19 “Beware The Ides Of March” 20SHAKESPEARE. The Tragedie of Julius Caesar. London, 1664. Folio, period-style full black morocco, elaborately gilt-decorated spine and covers. $14,500 The complete text of Shakespeare’s great historical tragedy, Julius Caesar, from the rare and important Third Folio, on 11 original leaves (one leaf supplied from another copy of this edition). Splendidly bound in elaborately gilt-decorated period-style 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 (a 1619 attempt at a collected edition in quarto form was never completed). The 1664 second issue of the Third Folio (from which this play was 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 facsimile title page and frontispiece reproduces the title page of the second issue of the Third Folio, bearing the date 1664 in the imprint rather than 1663. One leaf, [Nnn6], supplied from another copy of this edition and slightly shorter. A clean, wide-margined and splendidly bound copy in fine condition. “If We Shadows Have Offended” 21SHAKESPEARE. A Midsommer Nights Dreame. London, 1664. Folio, period-style full red morocco, elaborately gilt-decorated spine and covers. $19,500 Nine original leaves from the rare and important Third Folio, containing the complete text of Shakespeare’s festive, fantasy-filled comedy, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Splendidly bound in elaborately gilt-decorated period-style morocco. 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, xixii). With facsimile title page and frontispiece portrait, the facsimile title page reproduces the title page and frontispiece of the second issue of the Third Folio, bearing the date 1664 in the imprint rather than 1663. A splendidly bound volume in fine condition.
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