Home / Browse / Decorative Bindings / The Workes. [The second Volume. Containing these Playes, Viz. 1 Bartholomew Fayre. 2 The Staple of the Newes. 3 The Divell is an Asse.]

JONSON, Benjamin.

The Workes. [The second Volume. Containing these Playes, Viz. 1 Bartholomew Fayre. 2 The Staple of the Newes. 3 The Divell is an Asse.]

First editions of the three volumes comprising Jonson's collected works. The first volume was published between 6 and 25 November 1616. Jonson took an unusually close interest in its production, and his decision to include nine plays, then generally regarded as an ephemeral form of literature, broke new ground. Its publication in the very year of Shakespeare's death consolidated Jonson's position as England's foremost living author. That year he was granted a royal pension of 100 marks per annum, establishing him as Britain's de facto poet laureate. In addition to the plays, the volume includes more than a dozen masques, a group of court entertainments, the Panegyre written for the king's entry to parliament in 1604 and two substantial collections of poems, Epigrams and The Forest. The 1616 folio created a notion of authorial ownership and identity that is recognizably modern, and it was to serve as an important model for similar collected editions later in the century, not least the first Shakespeare folio of 1623. Jonson prepared a second volume for publication in 1631, containing the three plays named in the title, but left it unpublished in his lifetime. As usual, the 1640 volumes are here bound together, the third volume (issued without a general title) containing a number of hitherto unpublished masques and plays, along with the English Grammar, Discoveries, a verse translation of Horace's Ars poetica, and a third major collection of poems, The Underwood. The several parts of the third volume were arranged haphazardly according to the binder's whim.

3 volumes in 2, folio (287 × 183 mm). Bound uniformly in brown crushed morocco by Rivière & Son, spines lettered and decorated in gilt, five raised bands, covers blocked in gilt with elaborate strapwork cornerpieces and central ornament, board edges and inner dentelles ruled in gilt, marbled endpapers, gilt edges. Bookplate of John Whipple Frothingham. Vol. I with Vaughan's portrait of Jonson from the second edition of this volume inserted as frontispiece (no frontispiece called for in this edition), engraved title in Pforzheimer's second state ("in our experience … the rarest") trimmed around the engraved area and mounted, the prelims to vol. I and sporadic other leaves washed and pressed, a few trivial marks, occasional minor paper restoration, some leaves evenly and lightly browned.

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