Holinshed's Chronicles, best known as one of Shakespeare's major sources, contains one of the few accounts of Elizabeth's reign written during her lifetime. A contemporary history, it was subjected to censorship by the Privy Council. In this facsimile edition, a compilation based on this portion of the Chronicles in copies in the Huntington's collection as well as the British Library and Cambridge University Library, censored and substituted passages are represented between two covers for the first time. Professor Clegg provides a historical introduction and demonstrates that the censorship took place in three stages. Libraries around the world will be able to identify and describe the copies in their own collections based on the information provided.

The Chronicles, a scrupulously produced monument to Elizabeth, is also a rich source for the study of printing practices. The base text is an unusual copy in the Huntington Library containing the largest sample of proofmarkings that survive from the sixteenth century. Professor McLeod analyzes these in his textual commentary, along with the typography, demonstrating how the book was printed and explaining the roles of compositor and corrector in the sixteenth-century printing house.

Cyndia Susan Clegg, Distinguished Professor of English at Pepperdine University, is the author of Press Censorship in Elizabethan England and Press Censorship in Jacobean England. She specializes in early modern print culture, censorship, Shakespeare, and English Renaissance Poetry.
Randall McLeod, Professor of English at the University of Toronto, has published widely on typography and printing. He presented the Rosenbach Lectures in Bibliography at the University of Pennsylvania in 1999 and is the editor of Crisis in Editing: Texts of the English Renaissance.

"The Peaceful and Prosperous Regiment is a monumental work of scholarship. It will enable further investigations of its material and should provoke similarly radical studies of other texts. Cyndia Clegg's historical introduction is concise and elegant, and Randall McLeod's textual commentary is an extraordinary tour de force of meticulous analytical bibliography. The book is beautifully designed and produced and the many diagrams and legends are genuinely illuminating. It is an object of beauty, and a rich resource for historians and literary scholars."—Michael Warren, University of California, Santa Cruz, editor of The Parallel King Lear, 1608-1623 (1989)