Beaumont and Fletcher | Comedies and Tragedies... Never printed before, London, 1647, first edition

From the library of Clayre and Jay Michael Haft

Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher

Comedies and Tragedies... Never Printed Before. London: Printed for Humphrey Robinson and Humphrey Moseley, 1647

FIRST EDITION, folio (320 x 212mm.), engraved frontispiece portrait of Fletcher by W. Marshall in second state, woodcut head- and tailpieces, woodcut initials, early manuscript corrections to Rrr1r, old calf rebacked to style, double gilt fillet border, gilt edges, housed in modern collector's folding cloth case, title-page with small supplied section at lower margin,Kk1 with repaired closed tear at margin, a few other marginal closed tears, small hole in final leaf, rebacked with new endpapers

First edition of all the plays not hitherto printed, save for The Wild-Goose Chase, and, after the Shakespeare and Jonson folios, the third great collection of English Renaissance theatre. Edited, with a preface ("To the Reader"), by James Shirley and with an astonishing twenty-two leaves devoted to poetic encomia of the authors, the publication of Comedies and Tragedies occupied eight printers.

LITERATURE:

ESTC R22900; Greg III, 1013; Grolier/English 28; Pforzheimer 53; Wing B1581