“A PARTIALITY FOR VIOLENT EPISODES AND ROMANTIC COMPLICATIONS”

CRÉBILLON, Prosper Jolyot. Oeuvres de Crébillon. Avec les Notes de Tous les Commentateurs. Paris: Chez Lefevre, 1828. Two volumes. Octavo, late 19th-century three-quarter brown morocco, elaborately gilt-decorated spines, raised bands, marbled boards and endpapers, top edges gilt. $450.

Collected edition of the tragedies of Crebillon, with three engraved portraits, handsomely bound in morocco-gilt by A. Bertrand.

Includes the 18th-century playwright's dramatic masterpieces Idoménée, Atrée et Thyeste, Électre, Rhadamiste et Zénobie, Xerxès, Sémiramis, Pyrrhus, Catilina, and Le Triumvirat ou la Mort de Cicéron. His works "show a partiality for violent episodes and romantic complications… His plays are in fact melodramas of a highly tragic character; he seeks, as he says, to evoke pity by terror…. He was greatly esteemed in his day, a member of the Académie and dramatic censor" (Harvey & Heseltine, 176). Text in French. Bookplates of renowned New York attorney and collector Frederic Robert Halsey.

Fine condition. Very handsomely bound.