The Best Edition

MASSINGER, Philip. GIFFORD, W.

Plays [Second Edition]. With notes critical and explanatory, by W. Gifford, Esq. The second edition.

London: Printed for G. and W. Nicol...by W. Bulmer and Co., 1813.

The Plays of Philip Massinger...With notes critical and explanatory, by W. Gifford, Esq. The second edition...London: Printed for G. and W. Nicol...by W. Bulmer and Co., 1813.

Second edition and best edition, (first published in 1805). Four octavo volumes. Engraved frontispiece portrait in Volume I. Contemporary brown morocco, pictorially gilt-stamped with shields on covers, decoratively gilt-stamped on spines, gilt-turn-ins. All edges gilt. Minor rubbing along spine extremities.

A fine set. Housed in a custom brown cloth slipcase.

Philip Massinger (1583-1640), “English dramatist, author of some forty plays, of which half are lost; the manuscripts of at least eight were destroyed by Warburton’s cook, who used them to line pie-dishes. Of those that survive the most important is A New Way to Pay Old Debts, a satiric comedy which was first produced in about 1625...Among Massinger’s other plays are the romantic dramas, The Duke of Milan (1620) and The Great Duke of Florence (1627)...the comedies, The City Madam (1632) and The Guardian (1633); and the tragicomedies, The Bondman (1623) and The Renegado (1624). The Fatal Dowry (1619) and The Virgin Martyr (1620) were written in collaboration, the first with [Nathan] Field, the second with [Thomas] Dekker, while Massinger had a hand in several of the plays ascribed to Beaumont and Fletcher, and may have worked with the latter on Henry VIII and possibly Two Noble Kinsmen” (The Oxford Companion to the Theatre).

HBS 66422.

$600.

Price: $600.00

Item #66422