TENTH EDITION, 1630. ELEVENTH EDITION, 1630? No. XVII. Bodleian (Malone) 7 // ×3769 lately removed from the Ashmolean Museum to its present home, the Bodleian Library (Wood 79). It measures 4" and there is a device on the title-page of Cupid throwing down his bow. This edition was reprinted early in the eighteenth century. In one impression of Lintott's edition of Shakespeare's Poems which appeared in 1710 it was stated that Venus and Adonis was there printed from an edition of 1630. A title-page was given bearing that date, and a printer's device with the motto 'Sua Laurea Phoebo '.' To the same year (1630) is assigned an imperfect copy (lacking the title-page) of a slightly differing impression, which is also in the Bodleian Library (Malone 891). It measures 4" x 2". A title-page, which is supplied in manuscript, suggests the date of 1630. The text is not identical with the copy, 1630. perfect copy of that year, but it was clearly based on that edition. It was known, too, to the printer of the succeeding edition of 1636. It must therefore be dated between 1630 and the latter year. TWELFTH EDITION, 1636. No. XVIII. 16 Haviland's third edition appeared in 1636 again, to be sold by Francis Coules', with the same device of Cupid throwing down his bow, as in Haviland's first edition of 1630. Two copies alone are traceable. The signatures run as before, copy, 1636. A to D iii in eights, and the book contains twenty-seven leaves. The British Museum copy, which measures 4,5" x 3", is bound in russia, and is badly stained and soiled, with a few leaves mended. It belonged to George Hibbert, of Portland Place, London, at whose sale in 1829 it fetched £1 145. od. This copy is possibly identical with that which was sold bound up in a volume with the Rape of Lucrece (1616) and other poetical tracts, at the sale of Thomas Pearson in 1788, when the whole volume fetched £1 25. od. A better copy of the 1636 edition Perry copy, now belongs to Mr. Marsden J. Perry, of Providence, Rhode Island, U.S. A. It measures 43" x 33" and contains twentyeight leaves, the last being blank, while some leaves are uncut at the bottom. This copy was purchased by Henry Stevens, the American agent in London, in May, 1856, at Sotheby's, No. XIX. 1636. I See page 74. 1636. for £49 10s. od. Henry Stevens had it re-bound in blue TWELFTH morocco by Bedford, and re-sold it at Sotheby's for £56, in EDITION, August, 1857. It subsequently passed into the library of Brayton Ives, of New York, who paid for it $1,350 or £270. At Brayton Ives' sale in 1891 it was acquired by its present owner for $1,150 or £230. 1675. The last edition known to have been produced in the THIRTEENTH seventeenth century was printed in 1675 by Elizabeth EDITION, Hodgkinsonne for F. Coles, T. Vere, J. Wright and J. Clark', and was entered in The Term Catalogue' under date February 10, 1676, as Venus and Adonis; A Poem by W. Shakespear. Price sixpence'. It was a diminutive volume of the chap-book order, and was published by a London firm, whose business was mainly confined to broadsides, ballads, and chap-books. 1675. The only copy which seems traceable is now in America. No. Xx. Originally in the library of George Richard Savage Nassau, Folger copy, it was sold at the sale of his books in March, 1824, for £2 55. od. It seems to have been subsequently for a time the property of J. O. Halliwell. On April 12, 1889, it was sold by an anonymous collector at Puttick and Simpson's auction rooms in London, for £14 10s. od. to Messrs. Pearson and Co., of London. It afterwards passed to its present owner, Mr. H. C. Folger, jr., of New York. It is bound in russia. Bodleian Another copy of the 1675 edition, without a title-page, No. XXI. belonged to Malone and seems to have passed with his books Mislaid to the Bodleian Library. It is mentioned in the catalogue of (Malone) Malone's books in the Bodleian Library, which was published copy, 1675. in 1836. The entry is repeated in the printed catalogue of the Bodleian Library which was issued between 1835 and 1847. It also figures in the manuscript catalogue of the Library in present use, but no shelf-mark is there attached to it. The Cambridge editors reported that it was inaccessible to them when they sought to collate it in 1864. Efforts have been made at the instance of the present writer to find it during the present year, but so far without success. 1 Arber's Term Catalogues, i. 230. K century reprints. Eighteenth- In the eighteenth century, the poem was less frequently issued than might be expected. Few of the great editors deemed the Venus and Adonis or any other of Shakespeare's poems worthy of their notice. The first eighteenth-century reprint, Venus and Adonis, written by Mr. Shakespeare,' appeared in 1707 in Poems on Affairs of State (vol. iv, pp. 205-44). The text abounds in the corruptions of 1600 and the later issues, and was doubtless reprinted from the chap-book issue of 1675. Nicholas Rowe did not include Shakespeare's poems in his first critical edition of the plays which Jacob Tonson published in six volumes in 1709. But two publishers independently supplied the omission without delay. The notorious Edmund Curll (with E. Sanger) brought out in 1710 a so-called 'seventh volume' of Rowe's edition containing Venus and Adonis, Lucrece, with Shakespeare's miscellany Poems', and an essay by Charles Gildon on the history of the stage. A more respectable publisher, Bernard Lintott, brought out, also in 1710, more than one impression of another complete collection of Shakespeare's poems. This work, which was entitled A Collection of Poems', first appeared in a single volume, containing Venus and Adonis, Lucrece, and The Passionate Pilgrim. A second volume, which was published later, added the Sonnets and A Lover's Complaint. In one impression of Lintott's volumes the Venus and Adonis is preceded by a separate and subsidiary title-page bearing the date 1609. There was no known edition of the poem issued in that year, and the date may be a misprint for 1709, when Lintott sent the text to press, or it may be a confusion with 1609, the date of the first edition of the Sonnets. Other impressions of Lintott's edition of 1710 give Venus and Adonis a title-page dated 1630, in which year an edition was undoubtedly published (see No. XVI). Lintott's text was liberally corrected in the printing-office, but was apparently based on that of 1630. To Pope's edition of Shakespeare's plays, which Jacob Tonson issued without the poems in six volumes (1723-5), a syndicate of booksellers added in 1725 a 'seventh volume" giving the poems in Curll's text under the incom petent editorship of Dr. Sewell. Neither Theobald, Hanmer, Dr. Johnson, Warburton, Capell, nor Steevens noticed the poems in their editions of the plays. Capell annotated in manuscript a copy of the Lintott reprint, but the revision remains unpublished in the Capell collection in the library of Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1774 J. Bell, a London bookseller, first included the poems in a trade reprint of the plays. In 1780 Malone included the poems in his Supplement to Johnson and Steevens' edition of Shakespeare's Plays of 1778, and there first attempted a critical recension of the text. They reappeared as a matter of course in Malone's great edition of the works of Shakespeare, in 1790. It is due to Malone's example that Venus and Adonis and the rest of Shakespeare's non-dramatic works were finally admitted to the Shakespearean canon. They fill a place in all the nineteenthcentury editions of Shakespeare's works which enjoy a standard repute. Many so-called collections of Shakespeare's poems, which were produced by publishers in the middle of the eighteenth century under such titles as 'Poems written by Shakespeare', or 'Poems on several occasions by William Shakespeare', were merely reprints of the 1640 edition of Shakespeare's Poems which contained only the Sonnets and Passionate Pilgrim and omitted Shakespeare's narrative poems. |