1438300 1623 Shakespeare. Midsummer Night's Dream. Complete.
9657.
A Midsummer Nights Dream.
From the First Folio. 1623. Complete.
SHAKESPEARE. A Midsommer Nights Dreame. [London: Isaac Jaggard and Ed. Blount, 1623]. Folio (8 by 12-1/2 inches), modern half orange morocco gilt; 9 leaves. Complete. Nine leaves extracted from the landmark First Folio (1623) "intrinsically the most valuable volume in the whole range of English Literature" (Grolier 100 19) containing the complete text of Shakespeare’s festive, fantasy-filled comedy, A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Likely written in 1595-96, A Midsummer Night’s Dream "is a labyrinth, in which we are delighted to be lost" The Dream remains an unique literary work, with a highly individual place within the Shakespeare canon." Whose dream is it? Partly Bottom’s, partly ours Nothing in literature is so exquisitely sustained as this is. Had Shakespeare written only this superb marriage-song, his greatness would have been established forever after" (Bloom, xi-xii).
Shakespeare’s associates John Heminges and Henry Condell prepared the First Folio; in 1623, William and Isaac Jaggard along with the bookseller Edward Blount published it. Of Shakespeare’s 39 undisputed plays, 18 survive solely because they appear in the 1623 Folio, making the book "intrinsically the most valuable volume in the whole range of English Literature" (Grolier 100 19). Fewer than 250 copies of the First Folio survive, and most of those copies are incomplete. With facsimile of the First Folio title page. Ornamental woodcut headpiece and small decorative initial to leaf N1. Leaves N1-O3, paginated 145-162 ([N5]r mispaginated 151; O3r mispaginated 163). With press variants: N2r.b50 with “for” evenly printed; O2r with pagination 159; O3r.a39 without the inked space quad. Preceded by two quarto printings: a 1600 printing for Thomas Fisher and a 1619 fascicle of the abortive Pavier-Jaggard collected edition. This First Folio text is set from a copy of the second quarto printing, collated against a prompt-book. See Jaggard, 408. A fine copy.
There were only two quarto printings of A Midsummer Night’s Dream prior to the First Folio. Of the first, which was printed in 1600 for Thomas Fisher to be sold at his shop in Fleet Street, there are only eight known copies. The second, printed in 1619 by James Roberts, was among those plays falsely dated to 1600 in what is viewed as an initial attempt to publish a group of Shakespeare‘s plays following his death. There are twenty-seven known copies. This second quarto is rife with errors, the text of the First Folio being much closer to the original quarto.
As in most cases, the Folio version has significantly more stage directions than the quartos and is being used with increasing frequency as the basic text for considerations of performance.
Like Mach Ado, also in this collection, the Folio version offers up another of those delightful moments of theatrical history: a stage direction (bottom left, page 160) in which a certain “Tawyer with a trumpet” is said to precede the characters Pyramus, Thisby and Wall. It turns out that Tawyer was a servant of John Heminge, one of the two men whose heroic efforts made the First Folio possible.
The prefix for the Puck character shifts nine times between Puck and Robin Goodfellow. Modern texts usually eliminate the shifts and refer to the character throughout simply as “Puck”. However, in Shakespeare’s time a distinction was drawn between the two possibilities. In the book “An Encyclopedia of Fairies” Robin Goodfellow is described as harmless and possessing powers “to be used against the ill-disposed…in aid of honest folks.” Puck, on the other hand is described as being somewhat more malevolent, akin to “hobgoblins” who are “rather nasty people to annoy.”
Fine