The Devil's Charter

This Malone Society edition of Barnabe Barnes’s The Devil’s Charter (1607) is intended to supplement the important edition, published in 1904, of the play by R.B. McKerrow, the great editor of the works of Thomas Nashe. The new edition is based on a fresh examination of the twenty-three known copies of the quarto, which exhibit marked differences in relation to stop-press correction. The Introduction considers the play’s printing history, its date and authorship, its performance, and later history. Particular attention is paid to the possibility that Robert Armin had a hand in several scenes in the play and to how Barnes’s play may have come to be acted before King James I. Barnes is shown to have been familiar with Shakespeare’s plays and, in particular, to have borrowed elements from Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, and All’s Well that Ends Well.