Comedies and Tragedies Written by Francis Beaumont and Iohn Fletcher, Gentlemen. Neverprinted [sic!] before and now Published by the Authours Originall Copies.
London: Printed for Humphrey Robinson, at the three Pidgeons, and for Humphrey Moseley, at the Princes Armes in St Pauls Church-yard, 1647.
Price: $15,000.00
Folio: 32 x 21.5 cm. I. Port., [52], 75, [1], 143, [1], 165, [3], 71, [1], 172, 92, 51, p. 50, 28, 25-48 p. Collation: π1 (port.), A4, a-b4, [c]4, d-e2, f4, g2, B-K4, L2; Aa-Ss4, Aaa-Xxx4, 4A-4I4, 5A-5R4, 5S6, 5T-5X4, 6A-6K4, 6L6, 7A-7C4, 7D2, 7E-7G4, 8A-8C4, 8*D2 8D-8F4.
FIRST EDITION of BOTH WORKS (See below).
With the full-paged portrait of Fletcher by Marshall bound before the title page. Bound in 18th c. blind-ruled mottled calf, very nicely re-backed with the original label preserved; corners bumped, minor scrapes and light wear to boards. Complete with the engraved portrait (first state, with "vates duplex” with v and d in lower case, and with "J. Berkenhead" engraved in smaller letters than those in the first state.) Title page printed in red and black. A fine copy of the first edition of the plays, bound with a very good copy of the 1652 single play. Marginal dampstain in lower margin of gatherings Bb, Ii, Aaa, Ddd, Bbbb, and Ffff, and a few other scattered leaves. Very small wormtrail in the gutter of some gatherings, occ. affecting a letter or touching the printed rule. Leaf 6K1 with light ink smear, lower blank margin of leaf 7D2 torn away without touching the text. Second work with dusty t.p. and fingersoiling at edges. Second work with marginal soiling and light marginal stains. Provenance: Earls of Chesterfield (Bradby Hall bookplate); C. Pearl Chamberlain (bookplate, dated July 1919).
[Bound with:]
Fletcher, John (1579-1625)
The Wild-Goose Chase. A Comedie. As it hath been Acted with singular Applause at the Black-Friers.
London: Humpherey Moseley, and are to be sold at the Princes Armes in St Pauls Church-yard, 1652
Modeled on the folios of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, the 1647 "Comedies and Tragedies" comprises all of the hitherto unpublished plays of Beaumont and Fletcher, with the exception of the "Wild-Goose Chase", which did not see print until 1652, as it had long been lost and was supposed to be irrecoverable. [Fortuitously, this copy has that edition bound in.] In total there are 34 plays and one masque. Twelve of these are collaborations between Fletcher and Philip Massinger. Two others (Beggars' Bush and Love's Cure) are the work of Beaumont, Fletcher, and Massinger. Others involved in the writing of these plays include Ben Jonson and John Webster. Among those who provided commendatory verses for the volume are Jonson, Herrick, and Lovelace (the last of whom also added a long poem to the second work.)
"We know relatively little of Beaumont and Fletcher's lives, and still less of their collaboration. Like Shakespeare, they became legendary in their lifetimes, and being almost as famous as their older contemporary their legend is almost as misty. The actual concept of collaboration became an essential part of the legend.”(Andrew Gurr, 'Philaster')
“Even in the seventeenth century the notion of what 'Beaumont and Fletcher' denoted was quite hazy. Their first folio of 1647, Comedies and Tragedies written by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, Gentlemen, clearly designed to rival the impressive folios of Shakespeare and Jonson, contained thirty-four plays and a masque… The implication that all these plays are collaborations by Beaumont and Fletcher is vastly misleading. Of the folio plays, Fletcher wrote at least sixteen alone; two or three were done with Shakespeare; probably eleven with Philip Massinger; ten or so with the involvement of as many as eight other writers. Beaumont wrote alone just The Knight and a masque. Thus only about nine plays of the vast canon were products of the famous collaboration. (Much on this topic is guesswork. The best job of untangling the probably insoluble problems of the canon is a series of articles by Cyrus Hoy, 'The shares of Fletcher and his collaborators in the Beaumont and Fletcher canon', Studies in Bibliography, 1956–62. See also the definitive edition edited by Fredson Bowers, Beaumont and Fletcher, Dramatic Works, 10.751–2, for a tentative list of ascriptions.)
“Regarding the division of labour within a play, much on the topic is based on gossip or guesswork. One contemporary maintained that Beaumont's 'maine businesse was to correct the overflowings of Mr. Fletcher's luxuriant Fancy and flowing witt' (John Earle, quoted in Brief Lives, 21); Robert Herrick stated that Fletcher designed the plots (see Herrick's commendatory verses in the 1647 folio); and Dryden thought that Beaumont was such a master of plotting that even Ben Jonson 'submitted all his writings to his [Beaumont's] censure and 'tis thought, used his judgment in correcting, if not contriving, his plots' (Essays of John Dryden, 1.68). The problem, as John Aubrey said, is that there was such a 'wonderfull consimility of phansey' (Brief Lives, 21) between the collaborators that even an acute critic like Coleridge admitted that he could not distinguish Beaumont's writing from Fletcher's. As George Lisle said in the 1647 folio: ‘For still your fancies are so wov'n and knit,/ 'Twas FRANCIS FLETCHER, or JOHN BEAUMONT writ.’”(Finkelpearl, Oxford DNB).
I. Pforzheimer 53; Wing B-1581; II. Pforzheimer 52; Wing B-1616