This is the only edition of George Gascoigne's A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres to respect the integrity of the first edition, which he published as an anonymous anthology in 1573. Earlier editors either based their work on The Posies of George Gascoigne Esquire, self-censored and published in 1575, or omitted the two plays, Supposes and Jocasta. But, from a bibliographical point of view, the plays are an integral part of the first edition, and the work that suffers most from revision is Gascoigne's masterpiece, The Adventures of Master F.J. The critical apparatus of this edition allows the reader to reconstruct the changes Gascoigne made to The Posies, and all the works which appear there for the first time are included. Half of the works in this edition, including the plays and Gascoigne's longest poem, `The fruites of Warre', have never received any commentary before. The commentary closely studies Gascoigne's use of his sources, especially in his translations from the Italian, and situates his works in their literary and social milieux. It also includes all of the extensive marginal notes that Gabriel Harvey made in his copy of The Posies. The biographical introduction corrects a number of mistakes in Prouty's standard biography and, in particular, offers a fuller, more accurate account of Gascoigne's military service in the Netherlands.
