Overbury, Thomas, Sir | Character profiles

Overbury, Thomas, Sir

Sir Thomas Overbury His Wife with Additions of New Characters … The fourteenth impression. London: Printed for Robert Allot, 1630

Small 8vo (139 x 85 mm). Woodcut initials, head- and tailpieces. printer's ornaments; quire D wrongly imposed, text of H7v and H8r transposed, lacks final blank V8, quires A–C stained in upper right corner and quires S–V in bottom margin, a few fore-edges shaved, F3–4 catchwords cropped. Contemporary calf; rebacked.

His poem ”The Wife” depicts the virtues that a young man should demand of a woman before he has the rashness to marry her, most likely a reference to the illicit affair of his friend Robert Carr with the married Frances Howard. It is preceded by several elegiac poems about Overbury's untimely death (political machinations of various courtiers caused Overbury to be thrown into the Tower where he was poisoned and died 14 September 1613). Character sketches complete the remainder of the work, describing tradesmen, simple folk, and a handful of rogues as well.

REFERENCE:

ESTC S113548; STC 18917

PROVENANCE:

George Simon, 2nd Earl Harcourt (eighteenth-century engraved armorial bookplate on front pastedown)