9 04 SHAKESPEARE. The Tragedie of Romeo and Juliet. London, 1664. Folio, period-style full red morocco gilt. $18,500 “For Never Was A Story Of More Woe Than This Of Juliet And Her Romeo” The complete text of Shakespeare’s first tragedy and one of his greatest plays, Romeo and Juliet, from the rare and important Third Folio, on 13 original leaves. The four folios of Shakespeare are the first four editions of Shakespeare’s collected plays. These were the only collected editions printed in the 17th century. The 1664 second issue of the Third Folio (from which this play was taken), is the first to include Pericles and is therefore the first complete edition of Shakespeare’s plays. The Third Folio is believed to be the scarcest of the four great 17th-century folio editions, a large part of the edition presumed destroyed in the Great London Fire of 1666. Leaves [Hhh5]-[Kkk5] contain the play Romeo and Juliet. “The Shakespearean exuberance or gusto is part of what breaks through linguistic and cultural barriers… Shakespeare is to the world’s literature what Hamlet is to the imaginary domain of literary character: a spirit that permeates everywhere, that simply cannot be confined” (Bloom, The Western Canon, 52). The facsimile title page and frontispiece reproduce these pages of the second issue of the Third Folio, bearing the date 1664 in the imprint rather than 1663. A clean, wide-margined copy, beautifully bound.
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