Torquato Tasso | Godfrey of Bulloigne, or The Recoverie of Jerusalem, translated by Fairfax, 1600

From the Library of Clayre and Jay Michael Haft

Torquato Tasso

Godfrey of Bulloigne, or the Recoverie of Jerusalem. Done into English heroicall verse, by Edward Fairefax Gent. London: for J[ohn] Jaggard and M. Lownes, 1600

Small folio (243 x 172mm.), title within broad typographical border, Pforzheimer's first state of B1 (first line reading "The sacred armies and the godly knight"), seventeenth-century calf, spine with raised bands in six compartments, morocco label to second compartment, marbled edges, some light spotting, extremities slightly rubbed, rebacked retaining original spine

First edition of Fairfax's translation. "Fairfax translated with an eye to Carew's version of the first five cantos (1594), Harington's version of Ariosto, and Spenser's Faerie Queene. Godfrey is shot through with echoes of Homer and Virgil's Aeneid, most of them developed from hints in Tasso. Fairfax's command of the telling phrase and wide-ranging and aptly used scholarship established his reputation. There were several seventeenth-century reprints, that of 1624 being at the order of James I. It is supposed to have been a solace to Charles I during his time in prison" (ONDB). Tasso was extraordinarily popular in late sixteenth-century England and Shakespeare apparently read Gerusalemme Liberata in the Fairfax translation (L. Potter, Life of William Shakespeare, 2012, p. 316). 

LITERATURE:

STC 23698; ESTC S117565; Pforzheimer 1001 

PROVENANCE:

Sir Claude Champion de Crespigny (1706-1782), South Sea House: armorial bookplate