Home / Browse / Autographs & Signed Books / Il pastor fido; tragicom. pastor.
(SHELLEY, Percy Bysshe) GUARINI, Giovanni Battista.
Il pastor fido; tragicom. pastor.
Publisher: [No place, publisher or date] [c.1800]
Stock code: 43257
Price: £7,500 Currency Conversion
Percy Bysshe Shelley's copy, with his autograph ownership inscription dated 1820, of an undated reprint of Guarini's celebrated pastoral tragicomedy, undoubtedly bought by him in Italy and read during the most productive poetical years of his life. Shelley was exceptionally well versed in Italian literature and the Shelleys' reading lists and journals show that Shelley had already read Il pastor fido in England, with Claire Clairmont, on 9, 10 and 15 April 1815, the year that he emerged as a major poet. But on 11 March 1818 he and Mary left England for Italy, never to return. Shelley spent 1820, the year he acquired this volume, mostly in Pisa, with a couple of summer months house-sitting for the Gisbornes in Leghorn. Shelley's exile in Italy coincided with the climax of a rising interest in Italian literature among English writers, beginning about the middle of the eighteenth century and declining noticeably in the middle and late 1830s. Although Italy has a significant role in English literature well after this date, it is clear that, for all the Italian sympathies of the Brownings, Tennyson, Clough and the Rossettis, their generation knew markedly less of the Italian language and literature than the generation of Byron and Shelley. English versions of the minor Italian lyric poets appeared frequently in the 1820s. Shelley, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Hunt, Southey, Byron, and Hemans were only a few of those who produced their renderings of isolated lyrics. The London Magazine published in 1823–4 a series of Sonnets from the most eminent poets of Italy, giving both the Italian original and verse-translations, and corners in many of the periodicals were filled with poems headed simply "From the Italian", or "Imitated from Guarini". Shelley was a persistent and unusually skilful translator, especially during his Italian years, although it was left to Thomas Love Peacock and Leigh Hunt among his friends and literary peers to publish translations from Guarini. Nevertheless Guarini's pastoral had an undoubted influence on Shelley's writing. Prometheus Unbound is justly the most respected of the Hunt circle's efforts to return to such sources of the mythological drama as the masque and the pastoral drama. Mary Shelley's two unpublished mythological dramas, Midas and Proserpine—written partially in collaboration with her husband—take place in Sicily, the birthplace of pastoral (as Hunt puts it in a letter to Mary Shelley, "Didn't you go to Sicily while you were in the neighbourhood—the land of Theocritus, and Proserpine, and Polyphemus"). A good portion of Proserpine is given over to recounting the story of the nymph Arethusa, whose story had been tied into the pastoral drama by Guarini who used her lover Alpheus/Alfeo as the prologue to Il pastor fido. This pocket-sized edition, dated two years before Shelley's death by drowning, rubbed at the extremities, naturally evokes Trelawny's account of the recovery of Shelley's body from the sea, still dressed in his double-breasted jacket, nankeen trousers, and a pair of boots with white silk socks underneath, with a volume of Greek drama in one pocket and Keats's poems in the other (Hogg, 2.217).
16mo (121 × 66 mm). Contemporary Italian mottled calf, red morocco label, smooth spine with gilt urns in compartments, covers with triple gilt rules, marbled endpapers, gilt edges. Housed in a dark brown cloth flat back solander box made by The Chelsea Bindery. Engraved title-page. Worn at extremities, spine defective in lower compartment, a few minor marks but generally clean internally, a good copy, signed on the blank leaf before the engraved title: "P. B. Shelley 1820" in Shelley's autograph.
