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SHAKESPEARE, William.
Julius Caesar. A Tragedy.
As it is now Acted at the Theatre Royal.
Publisher: by H[enry]. H[ills]. Jun. for Hen Herringman and R Bentley, and sold by Joseph Knight and Francis Saunders, [after 1691]
Stock code: 69998
Price: £10,000 Currency Conversion
An unusually good example of an early quarto edition, surviving examples of which are commonly found trimmed and in poor condition. There is no lifetime quarto of Julius Caesar, which was first published in the first folio in 1623, that text being the sole authority for the play. Unusually for a major Shakespeare play, the text suffered no adaptation in the Restoration. The play was revived by Thomas Killigrew's King's Company in 1672, using the original text, with Charles Hart initially playing Brutus. Thomas Betterton (1635–1710), generally recognized as "the greatest English actor between Burbage and Garrick", took the part in later productions and is here listed in the part, with his boyhood friend Edward Kynaston as Antony. The quarto was first published by Herringman in 1684, the year he turned over the retail side of his business to Francis Saunders and his partner Joseph Knight, and the year before he published Shakespeare's fourth folio. It was followed by four undated reprints with closely similar imprints to this, and a 1691 edition with an imprint mentioning only Herringman and Bentley. In 1969 John W. Velz superseded Henrietta C. Bartlett's 1913 bibliographical ordering of these players' quartos. He regards the 1691 edition as the second authorized edition and identifies this edition as the first (QU1) of three undated reprints: unauthorized editions printed by Henry Hills Junior, the printer of the 1684 first quarto, most likely in the date range 1695–1700. But it is not the fourth and last of the undated piracies, which is not a Restoration quarto and has a different text showing signs of annotation from Rowe, which Velz therefore dates "from sometime after 1710, probably from sometime after 1714" (p. 181). This edition descends directly from the 1684 edition, and was probably issued in direct competition to Herringman's 1691 edition, for which Hills was not re-employed as printer.
Quarto (227 × 166 mm). Early twentieth-century full red morocco by Riviere & Son, spine gilt in compartments between raised bands, sides ruled in gilt with a French fillet, gilt inner dentelles, gilt edges. Housed in a flat back cloth solander box. Joints neatly restored, paper age-toned as usual with seventeenth-century quartos, but a very good copy, well-margined all round.
