The history of English Dramatic Poetry to the time of Shakespeare

First of 3 volumes in 8vo. pp. xvi, x, 11-489. There are three copies in this collection. The first is in morocco-backed brown boards; laid in is a letter to ‘Mrs Ross,’ 16 July 1879, presenting the book and referring to ‘your bountiful Father’ who has ‘just sent me what is indeed well worth more than thanks.’ The brown boards were a trial binding, and Collier asked for them to be changed to red. The second is in morocco-backed brown boards. It is Collier’s own copy, with a letter from the sixth Duke of Devonshire, accepting the dedication of the first edition, tipped in. The present is in morocco-backed red boards (the final binding, as insisted upon by Collier).

The present work is the second edition of Collier’s History of English Dramatic Poetry (first edition: 1831, see Bib# 584555/Fr# 921 in this collection). The principal novelty of the new edition was the addition of a section on early Shakespearian actors, lightly revised from Collier’s 1846 Shakespeare Society ‘Memoirs of the principal Actors in the plays of Shakespeare’ (Bib# 4117146/Fr# 968). Elsewhere in the three volumes he inserted occasional references to works published since 1831, and he generally (but not always) made minor changes to indicate the death of collectors or to update the location of books and manuscripts. A number of works unknown or undiscussed in 1831 are introduced. Only a handful of Collier’s fabrications of the mid-1830s and later are inserted, but he was unable to resist including yet another ballad from the Hall Commonplace Book, along with three other suspicious specimens of early verse; and in his preface he repeated one final ‘fact’ that is demonstrably untrue. For a list of questioned or questionable statements in this work, see A. & J. Freeman, John Payne Collier. Scholarship and Forgery in the Nineteenth Century. New Haven, 2004, II, A185.

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