 |
BOCCACCIO, Giovanni.
[The Fall of Princes] A Treatise excellent and compendious, shewing…the falls of sundry most notable Princes and Princesses with other nobles…
London: Richard Tottel, 1554.
£12500.00
|
|
Folio. ff. [ix], CCXXIIII (recte 225, several misfoliations): 234 leaves, complete with "The daunce of Machabree" at end, quite often missing. Black letter. Title within ornate architectural woodcut border by Edward Whitchurch (McKerrow and Ferguson 68(a)), and 12 further large illustrations (several in the Renaissance style), including one of the author, woodcut initials throughout. Printing tear to Q5 without loss, very light marginal soiling to final leaf and in one or two other places, a very little dampstaining to upper margins, a little cropped without touching text, else a handsome copy of a lovely book. In unusual, blind-ruled calf, c. 1600, central lozenge and converging diagonal lines (two double), within blind-ruled frame, 17th-century giltstamped armssuperimposed, outer gilt-ruled frame, marbled endpapers, sprinkled edges. Neatly rebacked, extremities a little rubbed, boards lightly scuffed. Faded contemporary inscription on title of James ?Joye, 19th-century armorial bookplates of J. Knight, and C.W.H. Sotheby on endpapers. Third, and best, edition. "This edition, according to Professor Bergin, is 'by far the best of the printed editions' being, as Tottel declares in the title, actually collated from several good manuscripts" (Pforzheimer), and the only edition to include the 'Danse Macabre'. The Fall of Princes is Lydgate's most ambitious work, adapted - at the request of Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester - in the 1430s from Laurent de Premierfait's French version of Boccaccio's De casibus virorum illustrum, (written between 1363-1373), and greatly expanded in the process. The great epic poem follows the pattern familiar to English readers from Chaucer's Monk's Tale, of a succession of "tragedies" ranging chronologically from Adam to King Jean of France, captured at Poitiers in 1356. It shows Lydgate's breadth of knowledge and his sympathy for the stories of the ancient world. He promotes the traditional doctrines of moderation, the avoidance of pride, and the pursuit of virtue, and demonstrates the horror of discord and strife between kinfolk. The Fall of Princes was hugely popular in the fifteenth century: more than thirty manuscripts survive, some finely illustrated, and the text was often quoted in excerpts, as well as serving as the model for The Mirror for Magistrates.
STC and Pforzheimer both note that copies of this edition "not infrequently" lack the final gathering (present here), containing the Dance Macabre, which includes two illustrations that "deserve to be ranked as among the best of English sixteenth-century wood-engravings" (Pforzheimer), for their design and conception. The other woodcuts, one at the opening of each book, are those used in Pynson's second edition of 1527 (Hodnett's numbers 1945, 1947, 1949, 1951, 1953, 1955, 1957, 1959, 1961), excepting the one at the end of the Prologue, which was cut for the 1527 edition. The former are, in turn, copies of the blocks Pynson apparently borrowed from Jean Du Pre to print his first edition in 1494. Martin describes Du Pre's cuts (from his 1483 Paris edition) as "d'une excellent exécution" and notes that they were designed for that edition.
Pforzheimer 74; STC 3177; Lowndes I 224; Ames IV 2595; Martin, p. 140; Hodnett, p. 389.
|
|
|