Gabriel Harvey's Rhetor was published in 1577 by the London printer Henry Bynneman, and, as far as is known, was never again reprinted. The Short-Title Catalogue lists approximately twenty copies of this work. These copies fall into two groups, those with a colophon at the end of the final page, and those with an ornament in place of the colophon. Copies of the work with colophon are located at: The British Library, London; Lambeth Palace, London; Bodleian Library, Oxford; University Library, Cambridge; Peterborough Cathedral (imperfect copy); Huntington Library, San Marino, CA; Univ. of Illinois, Urbana; Newberry Library, Chicago; and Univ. of Texas, Austin. Copies with ornament in lieu of colophon are found at: Bodleian Library, Oxford; Queen's College, Oxford; Corpus Christi College, Oxford; Trinity College, Cambridge; Peterborough Cathedral (imperfect copy); Folger Shakespeare Library, D.C. (2 copies); Huntington Library, San Marino, CA; Univ. of Chicago; Harvard Univ.; and Yale Univ. The Short-Title Catalogue adds that there are possibly copies of either kind at Peterhouse, Cambridge; Marsh's Library, Dublin; and Cornell Univ., Ithaca, NY.

In preparing the transcription I consulted the copies of the Rhetor at the University of Illinois and the University of Texas, as well as an enlarged photostatic reproduction of the copy in the British Museum Library. The Illinois and Texas copies are identical, but these differ somewhat from the British copy. In the Texas and Illinois copies, on page a.iiii^r, line 9 of the preface, the word me, omitted in the British text, was printed between si and meae, and a few changes were made in lines 9 and 10 to make room for the addition of the word:

British Library copy:
  9 Graecis, Latinis, & Philosophicis, si meae vitae rationes adhuc in Academia
10 Cantabrigiensi agere paterentur. Nihil est, quod magis doleam, quam quod

Texas and Illinois (for circumflex accents, understand nasal macrons):
  9 Graecis, Latinis, & Philosophicis, si me meae vitae rationes adhuc in Acade-
10 mia Cantabrigiensi agere paterentur. Nihil est, quod magis doleâ, quâ quod

Concerning the transcription of the text, the following points should be noted:

• Everything written in italic type in the original work I wrote in Roman type, and the material in Roman type I wrote in italics.

• I omitted all catchwords, and all accent marks written over the Latin words. I spelled out the contracted words in full. The contracted words were of two kinds: those in which the letter m or n was omitted and a macron placed over the preceding vowel; and those ending with the conjunction -que, in which the ue was dropped and what looks like a small number 3 (or in Roman type, a semicolon) was written next to the stem of the q, and an acute accent written over the q.

• I maintained the lineation of the original, but whenever a word was divided at the end of a line, I wrote the entire word on that line.

• There were a number of ligatures used in the printing of the Greek words which of course cannot be reproduced here. Errors of accent and breathing I corrected without notice.

• I added page numbers.

• I made all the changes specified in the list of errata that prefaces the work without indicating the original readings.

• Whenever I made a correction on my own authority, I placed an asterisk after the word, and gave the original reading at the bottom of the page. I imagine that in a few instances the word I've 'corrected' is a legitimate variant.