60 Great Books Bauman Rare Books - 56 - Shakespeare’s Immortal Tragedy Romeo And Juliet, Extracted From The Third Folio, 1664, Splendidly Bound 54. SHAKESPEARE. The Tragedie of Romeo and Juliet. London, 1664. Folio (9 by 12-3/4 inches), period-style full red morocco gilt. $18,500. Complete text of Shakespeare’s first tragedy and one of his greatest plays, Romeo and Juliet, from the rare and important Third Folio, on 13 original leaves, splendidly bound in elaborately gilt-decorated periodstyle morocco. 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. The 1664 second issue of the Third Folio (from which this play was taken) is the first to include Pericles 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. Leaves [Hhh5]-[Kkk5] contain the play Romeo and Juliet. “To more effective account did Shakespeare in Romeo and Juliet (his first tragedy) turn a tragic romance of Italian origin, which was already popular in the English versions of Arthur Broke in verse (1562) and William Painter in prose (in his ‘Palace of Pleasure,’ 1567). Shakespeare made little change in the plot, but he impregnated it with poetic fervor… The fineness of insight which Shakespeare here brought to the portrayal of youthful emotion is as noticeable as the lyric beauty and exuberance of the language” (DNB). 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. A clean, wide-margined copy, beautifully bound.
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