Amends for Ladies. A comedy, by Nathaniel Field. With illustrations and notes, by J. Payne Collier, Esq.

8vo. ff. [2]. pp. [3]-80. Signatures: [A]1 B-F8. Original tan printed wrappers (back wrapper lacking), large paper.

No. V of “A series of old plays: now for the first time reprinted, uniformly with the last edition of Dodsley’s Collection. With illustrations and notes, by J. Payne Collier, Esq.” The last of five plays issued by Prowett as a ‘Supplement to Dodsley,’ a continuation of an anthology of pre-Restoration English drama known as ‘Dodsley’s Old Plays,’ edited by Robert Dodsley (1703-1764) and re-edited by Collier. Each of the ‘Five Old Plays’ were edited for the first time and published in separate fascicles by Prowett in 1828-1829, extending to only five plays before ‘the publisher could not afford to go on’ (see Collier’s note in his own set, now British Library 11775.bbb.5). The sheets were then sold to William Pickering, who canceled the Prowett titles (or not, erratically), added a four-leaf prefatory gathering with a new general title and a half-title designating the book ‘Volume XIII’ [of the Dodsley collection], and reissued the five texts in one volume, on both large and small paper, titled Five Old Plays Forming a Supplement to Dodsley (1833, see Bib# 4117100/Fr# 922 in this collection).

In his biographical note on Field, Collier gave a pioneering account of the famous virago Mary Frith (‘Moll Cutpurse’).

See A. & J. Freeman, John Payne Collier. Scholarship and Forgery in the Nineteenth Century. New Haven, 2004, I, p. 139; II, A15.

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