LITERATURE 8 Extra-Illustrated Aldine Edition Of Shakespeare’s Poems, Exquisitely Bound 05SHAKESPEARE, William. The Poetical Works. New York and London, 1892. 12mo, contemporary full crimson morocco gilt, green morocco-gilt doublures. $3800 Later Aldine edition of the Bard’s poems, with portrait of the poet and extra-illustrated with five windowmounted engravings, two hand-colored, splendidly bound. This beautiful volume includes "Venus and Adonis," "The Rape of Lucrece" and the Sonnets: “They abound in meditations on estrangement, failure and death. They bewail the poet’s outcast state, death’s dateless night, the anxieties of separation, time’s giving and taking away, even world-weariness. The conclusion, however, is triumphant—an uncompromising affirmation of the transcendence of love” (Baugh et al., 482). Includes Alexander Dyce’s life of Shakespeare. A splendidly bound, extra-illustrated volume in fine condition. 1698 Complete Collected Edition Of Milton’s Prose Works 04MILTON, John. A Complete Collection of the Historical, Political, and Miscellaneous Works. Amsterdam, 1698. Three volumes bound as one. Thick folio, contemporary full speckled calf gilt rebacked with original spine laid down. $4000 Expanded second edition of Milton’s collected prose works, published only one year after the first edition. This folio volume notably includes Milton’s finest prose works: Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, Eikonoclastes, and his landmark Areopagitica, in which “the argument for freedom has never, before or since, been so magnificently or forcefully expressed” (PMM 133). In his lifetime, Milton was renowned more for his rhetoric than poetry: “a fiery pamphleteer in an age of religious and political argument, whose tireless defense of divorce, progressive education, regicide and the Commonwealth marked him out as a natural, and brilliant, English radical” (Robert McCrum). Text generally quite clean, title page of Volume III remargined. A handsome copy.
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