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MODERNIZATION OF THE TEXT - Algernon Sidney, Discourses Concerning Government [1698]

Edition used:

Discourses Concerning Government, ed. Thomas G. West (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund 1996).

About Liberty Fund:

Liberty Fund, Inc. is a private, educational foundation established to encourage the study of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals.


MODERNIZATION OF THE TEXT

Our intention has been to print an edition of the Discourses that is accurate yet easily accessible to today’s readers. To this end it has been modernized in several minor respects.

Capitalization in the 1698 Discourses is generally consistent with surviving manuscripts of letters in Sidney’s own hand. By today’s standards it looks haphazard. The section titles, which Sidney wrote as complete sentences, were not capitalized differently from the body of the text. In the body of the text we have changed capitalization to conform to today’s usage, but we have set the section titles with their original capitalization.

Italics in the 1698 edition were used for proper names, foreign language phrases, and terms under discussion, such as aristocracy. Quotations and paraphrases from other works were also generally given in italics. In Sidney’s surviving letters proper names are not underlined. Therefore we have retained all italics except for proper names. (A few of Sidney’s quotations were placed, inconsistently, in quotation marks. We did not change these.) We did not add italics except when proper names within italic quotations and book titles had been set in Roman type.

Spelling. Sidney’s irregular spelling in his letters was typical of his day. The same words, including names, were sometimes spelled differently even within the same sentence. The 1698 editor, it appears, regularized Sidney’s spelling, but according to standards no longer in use today. Spelling in this edition was determined as follows:

Except for King Lewis of France, we modernized proper names: Hobbs became Hobbes, King Ralph became Rudolph, in a radical instance. For Greek and Latin names we used the Oxford Classical Dictionary; for Biblical names, the King James Bible. For British and other names we followed accepted modern usage, with an occasional reliance upon spellings appearing in Webster’s Second International Dictionary. This prompted us to retain Sidney’s Britains, though Britons is preferred today. We let stand Switzers to refer to the Swiss.

A number of old, often familiar, spellings were retained: chuse, compleat, shew, publick (and other -ck endings), compell’d (and other contracted -ed endings, but rendred became rendered, and so on). Tho, without an apostrophe, seems quite contemporary, but it is Sidney’s, and we let it stand.

Other old spellings, although easy to guess at, are unfamiliar today and were modernized: bin is been, alledge is allege,sute is suit, and so on. Expresly, which could be taken for a contemporary typographical error, became expressly. And finally, we modernized constructions like no where and every thing, making them one word, according to today’s usage.

In the Latin, the -que endings that Sidney represented by -q; are spelled out.

Other changes. We retained Sidney’s use of the ampersand (&) in the text and in his notes. Obvious typographical errors were silently corrected. We changed Sidney’s (or Toland’s) punctuation in a very few instances where the sense was unclear. Sidney’s nouns in the possessive did not always have apostrophes; we have added them, so that mens affairs became men’s affairs. Sidney also used, and we retained, the old-fashioned possessive Brutus his sons where we would write Brutus’s sons. An occasional word has been added where Sidney or the first typesetter seems to have slipped. These are placed in brackets.