"EXIT PURSUED BY A BEARE": THE WINTER'S TALE, EXTRACTED FROM THE THIRD FOLIO, 1664

SHAKESPEARE. [The Winter's Tale]. [London: Printed for P.C., 1664]. Folio (9 by 13-1/2 inches), period-style three-quarter calf gilt, red morocco spine labels, marbled boards. $4250.

Fourteen original leaves from the Third Folio, containing The Winter's Tale—the Bard's "great, troubling late play of loss and redemption"—handsomely bound.

The four folios of Shakespeare are the first four editions of Shakespeare's collected plays. These were the only collected editions printed in the 17th century (a 1619 attempt at a collected edition in quarto form was never completed). The 1664 second issue of the Third Folio (from which these plays were taken), is the first to include Pericles (along with six other spurious plays) and is therefore the first complete edition of Shakespeare's plays. The Third Folio is believed to be the scarcest of the four great 17th-century folio editions, a large part of the edition presumed destroyed in the Great London Fire of 1666. "The folios are incomparably the most important work in the English language" (W.A. Jackson, Pforzheimer Catalogue).

Leaves Aa-[Bb8] contain The Winter's Tale, which "takes two half-plays, one a realistic tragedy, the other an idyllic pastoral, and glues them together with a Chorus and the lapse of 16 years" (Baugh et al., 540). "Shakespeare's great, troubling late play of loss and redemption… offers us dazzlingly individual characters. Then it sets them loose in a universe where their will is not their own and fate can slip a man a mickey that turns him inside out" (Ben Brantley, New York Times).

The facsimile title page and frontispiece reproduce these pages of the second issue of the Third Folio, bearing the date 1664 in the imprint rather than 1663. See Jaggard, 496.

First leaf with paper repair to upper margin, with part of border on page 277 and word "Winters" from running header on page 278 supplied in neat facsimile. About-fine condition.