60 Great Books - 57 - Bauman Rare Books “The Play’s The Thing”: Two Of Shakespeare’s Immortal Tragedies, Hamlet And Macbeth, Extracted From The Third Folio, 1664, Splendidly Bound 55. SHAKESPEARE. Macbeth. BOUND WITH: Hamlet. London, 1664. Folio (9 by 12-3/4 inches), period-style full red morocco gilt. $35,000. Complete text of two of Shakespeare’s greatest plays, Hamlet and Macbeth, from the rare and important Third Folio, on 26 original leaves, splendidly bound in elaborately gilt-decorated period-style morocco. Leaves [Ooo4]-[Sss5] contain the two plays Macbeth and Hamlet. “The Shakespearean exuberance or gusto is part of what breaks through linguistic and cultural barriers… Shakespeare is to the world’s literature what Hamlet is to the imaginary domain of literary character: a spirit that permeates everywhere, that simply cannot be confined” (Bloom, The Western Canon, 52). “Shakespeare’s standard play is Hamlet… the truest mirror of Shakespeare’s personality and the ripest production of English literary art” (Baugh, 5278). Few dispute Samuel Johnson’s declaration that “Shakespeare is above all writers,” or a view of Hamlet as “theatre of the world, like The Divine Comedy or Paradise Lost or Faust, or Ulysses, or In Search of Lost Time… The phenomenon of Hamlet, the prince without the play, is unsurpassed in the West’s imaginative literature” (Bloom, Shakespeare, 383-4). “Hamlet appears to be in the height of the Shakespearean canon. My own preference is for Macbeth, where I never get over my shock at the play’s ruthless economy, its way of making every speech, every phrase count” (Bloom, The Western Canon, 65, 393). With facsimile frontispiece and title page; the facsimile title page reproduces the title page of the second issue of the Third Folio, bearing the date 1664 in the imprint rather than 1663. A clean, wide-margined, splendidly bound copy in fine condition, a wonderful pairing of two of Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies.
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