered garment wherewith to clothe the nakedness of the underlying substance.  This may be so in certain cases in which the poet is made and not born, or in which he forces himself to work at an uncongenial theme.  But in a genuine work of art the substance cannot so be separated from the form without injury to both.  The poetry in this case is not an external adornment, but a necessary part of the structure, without which