Holinshed, Raphael | Used by Shakespeare as a principal source for many of his plays

From the Library of Clayre and Jay Michael Haft

Holinshed, Raphael

The First and Second Volumes of Chronicles (The Third Volume ...), Comprising 1 The Description and Historie of England, 2 The Description and Historie of Ireland, 3 The Description and Historie of Scotland: First Collected and Published By Raphaell Holinshed, William Harrison, and Others: Now Newlie Augmented and Continued ... London: [H. Denham] At the Expenses of J. Harison, G. Bishop, R. Newberie, H. Denham, and T. Woodcock, January 1587

3 volumes bound in 4, folio (357 x 233 mm). With the usual excisions replaced by eighteenth-century leaves, black letter, double column, seven title pages within woodcut borders (McKerrow & Ferguson 147a, 148, 122 and 138), three other woodcut titles, woodcut head- and tail-pieces, decorative initials; slight browning and soiling, title of vol. 1 detaching and with a few tears (some of which repaired), title of vol. III mounted, penultimate leaf with restoration and with last leaf cut down and mounted on the verso, a few marginal tears and repairs. Early 19th-century russia gilt, all edges gilt; joints repaired, splits to joints, slightly rubbed.

Second edition, revised and expanded from the 1577 first edition, of the great Elizabethan narrative history, used by Shakespeare as a principal source for many of his plays, including Richard II, Richard III, Macbeth, Henry IV parts I and II, Henry V, Henry VI parts I, II and III, Henry VIII and Cymbeline, as well as (conjecturally) King Lear and King John. The 1587 revision was a substantial collaborative undertaking prepared with great care by the printers, with authors and revisers including Protestants, Catholics, and crypto-Catholics. The overall project was placed in the hands of the "learned corrector" Abraham Fleming. The textual history of this second edition in particular is very complex and still not fully documented. However, most copies bear cancels in volumes 2 and 3 following censorship by the Elizabethan authorities who ordered the removal of passages in the continuation of the Scottish history that might jeopardize Anglo-Scottish relations, especially those concerned with English intervention in Scottish factional politics. The censorship also sought to cultivate good opinion, both at home and abroad, ahead of English efforts to negotiate a settlement in the Low Countries and of the expected response to the execution of Mary, queen of Scots. There were three stages in the castrations and revisions (see Cyndia Susan Clegg, ODNB), and consequently copies survive with various states of cancels, variant cancels and original leaves, as well as with facsimile castrated leaves printed in the early eighteenth century to replace cancels and missing leaves.

PROVENANCE:

Joseph Henry Straker (bookplate; sold in our London rooms, 22 July 1985, lot 389)