From the INTRODUCTION. The text of the following reprint of Ben Jonson's "The Case is Altered" is based upon that of the Gifford-Cunningham edition, carefully revised, however, after a transcript (made by Mr. S. A, Chevalier) of the copy of the original edition of 1609 now in the Barton collection in the Boston Public Library. The old stage directions have been restored, although most of those added by modern editors have been retained; the old division into acts and scenes has been restored so far as it goes; the punctuation has been renovated; and some forty or fifty alterations have been made in the modern text itself to bring it into closer conformity with the original; so that altogether, as here presented, the case is considerably altered! The play seems to have been one of Jonson's early studies, before he had definitely renounced the romantic vein and the Italian atmosphere found in most of the contemporary dramatists; and, aside from the first version of "Every Man in His Humour," it seems to be the only one which has come down to us from among the various pieces of this period in which we have reason to believe that he had a hand. Its date is pretty definitely fixed by the fact that the words of Act I, Scene i. "You are in print already for the best plotter," applied to Antonio Balladino, are plainly a reference to a passage in Meres' "Palladis Tamia," published in the autumn of 1598, which cites Anthony Munday as "our best plotter"; and by the further fact that "The Case is Altered" is definitely mentioned by name in Nash's "Lenten Stuff," which appeared in 1599. Our play first appeared in print in 1609 - apparently a surreptitious publication, for it was afterwards included in neither the folio collection of Jonson's plays in 1616, nor in the second folio volume the separate contents of which bear various dates from 1631 to 1641, and the text and typography of the 1609 quarto are as careless and corrupt as possible.