A prologue or prolog is an opening to a story that establishes the context and gives background details, often some earlier story that ties into the main one, and other miscellaneous information. The Ancient Greek word πρόλογος includes the modern meaning of prologue, but was of wider significance, more like the meaning of preface. The importance, therefore, of the prologue in Greek drama was very great; it sometimes almost took the place of a romance, to which, or to an episode in which, the play itself succeeded.
Artwork by Gustave Doré.
Title page of 1616 printing of Every Man in His Humour, a 1598 play by the English playwright Ben Jonson. The play belongs to the subgenre of the "humours comedy"
A miscellany is a collection of various pieces of writing by different authors. Meaning a mixture, medley, or assortment, a miscellany can include pieces on many subjects and in a variety of different forms. In contrast to anthologies, whose aim is to give a selective and canonical view of literature, miscellanies were produced for the entertainment of a contemporary audience and so instead emphasise collectiveness and popularity. Laura Mandell and Rita Raley state:This last distinction is quite often visible in the basic categorical differences between anthologies on the one hand, and all other types of collections on the other, for it is in the one that we read poems of excellence, the "best of English poetry," and it is in the other that we read poems of interest. Out of the differences between a principle of selection and a principle of collection, then, comes a difference in aesthetic value, which is precisely what is at issue in the debates over the "proper" material for inclusion into the canon.
Miniature of Noah's Ark landing on the Mountains of Ararat (fol. 521a), from the 13th century North French Hebrew Miscellany
A patterned page from the Trevelyon Miscellany of 1608
"My hope is yow for to obtaine". A love poem in a distinctive hand from The Devonshire Manuscript, 57r.
A drawing illustrating the medieval poem "Reinbroun" from the Auchinleck Manuscript.