Spenser, Edmund

The Faerie Queen: The Shepheards Calendar: Together with the Other Works of England's Arch-Poët ... Collected into one Volume, and carefully corrected. London: Printed by H[umphrey] L[ownes] for Mathew Lownes, 1611



Folio (10¾ x 7⅛ in.; 273 x 180 mm). General title within historiated woodcut border (McKerrow & Ferguson 212), 10 section-titles with woodcut devices, 12 woodcut text illustrations in Shepheards Calendar, numerous woodcut and typographic initials, head- and tail-pieces, and other ornaments; leaf B1 in Shepheards Calendar soiled, a few rust spots and minor marginal soiling, final leaf creased and torn in lower outer corner touching a letter, a few leaves in the minor poems lightly browned. Contemporary calf with blind-ruled borders, gilt-stamped central lozenge on both covers; rebacked with fragments of the original spine laid down, ties gone.

Henry Dethick (signature and purchase note on title, signature on front free endpaper verso) — George Dethick (signatures in same places) — George Goyder (bookplate)

Johnson 19; Pforzheimer 972; STC 28083.3

First collected edition, first issue. The title and colophon leaf of the second part of the Faerie Queen are dated 1609, and the Prosopoia or Mother Hubberds Tale attacking Lord Burghley has been suppressed.

Henry Dethick (1547/8–c.1613), Latin poet and writer on poetic theory, was the author of Oratio in laudem poëseos, dedicated to Lord Burghley and printed c.1574, one of the earliest formal defences of poetry in Elizabethan England.

A beautiful, crisp copy with an interesting provenance.