“PLAY OUT THE PLAY”: AN EXTRAORDINARILY GREAT RARITY—1639 QUARTO EDITION OF SHAKESPEARE’S THE HISTORIE OF HENRY THE FOURTH

SHAKESPEARE, William. The Historie of Henry the Fourth: With the Battell at Shrewsbury, betweene the King, and Lord Henry Percy, surnamed Henry Hotspur of the North. With the humorous conceits of Sir John Falstaffe. Newly corrected by William Shake-speare. London: Printed by John Norton, and are to be sold by Hugh Perry, 1639. Slim quarto, early 19th-century three-quarter calf over paper boards; 40 unnumbered leaves. Housed in a custom chemise and full brown morocco box.    $185,000.

An exceptional complete copy of the extraordinarily rare 1639 Shakespeare quarto edition of Henry IV, Part I. This is the earliest obtainable quarto edition of one of the greatest and most important of Shakespeare's history plays.

Henry IV, Part I, likely written in 1597, is one of Shakespeare’s greatest and most important history plays, introducing the memorable characters of Prince Hal, Hotspur and Falstaff—a “veritable monarch of language” whose very name, Fal/staff, playfully parallels Shake/spear (Bloom, Shakespeare, 294). “For his sources Shakespeare consulted the second edition of Holinshed’s Chronicles (1587), Samuel Daniel’s The Civil Wars (1595), and an anonymous play, The Famous Victories of Henry V (1594). In this last source Shakespeare found the name of Sir John Oldcastle, a Protestant martyr, which he changed to Sir John Falstaff when Oldcastle’s relatives protested…. Most critics agree that Henry IV, Part I, marks the first totally successful product of Shakespeare’s mature talent. The verse is lively and expressive, depending less on formal rhetoric than a sure sense of individual characters. The prose is consistently fluent and colloquial, as if Shakespeare had emerged from writing Romeo and Juliet with an inspired awareness of the great possibilities of the medium. Moreover, for the first time in any of his history plays, every character in the Henry IV plays is completely individuated by diction and speech rhythms” (Ruoff, 190-1). Only 17 Shakespeare plays were separately printed prior to 1640 (the rest appearing only in the First and Second Folio). Of the plays appearing in quarto editions, Henry IV, Part I was perhaps the most popular, with nine distinct editions appearing between 1598 and 1700; there also exists a fragment of four leaves from what is assumed to be the earliest 1598 printing. This 1639 edition is identified by Bartlett and Pollard as the eighth edition, the last early (pre-1640) printing of Henry IV, Part I. In their 1914 census of the Shakespeare quartos, Bartlett and Pollard list only 19 existing copies of this 1639 quarto edition, some defective or restored, most in libraries or institutional collections; their updated 1939 census listed 27 copies. Rosenbach called this 1639 printing a “very rare early edition” (Rosenbach 39:4) and valued it accordingly (asking $1600 in 1920). All of the earlier printings are virtually unobtainable, existing in very small numbers (from as few as three to about a dozen copies), many of which are imperfect, and nearly all of which are in libraries or institutional collections. STC 22287. Jaggard, 328.

This copy is complete and essentially in excellent condition; the text is lightly browned, primarily around the edges, with a few very minor stains and small marginal tears; the early calf is somewhat age-worn with the front board separating at the joint. The first few pages of text have a number of corrections in red ink in an 18th-century hand, evidently based upon readings from the folios. Few Shakespeare quartos remain undiscovered, and of those that are known, only a handful will ever come onto the market. A superb Shakespeare item of the utmost rarity and desirability.